America builds warships without humans as China dominates naval production
DARPA's autonomous Defiant represents a technological gamble against overwhelming Chinese shipbuilding capacity
The champagne bottle shattered against a hull that will never know the weight of human footsteps. On 11 August in Everett, Washington, the US Navy christened USX-1 Defiant—180 feet of steel and circuitry designed around a revolutionary absence. No bunks. No galley. No toilets. No corridors wide enough for sailors to pass. Every design decision flowed from a single, stark principle: humans would never board this vessel during operations.
Defiant embodies America's most audacious naval gamble in generations. Faced with China's crushing shipbuilding supremacy—230 times greater capacity, 370 warships to America's 219—the Pentagon has abandoned any pretence of matching hulls with hulls. Instead, it's betting everything on a radical proposition: that algorithmic crews can somehow equalise waters dominated by human ones.
The stakes could hardly be higher. China's naval expansion has rewritten the strategic map of the Pacific, whilst America's shipyards struggle with backlogs, cost overruns, and worker shortages that would prove catastrophic in any sustained conflict. Traditional responses—more yards, more workers, more spending—appear politically and economically impossible. So America is attempting something unprecedented: winning a naval arms race not by building more ships, but by building ships that think.
China's industrial tsunami forces American reinvention
The numbers that drove this desperate innovation are sobering. China operates dozens of commercial shipyards larger than America's biggest naval facilities. Its civil-military fusion allows cargo ship builders to construct destroyers, creating economies of scale the West cannot match. American yards, meanwhile, face skilled labour shortages so severe that nuclear submarine construction has become a national security crisis.
"China now has the world's largest navy," confirms the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "with 370 ships and submarines and over 140 major surface combatants. China's 13 naval shipyards have more capacity than all seven naval US shipyards combined."
The arithmetic is unforgiving. At current trajectories, China will surpass America in vertical launch cells—the tubes that fire modern naval missiles—by 2027. Chinese shipyards that once built fishing boats now launch guided missile destroyers. What took American industry decades to develop, China accomplished in years through sheer industrial force.
Hudson Institute analysts Brian Clark and Michael Roberts delivered the brutal verdict in December 2024: "It is not realistic for the US to match China hull-for-hull." The traditional American response of outspending problems has met its match in Chinese manufacturing capacity. Faced with industrial defeat, America chose technological disruption.
The ghost ship revolution
Eliminating humans from warships transforms everything. Ryan Maatta, Serco's marine engineering manager overseeing Defiant's construction, describes the cascade of changes: "There's no heads, no galleys, no passageways, very few penetrations through bulkheads. The hull is allowed to be very simplistic."
This simplicity enables extraordinary construction speeds. Fourteen welders assembled Defiant's hull in fourteen months—impossible for conventional vessels burdened with life support systems, escape routes, and human safety equipment. The design can be replicated in any of America's 35 tier-three shipyards, facilities that typically build tugboats and yachts, not warships.
Greg Avicola, DARPA's programme manager, calls this "removing the constraints of people" that make traditional ships "sub-optimal for the autonomy problem." Without human needs, naval architecture becomes fluid. Unusual hull forms become possible. Air-filled spaces shrink. Weight distribution optimises for sensors rather than comfort.
Defiant targets 90% operational reliability across an entire year at sea—alone. The vessel must survive 13-foot seas routinely and 30-foot storms without human intervention. Systems must self-diagnose problems, execute repairs where possible, and gracefully degrade when repairs fail. It's naval engineering reimagined around algorithmic resilience rather than human adaptability.
"We delivered a vessel in reasonable time, at reasonable cost, which is somewhat rare in today's industry," Maatta explains. The economics are compelling: lower construction costs, no crew expenses, simplified logistics. If successful, the model could enable rapid fleet expansion without decade-long construction programmes or massive recruitment drives.
Ukraine's autonomous navy writes tomorrow's tactics
While Pentagon engineers debate theoretical possibilities, Ukrainian operators have been perfecting autonomous naval warfare under fire. Ukraine's transformation from a nation with no meaningful navy into a force that humiliated Russia's Black Sea Fleet provides the clearest glimpse of unmanned warfare's potential.
In May 2025, Ukrainian Magura V7 drones achieved a historic first: autonomous naval platforms shooting down crewed aircraft. Two Russian Su-30 fighters, worth $50 million each, fell to AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles fired from vessels costing mere hundreds of thousands. The symbolic reversal was profound—autonomous systems achieving air superiority over human-operated platforms.
Ukrainian innovations cascade across domains. Sea drones launch aerial kamikaze attackers. Swarms coordinate through artificial intelligence. Platforms navigate GPS-denied environments using machine learning. In January 2025, Ukrainian sea drones deployed aerial strikes against Russian Pantsir-S1 air defence systems worth $15-20 million each, demonstrating how autonomous vessels become mobile launch platforms for multi-domain attacks.
The operational tempo defies human oversight. Ukrainian officials acknowledge deploying "autonomous drones without human oversight that hit Russian targets." These systems select targets, navigate contested waters, and execute attacks based on algorithmic decision-making. Human commanders set objectives; machines choose methods.
"Ukraine has effectively created the world's first autonomous naval force," observes maritime analyst HI Sutton. "They're rewriting the rules of naval warfare in real time." The implications transcend specific tactical successes. Autonomous platforms have proven they can operate in contested environments, coordinate complex operations, and achieve strategic effects previously requiring major naval formations.
When algorithms choose life and death
Ukraine's experience illuminates ethical territory that American programmes must eventually navigate. US policy demands that autonomous weapons allow "appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force," but operational realities suggest this requirement may prove incompatible with future warfare's speed and scale.
The contradiction is stark. Admiral Samuel Paparo, commanding US Indo-Pacific forces, envisions flooding the Taiwan Strait with thousands of autonomous platforms in any Chinese invasion scenario. Mathematical reality suggests meaningful human oversight of each engagement becomes impossible at such scale. Humans cannot process decisions fast enough; autonomous systems must choose independently.
Critics warn of profound risks. The International Committee of the Red Cross argues autonomous weapons "pose humanitarian risks, legal challenges and ethical concerns due to the difficulties in anticipating and limiting their effects." Pope Francis condemned systems that "can never be morally responsible subjects," arguing human dignity demands human decision-making in matters of life and death.
Yet supporters contend autonomous systems may prove more ethical than human operators. Atlantic Council analyst T.X. Hammes argues that "failing to deploy them in major conventional conflict will result in many deaths, both military and civilian, and potentially loss of the conflict." Autonomous systems, programmed with rules of engagement and operating without fear or anger, might make more consistent ethical choices than humans under combat stress.
The debate intensifies as capabilities outpace policies. Current Pentagon directives assume human operators can monitor autonomous systems individually. Future swarm operations will involve thousands of platforms making coordinated decisions at machine speed. The ethical frameworks designed for human-controlled warfare may simply collapse under algorithmic warfare's operational demands.
The algorithmic naval future takes shape
Autonomous warfare is reshaping naval competition fundamentally. Traditional metrics—tonnage, crew size, industrial capacity—matter less when distributed swarms can neutralise conventional fleets. The economic implications are transformative: where destroyers cost billions and require hundreds of crew, platforms like Defiant cost fractions while needing no human operators.
China recognises the shift. Its massive shipbuilding capacity combined with advanced AI capabilities could potentially produce autonomous swarms at unprecedented scale. Russia, learning from Ukrainian innovations, develops its own naval drone programmes incorporating artificial intelligence. The autonomous naval arms race has begun, with early movers gaining potentially decisive advantages.
NATO responds through initiatives like Task Force X, demonstrating autonomous surface vessels in the Baltic Sea. Lithuania partners with Ukraine on shared sea drone production. Allied nations recognise that autonomous naval technology may prove decisive in future conflicts, particularly in contested environments like the South China Sea or Baltic approaches.
America's bet on Defiant represents more than technological development—it's strategic transformation. Success could enable rapid naval scaling without massive shipbuilding programmes or recruitment drives. Failure would force return to traditional competition with China, a contest America appears unlikely to win.
Congress has already appropriated $2.1 billion for "purpose-built medium unmanned surface vessels," signalling confidence in the autonomous approach. The Pentagon's Project 33 plan prioritises robotic systems as force multipliers against Chinese numerical superiority. Autonomous platforms promise to solve the fundamental strategic problem: how to project naval power when adversaries can simply build more ships.
Testing the algorithmic tide
Defiant's extended sea trials should provide crucial answers. Can autonomous systems maintain operational reliability during months-long deployments without human maintenance? Will adversaries develop effective countermeasures against unmanned swarms? Most critically, will societies accept warfare conducted increasingly through algorithmic decision-making?
The vessel will transfer to the Navy's Unmanned Maritime Systems Program Office after demonstration, becoming America's first purely autonomous medium surface vessel. Success could trigger rapid scaling across the fleet. Failure would expose the limits of technological solutions to strategic problems.
The broader implications extend beyond naval warfare. Autonomous military systems challenge fundamental assumptions about human agency in conflict, democratic oversight of military operations, and the nature of strategic competition itself. If machines can navigate, decide, and fight independently, what role remains for human judgment in warfare?
As Defiant prepares for its defining trials, the vessel embodies both promise and peril of the autonomous revolution. In the grey waters off Washington state, algorithms will soon confront their ultimate test: mastering oceanic chaos without human guidance whilst China's shipyards continue their relentless production.
The outcome may determine whether America can maintain naval relevance through technological sophistication, or whether sheer industrial capacity will ultimately prevail. Either way, the age of thinking ships has arrived, carrying with it fundamental questions about the future of human agency in warfare itself.