You’ve probably seen more news out of the Strait of Hormuz this year than in the previous ten combined. Tankers, mines, warships, oil prices doing unpleasant things. But the latest machine to turn up burning on camera there isn’t a tanker or a destroyer. It’s a sailboat. A 23-foot robotic sailboat with nobody aboard, which Iran says it hit. The US says it’s perfectly fine.<\/p>\n
On September 10, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that its navy had struck an American unmanned surface vessel, hull number 5838, at the entrance to the strait, and put out video of a small boat burning on the water. The IRGC statement, carried by Naval Today<\/a>, said the vessel had been stopped from carrying out an “aggressive mission.” A US official’s answer, given to Military Times<\/a>, was short: “All of our Saildrones are accounted for and fully operational.”<\/p>\n Both of those can’t be fully true at once, and I can’t tell you whose version has the hole in it.<\/p>\n What I can tell you is that four days later, according to US officials, IRGC small boats made a grab at another Navy surface drone in the same strait, and that time the US shot back with missiles. So somebody in Tehran apparently thinks these boats are worth going after. Which raises a fair question: what exactly is the Navy doing parking robotic sailboats at the mouth of what’s arguably the most contested waterway on the planet right now? Bear with me, because the answer’s pretty good.<\/p>\n The boat in the September 10 video is a Saildrone Explorer, going by Iranian media’s identification and by analysts who reviewed the footage. Saildrone is a company out of Alameda, California, that builds uncrewed sailboats, and the Explorer is its smallest one: 23 feet long, with a 15-foot rigid wing where a normal sailboat would carry a cloth sail. The wing works less like a sail and more like an airplane wing stood on end. Wind flowing over it produces thrust, and a small tab on the tail trims the angle. That’s the entire propulsion system.<\/p>\n There’s no engine anywhere on the boat. Solar panels feed the cameras, the radar and the satellite link, and the wind does the moving, at an average of about 3 knots. Which sounds slow, and it is, but this boat isn’t trying to get anywhere. According to Saildrone<\/a>, an Explorer can stay at sea for more than 12 months at a stretch. A year on the water without burning a drop of fuel.<\/p>\n If that setup sounds familiar, it’s because we just covered a 4-foot drone sailboat that crossed the Atlantic by itself<\/a> in 117 days. Same recipe, scaled up and sent somewhere far less friendly.<\/p>\n The Navy has been running Explorers in the region since early 2022, when Task Force 59, its unmanned-systems unit based in Bahrain, put them to work in the Arabian Gulf. The job’s boring on purpose: sit in one patch of water, watch everything with cameras and radar, and pass anything odd up the chain. The Navy calls it maritime domain awareness. I’d call it a very patient robotic lookout.<\/p>\n Because holding a station is one of the most expensive things a navy does. A destroyer parked at the mouth of Hormuz needs roughly 300 sailors, fuel, food, and eventually another destroyer to relieve it. A 23-foot sailboat needs wind. If somebody shoots it, you’ve lost a boat instead of people, and the whole pitch is that a lost boat is basically an accounting problem.<\/p>\n Iran’s apparently decided that grabbing them is the countermove, and this isn’t a new hobby. Iranian vessels grabbed at Saildrones twice in 2022, once towing one in the Arabian Gulf and once lifting two out of the Red Sea, and handed them back when American destroyers showed up. This month has been busier. On September 8, two days before the burning-sailboat video, the IRGC hauled in a 19-foot Anduril Dive-LD, an American underwater drone, at the entrance to the strait. A Pentagon spokesperson told Reuters that one had “malfunctioned more than a day ago” and carried nothing classified. We looked at that class of undersea drone when a German rival built to fit a torpedo tube<\/a> showed up days later.<\/p>\nSo what is this thing?<\/h2>\n
Why a sailboat, though?<\/h2>\n
Then somebody tried to steal one<\/h2>\n