U.S. Navy efforts to deploy large numbers of drone weapons advanced this week with the disclosure of a coming autonomous warship and a new undersea drone.
Blue Water Autonomy, a shipbuilding startup, announced the first autonomous warship called the Liberty that the company says will provide advanced warfare capabilities for the Navy as soon as later this year.
The Boston-based technology firm and shipbuilder said construction of its first 190-foot Liberty drone ship will begin next month with the goal of delivering the first vessel to the Navy in 2026.
The ship will be 190-feet long with a range of over 10,000 nautical miles and can carry more than 150 tons of payload capacity, Blue Water said in a press release.
“As the U.S. Navy drives to expand fleet capacity, accelerating the deployment of unmanned systems that complement traditional crewed ships has become a critical effort,” the company said.
“Liberty’s design supports a range of missions, including missile, sensor, and logistics payloads, and offers the Navy a ship immediately producible with existing U.S. shipyards and commercial supply chains,” it said.
Separately, defense contractor Lockheed Martin this week disclosed its development of a new class of smart, stealthy, multimission autonomous undersea drone.
The Lockheed vessel, called the Lamprey, is capable of launching drone aircraft from the surface and is described by the company as a “do-it-all” submersible, “built to disrupt and deny enemy forces at sea.”
The undersea drone will be used to detect, disrupt, decoy and target enemy forces in support of sea denial missions and “subsea seabed warfare,” Lockheed said on its website.
The Lamprey can be hitched to submarines or warships, will launch aerial drones for surveillance or attacks, and can conduct electronic warfare to disrupt underwater enemy sensors.
Both drone warfare platforms are likely to become part of what the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Sam Paparo, has called a “hellscape” strategy to deter China.
The strategy, which remains mostly secret, calls for deploying thousands of low-cost armed drones as a deterrent and counter to any potential future Chinese attack on Taiwan or other locations in the region. The “hellscape” could also influence Chinese commanders’ decision-making on whether such attacks could be successful.
Blue Water Autonomy’s Liberty is being built with a special hull, designed from the hull of a patrol boat built by the Dutch shipbuilder Damen that uses a distinctive vertical bow that allows for smoother transit through seas.
“The proven design reduces technical risk, allowing Blue Water to focus engineering on re-architecting the vessel’s internal systems for autonomous operation,” Blue Water said.
“The resulting platform retains the hull’s performance, payload capacity, and seakeeping characteristics, while supporting months-long deployment and serial production.”
“The Liberty class reflects our focus on building autonomous ships that are designed from the start for long-duration operations and repeat production,” said Rylan Hamilton, Blue Water Autonomy chief executive. “By adapting a proven hull and reengineering it for unmanned operations, we’re delivering a vessel that can operate for extended periods without crew while being produced at a pace the Navy urgently needs. This is a modern take on an old idea: building capable ships quickly and at scale.”
The drone warship will use artificial intelligence for its automated controls with limited human intervention for months-long deployments.
It was developed entirely with private capital without defense funding as part of push by Navy and Pentagon leaders on defense contractors to privately develop key military technology outside of a problematic procurement process.
The Liberty-class drone ships will be built at the Conrad Shipyard in Louisiana, with a goal producing 10 warships to 20 warships per year.
Air Force urged to build 200 B-21 bombers
Current plans for U.S. bomber forces are inadequate for winning a future conflict with China and the Air Force needs 200 new B-21 bombers to bolster the strategic bomber shortfall, according to a new report by a think tank that supports the Air Force.
The larger bomber force is needed to attack Chinese inland sanctuaries should a war break out between the U.S. and China over Taiwan or other regional allies, the report by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies stated.
The U.S. military today lacks the post-Cold War combat aircraft power for conducting Air Force strikes deep inside enemy lines and denying operational sanctuary to enemies like China and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The Air Force is “losing its ability to prevent the PLA from generating long-range air and missile attacks from operational sanctuaries within China,” the Mitchell Institute report said.
The shortcoming is eroding the military’s ability to deter Chinese aggression and win a war if deterrence fails.
The Pentagon’s current war fighting strategy is limited to denying the PLA from conducting a rapid military takeover of Taiwan and the strategy will not deter Chinese aggression, the report said.
A balanced war fighting strategy should include airstrikes that erode and then collapse China’s capacity to create high-density threat bastions in the air, on the ground, and at sea over extended ranges from the mainland.
“A strong offense is the best defense, and a war-winning U.S. campaign must include strategic attacks against China’s military leadership, command and control, and long-range combat forces that now threaten the U.S. military’s ability to operate effectively in the Western Pacific,” the report said.
Currently, American military forces are unable to deny inland sanctuaries for Chinese missile and air forces as a result of decades of forces cuts and deferred modernization. The policies have reduced Air Force fleets of long-range, stealth bombers.
To fix the problem, the Mitchell Institute report said the Air Force must rebuild its sanctuary denial forces by building at least 200 B-21 bombers as quickly as possible to deter China and reduce the risk of losing if war breaks out.
“B-21s in sufficient numbers are necessary to seize the operational advantage in a conflict with China,” the report said.
Additionally, the Pentagon should build at least 300 of the new, sixth-generation F-47 jets.
“At that force size, the F-47’s longer range, larger payload, and all-aspect, wideband low observability may provide the Air Force a combat advantage against China’s formidable [integrated air defense systems],” the report said. “F-47s and B-21s in combination will be able to strike any target on China’s mainland to deny sanctuary and eliminate capabilities critical to the PLA’s air and missile forces.”
Until the new B-21 goes into full production, the Air Force should not retire any current B-2 bombers, currently the sole stealth bomber capable of attacking through high-density air defense areas and striking the most difficult mobile, fixed, or hardened and deeply buried targets.
“The Air Force must size and shape its forces to defeat Chinese aggression while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland and deterring nuclear attacks,” the report said. “It cannot do so at acceptable levels of risk with its current force mix and inventory.”
China’s military reveals future air warfare plans
An internal Chinese military report has revealed that the People’s Liberation Army is placing a heavy emphasis on waging advanced air war using stealth, drones and high-technology weapons.
The report, “How Will the Form of Air Warfare Change in the Future?” was published in September in the Liberation Army News, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.
It was translated by the U.S. Air Force think tank China Aerospace Studies Institute, which described the report as having “the imprimatur of orthodoxy.”
The Chinese report was written by Chai Shan, a military author who has previously written about PLA air power control.
“The future form of air warfare is ultimately and inevitably intelligentized aerial combat,” the report stated.
It asserted that combat weapons and equipment will form system clusters leading with “intelligentized” uncrewed combat systems that use independent, self-adaptable, and self-coordinating system-of-systems operations under the control of artificial intelligence decision-making and management systems.
The report also said future air warfare for the PLA will evolve toward uncrewed weapons platforms, autonomous weapons platforms, distributed operations, and swarms, aerial combat will employ crewed aircraft backed by drone formations that will provide sensors and enhance manned warplane weapons.
China’s forces already are moving toward the goal of “distributed aerial combat with stealth, hypersonic [propulsion], and beyond-visual-range attacks as the primary means,” the report said.
“Stealth aircraft carrying long-range, air-launched stealth missiles and hypersonic missiles will become operational endpoints within an aerospace system-of-systems network, where they will disperse and deploy across a broad area, widely participating in each operational stage of reconnoiter, search, strike, and assess [akin to ’find, fix, finish, and assess’], and with the support of integrated aerospace sensing systems, they will execute long-range strikes against the enemy from outside visual range.”
Current development of the PLA new form of air warfare is “fast and ferocious,” the report said.
A key to air warfare will be the combining of both physical and information domains to produce a hybrid of conventional and cognitive power to attack enemies.
“Aerial combat actions with ’striking vital points’ firepower warfare and ’pretending to be foolish while smart’ information warfare as primary characteristics, as well as air warfare system of systems, by executing ‘hard kills’ against the enemy’s key smart weapons and equipment as well as ’soft kills’ by methods such as deep fakes, algorithmic fog, virus infections, etc., will make the enemy’s cognitive environment complex, ultimately causing the cognitive collapse and degradation of the enemy’s air warfare system of systems,” the report said.
It went on to assert that the PLA is developing these type of air warfare capabilities with hypersonic munitions, advanced battle management systems and other high technology that are “rapidly developing” along with new types of warfare, which the report described as “decision-centric warfare,” “mosaic warfare,” and “algorithmic warfare.”
“In the not-too-distant future they could appear on the battlefield,” the report said.
• Contact Bill Gertz on X @BillGertz.
• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.
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