Florida has spent decades building fast boats for people with money. Composite catamarans and deep-vee hulls, laid up by hand, priced like houses, built to cross open water very quickly and not to do much else.<\/p>\n
In June, two of those yards signed manufacturing deals with a defense contractor in Melbourne. Same molds, same workforce, same obsession with keeping a hull flat at speed. The boats coming off the line now have nowhere to sit.<\/p>\n
The contractor is Maritime Tactical Systems, MARTAC for short, and by its own count it has been building crewless boats for 15 years without much of anyone outside the defense trade noticing. Last week is when it stopped being quiet.<\/p>\n
Submissions for the first round of the Pentagon’s SWAP-USV competition<\/a> closed at 11:59pm Eastern on Monday. In the days before that deadline MARTAC put its argument on the record twice: a company post on August 7 explaining why its flagship boat fits the requirement, and first-half results on August 4 claiming the strongest six months in its history.<\/p>\n Neither document says the company entered. Both read like it did.<\/p>\n Nobody is confirming anything now that the window has shut. The Defense Innovation Unit has not published a list of entrants, and MARTAC has posted nothing since the 7th.<\/p>\n The competition is run by the Defense Innovation Unit. What it wants is a crewless boat that carries its own attack drones, throws them into the air while moving and catches the reusable ones on the way back down.<\/p>\n There is up to $100 million in prize money across three rounds, plus $200 million budgeted for whatever gets bought afterward. We went through the solicitation line by line when it dropped<\/a>.<\/p>\n The short version is that DIU is not interested in prototypes, and the performance floor is a boat with 200 nautical miles of range and a sustained cruise of at least 10 knots.<\/p>\n DIU’s stated problem is arithmetic. Explosive boats, small drones, go-fast smuggling hulls and semi-submersibles are all cheap, and the assets currently sent out to stop them cost millions apiece.<\/p>\n The department would like to stand on the cheap side of that trade for once, and it has already seen what the cheap side can do: a $240,000 American drone boat got close enough to film a billion-dollar Chinese destroyer off Luzon in June<\/a> and drove itself home afterward.<\/p>\n MARTAC’s strongest card is a mission it ran in May and has been citing ever since.<\/p>\n A Devil Ray T38 spent 192 hours at sea off the California coast with nobody aboard and nobody following it.<\/p>\n The boat belongs to the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division’s Point Mugu Sea Range, which runs it through a program called Blue Water Instrumentation. The company’s account of the run<\/a> makes a point of the fact that there were no chase boats and no escorts.<\/p>\n Eight days is the headline. The conditions are the more interesting part. Sea states averaged 3, meaning wave heights of roughly 1.5 to 4 feet, and peaked at Sea State 5 with waves reaching 10 feet.<\/p>\n For two of those days, around 400 nautical miles offshore, the operators deliberately shut down one of the two engines and alternated between them. MARTAC says that was not a failure scenario, and describes it as a way to stretch loiter time and see what the autonomy did on reduced propulsion.<\/p>\n Karl Van Deusen, MARTAC’s senior vice president for federal and government sales, said the mission was “designed to test more than endurance.” The company also states the T38 clears 2,400 nautical miles on a full tank under an endurance profile, which is twelve times the DIU floor.<\/p>\n The number MARTAC actually sells the T38 on is not 192 hours. It is 60 knots.<\/p>\n The company spec sheet<\/a> lists the T38 at 38 feet, 4,000 pounds of payload capacity and a burst speed above 60 knots, qualified as depending on sea state. It is a race hull with a diesel powertrain and an autonomy stack sitting where the driver should be.<\/p>\n Across the eight-day run it averaged a little over 4 knots. That works out to about 4.6 mph, roughly the pace of someone walking briskly, held for a week, 400 nautical miles (460 miles) from the nearest fuel dock.<\/p>\n Both numbers are real and they do not contradict each other. Fuel is fuel. The release notes short intervals where burst speed was called for and the boat produced 50-plus knots, and the rest of the time it ran an efficiency profile, because that is what endurance costs.<\/p>\n DIU’s threshold asks for a sustained cruise of at least 10 knots. The mission that made MARTAC’s name this year averaged less than half of that.<\/p>\n That is not a disqualification. The threshold describes what a hull can hold when it is asked to, not what one particular mission chose to do. But the record everybody keeps quoting was set doing something other than what the Pentagon is buying, and those two facts keep getting stapled together in the coverage.<\/p>\n DIU wants at least two drones aboard, one of them carrying a kinetic payload of 2 kilograms or more, and it wants a mix of reusable aircraft and single-use ones.<\/p>\n MARTAC has publicly done the single-use half, and it did it from this exact boat.<\/p>\n In October 2023, during a Navy exercise called Digital Talon in the Arabian Gulf, a T38 fitted with a six-round launcher fired AeroVironment Switchblade 300 loitering munitions at mock targets and scored direct hits<\/a>.<\/p>\n The engagement calls came from a human operator sitting ashore at Task Force 59’s Robotics Operations Center, the Navy’s Bahrain-based unmanned unit, and the same outfit that later ran the drone boat that pulled two Apache pilots out of the water off Oman<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is a wrinkle in the arithmetic. The Switchblade 300’s warhead is commonly reported at around 4 pounds, and DIU’s floor is 2 kilograms, which is 4.4 pounds. Depending on whether “payload” is read as the warhead or the whole munition, the one weapon MARTAC has publicly fired off a T38 deck sits right on the line.<\/p>\n The company’s August 7 post reaches back further than Digital Talon, to 2021, when it was among the first vendors putting boats in the water for Task Force 59.<\/p>\n It also claims five escorted transits of the Strait of Hormuz alongside the US Coast Guard, and a T38 craned off the expeditionary sea base USNS Lewis B. Puller in the southern Red Sea.<\/p>\n The requirement that decides this competition is not the launch. It is the landing.<\/p>\n DIU’s language on reusable aircraft is specific: safe and repeatable recovery aboard the vessel while underway, in representative sea states, with minimal operator intervention. A pitching deck a few feet across, making way through a swell, with nobody standing on it holding a net.<\/p>\n MARTAC’s post argues the catamaran is the answer to exactly that, on the grounds that two hulls and a wide beam roll less than one hull does. The May mission is offered as the evidence for the stability claim, and the physics behind it is not in dispute.<\/p>\n What the post does not contain is a demonstration. The only recoverable aircraft it names is an Easy Aerial tethered drone used for surveillance, and a tether is a different engineering problem from a free-flying quadcopter finding a moving deck on its own.<\/p>\n The clearest public example of that trick working came in May from a German firm<\/a>, not an American one.<\/p>\n The gap shows up in stranger places too. Belgium’s new mine warfare setup runs a 39-foot drone boat that carries three underwater robots out to the search area<\/a>, and there is still a crewman riding on it, because the launch and recovery system is not automatic yet.<\/p>\n A navy that built its entire doctrine around keeping people out of the blast radius still cannot get a human off that one boat.<\/p>\n Stability is a good argument. It is still an argument.<\/p>\n Six days ago MARTAC told the market it had finished the best half-year in its history.<\/p>\n The claims: record orders, backlog, revenue, profit and cash flow for the six months to June 30, a 25-fold increase in production capacity, and full-year projections of 700% order growth and 500% revenue growth against 2025, with research spending up 1,000%.<\/p>\n Every one of those is a percentage. MARTAC is privately held, the release carries no dollar figures, and 500% growth on an undisclosed base is not a number anyone outside the company can check. Chief executive Tony Smeraglinolo, hired as part of a leadership overhaul last year, put the company at 115 missions in theater across those 15 years.<\/p>\n The production side is firmer. The Mystic Powerboats agreement landed in early June and the Intrepid Powerboats one on June 17, and MARTAC says the pair together take Devil Ray output to between 200 and 300 hulls a year. Intrepid’s president, Terry McNew, described it as a natural extension of what his yard already builds.<\/p>\n That matters more than the percentages do, because DIU wrote production readiness straight into the scoring. It states it is not buying concepts, and it wants an active production line for the boat and the aircraft both.<\/p>\n The August 7 post opens on “the ongoing conflict in the Strait of Hormuz,” which is a fair description of a waterway that has been disrupted since late February.<\/p>\nThe endurance record was set the awkward way<\/h2>\n
A boat rated for 60 knots averaged the speed of a brisk walk<\/h2>\n
The kamikaze half of this was settled three years ago<\/h2>\n
Nobody has shown the drone coming back down<\/h2>\n
Five hundred percent of a number nobody has published<\/h2>\n