Wing-in-ground-effect craft have been about to change warfare for roughly sixty years. The Soviets built the ekranoplans, the West looked at them, and almost nothing came of it. DARPA had a go with Liberty Lifter, a giant WIG transport X-plane, and killed the program in 2025.<\/p>\n
So the sensible reaction to another WIG announcement is a raised eyebrow.<\/p>\n
Except this one comes with a deadline attached. The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab said back in April that it would decide how it intends to use this machine in the Pacific if, and only if, the vehicle cleared two specific tests. The first of those was an electronic warfare gauntlet in Michigan last month.<\/p>\n
That test is now finished, and the company involved says it went fine.<\/p>\n
Some of the coverage has this thing wildly oversized, so start with the tape measure.<\/p>\n
Squire, built by REGENT of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, is 13 feet long with an 18-foot wingspan<\/a> and stands about five and a half feet tall. It carries 50 pounds. The internal bay measures 14 by 12 by 14 inches, which works out to 2,400 cubic inches of mission volume.<\/p>\n This is a drone roughly the footprint of a large jet ski, not a vessel. Anybody quoting it in tons has confused it with something else.<\/p>\n The three-stage sequence is the whole reason REGENT calls these seagliders instead of ekranoplans.<\/p>\n Squire starts sitting on its hull like any small boat. It accelerates, retractable hydrofoils lift the hull clear of the water, and it runs on the foils to about 35 knots. Once it has enough speed it comes off the foils entirely and transitions into ground-effect flight, skimming within a wingspan of the surface at up to 70 knots.<\/p>\n That middle step matters more than it sounds. Classic WIG craft had to claw their way up onto the air cushion straight from a displacement hull, which is where most of them got into trouble in anything but flat water. Foiling out first removes the worst of that problem.<\/p>\n The payoff at the far end is signature. A wing operating within its own wingspan of a flat surface gets a large efficiency gain from the trapped air underneath, and a vehicle sitting that low sits below the line-of-sight radar horizon and above sonar. Fast like a small aircraft, hard to see like a low boat.<\/p>\n REGENT classifies it as a USA-V, for unmanned surface and aerial vehicle, because it does not fit either existing category cleanly. It also does not need runway infrastructure, which is the entire argument for using it in the Pacific.<\/p>\n REGENT announced on August 18<\/a> that Squire had completed its run at Silent Swarm, which ran July 13 to 24 across Michigan’s Northern Lower Peninsula, the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center and their combined ranges, airspace and waterways.<\/p>\n Nobody shoots at anything there. The exercise exists to throw radar, communications interference, navigation spoofing, infrared and directed-energy effects at small uncrewed systems and see which ones keep working.<\/p>\n Squire spent the event carrying payloads across electronic attack, electronic protection and electronic warfare support roles. The stated goal was proving it can operate inside a joint picture and stay talking to other assets while a professional crew tries to break its links.<\/p>\n The event was led by Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane and sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, through its Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance office. Partners included the Michigan National Guard, Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic, NOAA, the Army C5ISR Center and the Air Force Test Center.<\/p>\n Co-founder and chief executive Billy Thalheimer framed it as a chance to show defense stakeholders what the drone does in what he called an operationally relevant setting. Which is corporate for: the customer watched, and nothing embarrassing happened.<\/p>\n One correction worth making. Defense Daily described it<\/a> as almost two weeks, which is right. Squire did not fly for two weeks straight. It flew sorties inside an event that spanned those dates.<\/p>\n Here is the part that makes the timing interesting.<\/p>\n When Squire made its first flight on April 13 on Narragansett Bay, MCWL project manager Matthew Koch told The War Zone<\/a> that a Marine Corps position on Pacific employment was conditional. If the technology proved out at Silent Swarm in July and in a full-size flight test in early August, he said, he would have a statement on how the Marines intend to use it.<\/p>\n Gate one is now closed. REGENT says it went well, though the Marines have not said so themselves.<\/p>\n Gate two was scheduled for a window that has already passed, and no public statement has followed. That silence is the most informative thing in this story right now, and it cuts both ways: programs stay quiet when results are bad, and they also stay quiet when a service is still writing the paperwork.<\/p>\n The skepticism is earned. Liberty Lifter was the Pentagon’s serious swing at WIG, a large flying transport meant to move heavy cargo across the Pacific without ports or runways, and DARPA shut it down in 2025.<\/p>\n Ground-effect flight is unforgiving in a real sea. You cannot climb over an obstacle the way an aircraft can. Nobody has run a WIG fleet at scale in decades, so maintenance intervals, sea-state limits and autonomy in cluttered coastal traffic are all open questions rather than known quantities.<\/p>\n Squire’s approach is to be small enough that those unknowns are survivable. Fifty pounds of sensor or medical supply is not a landing force. It is a probe you can afford to lose, which is the same logic driving the Navy’s cheap uncrewed surface boats<\/a>.<\/p>\n REGENT stood up a dedicated defense division in July 2025. Its Marine Corps relationship runs older than that: a first phase worth $4.75 million covering twelve deliverables, then a second phase worth $10 million with extension options announced in March 2025. Defence Blog puts<\/a> the current Marine Corps contract value at $15 million, and notes development relationships with US Special Operations Command and the Coast Guard Research and Development Center.<\/p>\n In February, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited the company’s Rhode Island headquarters, and Squire was displayed for him at the Seabee Museum in Quonset on February 9. That is unusually senior attention for a 13-foot drone.<\/p>\n Since April, Squire has also run live scenarios with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab covering dockside litter boarding, beach extractions and an open-water life raft rescue, all aimed at medical evacuation work.<\/p>\n The bigger machines are where the money is. The crewed Viceroy is 55 feet long with a 65-foot wingspan, carries 12 passengers or 3,500 pounds at 160 knots, and its prototype Paladin has been in sea trials on Narragansett Bay. REGENT is developing a hybrid defense variant rated at 1,400 nautical miles, and building a 255,000-square-foot plant at Quonset to make them.<\/p>\n All of which is a lot of infrastructure resting on whether a 13-foot drone convinced a room full of Marines in Michigan. The company has told us its side. The service that actually has to buy the thing has not said a word, and it promised it would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wing-in-ground-effect craft have been about to change warfare for roughly sixty years. The Soviets built the ekranoplans, the West looked … <\/p>\nIt floats, then it foils, then it flies<\/h2>\n
Silent Swarm is a jamming range, not an air show<\/h2>\n
The Marines set two gates and this was the first one<\/h2>\n
DARPA already killed the ambitious version of this idea<\/h2>\n
The paperwork behind it<\/h2>\n