Are killer robot ships coming to save us?
Autonomous maritime vessels could keep armed service members out of harm’s way — if they don’t set off new wars in the process
military industrial complex artificial intelligence
Stavroula Pabst
Oct 20, 2025
Sinking warships with “kamikaze”-like strikes, attacking critical infrastructure, and “swarming” together to overwhelm enemy defenses, Ukraine’s Magura drone boats have had success countering Russian naval forces in the Black Sea — despite its Navy’s markedly limited resources.
These autonomous maritime vessels are having a moment, and the Pentagon and weapons industry alike want in on it. Flush with cash from venture capitalists and, increasingly, the DoD, which has awarded hundreds of millions in contracts to this end, defense-tech start-ups, including Saronic, BlackSea, and Blue Water Autonomy, have been building a new generation of myriad autonomous and semi-autonomous maritime vessels.
Such vessels range from row-boat size drones, to hundreds-of-feet-long larger unmanned vessels (Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, or LUSVs), to submarines. The diversity of these vessels, from tactical surface craft to strategic underwater systems, boasts various capacities, including tracking and patrolling, carrying cargo and payloads — and increasingly, exercising lethal capacities within kinetic contexts, like firing lethal payloads, carrying out anti-missile defense, or even throwing themselves at targets to attack them, where a human in the loop could remotely carry out such tasks from afar.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/autonomous-ships-military/
