MARINE CORPS NEWS MDM News: Simplicity Key to Integrating Autonomy for the Marine Corps By Tabitha Reeves Marine Corps photo WASHINGTON, D.C. — When it comes to integrating autonomy into Marine Corps operations, it is important to embrace simplicity over complex technological advancements and move step-by-step deliberately, a service official said at the Modern Day Marine conference April 29. Autonomous technology entails “a lot of pieces of the puzzle that we have to talk about, but we need to go slow. We need to go one step at a time,” said Col. Kenny Jones, science and technology director at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the Marine Corps’ robotics and autonomous systems capability portfolio manager. Jones presented an image to his audience depicting an assortment of uncrewed vehicles dotting the sky in clusters, with autonomous maritime systems on the waves below, amphibious vehicles moving towards the shore and ground vehicles on the sand. “This is where we want to go,” he said, “but we’re not going to get there tomorrow.” There are numerous challenges to integrating new technologies to keep pace with the rapidly evolving battlefield, but the “true challenge of autonomous systems in the Marine Corps is, how do we take an organization whose trust is in the skill and the discipline of the individual Marine and get us to a place where we can trust autonomous systems?” Jones said. The service currently has a limited number of uncrewed platforms in its fleet, with the primary one being the Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel, he said. The ALPV — which he noted is currently a prototype and not yet a program of record — is a slender uncrewed surface vessel being tested by the Marine Corps for logistics purposes, such as carrying cargo from one place to another. “That’s about the