The Pentagon wants robot boats that can carry, launch, and control attack drones — and it wants working hardware in the water this fall, not paper concepts.
The Defense Innovation Unit, the military's tech scouting arm, opened a contest on July 29 for unmanned surface vessels armed with at least two aerial drones. The program, called Suitable Warfighting Adaptive Payloads, or SWAP-USV, backs the effort with up to $100 million in prize money spread across three phases.
Companies have until Aug. 10 to respond. The winners will be expected to ship a complete, mission-ready boat-and-drone package for testing within 29 days of selection. DIU says it is looking for "mature, market-ready" unmanned surface vessels "fully integrated with two or more mature, market-ready aerial drones" that can detect, identify, track, and defeat hostile threats.
Why the Navy is chasing cheap robot boats
The solicitation reads like a confession that the old math no longer works. DIU says the "cost-exchange ratio" for stopping asymmetric maritime threats "is heavily skewed in favor of the adversary," and that the U.S. military can't keep throwing "exquisite, multi-million-dollar naval and aviation assets" at inexpensive attackers.
The threats named in the document are familiar ones: swarming small boats, "go-fast" smuggling craft, and semi-submersibles that drug cartels have used to move contraband from South America for decades. In the Persian Gulf, Iran's fleet of fast attack craft and one-way attack drones has pushed the U.S. Navy toward cheaper, expendable answers. The same logic drove Ukraine's Magura drone boats, which have hammered Russian warships in the Black Sea since 2022 and cost well under $500,000 apiece.
The war in Ukraine turned the unmanned surface vessel from a curiosity into a proven weapon class. Kyiv's naval drones have sunk or disabled Russian vessels including the patrol ship Sergei Kotov and the corvette Ivanovets, and the GUR intelligence service has released steady footage of Magura strikes. Those results did not go unnoticed in Washington. The Pentagon's own review of its European force posture, kicked off the same week as the SWAP-USV solicitation, is wrestling with how to defend against the same tactics at much larger scale.
SWAP-USV wants a vessel that can patrol ocean, coastal, and riverine waters, loiter on station, and shadow a vessel of interest on its own. The drones it carries should be able to handle surveillance, communications relay, electronic warfare, or kinetic strikes with a combined payload of at least 2 kilograms — just over four pounds. DIU wants a mix of recoverable and one-way attack drones, and it wants the boats to keep watch for days at a time while minimizing crew requirements, logistics burden, and daily operating cost.
Three sprints, $100 million in prizes
The challenge runs for about a year and is split into three sprints, each with its own cash and its own testing window:
- Sprint 1 puts $40 million on the table. In-water testing happens this fall, with a goal of fielding a system within 120 days. DIU wants a full mission-ready USV with integrated drone capability available for evaluation within 29 days of down-selection.
- Sprint 2 also carries $40 million in prizes, with submissions in late 2026 and testing in early 2027. The focus shifts to "expanded payloads, upgraded autonomy, and multi-vendor integrations."
- Sprint 3 offers $20 million, with submissions in early 2027 and summer testing. The goals for that phase will be announced later.
Teams that pass testing become eligible for procurement contracts backed by a separate $200 million budget. DIU says it wants vessels with "an established production line" — not hand-built demonstrators that lean on their original engineering team. The government reserves the right to assign applicants to sprint cohorts based on technical and manufacturing maturity, so a startup with a promising hull and a defense giant with a proven supply chain will be measured against the same fielding clock.
The hard part isn't the boat
IN Defence, a defense trade publication, dug into the engineering reality behind the contest: carrying a drone aboard a small vessel is easy compared with launching and recovering it at sea.
The deck, canister, or launch frame has to tolerate aircraft loads, hull movement, shock, saltwater, and repeated handling. Power and data connections are needed for charging, thermal control, navigation alignment, software loading, and mission updates — all while competing with propulsion, sensors, and communications for limited onboard energy.
Recovery is harder than launch. A reusable aircraft on a pitching small boat needs precision landing, capture gear, beacons, deck markings, or protected storage, and every added mechanism brings weight, corrosion exposure, and maintenance. One-way drones skip the recovery gear but turn the vessel into a forward magazine: useful only if reloading is safe, fast, and cheap.
Armed payloads add another layer. DIU's solicitation demands defined electrical, mechanical, software, and safety standards for weapons integration — no ad-hoc mounts that a supplier bolts on for a trial. Communications matter too, because the boat must control its drones while staying linked to the wider force in contested conditions. Greater autonomy reduces reliance on continuous links, but it pushes the burden onto software assurance, navigation resilience, and safe-failure behavior — the unglamorous parts of naval engineering that decide whether a system survives contact with a real adversary.
A container-sized answer
Transportability shapes the design from day one. The system must fit inside a standard cargo container, on a road trailer, or in a C-17 or C-130 transport aircraft. DIU says it will look favorably on solutions that can launch from unimproved locations or be fired remotely from a container.
That packaging requirement is deliberate. It lets the Navy treat drone boats like ammunition — airlift them to a theater, drop them near the coast, and let them operate with minimal logistics. It also keeps the door open for commercial builders who have never worked with the Pentagon but build seaworthy hulls and reliable autopilots at scale.
The economics are the point. The Pentagon has watched Ukraine wage a naval war with hundreds of cheap surface drones, and has studied how a single $250,000 USV can threaten a ship that costs a hundred times more. SWAP-USV is the Pentagon's attempt to industrialize that lesson instead of resisting it. Each vessel in the contest must sustain a range of at least 200 nautical miles and hold ten knots while crossing open water, littoral zones, and confined channels — a spec sheet that reads like a checklist for the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea, and the Black Sea alike.
What happens next
The Aug. 10 response deadline is the first gate. DIU will assign companies to sprint cohorts based on technical and manufacturing maturity, reserving the right to slot applicants where it sees fit. The fall testing window is tight, which is exactly the intent: the program is designed to skip the multi-year acquisition cycle that normally governs naval hardware.
One early sign of the direction: Portland-based ReconCraft said earlier this month it will build Ukrainian-designed Magura drone boats in the United States, with ambitions to produce thousands a year. The Wall Street Journal first reported the move, which pairs a U.S. shipbuilder with a combat-proven Ukrainian design — a template for the kind of rapid fielding the SWAP-USV contest is trying to force.
The contest also fits a broader pattern in U.S. defense robotics. Earlier this year the Pentagon moved to speed up drone production across all three services, and the DIU has run similar prize challenges for counter-drone systems and autonomous logistics. Robot boats are the maritime chapter of the same story: take a cheap, proven platform, add autonomy and modular payloads, and let numbers do the work that expensive platforms used to do alone.
For a full look at how the Pentagon is reshaping its drone and robotics programs, browse the Robotics and Drones section of this site. The program details come from the Defense Innovation Unit's solicitation as reported by Military Times, with additional reporting from UPI and IN Defence.