Small drone boats have spent the last two years running errands. They map seabed, shadow suspicious hulls, carry spare parts between ships and stay well clear of anything that goes bang. One of them, an 11-foot boat called the Typhoon, had its moment in July by driving in through the open stern gate of a moving American warship with nobody aboard and nobody on a joystick. Its maker has now bolted a launcher for one-way attack drones onto the same deck.<\/p>\n
Splash Industries calls the module the Airstrike Pack. An operator hits a button inside the company’s own control software, Splash C2, and aerial drones leave the boat. Defence Blog<\/a> carried the announcement on August 26, and Splash said the module had already been through a force-on-force exercise.<\/p>\n The company has published no count, no model name and no range for the aircraft that pack carries.<\/p>\n The Pentagon put out a very specific shopping list five weeks earlier, and that one asked for numbers.<\/p>\n The Defense Innovation Unit opened a prize challenge called Suitable Warfighting Adaptive Payloads, or SWAP-USV, on July 29. It wants a crewless boat carrying “two or more mature, market-ready aerial drones” able to detect, track and defeat hostile targets at sea. DIU attached $100 million in prize money across three sprints, plus a separate $200 million budgeted for whatever the government buys afterward. Sprint 1 submissions closed on August 10.<\/p>\n DIU set the entry bar low on purpose. A boat needs 200 nautical miles of range, about 230 miles, and a sustained cruise of at least 10 knots, about 12 mph. Splash rates the Typhoon at more than 600 nautical miles, roughly 690 miles, and more than 50 knots sustained, roughly 58 mph. DIU also asks that the aircraft together carry at least 4 pounds (2 kg) of kinetic payload, and that some of them fly home while the rest do not. We went through that solicitation line by line when it landed<\/a>, and the recovery clause is the hard one.<\/p>\n DIU wrote its reasoning into the solicitation as arithmetic. Adversaries send explosive boats, small drones, go-fast smuggling hulls and semi-submersibles, all of them cheap, and the United States answers with naval and aviation assets that cost millions apiece. The department would like to stand on the cheap side of that trade. It also wants the kit to travel, so the boat and its drones have to fit inside a standard cargo container, onto a road trailer, or into a C-17 or C-130.<\/p>\n DIU left almost no room to build anything new. Companies picked for Sprint 1 get 29 days from down-selection to hand testers a complete boat with its drone system already integrated, and DIU has set a 120-day target for putting one to work. A vendor with a strike module already built and already exercised sits in a different spot from a vendor drawing one.<\/p>\n Splash’s announcement does not mention SWAP-USV. Neither outlet that carried it does either.<\/p>\n Launching is easy. Anything with a tube can throw. Catching a drone back onto a wet deck that is pitching and rolling, with no crew standing there to grab it, is the part nobody has made routine yet.<\/p>\n A one-way drone deletes that problem by never coming home. By Splash’s own description, the Airstrike Pack throws one-way aircraft and nothing else. The module bolts to the same configurable deck that carries the cargo and sensor packages, which is how an 11-foot boat gets to claim three jobs without three hulls.<\/p>\n Other builders have hit the same wall from the other side. A 38-foot uncrewed catamaran fired six loitering munitions off its own deck in the Arabian Gulf<\/a> while the man authorizing the shots sat in Bahrain, and that boat has never landed a drone back on.<\/p>\n Splash sent a Typhoon to RIMPAC 2026 in July with cargo aboard. The boat crossed the wake of USS Essex, an 844-foot Wasp-class amphibious assault ship under way off Hawaii, and put itself into the flooded stern with neither a radio nor a satellite link feeding it orders. The Naval Postgraduate School’s Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education put the demonstration together. Naval News<\/a> carried it on July 16, working from a clip that Splash CEO Ivan Avanesov had posted on X. Marines aboard the Essex built drone components during that same day, and a Typhoon took the finished parts back to the beach.<\/p>\n Axios reported the following week<\/a> that Splash also delivered parts to the nuclear-powered carrier Theodore Roosevelt at the same exercise, and that the company had raised $4.2 million in a round led by Ubiquity Ventures. RIMPAC 2026 ran more than 30 surface ships, a handful of submarines, hundreds of aircraft and tens of thousands of personnel.<\/p>\n A boat that can find a moving stern gate with its link cut can find a launch point with its link cut. Defenders jam first. An armed drone boat that loses its autonomy the moment somebody switches on a jammer is a target with an interesting payload, and the Essex approach is the closest thing Splash has to public evidence that the Typhoon keeps thinking on its own.<\/p>\n Another American builder ran a comparable errand at the same exercise, driving a 3D-printed spare part almost 40 nautical miles across Hawaiian water to a Canadian navy oiler<\/a> and coming back empty.<\/p>\n Splash prices a Typhoon at roughly one tenth of what it says rival systems cost, and it designs the electronics, the software and the sensors itself. On the Airstrike Pack, the company claims “a tenth of the price of our nearest competitor.” It names no competitor and attaches no dollar figure to either claim.<\/p>\n Splash left stealth mode in July with a claim of 10,000 nautical miles already behind its fleet, about 11,500 miles, run autonomously on three continents. Avanesov has a bigger hull coming called the Tempest, rated for 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of payload and 300 nautical miles, about 345 miles, and pointed at US Navy testing.<\/p>\n The Navy has already used cheap boats as the weapon itself. Naval News reported on July 13 that CENTCOM sent three Saronic Corsair uncrewed vessels carrying explosive packages against an Iranian submarine at Bandar Abbas, the first US use of a USV in a strike role. The Airstrike Pack points the other way. The hull comes home and the flying part does not, which changes what a single boat costs to use twice.<\/p>\n Splash’s site lists six mission profiles for its vessels: coastal defense, seabed mapping, harbor patrols, oceanography, payload delivery and mine clearing. None of them is a strike role. The company’s public specification page<\/a> carried a 50-knot top speed and a 600-nautical-mile range as of August 31, with no Airstrike Pack entry anywhere on it.<\/p>\n Splash’s announcement and the two outlets that carried it are the entire public record on this module. The exercise has no date, no location and no named participants. The pack has no drone count and no drone model.<\/p>\n A Typhoon carrying an Airstrike Pack onto a government test range would settle the drone count in an afternoon. DIU closed Sprint 1 submissions on August 10 with $40 million attached to that round, and its first in-water testing is scheduled for this fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Small drone boats have spent the last two years running errands. They map seabed, shadow suspicious hulls, carry spare parts … <\/p>\nThe Pentagon asked for this exact boat on July 29<\/h2>\n
One-way drones skip the part everybody is stuck on<\/h2>\n
The well deck run is what makes the launcher believable<\/h2>\n
An 11-foot hull is the whole commercial argument<\/h2>\n
Splash’s own website still lists no weapon<\/h2>\n