Autonomous Sea Drones

Gregory Chassapis

Jul 16

5 min read

Updated: Jul 28

In February 2024, a Ukrainian Magura V5 slammed into a Russian guided-missile corvette and sank it. It was the first time an uncrewed vessel had destroyed a warship in combat, and just as aerial drones are redefining aerial combat, sea drones are redefining naval combat.

Technical Briefing

An Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) is exactly what it sounds like: a boat with no crew aboard, but beyond that, the category is quite wide. At the small end are small attack craft like Ukraine’s Magura, which can carry a few hundred kilograms of explosives and range in size from 15-50ft. At the larger end are Medium and Large USVs. These are vessels the size of patrol boats or small frigates, built to carry sensors, missiles, or supplies alongside the crewed fleet. Power is provided by a variety of propulsion systems ranging from lithium-ion batteries to large diesel engines for longer naval operations.

But what unites them into a single asset class, is the ability to operate autonomously.

A USV blends satellite links, onboard cameras and radar, GPS, and increasingly AI-driven navigation to sense, decide, and act with limited or no human input. Remove the crew and you remove the most vulnerable and constraining element of any warship. With no bunks, galley, life-support, or armor protecting people, the hull can be smaller, cheaper, and more expendable, and it can accept risks no captain would take with 300 sailors aboard.

Viability

America once had the largest shipbuilding industry the world had ever seen, but today, it accounts for well under 1% of the world's tonnage. National security priorities are now aimed at reversing that decline, thanks to the drive to rebuild naval capacity, onshore the maritime supply chain, and field uncrewed vessels at scale. While previous iterations of American shipbuilding were fueled by government subsidies and wartime footing, today’s efforts are increasingly being funded by the private sector, with the end product being autonomous, easy to manufacture, and attritable (the idea that certain systems are inexpensive enough to risk in high-risk combat environments).

Among the catalysts for this buildout is the availability of cheap and capable components (i.e. navigation chips, cameras, batteries, and satellite links that came out of the smartphone) that make a competent autonomous boat buildable for a fraction of historical cost. Second, is software, since there’s no autonomy without it. This is the operating system that gives the vessel the ability to hold course, avoid obstacles, and coordinate with other units in the area to coordinate and execute a mission. Then there’s proof of concept: while the technology can appear impressive on paper, does it actually work?

The war in Ukraine is frequently credited for demonstrating to the world that drones can work, and while most of the headlines involve aerial combat drones, the incident in the Black Sea turned a theory into a combat outcome for naval drones.

Impact on Naval Operations (Why USVs?)

For a century, sea power has been built around what are known as “exquisite” platforms or systems. These are the enormously capable, enormously expensive ships that everyone is familiar with that take years to build and play critically important roles for any serious Navy. In many ways, that’s precisely the problem. These are expensive and scare assets (a Zumwalt class destroyer, for example, costs upwards of $4B per unit and roughly a decade to build, launch and accept). Damage one badly and it can sit in a repair yard for years before returning to the fight. Because you cannot build another ship quickly, every hull is precious, and precious things are used cautiously.

USVs invert that logic. They are cheap enough to lose. A vessel costing tens of millions (or, at the small end, hundreds of thousands) can be built in weeks, not years, on commercial production lines rather than in a handful of specialized shipyards. When numbers, not individual survivability, become the measure of strength, an adversary’s expensive missile is a poor trade against your cheap boat. Navies now talk of a “hybrid fleet,” which is to say, a few crewed "command ships" directing swarms of uncrewed vessels that scout, screen, resupply, and strike, all of which can be replaced as fast as they are lost. This is the exact same formula the air force is using with its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.

The Sword Cuts Both Ways

Every argument for USVs is also an argument against the fleet you already own. If a one-ton boat can sink a corvette, it can just as easily threaten a carrier, a destroyer, or a tanker, and the United States (with the most exquisite hulls afloat) has the most to lose. China is fielding uncrewed vessels at scale, Iran has harassed Gulf shipping with them for years, and Houthi forces have already launched explosive drone boats at commercial and naval targets in the Red Sea. The same asymmetry that makes USVs attractive on offense makes them a first-order problem for defense.

That reframes where a good deal of the money will flow. Alongside building cheap boats, navies now have to detect, track, and kill them, driving demand for layered ship defense that includes radar and electro-optical sensors tuned to small, low-profile targets, electronic warfare to sever their control links, decoys, and cheaper interceptors like directed energy so a $250K drone isn't met with a $2M missile.

Real Risks Worth Acknowledging

Autonomy remains imperfect. Spoofed GPS, jammed links, and the unresolved question of how much lethal authority to hand a machine are genuine constraints, and USVs are vulnerable to the same electronic warfare they impose on others. Procurement is lumpy and politically exposed since a program funded one year can be cut the next. Many of the most exciting builders are venture-backed and need time to prove themselves at scale, despite this being a real capability that has already been purchased by governments around the world.

Looking Ahead

Strip it down and the story is simple. Uncrewed surface vessels are cheap, buildable in weeks, and proven to sink ships that cost a thousand times more. They will not replace the crewed fleet, but they will reshape it, pushing navies toward large numbers of attritable, autonomous, rapidly replaceable hulls coordinated by a smaller core of exquisite ships. Governments are budgeting for it, private capital is racing into it, and the industrial logic (mass over irreplaceability) is hard to argue with. The risks of imperfect autonomy, electronic warfare, policy swings, and scalability remain real, but the age of the robotic boat in combat, has already begun.

Sources

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