On a scorching afternoon in Tampa, the Kraken3 Scout Medium uncrewed surface vessel (USV) sped in circles through the harbor, offering a glimpse of its potential to thousands flocking to the annual Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week conference. The demonstration came as the use of USVs, also known as drone boats, was a hot topic of conversation at the conference attended by top spec ops leaders from around the world, thanks largely to Ukraine’s successful deployment of these weapons against Russian targets.
The 27-foot USV was designed by the British Kraken maritime technology company to carry out a variety of missions. They range from kinetic strike to counter-drone to cargo and personnel delivery, Alex Clark, senior technical director for AV, told us from the SOF Week showroom floor at the Tampa Convention Center. While the vessel was made by Kraken, AV (formerly known as AeroVironment until it merged with BlueHalo) designed the navigation and swarming technology and two different payloads for the USV.
On the day we spoke with Clark, he said “a NATO customer” was “taking delivery” of one of the boats. He declined to name the customer.
The boat is a so-called “marsupial” USV, with two different compartments designed to carry a variety of payloads. In Tampa, it carried AV’s Titan 4 RF detect and defeat counter-drone system, which was also introduced during SOF Week. The Kraken3 can also carry “a lot” of AV’s Switchblade 600 and 300 drones, Clark said. These are tube-launched loitering munitions that can provide reconnaissance or strike capabilities, and have seen service in Ukraine against Russian targets. The 600 variant has a larger warhead and greater range than the 300.
Using AV’s proprietary “HaloSwarm” collaborative autonomy system, Kraken3 Scout can operate fully autonomously or with man-in-the-loop, Clark explained.
“We have operated three USVs in the U.K. simultaneously using our HaloSwarm collaborative autonomy,” he added.
In Tampa, the boat carried a passenger.
“During the SOF Week demo, our team was able to showcase the versatility of platform control available with the Kraken vessel and AV integrations, including fully autonomous operations, remotely operated operations over vast geographic regions, and pilot bay options,” Clark told us. “A human was on the boat to demonstrate the pilot bay and to comply with regulatory constraints.”
Clark offered up an example of how the Kraken3 can operate autonomously even with passengers.
“Somebody wants to send a boat to an area, but they don’t want to deal with docking, so they remotely load the waypoints,” he posited. “You have a guy that kicks the boat off … and then the boat will navigate where it’s supposed to go. And when it gets within view of the dock, they berth the boat, get out and unload …”
“The Kraken3 has four cameras that are just for situational awareness and a user-configurable sensor ball gimbal,” Clark continued. “This can be a FLIR or any number of other camera systems around the top for spotting longer range.”
As for communications, the systems “in use right now are Starlink long-range, HF and 2.4,” Clark explained. “It can also run over cellular networks. Depends how we have it configured.”
In GPS-denied environments, Kraken3 is designed to navigate via the HaloNav Alternative Precision, Navigation and Timing (APNT) system.
The system “utilizes sky polarization, solar tracking, lunar tracking, celestial tracking, Inmarsat Satellite positioning, and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU),” according to AV. That set up is designed “to support navigation of USVs in Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD) environments where Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are not available and passive modes of operation are preferred.
That system is accurate to less than 100 meters “from a cold start anywhere in the world,” AV claims.
When it comes to range, Kraken3 is capable of traveling 650 nautical miles, with a 600 kilogram payload, at a 35 knot cruise speed and 55 knot surge speed, Clark claimed.
For the one-way kinetic attack configuration against other vessels, Kraken3’s terminal seeker utilizes BlueHalo’s automated target recognition (ATR) system, Clark pointed out, adding that it has a threat library of warships to choose from.
“It is my understanding that AV has one of the largest threat libraries in existence,” Clark posited.
Though the vessel has the capability to do “a terminal one-way mission using full ATR … we would ask to put an operator on the loop for that type of mission,” he noted.
Current U.S. military doctrine requires all autonomous combat systems with deadly abilities to be capable of “man-in/on-the-loop” control, even just to give approval for engaging targets with deadly force. How long this norm lasts is up for debate, but full autonomy for kinetic weaponry remains a taboo concept within the U.S. military-industrial complex, even though adversaries (and some allies) will have no qualms with allowing weapons to pick their own targets and engage them. And this is already becoming a reality on the battlefield in Ukraine. By allowing these systems to engage on their own, especially when working as a team with other drones, they become far more survivable, deadly, and competitive, but there is a major moral tradeoff in doing so. You can read all about this issue in this previous feature of ours.
Clark laid out the Kraken3’s capabilities just days after Ukraine claimed it shot down two Russian Su-30 Flanker multirole fighters with AIM-9 Sidewinders launched from Magura 7 USVs, a story we were the first to report. You can see one of those engagements in the following video.
Such a configuration is “something that would fit the profile for this type of boat,” Clark commented. “I don’t know that we would do a surface-to-air missile out of this, but we’re definitely entertaining using the AV Switchblade line of products.”
The ongoing fight in the Black Sea between Ukraine and Russia has shown that USVs are vulnerable to manned vessels and aviation assets firing heavy machine guns and other weapons as well as first-person view (FPV) aerial drones. AV has no current plans, however, to add kinetic defensive armament, instead relying on the Titan 4 counter-drone system.
A day after the SOF Week conference wrapped, GUR posted a new documentary, called “Sea Battle. The Age of Drones.” It showcases the Ukrainian development of USVs as weapons that helped destroy several Russian vessels and keep the Black Sea Fleet largely at bay. The documentary, by Artem Shevchenko, also introduces some never-before-seen USVs, like one with four rails to launch drones. Ukraine pioneered the operational use of USVs to launch aerial drones. In January, Ukraine claimed it used these vessels to launch FPV drones at Russian targets in Crimea.
GUR is also aiming to create a new USV flotilla with boats ranging from “single-use kamikaze drones to reusable platforms for launching drones and for supporting the attack with fire,” according to the documentary.
“Our sea platform carries from 500 to 3,000 kilograms of various types of weapons — air, surface, underwater. The system uses the latest technologies combined with NATO-style artificial intelligence,” says a member of a special forces reconnaissance group working with these drones.
The success of Ukraine’s USV program was not lost on those planning the future of U.S. SOF naval warfare.
“We’ve learned a lot from international partners and current events,” Navy Cmdr. Michael Linn said during a PEO Maritime panel at the conference. “So I want to make sure that we’re prioritizing rapid, iterative improvements and adaptations that are critical to success. You know, everyone likely saw the news out of Ukraine … that a Magura 7 USV shot down an SU-30 fighter with a SAM. That’s another major milestone coming out of [Ukraine].”
Linn told us that while he is interested in fielding something akin to how Ukraine used a SAM to take down the Flankers, he is not currently in the position to pursue that capability.
Given Ukraine’s success with USVs, more companies are developing models in what is becoming a growing market segment, of which Kraken3 is just one of a number of offerings.
However, with on-the-water demos and a static mock-up on display at SOF Week, there were certainly a lot of high-ranking international special operations officials who got a chance to learn about Kraken3. Whether that translates into the USV ever becoming a program of record for the U.S. or any other military remains to be seen.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com