As the Trump Administration Eyes Spiraling Conflicts, Only an Unmanned Fleet Can Protect Our Trade

Lessons from Nazi Germany’s nearly successful submarine campaign to starve Great Britain.

Our guest author is Daniel Stefanus, U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Lead, Saronic Technologies & former U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer

The heart of global trade lies within the Gate of Tears. The Bab-el-Mandeb or “Gate of Tears” lies off the coast of Yemen, and through its arid channel flows 12% of the world’s commerce. Last year, Yemen’s Houthi rebels began the largest maritime warfare campaign since World War II using Iranian-financed drones and missiles against the shipping fleets of the U.S. and its allies. This modern-day commerce raiding has forced U.S. and allied warships into the Red Sea to defend our trade at the cost of over two billion dollars in defensive missiles. The ease with which the Houthis have attacked global shipping as a conduit for a rogue nation will inspire others, and an already over-stretched U.S. military will not be able to protect the flow of goods that fuels our growth. The American economy is not secure.

As the Trump administration prepares to launch a new era of trade and national security priorities, we must ensure that we have the capabilities to safeguard our economy. While new tariffs and industrial policies will alter our trade flows, maritime trade will remain a cornerstone of our nation’s success as we source goods to power our economy and export world-leading products. To best protect our trade, we should learn from the last large-scale war against shipping: Nazi Germany’s nearly successful submarine campaign to starve Great Britain.

There were three secrets to the Allies’ success in defeating the U-Boat menace: longer range aircraft to attack submarines, the wide-scale adoption of the convoy system, in which warships would escort large groups of cargo ships across the North Atlantic, and the breaking of Germany’s message encryption codes. In that war, the Allies overmatched the Germans with better, more numerous weapons that slowly, then rapidly, turned the tide of war as the U-Boat fleet was decimated and Britain received desperately needed supplies.

Today, the U.S. is vastly more vulnerable to attacks on international maritime trade than it was in the 1940s. The U-Boat threat to the Allies was isolated to one theater, the North Atlantic, and international trade represented under 5% of the U.S. economy. In 2022, 27% of the U.S. economy was based on trade. Without secure global shipping, American prosperity will be undermined, but whereas in World War II we had thousands of escort ships to protect our merchant mariners, today we have hundreds. As our seaborne commerce has ballooned, our Navy has shrunk.

This matters. The U.S. and its allies’ militaries are stretched to the breaking point, struggling to maintain readiness and respond to threats in the Baltic, Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, South China Sea, and Sea of Japan. As more regimes arm non-state actors for deadly ends with cheap, unsophisticated unmanned systems and missiles, it will become impossible for our current force to protect our trade in all regions. To pre-empt this brewing crisis, the Trump Administration should turn to the playbook that saved the Allies to safeguard our shipping.

This effort begins by resurrecting convoying whenever shipping is threatened. Convoys are a planned effort to group merchant vessels with protective warships for a safe, combined transit. With the U.S. and its allies’ scarce surface vessels already occupied with other critical missions, the escorting of potentially hundreds of convoys is not feasible. Over the last ten years, the U.S. Navy has tried to grow its battle force from 273 to 355 ships, but it has only reached 297 - of which, only about a third are escorts. It has no path to the exponential growth needed to repulse burgeoning threats to maritime trade due to factors beyond its control as warships take many years to build, cost one to two billion dollars, and require a large shipyard. These long time horizons, significant capital outlays, and a lack of available shipyards mean that the U.S. has no surge capacity to meet its expanding maritime needs by traditional means. At the speed, cost, and scale needed, only one solution offers a feasible solution to protecting our trade: unmanned surface vehicles (USVs).

In the last few years, advances in self-driving cars and artificial intelligence have been applied to the maritime domain to create a new generation of autonomous USVs capable of advanced navigation and mission operations. Ukrainian victories in the Black Sea have demonstrated how powerful USVs can be against legacy fleets. Since those successes, even more robust, long-endurance USVs have been developed and outfitted with the sensors and systems necessary to defend convoys. For the cost of one destroyer escort, two thousand long-range USVs can be acquired, equipped, and fielded to protect our trade without putting American lives in harm’s way.

To understand the scale of ships that will need protection, there are approximately 56,500 currently plying the world’s oceans. If 70% of those support Western trade, and, using a rough proxy ratio from historic convoy systems, five USVs can protect a convoy of 20 ships, then, for the cost of five destroyers, all American maritime trade could be protected with 10,000 USVs. If only some regions need protection, the cost dramatically decreases to that of one or two destroyers. For context, this is roughly 10% of just one year of the U.S. Navy’s current shipbuilding budget.

To make use of this worldwide fleet of USVs and assemble these convoys requires real-time intelligence sharing on a scale impossible even a decade ago. Today’s equivalent of breaking Nazi codes in World War II is fusing the unprecedented network of global sensors using software into one shared, world-wide view for coherent analysis and planning. Enabled by this unparalleled common operating picture, unmanned escorts become vigorous shields to defend Western trade and enable the manned fleet to execute high-end missions. This network of human-directed, unmanned vessels can be spontaneously assembled or redirected in response to warnings from air, sea, space, and satellite-based sensors at a price the Navy can sustain. They also accomplish this taxpayer-friendly defense without putting American servicemembers at risk.

As the Trump administration works to Make American Great Again, USVs enabled by advanced intelligence software can provide the affordable mass and power necessary to protect the ships that undergird American dynamism and growth. Manned platforms will still have a large role to play in collecting data and backstopping regional security, but they are too expensive, irreplaceable, and scarce to protect American trade in times of conflict. As cheap missiles, drones, and other weapons enable bad actors to harass the world’s oceans on a scale not seen in generations, unmanned vehicles queued to convoy by American leaders will allow our economy to flourish despite dark waters ahead.