Pentagon Confirms First Combat Strike by Seaborne Drones

They first appeared as three specks on the horizon, cutting across calm seas moving at 30 knots. Streaking past the defenses of the Bandar Abbas naval base and into the heart of its port, the boats aimed for a pier handling submarine maintenance tasks. Inside, a small submarine was held in place by a drydock claw, its propellers hanging in the air above the waterline.Too late, Iranian defenders realized that each craft the size of a sportsman’s boat was unmanned, unfriendly — and packed with the same amount of explosives as a Tomahawk cruise missile.Within seconds the dock disappeared in fiery, thunderous explosions.The Pentagon announced this week that three of its Corsair Autonomous Service Vehicles had destroyed that Iranian sub and ship facility at Bandar Abbas on Sunday. It’s the first time the U.S. military has used a seaborne drone in combat.“Anytime you’re fighting somebody at ranges of less than a few hundred miles, drones are going to be probably the predominant weapon that you see employed,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute, “which I think is a big shift.”Since 2022, when the Ukrainian military used a seaborne drone to sink Russia’s Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva, armchair experts and military leaders alike have hailed the onset of a new type of naval combat.This week, the world’s most formidable naval power got into the game.“I think it’s revolutionizing some dimensions of naval warfare like this: littoral operations, anti-submarine warfare operations,” said Mr. Clark, who spent 25 years as both an enlisted and officer submariner with the US Navy. “It’ll also change kind of the calculus in terms of when you design your force, you can include a lot of these drones to make up capacity that you would otherwise need crewed ships to do.”The Corsair sea drone was tailor made for the Bandar Abbas operation, he said, because it would be more effective in causing damage than an airstrike.“The airstrike, you’re going to hit it hit things from the top which actually may not hit the dry dock,” he said. “If you want to damage that stuff at the water line, you want to attack it at the water line.”U.S. Central Command, the military division devoted to operations in the Middle East, released video of the sea drone assault on Monday afternoon, saying the attack “degraded Iran’s ability to continue attacking commercial shipping.”Saronic, a Texas-based company specializing in autonomous naval vessels, said on social media the sea drones used were the company’s 24-foot version, built to operate autonomously for kamikaze attacks.“We are proud that our technology supported this mission and helped to keep the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces safe,” the company’s statement read.Mr. Clark said the Corsairs have the option of being either remotely piloted or fully autonomous. He speculated they were likely launched from the shores of Oman, a 45-minute trip across the Arabian Gulf from the Bandar Abbas naval base.Corsairs can be utilized for one-way attack missions like Sunday’s or for reconnaissance. It was a reconnaissance sea drone that safely rescued two attack helicopter pilots after their AH-64 Apache took Iranian fire and crashed off the coast of Oman last month.“The U.S. has already demonstrated the ability to put missile launchers and Aegis radars and Aegis combat systems onto unmanned surface vessels,” Mr. Clark said. “You could see a future where the U.S. or other countries basically create air defense drone ships and you can use those. You maybe have one crewed ship to do command and control, then you have a bunch of these drone ships doing the rest of the missile defense mission.”The videos released by CENTCOM Monday of the kamikaze boats slamming into drydock weren’t just for the consumption of American taxpayers, Clark said. There’s another, very specific audience the Pentagon wants to reach: leaders inside the People’s Republic of China.“So now the Chinese have to think about: these things really exist, the U.S. has made them work, now we have to contend with this if we want to do an invasion of Taiwan,” Mr. Clark said.Recent battleplans to defend the island of Taiwan against a theoretical amphibious assault by Chinese forces heavily rely on air and seaborne drones. Strategists in both the United States and Taiwan have devised what’s called a “hellscape” concept, where the ships of any invasion force would face constant bombardment during the minimum 100-mile trip across the Tawian Strait. The goal would be to use airpower, attack submarines and drones to sink or heavily damage the ships carrying the invading People’s Liberation Army forces before they could even reach Taiwan’s shores.“A few hundred drones are enough to make that happen,” Mr. Clark said.Food for thought for Chinese leaders as they ponder Premier Xi Jinping’s directive to have the military capability to seize Taiwan by next year.“These smaller drones are going to make it so you can deny areas of water in these like littoral environments, relatively close to shore so it makes it really hard to think about doing things like amphibious landings,” Mr. Clark said. “Or you can control or at least deny a choke point maybe like the Strait of Hormuz or even choke points like in between islands of Japan.”On Wednesday, Taiwan’s government awarded contracts to MARTAC, an American company, for 25 uncrewed surface vessels and two unmanned underwater vehicles forits Coast Guard. Last month, Taiwan’s presidential administration proposed a defense budget that would include buying nearly 1,500 sea drones.Sunday’s American naval strike was a declaration of intent that takes seaborne drone warfare “from the realm of theoretic to the realm of real for the Chinese,” Mr. Clark said.

Pentagon Confirms First Combat Strike by Seaborne Drones

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