When a foreign weapon starts working well enough to rattle a navy, the usual American answer is to buy a couple, take them apart, and spend the next decade funding something similar with a longer name. The exploding drone boats Ukraine has been running in the Black Sea skipped that queue completely.<\/p>\n
Two American boatyards are now tooling up to build the same 7.8-meter hull. One of them has been in full-rate production since late May and says the design came out of its own engineering shop. The other signed paperwork on July 21 with the Ukrainian company that says it builds the original.<\/p>\n
Both are selling American manufacturing. Only one is selling an American design, and that gap is now the most interesting thing happening at the small end of the naval drone market.<\/p>\n
Red Cat Holdings said on May 28 that its maritime division, Blue Ops, had moved the Variant 7 into full-rate production<\/a>. The company describes the V7 as designed in Maine, built in Maine and in Valdosta, Georgia, with research and testing run out of West Palm Beach, Florida.<\/p>\n Prototype work was supported by Hodgdon Shipbuilding, which Red Cat calls the oldest continuously operated shipbuilder in America. Blue Ops president Barry Hinckley said the company was scaling up because “the mission demand is here now.”<\/p>\n The Georgia end of that is not a slide in a deck. Governor Brian Kemp’s office announced in April that Blue Ops would put $30 million into a 155,000-square-foot plant<\/a> in Valdosta, the former Regal Boats facility, with more than 200 jobs expected over several years and up to 100 hires in 2026.<\/p>\n Hinckley gave WorkBoat<\/a> the production targets: more than 200 boats in 2026, more than 1,000 in 2027, with a single hull buildable in several days to a week depending on how it is configured.<\/p>\n He gave Seapower<\/a> the price list. One V7 runs $695,000. Order more than 100 and it drops to the mid-$500,000s. Order more than 200 and it lands near $525,000.<\/p>\n The whole program is about a year old. Hinckley dated the idea to August 2025, production to October, water trials to late December and early January, and the unveiling to two days in February: military officials first, Wall Street the next morning.<\/p>\n On July 21, UForce announced a memorandum of understanding with ReconCraft<\/a> at a ceremony hosted by the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington.<\/p>\n UForce is Ukraine-origin and UK-based, registered in London with operations in Ukraine, and was assembled by merging nine Ukrainian defense developers into a single company. It says the Magura family of drone boats is made exclusively by UForce.<\/p>\n ReconCraft is the other half of the deal. It builds combatant craft for US and partner special operations forces from a campus near Portland, Oregon, and co-founder Joe Silkowski framed the arrangement as a way to get capability to American units “faster than developing a new system from the ground up.”<\/p>\n Running the American side is Sean Plankey, chief executive of UForce USA, who most recently served as senior advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security with responsibility for the Coast Guard, and was twice nominated to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.<\/p>\n Army Recognition<\/a> reported the production base is expected to span ReconCraft’s Oregon and South Carolina facilities, with long-term capacity discussed in the hundreds and potentially thousands of hulls a year. No order has been announced, no quantity disclosed, and no first American configuration named.<\/p>\n UForce also said it has entered the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance competition alongside ReconCraft. That program, jointly run by the Test Resource Management Center and the Defense Innovation Unit, has so far bought small aerial attack drones, and Red Cat’s own Teal Drones unit advanced to its second round on July 2.<\/p>\n Hinckley gave WorkBoat a full rundown of the American V7: 7.8 meters, up to 650 kg of mission payload, 40 knots in combat configuration and 32 knots sustained, 800 nautical miles on one load of fuel, more than 60 hours of unmanned endurance, and 1,200 liters of fuel feeding a 270-hp Steyr six-cylinder diesel.<\/p>\n Army Recognition’s rundown of the MV7, the current large Magura, lists a 7.8-meter hull, 1,200 liters of fuel, a basic payload of 650 kg, roughly 800 nautical miles of range, a top speed near 39 knots, and either a waterjet or a sterndrive. The V7 line runs a 270-hp diesel.<\/p>\n The differences that do turn up are in materials and electronics. Blue Ops describes an advanced composite HDPE and fiberglass hull, while UForce describes fiberglass reinforced with carbon fiber and Kevlar.<\/p>\n Blue Ops also leans hard on a domestic autonomy, command-and-control and communications stack built from NDAA-compliant parts. That stack, rather than the shape of the boat, is the part the company most insists is its own.<\/p>\n Red Cat entered the maritime drone business in May 2025 by announcing a partnership with an unnamed manufacturer whose boats had logged more than 10,000 hours in live combat missions. Nobody in the trade had much trouble working out who that was.<\/p>\n A year later the language had changed. When full-rate production was announced, the design was credited to Blue Ops engineers. Defense Express<\/a>, the Ukrainian defense outlet, argued in early June that the V7 is best understood as a system derived from the Magura V7 design line, at least in its prototypes and earliest configurations.<\/p>\n Hinckley’s account, given to Seapower a week before the production announcement, runs differently. He said Blue Ops originally cut a deal with a European company with Ukrainian roots and built boats in Western Europe under a Version 2 designation, then fell out with the partner over who controlled the technology.<\/p>\n Blue Ops wanted an open modular architecture that let customers bolt on their own payloads and sensors. He said the partner wanted to own the tech pack top to bottom and have Blue Ops resell it in the United States.<\/p>\n “It was an amicable separation. We separated in December,” Hinckley told Seapower.<\/p>\n Neither company has announced legal action, and no party has publicly alleged a breach of contract or infringement of anyone’s intellectual property.<\/p>\n The combat record everybody is trading on belongs to the Ukrainian original, not to anything built in Maine or Oregon. Blue Ops told WorkBoat it has not run live fire tests with the V7 and that the boat has not seen combat.<\/p>\n UForce says the Magura family contributed to the destruction of more than a dozen Russian warships in the Black Sea, and that its portfolio includes the first uncrewed surface vessel to bring down manned helicopters and fighter aircraft. Those are Ukrainian claims and Russia has not confirmed the losses. We went through the aircraft shootdowns in detail when BlackSea Technologies rolled out its own armed drone boat<\/a>, the Comet, in June.<\/p>\n Hinckley told WorkBoat that military interest in the V7 climbed sharply after Operation Epic Fury, the American campaign against Iran that began on February 28. He said Blue Ops has customers for the boat but declined to name any of them.<\/p>\n There is still no publicly announced US government order for either program. Red Cat reports second-quarter results on August 6, which is the first proper look at whether full-rate production has turned into anything with a purchase order attached to it.<\/p>\n None of this is unusual for the moment the Pentagon is in. The Navy has been buying foreign-designed uncrewed hardware wherever the foreign design is simply further along, which is how an Australian robot submarine ended up in US Navy hands<\/a> in May. Cheap and finished beats domestic and theoretical.<\/p>\n The argument over who drew this hull matters less than the argument over who can build it in volume. Blue Ops has a leased plant in Georgia, a published price, and boats coming off a line. ReconCraft has a signed memorandum, an Oregon campus, and an empty order book. Whoever books the first serious American contract gets to decide whose boat this is, and by then the spec sheet will have the winner’s name on the cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a foreign weapon starts working well enough to rattle a navy, the usual American answer is to buy a … <\/p>\nThe Ukrainians just signed an American factory of their own<\/h2>\n
The two spec sheets read like the same document<\/h2>\n
One side calls it a separation, the other calls it a copy<\/h2>\n
Neither American boat has fired a shot in anger<\/h2>\n