The US Department of Defense has of an uncrewed ship firing a large missile, in a demonstration of its Ghost Fleet Overlord programme, an initiative to develop robot vessels that can operate alongside crewed warships.
Previous Ghost Fleet operations have focused on endurance missions without human assistance, including the first uncrewed transit of the Panama Canal, but the firing is the first indication that the vessels will be armed.
The SM-6 weapon used in the demonstration is a 1500-kilogram missile travelling at Mach 3.5 with a range of over 240 kilometres, fired from a modular launcher on the ship, the USV Ranger. Although the missile was launched without a human on board, US policy requires that the target selection and order to fire would be controlled by a person. The demonstration isn鈥檛 the first launch of a missile from a robot boat, but the SM-6 is about 100 times larger than the missile used in an .
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of Royal United Services Institute, a UK defence think tank, says that the uncrewed vessels are likely to take on a variety of roles such as supply, minesweeping and intelligence gathering. The missile demonstration shows they could also enhance a fleet鈥檚 capacity to tackle large numbers of incoming missiles or other threats.
Because modular launchers can easily be fitted to the low-cost uncrewed ships, they can greatly increase a fleet鈥檚 missile firepower without the need for new, billion-dollar warships, says Kaushal. 鈥淭hey could conduct both offensive strikes and missile defence missions.鈥�
Kaushal notes that, given current limitations of sensors and artificial intelligence, the new vessels will work with rather than replace crewed vessels, but he says there could be a greater risk of them being attacked in peacetime.
鈥淭hey may become targets for sub-threshold aggression, given that damaging or destroying them involves no loss of life,鈥� says Kaushal. He points to a 2016 incident in which .
The US Navy hadn鈥檛 responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
