On July 12, three explosives-laden Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) motored into an enemy port, maneuvered past whatever defenses may have been in place, and blew up a drydock cradling a submarine undergoing maintenance.
If the USVs had been Ukrainian and the target had been Russian, the robot raid would have been old news.
But the 8-meter (26 ft) Saronic Technologies Corsair USVs belonged to US Central Command. And the target was a naval base in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. It was “the first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations,” CENTCOM stated.
In the same way, more countries, including the United States, are adopting the Shahed-style one-way aerial attack drones that both Russia and Ukraine fling at each other by the hundreds; more countries are also adopting the kinds of one-way USVs that Ukrainian forces have built their sea denial strategy around.
USVs are cheap and hard-hitting. But they’re no naval panacea. In rushing explosive robot boats into service, countries risk using them the wrong way. For all their many benefits, strike USVs aren’t one-for-one replacements for pricier anti-ship munitions. They’re complementary, not supplementary.
The concept of an explosives-laden, remotely controlled attack boat isn’t new. But the Ukrainian military honed the idea to a sharp point after losing most of its warships in the first days of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine starting in February 2022. By the following year, Ukrainian USVs including the 6-meter Sea Baby and the 5.5-meter Magura, both costing a few hundred thousand dollars per copy, were chasing down Russian warships on the Black Sea.
Three years later, the satellite-controlled USV victims include at least one corvette, a couple of landing ships, some patrol boats, a survey vessel and a tanker. Armed with remotely aimed guns, rockets, surface-to-air missiles, and even first-person-view aerial attack drones, the drone boats have shot down Russian helicopters and jets and harassed ground forces along the Black Sea coast, especially in Crimea.Â
In July, a Ukrainian USV even beached itself on the Kinburn Spit in southern Ukraine and landed a gun-armed ground robot: history’s first all-robot amphibious assault.
Given their low cost and high-profile kills, it’s no wonder USVs caught the attention of other countries. The US Navy isn’t lacking for traditional warships, but even it has found a niche in its force structure for explosive USVs. Now navies everywhere are rushing to field their own one-way explosive boats. Taiwan is practically rewriting its sea denial strategy to incorporate a large flotilla of USVs.
These late adopters should proceed with caution. Slow, easy to spot from the air and prone to getting lost amid heavy radio jamming, USVs are actually pretty easy for a prepared foe to defeat.
There were zero hard kills against Russian warships between late 2024 and late 2025 as the survivors of its Black Sea Fleet retreated to the anchorage in Novorossiysk in southern Russia, which is protected by physical barriers, aerial and sea patrols, and lots of sailors manning heavy machine guns. Ukrainian USVs finally started registering hits again as 2025 ground into 2026, but only because Ukrainian leaders made the deliberate and risky decision to escalate the Black Sea naval war by striking 183 dry cargo ships, tankers, and auxiliaries belonging to Russia’s unregistered commercial “shadow fleet” up to July 19. That move has triggered retaliatory Russian strikes on Ukrainian grain ships.  Â
USVs cannot replace fast, accurate and low-flying anti-ship cruise missiles, which might cost five or six times as much per unit as a USV per unit, but which are much more survivable and pack much more destructive potential thanks to their combination of big warheads and kinetic energy.
It’s not for no reason that the majority of anti-ship strikes in America’s on-again, off-again war on Iran have been executed by air-launched cruise missiles or, in one chilling case, a torpedo fired by a lurking nuclear-powered attack submarine.
For all their early success on the Black Sea, USVs are still weapons of desperation. Or, at best, expedients that provide inexpensive munitions for bulking up a sea denial force. It’s telling that Ukraine itself is still investing billions of dollars in new anti-ship cruise missiles even as it leans hard into USVs.
That those American Corsairs could motor into Bandar Abbas and blow up a drydock says more about the state of Iranian coastal defenses after months of sporadic bombardment than it does about the potential for such unmanned vessels to rewrite naval doctrine.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. His current focus is on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. 
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
