For over a decade, Saildrone has been building extreme long-endurance sail/hybrid autonomous sea vessels for ocean data collection and mapping. Now, the company is adapting the tech to create a super-quiet, long-range sub-hunter craft.
It may seem odd for a company that builds vessels propelled by the wind and solar energy for research to suddenly shift gears and get into submarine warfare, but if you look at the current trends in naval strategy it begins to make a lot of sense.
The days when a seafaring nation could rely on a blue-water fleet of major combat ships numbering less than one or two hundred hulls is over. The fleets of the future will be much larger and will be composed of a mix of crewed and autonomous craft designed to patrol far vaster areas than today. That means a lot of small robotic craft will be taking up the slack, leaving the conventional warships for more important duties.
Spectre
Long-range sub-hunting is ideally suited for an autonomous sailcraft. Sailboats are notoriously quiet and their hulls are often acoustically transparent. In other words, they don’t show up on sonar very well – if at all. It’s for this reason that there are occasional news stories of submarines surfacing only to collide with small yachts. An autonomous sailing ship towing acoustic sensors would be, in theory, an excellent platform for detecting and tracking submarines.
With this in mind, Saildrone has released its first images of the two variants of its Spectre high-speed Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV). Based on the company’s earlier vessels, the Spectre is made out of aluminum and is being built in partnership with Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, which claims to be able to produce five craft per year. Meanwhile, Saildrone has partnered with Lockheed Martin since October 2025 to integrate combat-proven systems into the Spectre, including the Mark 70 Vertical Launch System for missiles.
Both variants can operate over a range of 8,000 nm (9,200 miles, 14,800 km) and can carry up to 25 tonnes of payload in the form of two 40-ft standard shipping containers or the equivalent.
Saildrone
Where the variants differ is propulsion. The Spectre Silent Endurance relies mainly on its 140-ft (43-m) composite wing for extreme range and silent propulsion. Meanwhile, the Spectre Stealth Strike swaps out the wing for Caterpillar diesel engines that allow it to sprint at speeds up to 27 knots (31 mph, 50 km/h) or trawl silently at 12 knots (14 mph, 22 km/h) under electric power.
The Spectre has already been granted Approval in Principle by the American Bureau of Shipping, and the first prototype is expected to begin sea trials early next year.
“Spectre is the result of 25 years of continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Richard Jenkins, Saildrone’s founder and CEO. “A unique design evolved through the hard lessons of operational experience in the real world. Spectre is not a craft hurriedly readied to meet a particular RFP, but diligently evolved over multiple years to meet the operational requirements of our customers and fill critical capability gaps in the ASW domain.”
Source: Saildrone
