Manned and unmanned team “The future of our Fleet is a formidable manned and unmanned team, Vice Adm. Stephen T. Koehler said during the handoff of the Ghost Fleet Overlord effort by the Navy.
The wording is succinct; the engineering issue below is not. With surface warfare going even more into deep-range sensing and precision weapons, the old mainstays of the fleet, big, beautiful, manned ships, risk increasingly becoming no longer command nodes, but rather lighthouses. A ship that puts command staff, sensors, magazines and crew endurance in a single hull concentrates the value of hitting, as well. Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) attempts to de-concentrate that concentration, yet it encounters a new tension, distributing combat power usually results in distributing signatures, networks, and control links that an enemy can probe, jam, or attack.
The contemporary “range war” is behind this change. A 2022 Proceedings essay points out that antiship missiles are now capable of going many “hundreds or even thousands of miles,” and that the DF-21D antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) has the range of 910 miles. The engineering implication is simple: organic sensors on the fleet and organic defensive envelopes do not ensure the safe standoff distance of the high-value units anymore. “Eyes of the fleet” need to view beyond the horizon of the shipboard radar and shooters need to take action according to information on targets often not on the firing platform. It ruins an old relationship between ship and fight, substituting it with a kill chain in which data quality, latency and resilience are as decisive as the missile itself.
This is where the idea of the “ghost fleet” is more than just a technological experiment. The Strategic Capabilities Office started modifying commercially-available hulls into autonomous operation, and such prototypes, NOMAD and RANGER, covered 28,982 nautical miles in autonomous operation during the testing of modular payloads and communications architectures before they were transferred to the Navy. The Navy subsequently extended the idea into fleet familiarity: USNI defined Mariner and Ranger sailing to Japan as an operation to demonstrate how unmanned ships could expand horizons and enhance manned-ship magazines, as the ships can carry a containerized load of all sorts “with a range of sensors and weapons,” and still have a civilian mariner aboard. The reason such details are important is that it shows the design center: endurance, modularity and becoming part of existing formation, rather than a one-off “robot ship” taking the place of a destroyer.
However, the same integration which renders unmanned surface vessels useful makes them a victim to the beacon problem. The connection of networking of the unmanned scouts to manned shooters introduces new points of failure: datalinks, relay nodes, control stations and the procedures that determine those who may send what and when. A fleet that “disaggregates sensor, shooter and platform” has the ability to distribute firepower, but it needs to distribute trust in the data and be able to keep coherent under disruption. The Proceedings essay cautions against the use of only satellite-oriented or GPS-dependent technologies and points to diversification of transmission lines including both undersea cables and layered wireless repeaters as space capabilities should be considered as a critical node (as opposed to a guaranteed utility).
The capacity to absorb blows and continue to the fight, which is the sticking power, must rest ill in this image. The contemporary salvo reasoning popularized by Wayne Hughes focused on the “stay power” and claimed to have been overlooked, and subsequent commentary is that the premises underlying the defensive capability modelling became frozen in the middle of the 1990s. When large ships can be spotted at greater range and become targets, survivability ceases to be a property of the hull, instead it becomes a property of form geometry, emissions discipline, decoys, data fusion and the capability to maintain the kill chain intact in the event that one or more parts of the kill chain is damaged.
Even a human aspect of fleet architecture is evolving. The 2026 “No Sailor Lives Afloat” plan by Navy redefines the concept of in-port hab as a readiness infrastructure, and around 4,500 Sailors already moved ashore, and barracks restorations underway. It is not a weapons policy, but it highlights a parallel fact: the model of operations of the fleet is heavily reliant on people and people heavily rely on shore systems which are also constituent of the greater enterprise in the maritime.
The issue of the “ghost fleet,” then, does not depend on the possibility of the unmanned ships to sail. Whether a distributed force may keep its largest vessels out of the way of being the most readily detectable things and whether the nets which render distribution fatal can be kept up so true that the big ships will cease to be beacons.
