Pickup trucks get used for all kinds of things in Texas, and if you’ve spent any time near the coast you’ve probably watched a few of them back a trailer down a boat ramp before sunrise. The Pentagon’s border surveillance program now works pretty much like that, except the boat in the bed weighs about what a mid-size outboard motor does and nobody gets in it.<\/p>\n
That boat’s called the Lightfish, built by a San Diego startup named Seasats, and on October 2 the company said a fleet of them had been launched from the Texas coast into the Gulf<\/a> to look for drug runners and anyone else coming in by water. It’s an extension of a job those boats have been doing on the Rio Grande since January, floating alongside crewed patrols as part of something called Operation River Wall.<\/p>\n So what exactly is out there?<\/p>\n Each Lightfish is about 11 feet long, 3 feet wide and 340 pounds, according to the company. That’s lighter than most jet skis. Two people can carry one down to the water and launch it from a ramp or straight off a tailgate, and that’s basically the whole reason it could show up on a river where, by Seasats’ own account, nobody had run a drone boat for any length of time before.<\/p>\n It’s solar powered. The top of the hull is covered in panels, the panels charge a battery, and the battery turns an electric motor. Seasats’ spec sheet<\/a> rates the boat for six months on station, a cruise speed of 2 knots, a 5-knot sprint, and seas up to state 6, which works out to waves somewhere between 13 and 20 feet. It’s self-righting, so if a wave rolls it over it comes back up on its own, and there’s a small generator aboard as a reserve for bad weather or power-hungry sensors.<\/p>\n Two knots, by the way, is about 2.3 mph. You walk faster than that.<\/p>\n So this isn’t a boat that chases anyone. It parks itself on a patch of water, points its cameras at the bank or the horizon, and stays put, which is what the industry means by “holding station.” A crewed patrol boat has to come home when the fuel or the people run out. A Lightfish apparently doesn’t, for months at a time.<\/p>\n What rides in the payload bay depends on the job. Seasats says one hull has carried electro-optical and infrared cameras (regular video and heat vision, more or less), signals equipment, and sonar. Reuters puts the price at roughly $240,000 a boat.<\/p>\n Watching, mostly. Reuters reported on October 2<\/a> that the Pentagon has been running a test group of 10 Lightfish on the river since January. In an average month, the Pentagon says, the boats have assisted in 452 detections, 350 apprehensions and 100 turnbacks. Frankly, those are bigger numbers than I expected from a 10-boat pilot.<\/p>\n A turnback is border jargon for a group that starts crossing, realizes it’s been spotted, and heads back the way it came. The boat doesn’t do anything to them. It just sits there with its cameras on, and according to Mark R. Ditlevson, the assistant secretary of war for homeland defense whose office runs the program, that’s often enough. People on the bank see the boat waiting for them and know they’ve “basically been found out,” he told Reuters.<\/p>\n How does a boat with nobody aboard tell a Border Patrol agent anything? Its sensors feed tracking data into military software, Palantir’s Maven and Anduril’s Fortress according to Reuters, and those systems push alerts out to Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard. Basically, the boat spots something, a screen lights up somewhere, and a crewed unit decides whether to go take a look. The boat stays where it is.<\/p>\n I’d argue the river is the more interesting half of this story, even though the Gulf is the news. A drone boat on the open ocean is something you’ve seen on this site plenty of times. A drone boat anchored on a river narrow enough to throw a rock across, in water that’s shallow and muddy and full of debris, is a different problem, and 10 of them have apparently been dealing with it for nine months.<\/p>\n Because the Gulf is enormous and the Coast Guard can only be in a few places at once. Offshore surveillance has traditionally meant planes and cutters, and both run into one limitation: they burn fuel and they carry people, so they go out, look, and come back. Seasats CEO Mike Flanigan put it bluntly in the company’s release: “The Gulf is too vast to monitor with crewed hulls alone.”<\/p>\n He’s selling boats, so take that with a grain of salt. But the basic point holds up. A plane covers a lot of water fast and can’t stay. A 2-knot solar boat covers almost nothing fast and can stay for months. Put enough of them in a line and you’ve got a fence of cameras instead of a sweep, which is arguably a better match for the job of waiting around for a go-fast boat that may or may not show up.<\/p>\n That’s apparently the plan. Ditlevson told Reuters that if the program keeps working, Lightfish orders could grow by 50 boats and the fleet could form a radar fence across the Gulf from Texas to Key West. Key West is the far end of the Florida Keys, so that’s essentially the whole U.S. rim of the Gulf. He also said the expansion would come in increments and that his office isn’t wedded to one vendor.<\/p>\n Reuters names Saronic, Saildrone and Splash as companies building similar boats, and a couple of those have been through here recently: Saronic’s 24-foot Corsair stayed behind in Panama after a summer exercise<\/a> and now patrols with that country’s coast guard, and Splash’s 11-foot Typhoon<\/a> is a rival hull about as long as the Lightfish, built for speed instead of endurance.<\/p>\n Seasats hasn’t said how many boats went into the Gulf, and neither has the Pentagon. The release says “a fleet,” which could mean five or 50. My guess is it’s closer to the river number than the 50-boat figure, since that one’s still a maybe, but I can’t find anything that pins it down, so your guess is about as good as mine.<\/p>\n That sounds odd for a body of water that produces hurricanes, but it’s how the Pentagon is treating it. Reuters reports the Gulf deployment is a warm-up for testing the boats in the Pacific off San Diego, where the seas are rougher and the swells are bigger. Seasats happens to be based in San Diego, and the company has run Lightfish across the Pacific before, so the boat’s been in big water. Running a surveillance line in it, with boats expected to hold a spot for months, is a different ask.<\/p>\n So the sequence goes river, Gulf, Pacific. The 10 boats on the Rio Grande have been out there since January, the Gulf fleet went in off the Texas coast on October 2, and Ditlevson told Reuters the same day that the up-to-50-boat expansion depends on the results coming back from both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pickup trucks get used for all kinds of things in Texas, and if you’ve spent any time near the coast … <\/p>\nAn 11-foot boat that runs on sunlight<\/h2>\n
So what has a 340-pound boat been doing on the Rio Grande?<\/h2>\n
Why move them into the Gulf?<\/h2>\n
The Gulf is the easy water<\/h2>\n