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In recent years, top US Navy leadership has continually reaffirmed that the future fleet will be hybrid. Traditional manned warships will work in concert with unmanned surface, subsurface, and aerial vehicles to enhance maritime domain awareness, increase American power projection, and bring to fruition truly distributed maritime operations. Saildrone is supporting the Navy’s vision by integrating proven unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with combat-tested, mission-ready payloads.
Saildrone and Lockheed Martin have partnered to field lethal capabilities at the pace and scale the Navy demands. The first tangible step in this partnership will be to equip the 20-meter Saildrone Surveyor with Lockheed Martin’s proven and prolific JAGM Launcher.
Surveyor is a high-endurance, extreme-range USV that provides persistent maritime ISR and deep-ocean mapping capabilities, designed to operate autonomously anywhere in the world for months at a time with minimal human intervention or oversight. Equipped with sensors, radars, and communications equipment, the Surveyor detects, tracks, classifies, and relays near-real-time intelligence into a common operating picture, accelerating operational decision-making.
In addition to equipping Surveyor with the JAGM Launcher and other payloads, Lockheed Martin’s $50 million investment in Saildrone will integrate command and control enhancements, enabling Saildrone to conduct fleet defense, signals intelligence, reconnaissance, and strike missions. This combination of best-in-class commercial and defense technologies will support the US Navy in realizing its vision for a manned–unmanned hybrid fleet.
Proof-of-concept integrations and a live-fire demonstration are scheduled for summer 2026. Additionally, larger Saildrone USVs are being developed to support a wider range of Lockheed Martin payloads, including the Mk 70 VLS launcher.
Bringing the hybrid fleet to life
As the world’s most experienced USVs, Saildrone platforms are already operating year-round missions in conjunction with American sailors and Coast Guard personnel. First deployed by the US Navy in 2021, Saildrone vehicles currently support US Navy and Coast Guard missions in the Middle East, Caribbean, Gulf of America, Atlantic, and Pacific.
Designed to operate globally in the world’s harshest marine environments, Saildrone has deployed in support of Operation Windward Stack and, more recently, Operation Southern Spear to strengthen the federal government’s efforts to secure the US southern border. Saildrone USVs contributed directly to this mission by detecting, tracking, and relaying precise coordinates of boats smuggling illicit contraband.
In the past year alone, Saildrone has spent more than 10,000 cumulative days on the water, providing persistent maritime ISR, covering over 380,000 nautical miles, and detecting 2,376,583 unique vessels. Fully ABS-classed, Saildrone USVs are manufactured in America and built to traverse the open ocean, reliably and autonomously, while delivering near-real-time intelligence to operators.
