Every beach landing movie you’ve ever seen skips a step. Before anyone storms ashore, someone has to make sure the water isn’t hiding things that explode, and for the better part of a century that someone has mostly been a human in a wetsuit with very steady nerves.<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps is working on sending a robot in first.<\/p>\n
In late August, Marines at Camp Pendleton spent two weeks running a small drone boat through the water just off the Pacific coast, building mock mine targets and then hunting them with sonar. The test is part of a program called LEON, short for Littoral Explosive Ordnance Neutralization, and the details went out on September 15 in a news release from Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps<\/a>, the office that runs the program. The release never names the boat, which is apparently standard practice here. It took USNI News<\/a> two more days to match the Pentagon’s own photos and video to the Mako Lite, a commercial drone boat built by AEVEX<\/a>.<\/p>\n The company’s spec sheet fills in what the Marines left out. The Mako Lite is 110 inches long and 46 inches wide, weighs 455 pounds empty, and hauls up to 100 pounds of payload. AEVEX rates it at 12.5 hours of endurance and up to 250 nautical miles of range, on a fuel tank configurable anywhere from 8 to 30 gallons. It talks to its operators over a 900 MHz line-of-sight radio and navigates with a multi-constellation GNSS receiver, and that’s a fancy way of saying it doesn’t lean on American GPS satellites alone. For this test, it carried sonar, forward-looking infrared cameras, and both line-of-sight and acoustic communications gear.<\/p>\n AEVEX hasn’t published a top speed for the Mako Lite, and I’m not going to guess one. The company does say it’s a scaled-down version of its bigger Mako hull, which runs about 11 feet.<\/p>\n Because LEON isn’t one machine. It’s five increments of capability, in Marine-speak: a remotely operated vehicle, diver equipment, an underwater drone, this surface boat, and an amphibious ground robot that crawls through the surf zone. Together they’re built to confirm and mark explosive hazards from very shallow water all the way up onto the beach, so an EOD technician gets close to a hazard as the last step instead of the first.<\/p>\n The boat is increment four, and it has two jobs. Job number one is obvious: the sonar and cameras sweep for anything that shouldn’t be there. Job number two is less obvious, and frankly it’s the more interesting of the two. The Mako Lite provides the system’s communications link in the form of a Mobile Gateway Buoy, and everything the underwater systems find gets relayed up to the surface in real time.<\/p>\n If you’re wondering why underwater robots need a surface boat passing their messages along, it’s a physics problem. Radio doesn’t work underwater. The signal dies within a few feet of the surface, while sound carries just fine down there, which is why submarines hunt with sonar instead of radar. So from the looks of things, the buoy is the middleman, with the machines below reporting in acoustic pings and their findings reaching the operators as regular radio traffic. The Navy has been working the same acoustic angle elsewhere, with a seabed drone that heard submarine drones pass through a channel<\/a> and put them on a screen within seconds.<\/p>\n Capt. Timothy Guinan, the project officer on the Explosive Hazard Defeat Team, summed up what all of that buys the Corps: the system enables maneuvers by “identifying safe routes for transit within the littorals,” he said in the release. Translation for those of us who don’t speak acquisition: it finds the lanes where nothing blows up.<\/p>\n System engineers from the Explosive Hazard Defeat Team and EOD technicians from 7th Engineer Support Battalion started out gently, running the boat through calm water and getting comfortable with the control system. Then they pushed it out into wide-area searches across different sea states, practicing waypoint runs, dropping targets in the water and double-checking their positions as they went.<\/p>\n So did the boat hold up? According to the Marines who ran it, yes. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Alfredo Andrade, who runs the EOD company at 7th Engineer Support Battalion, said the events were successful, the boat ran well with long endurance, and the results were good enough to keep refining the capability.<\/p>\n The two weeks were a Field User Evaluation, which basically means the Marines who’d actually operate the thing got their hands on it while it’s still in development, with their feedback going straight to the program office before the design gets locked in. That sounds like common sense, and it kind of is, but plenty of military hardware has reached the fleet with problems the end users could’ve flagged years earlier.<\/p>\n The boat won’t put EOD divers out of work. The Corps isn’t claiming it will, either. The machine goes in ahead of the humans and feeds them information. Whatever it finds, divers still handle. What changes is how long a search can run: Guinan noted that a drone can go in the water and stay on task for hours, covering big stretches of coastline while a handful of people keep an eye on the screens.<\/p>\n Andrade’s argument for the program came down to preserving the force. Long conflicts grind people down, bringing in replacements gets expensive and turns into a logistics problem, and unmanned gear exists so combat power stays available anyway.<\/p>\n The Marines have been leaning into this kind of gear across the board lately. The Corps just committed to a dozen more eight-wheeled cargo drones<\/a> after a similar test-and-feedback cycle, and American and German sailors recently spent five days dropping practice mines off Portugal<\/a> with a drone glider logging the water around them. Of all the jobs you’d hand to a machine first, “swim toward the explosive device” is frankly a pretty defensible pick.<\/p>\n The Corps has been putting LEON platoons in the field since 2021 under its Force Design overhaul, which pushed the service toward smaller, littoral-focused units that bring their own beach clearing capability. Other pieces of the family are moving too. The amphibious crawler is a customized Bayonet 250 from Greensea IQ, under contract since early last year, and Marines already ran it through the surf off Kodiak, Alaska, during an Arctic exercise this past winter.<\/p>\n The Marine Corps says the successful validation of the surface boat sets a path to fielding it to EOD companies in fiscal year 2027, with the integrated LEON family of systems due in the field within the next two years, per the September 15 release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every beach landing movie you’ve ever seen skips a step. Before anyone storms ashore, someone has to make sure the … <\/p>\nSo why put a boat on the surface when the mines are underneath?<\/h2>\n
Calm water first, then rougher stuff<\/h2>\n
Divers aren’t going anywhere<\/h2>\n
Fielding is penciled in for fiscal 2027<\/h2>\n