The technology barrier just fell. The procurement barrier hasn’t.
Two vessels. Two countries. The same month.
MARTAC announced on 5 May that its T38 Devil Ray, owned and operated by the US Navy’s Point Mugu Sea Range (Point Mugu), had completed a 192-hour autonomous mission 400 nautical miles off the California coast. Eight days, no crew, no chase boats with conditions up to sea state 5 at the peak, and averaging Sea State 3 across the mission. Single-engine operations deliberately sustained for two days at maximum range, not as a failure mode but as a demonstration of operational flexibility. COLREGS-compliant collision avoidance handled throughout.
Then, on Monday 18 May, Maritime Robotics’ Mariner X departed its headquarters at Brattørkaia in Trondheim and set out on a 500 nm unmanned voyage down the Norwegian coast, without a human aboard. The first leg alone, Trondheim to Mongstad north of Bergen, covered over 300 nautical miles. A live SeaSight camera feed tracked the entire transit publicly.
They weren’t talking about warships.