Navy used reconnaissance sea drones to sink 820-foot warship

The U.S. Navy just used GARC drone speed boats – which employed Anduril’s Lattice AI autonomy suite – to strike a decommissioned aircraft-carrier-sized target in the Pacific during the Navy-led Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC 2026, exercise.

The Navy has likely hundreds of GARCs, short for Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Crafts, but based on their use as armed one-way attack drones against the retired Tarawa-class USS Peleliu, reconassaince is clearly not all these drone boats were built for.

The exercise follows the rescue of a downed Apache crew near the Strait of Hormuz and a strike against an Iranian submarine repair facility by Corsair naval drones.

It appears that the Navy is increasingly willing to open the curtain on the wide variety of ways naval drone platforms can be used.

The footage of the Peleliu sinking was recorded from an unarmed GARC and released about a week ago, but it wasn’t until yesterday that we learned that an armed GARC was used to strike the ship.

The GARC strike was just one of several hits the 820-foot Peleliu endured before ultimately succumbing to the salty deep. The ship was also hit with everything from Hellfires to Harpoons to Naval Strike Missiles.

RIMPAC 2026 also saw the sinking the former Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Mobile Bay some 50 nautical miles off the coast of Hawaii.

Units from Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain also participated in the exercise. They used a wide variety of anti-ship weapons to gain real-world experience with the systems while also gathering valuable information about the resilience of naval ships – which is higher than people probably think.

Built by Black Sea Technologies, each GARC is about 16 feet long, with a five-foot eight-inch beam. They can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds while cruising at around 22 knots (around 25 miles per hour) or sprinting at up to 44 knots (around 50 miles per hour). Able to carry 163 gallons of diesel fuel onboard, each of these 200-horsepower drone boats can cover more than 800 miles in a hurry, or more than 1,800 at a slower pace.

The drone is rated to operate in Sea States of up to 5, which translate to 13-feet-high waves; in testing, GARCs even bested Sea States of 6, or 15-foot waves.

Like the slightly larger Saronic Corsair, these GARC boats can operate autonomously, under direct remote control, or using collaborative swarming.

It isn’t clear how many of these GARC boats the Navy already has in service, but we know the number if likely over 300. Black Sea Technologies, says it is currently producing an average of one completed GARC drone daily.

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