Week 32 | July 2026
The video runs about twenty-five seconds.
Three boats, filmed separately, each making an unhurried approach to a pier at Bandar Abbas. No evasive manoeuvring, nothing shooting back. The last clip cuts to a camera mounted on a bow, and a Ghadir-class midget submarine swings into frame, hanging from a yellow gantry, close enough to make out the fittings. Then a wide shot. Three explosions. The clip ends before the smoke clears.
CENTCOM posted the video on Monday 13 July. “Yesterday, using multiple one-way attack surface drones, CENTCOM forces successfully struck a submarine and ship maintenance facility in Iran,” the statement read. “Three Corsair unmanned surface vessels hit the port at Bandar Abbas Naval Base, marking the first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.”
The first time.
Four days later, on Thursday morning in Austin, Governor Greg Abbott stood at Saronic's headquarters and announced that the company which builds those boats had picked Brownsville for a shipyard it intends to spend more than three billion dollars on. Ten thousand employees at full build-out. Ground broken this year, operations in 2028.
Both stories got wall-to-wall coverage. We counted eleven outlets running the Brownsville announcement inside twenty-four hours, most of them close to verbatim off the press release. The Corsair strike ran everywhere from USNI to the Jerusalem Post.
Nobody put them in the same paragraph. Do that, and the Golden Fleet stops reading as a shipbuilding story.
The line most of the coverage skipped
USNI News reported something the wire pickups left out. A US defence official said the 12 July strike was not a Task Force 59 operation and was not overseen by the US Navy. The official called it a CENTCOM operation.
Task Force 59 has run out of Bahrain since September 2021. Integrating unmanned systems into Fifth Fleet operations is the entire reason it exists. In January 2024 it stood up a subordinate unit, Task Group 59.1, the Pioneers, under a lieutenant named Luis Echeverria, with a brief to push unmanned systems past experimentation and into operational deployment alongside human crews. By late 2024 the group was running live-fire and remote kinetic trials. TF 59 began operating Corsairs in theatre in late March this year. By 12 July the boats had spent roughly fifteen weeks in the Gulf on surveillance and support.
Then the first combat employment of an American sea drone arrived, and it went somewhere other than the outfit built to do exactly this.
We must be careful with what that does and doesn't establish. A CENTCOM operation is a normal thing. CENTCOM commands the theatre, it runs the campaign against Iran, and Fifth Fleet is one of its components. Calling the forces involved CENTCOM's tells you very little on its own. The public record doesn't reveal which headquarters held tactical control, who launched or programmed the boats, or whether TF 59 provided any support behind the scenes. None of that is knowable from open sources, and anyone claiming CENTCOM headquarters personally steered three boats into a pier is guessing.
What can be said is narrower and still worth saying. The strongest available reporting puts the mission outside the one Navy command created specifically to operationalise unmanned systems in that theatre.
The shape of that is the tell. Nearly five years building the unmanned enterprise. Two and a half years since the Pioneers stood up to take these systems operational. Roughly fifteen weeks with Corsair in the water. When it came time to actually use one in combat, the Navy's purpose-built unmanned command wasn't the one that did.
What's actually being bought
You’ve probably read about this part three times already, so we’ll be brief.
On 21 April, Rear Admiral Derek Trinque, Director of Surface Warfare, and Rebecca Gassler, the Navy's Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Robotic and Autonomous Systems, testified together to the Senate Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee. Their written statement casts USVs as the modern equivalent of the Scouting Force the Navy built a century ago: scouting, screening, harassment and attrition, while what they call the Main Battle Force provides the mass to finish the job.
The number everyone quotes came earlier, from Rear Admiral Christopher Alexander at the Surface Navy Association symposium in January. “Looking at some projections moving out over the future, by 2045 we expect about 45 percent of the surface force to be unmanned systems.”
The number nobody quotes came from the same speech. In 2025 the Navy's inventory of small unmanned surface vessels started the year at four. By December it was close to 400.
The buying vehicle is the MUSV marketplace, announced 26 March after the Navy killed MASC. Roughly $2.1 billion out of the One Big Beautiful Bill, part of nearly $5 billion across Navy unmanned. Seven companies picked in May for at-sea testing through October: Saronic, Leidos, HII, Sea Machines, PacMar, Galliano and Birdon. Anduril bid and didn't make the list, which the Navy has not explained.
The requirements matter more than the names. 2,500 nautical miles at 25 knots. Twenty-five metric tons of containerised payload across two 40-foot ISO containers. Autonomous operation through Sea State 5, survivable to Sea State 7.
File that one in memory, it comes back.
Everything that moved
Now for something this publication almost never says: The procurement worked. It worked quickly, and the record is specific enough that you can check it yourself.
July 2024: the Navy awards Saronic a prototype Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) under the PRIME program, worth roughly two million dollars to start.
16 May 2025: NAVSEA and Saronic execute production OTA N000242596305. Value, $392,320,718. Classed in the federal procurement record as a production agreement for small craft. Completion date, 30 May 2031. Around $196.6 million obligated against it.
Ten months. Prototype agreement to production agreement, ten months.
DefenseScoop dug the record out of the Federal Procurement Data System that August. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced it from a stage at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December, which is where most reporting picks it up, and which is why you'll see the contract dated December 2025 in some places and December 2024 in others. Both are wrong. May 2025 is when it was executed. December is when it got a podium.
Late March 2026: Corsairs arrive in theatre with TF 59.
8 June 2026: an Iranian drone brings down a US Army AH-64 off the coast of Oman. A Corsair finds and recovers both aircrew inside two hours.
12 July 2026: Bandar Abbas.
Two years and change, from a two-million-dollar prototype agreement to a submarine on a gantry. Thirty-one weeks of OTI have gone into documenting why that normally takes a decade.
The money moved as well. Senator Rick Scott, chairing the April hearing, put it plainly: “The One Big Beautiful Bill made the largest single investment in unmanned maritime systems in history: a $5 billion investment, including $3.6 billion specifically for unmanned surface vessels.” His view of the customer was less generous. “The time is now and the Navy is late to the game already.”
The industrial base moved hardest of all. Saronic closed a $1.75 billion Series D on 31 March this year at a $9.25 billion valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins, more than doubling what it was worth thirteen months earlier. It bought a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana in April 2025 and is putting $300 million into expanding it. The first 180-foot Marauder hull was built there in under six months and went into water trials in May. Franklin is meant to be turning out twenty Marauders a year by December.
HII is running the same play from the other direction, moving its ROMULUS family into serial production, ordering four ROMULUS 151 hulls in April and adding Halimar Shipyard to its production network in July. Two theories of how this scales, one vertically integrated and one built on partnerships, and both are putting steel in the water while the argument goes on.
Then Brownsville. 835 acres to start, room to expand to nearly 4,400. Vessels up to 850 feet in phase one, over 1,200 feet later. Dino Mavrookas, Saronic's co-founder and CEO, told reporters at a roundtable that phase one alone would carry 150,000 gross tons of shipbuilding capacity. “Just phase one alone will make this the largest shipyard in the United States,” he said. “We will 1.5X the shipbuilding capacity in the United States in just phase one, with the ability to take that all the way up to 2 million gross tons of capacity over the life of the project.”
One company, one yard, one and a half times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. That's Saronic’s number, and it deserves to be treated as a sales figure until concrete gets poured. Discount it hard and it still describes something extraordinary.
Money, contracts, hulls, combat validation, industrial capacity. Every input arrived early.