Mark Megahan
DARPA wasn’t happy that their secret robot warship was spotted by casual observers. Since it was too late to stuff the genie back in the bottle, they went ahead and made a public announcement to admit the project. It’s called “USX-1 Defiant.”
DARPA secret warship
DARPA isn’t happy to admit they’ve been working on a secret robot warship.
The same Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that brought you “Facebook” has “been forced to acknowledge that a mysterious ship spotted by a Washington state Redditor is from one of their special programs.”
The intelligence community wasn’t thrilled when “images of the odd-looking, 180-foot ship escorted by a tugboat through the Saratoga Passage in Puget Sound emerged on Reddit.” They weren’t anywhere close to revealing their secret warship and it’s autonomous capabilities.
All it took was someone to post the snapshot on the “r/Navy” subreddit. They wanted to know what in the heck it was. The armchair experts were stumped, totally unable to “identify the craft photographed just a few miles from a Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island.”
They were glad to learn that there’s a really good reason they couldn’t identify the strange warship from it’s profile. They weren’t supposed to know anything about it.
Once they had a mystery on their hands they wouldn’t leave it alone until they had it solved. The high-paid eggheads at DARPA were smart enough to realize their cover had been blown to the moon.
Without any humans
A spokesperson for DARPA “confirmed to outlet The War Zone that the boat was a new ‘uncrewed surface vessel‘ designed to operate for extended sea voyages without any humans onboard.” It may not have humans but this warship is ready for action. Named “USX-1 Defiant,” it’s heavily armed and about to be deployed.
Built into the design is the concept of “graceful degradation,” which “accounts for the possibility of individual equipment failing at sea by having enough redundancy in the ship’s systems to maintain a 15-knot pace for an entire year’s journey.”
They have an entire No Manning Required Ship program and Defiant is only part of it. The government casually mentions that their new robot warship “may soon be an operational part of the Navy’s fleet.”
Sized at 240-metric tons, the autonomous warbot was developed by Serco Inc. and “will soon undergo extensive in-water testing.” They’ve dropped $68.5 million into it, so far.
If all the tests go as expected, they plan to send it on “a multi-month, crewless test journey at sea.” That will probably happen sometime this spring. The sales brochure calls it “a low-cost, low-maintenance, and versatile ship” that will be able to successfully navigate “missile-laden drone boats in the future.”
The warship also features an “innovative modular design,” which “allows the medium-sized vessel to house angled missile launch systems and act as a transport.“
