The Navy had to intervene to get them back. It seems to me that this disappearing act could prove handy in the real world: A couple of months before this exercise, an Iranian warship seized two autonomous vessels, called Saildrones, which can’t submerge. Called a Triton, it can be programmed to do this when its systems sense danger. It abruptly folds its sail down, like a switchblade, and slips beneath the swell. They are to be Task Force 59’s distributed eyes and ears: They will watch the ocean’s surface with cameras and radar, listen beneath the water with hydrophones, and run the data they collect through pattern-matching algorithms that sort the oil tankers from the smugglers.Ī fellow human on the speedboat draws my attention to one of the surfboard-style vessels. The exercise in the Gulf has brought together more than a dozen uncrewed platforms-surface vessels, submersibles, aerial drones. Task Force 59’s mission is to swiftly integrate them into naval operations, which it does by acquiring the latest off-the-shelf tech from private contractors and putting the pieces together into a coherent whole. Its focus is robotics and artificial intelligence, two rapidly evolving technologies shaping the future of war. These machines have mustered here for an exercise run by Task Force 59, a group within the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Yet another reminds me of a Google Street View car on pontoons. Another looks like a surfboard with a metal sail. A few resemble typical patrol boats like the one I’m on, but most are smaller, leaner, lower to the water. The robots do not share my pathetic human need for shade, nor do they require any other biological amenities. As the speedboat zips around the robot fleet, I long for a parasol, or even a cloud. On this morning in early December 2022, the horizon is dotted with oil tankers and cargo ships and tiny fishing dhows, all shimmering in the heat. I am on the nearby deck of a US Coast Guard speedboat, squinting off what I understand is the port side.

A FLEET OF robot ships bobs gently in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, somewhere between Bahrain and Qatar, maybe 100 miles off the coast of Iran.

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