Drone boat makers say they’re ready for the U.S. Navy to start testing their wares.
“I don’t think anyone questions whether unmanned has a place in the fleet architecture,” Blue Water Autonomy CEO Rylan Hamilton told Defense One. “It’s really: ‘How long is it going to take to get some of these vessels out into the fleet and operating, so the end user of the fleet can really figure out how they want to use them and how many they actually want?’”
Speaking ahead of this week’s WEST conference in San Diego, Hamilton said his two-year-old company has been intensively testing its first product, an 800-ton, nearly-200-foot autonomous surface vessel. He said the craft, dubbed Liberty Class, has endured more than a thousand hours at sea since the new year.
“We’ve been able to raise private capital from firms like Google Ventures, and we’ve used that to basically test everything on the ocean seven days a week,” he said. “We know we’re not going to be perfect out of the gate. And so it’s been really important for us to take everything we develop and just test it and take it through as many cycles as possible before we actually put it on a production ship.”
Blue Water aims to put the Liberty into production later this year at Conrad Shipyard in Louisiana. Hamilton wouldn’t say how many would be built, but said the shipyard can produce more than 20 similarly sized vessels a year.
“Right now, the focus really should be on the suppliers and not the Navy. I think the Navy’s given all the right signals. They’ve given all the right contract mechanisms to allow industry to move fast. And now what I think the Navy and the end user needs is to see the performance of these vessels,” Hamilton said. “They need to see that they actually meet the requirements and they actually serve the end user and the fleet in terms of being reliable.”
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CNO looks at robots, AI, and additive manufacturing in fighting instructions released ahead of his keynote opening speech Tuesday at the WEST conference in San Diego.
Robotic and autonomous systems “are an important feature of the current and future force. Yet by treating these systems as novel, we carve them out of the standard model and reduce options and fungibility in fielding them at scale,” Caudle writes in the document. “The Navy must clarify how Fleet Commanders and the Joint Force can express demands for RAS capabilities and effects” and “address the associated doctrinal shortfalls, organizational seams, and process gaps, including determining how we will allocate RAS in service decisions like strategic laydown, dispersal, and global force management.”
But the chief of naval operations isn’t quite ready to pen a standalone unmanned or robotic systems strategy, he told attendees Tuesday during Q&A following his WEST speech.
“I’m not ready to do that yet. We’re in this discovery phase of how we…assemble command and control of these forces through the administrative chain command, so we can actually field to maintain, sustain and train sailors to actually bring these kinds of capabilities to bear,” he said.
However, Caudle said he could easily see robotics and autonomous systems, or RAS, commanders as part of a carrier strike group’s staff, alongside those for air missile defense and information warfare, “to advise that strike group commander.”
The Navy has already experimented and employed autonomous systems with Task Force 59, Fourth Fleet, and Naval Forces Europe, he said. But “I need to understand this a little bit more…before I go pen the paper on how it’s going to look in the future.”
Caudle also spotlighted advanced manufacturing during his keynote.
“I just had this opportunity at [Naval Station Rota] to see this incredible demonstration of advanced manufacturing there on specific components—large-scale, metal components—that the Arleigh Burkes there in Rota need,” he said. “I did not know to the extent that that capability exists at that level. So those are the types of things I want to scale” to help speed up maintenance.
Arms exports. The Pentagon has made good on one of its acquisition reform goals: moving the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and Defense Technology Security Administration from its policy shop to its acquisition shop, defense officials announced on social media Tuesday.
“This realignment has created a single, coherent defense-sales enterprise within the department,” Michael Duffey, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said in a video posted on X. “We’ll proactively target sales that unlock foreign investment to help power critical production lines, fueling companies to invest in new manufacturing plants, hire more engineers and create thousands of well-paying American jobs, all while better equipping our partners to share the burden of their own conventional defense.”
On Feb. 6, President Trump ordered the Pentagon to prioritize foreign arms sales to countries that have increased their defense spending and focus on certain domestic-made weapons.
ICYMI: The Pentagon is definitely reviewing defense contractors’ performance, as promised in an earlier executive order, but is stopping short of naming which ones are under review.
What I’m curious about: Will these reviews result in any actual change for contractors, how long will they last, and will they steer future contract awards. TBD for now.
