M80 Stiletto Is The Pentagon's Stealthy Little Experimental Ship That Could
For a decade the ‘M-hulled’ Stiletto has been the surrogate for new maritime combat technologies and concepts.
By Tyler Rogoway September 6, 2016
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Although it looks like something from another world, the M80 Stiletto is ship designed for littoral, or “brown water,†operations. The unique craft was ordered in the mid 2000s by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s now defunct Office For Transformation (OFT). The vessel was originally envisioned as the centerpiece of an initiative called Project WolfPAC which aimed to revolutionize “netcentric†command and control capabilities and combat effectiveness of small ships operating cooperatively with other vessels, special warfare units and drones in the challenging littoral environment. Think of it as a stealthy floating supercomputer, mothership and command and control station that is capable of rocketing through the water at high-speeds in very shallow waters.
Check Out This Picture Of The Pentagon’s Shadowy New Special Operations Mothership By Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
The Stiletto program was also an element of a larger push by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who ran the OFT, to get the Navy to rely less on a relatively small number of vulnerable capital ships in favor of smaller, cheaper and more numerous vessels outfitted with cutting-edge technology.
TheDoD described WolfPAC as such:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5108/m80-stiletto-is-the-pentagons-stealthy-little-experimental-ship-that-could