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US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

(interestingengineering.com)
134 points jdmark | 5 comments | 28 Mar 25 21:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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icegreentea2 ◴[01 Apr 25 13:14 UTC] No.43546426[source]▶
Ha, I love the "rescue ops".

This will not primarily be for rescue ops. This will be for supporting Marine standin operations on and within the first island chain. The marines have been trying to figure out how they can handle sustainment and logistics in that environment.

You can read some wonkish article about this (back in 2022) https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/sustainment-of-the-stand-i... . You'll note that the article does suggest revisiting seaplanes as a distribution option.

With a few hundred miles range, these craft would be suitable as one way island to island hoppers, or 2 way over the horizon ship to shore transports. For a sense of scale, its ~140 miles from Luzon to Scarborough Shoal (one of the contested islands in the South China Sea).

The "Viceroy" craft that Regent has mocked up on their website claims 180 mile range, 3500lb of cargo / 2 crew + 12 passengers.

EDIT: And to be clear, the article title says "to get", but the article makes clear, this is basically a testing and development contract. There's no certainty that the Marines will get this capability in any meaningful way. Probably better to replace with "to test". This is particularly important because the commercial version of this craft is also still in development and testing.

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mlyle ◴[01 Apr 25 14:28 UTC] No.43547196[source]▶
> This will not primarily be for rescue ops

It seems like combat SAR in the maritime environment is what these are best at.

> The "Viceroy" craft that Regent has mocked up on their website claims 180 mile range, 3500lb of cargo / 2 crew + 12 passengers.

This is like 1/4th the size needed for minimum scale sustainment and support. Not to say that it won't be used for that in a pinch or for special operations, but it's pretty limited. Of course, there's been talk about building huge ones.

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1. icegreentea2 ◴[01 Apr 25 14:46 UTC] No.43547419[source]▶
The company press release states "The second phase of work will examine seaglider capabilities across missions including contested logistics and medevac/casevac".

I agree that this would be useful for medevac/casevac, but I'm less sure about the search part of SAR. 180 miles is not a lot of range for searching.

I still believe this is primarily about contested logistics, because the USMC still hasn't solved that issue. One of the stand in force concept's biggest weakness right now is how will the marines go about sustaining the force. There's a lot of good ideas written down, but concretely they still don't have good solutions.

I think it's fairly clear that the Marines will look to unnamed undersea vehicles as one vector, but I think they're looking for flexibility and redundancy (and certainly the speed that these guys offer would be interesting).

What's written about SIFs is that the Marines anticipate the majority of SIFs to be deployed in the crisis building phase. They do not envision on day one of a shooting war, somehow dispersing all of their forces across the first island chain - they take for granted that they will somehow do that in the build up. After that, then ya, maybe just med/casevac and resupply is what they're after.

I have a hard time finding concrete examples, but I always envisioned an example detachment being roughly platoon sized. Basically, imagine being able to man a NMESIS launcher or two, ISR, and a squad or two of infantry for security. I think at that point, these vehicles become more viable for certain types of sustainment. You could for example priority rush more NSMs to a detachment.

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2. vonmoltke ◴[01 Apr 25 15:01 UTC] No.43547608[source]▶
> but I'm less sure about the search part of SAR

The article never mentioned the search part of SAR, only the rescue part. The range is still something of an issue with that, though, as you'd need to be fairly close the people needing rescuing. So I still agree that contested rescue is likely a side mission for this.

3. hammock ◴[01 Apr 25 17:57 UTC] No.43549693[source]▶
Pretty sure the search mission has been taken over by sats and drones for the most part
4. mlyle ◴[01 Apr 25 18:30 UTC] No.43550011[source]▶
> I think at that point, these vehicles become more viable for certain types of sustainment. You could for example priority rush more NSMs to a detachment.

Sure-- like 3 per trip. If they're not too long for the vehicle (they might be).

You might be able to barely sustain a platoon-sized force with a trip per day, but this seems very marginal.

5. CapricornNoble ◴[02 Apr 25 03:25 UTC] No.43553361[source]▶
> I have a hard time finding concrete examples, but I always envisioned an example detachment being roughly platoon sized. Basically, imagine being able to man a NMESIS launcher or two, ISR, and a squad or two of infantry for security.

Most of the scenarios I've participated in have involved reinforced companies.