America deployed it in the Gulf waters and Iran is seeking it.. Will the drones change the face of the war at sea?

Drones play pivotal roles in a number of conflicts and wars around the world, including the Azerbaijan-Armenia war, in which Azerbaijan was able to regain control of the “Karabakh” region in 2020, which would not have been possible without the use of the first Turkish “Bayraktar” drones, including More recently, the effective role played by the Turkish rallies themselves in helping Ukraine survive during the early days of the war launched by the Russian forces last February, and before the arrival of European and American military aid shipments.

On the ground, unmanned vehicles take many forms and contribute in various fields, including reconnaissance and surveillance, intelligence gathering, explosive ordnance disposal, and demining.

In 2011, during the devastating earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, which caused the collapse of the nuclear reactor in Fukushima city and caused a serious environmental disaster;

Ground-based vehicles were used to search among the radioactive rubble.

And in 2018, the Russian army revealed that it had used the “Uran-9” ground-based vehicle in combat battles in Syria to test its capabilities.

With the spread of these unmanned vehicles by land and air and the intensification of international competition over them, and the armies around the world trying to reduce their human losses of soldiers in land and air battles, we cannot prevent ourselves from imagining the battles that these armies may wage by sea using “drone boats” to strike the coasts of the enemy country, for example, or Destroy its naval fleet, without endangering the Marines.

This scenario is not entirely fanciful, as unmanned marine vehicles (drones) are already scattered throughout the oceans today, and they are boats ranging from 3 to 40 meters in length, powered mostly by solar or wind energy, and are launched above the water surface after Programmed on a specific itinerary, and controlled by human elements remotely through controllers on land.

Drone boats roam the oceans

Saildrone Explorer-class unmanned surface ship (Reuters)

The largest contribution of these currently marching boats is in the scientific fields, as they work to develop a deeper understanding of the seas and oceans, and then help scientists identify the most pressing climate problems, and perhaps devise solutions to confront them.

According to the American company "Sildoorne", which manufactures, operates and distributes such boats;

It roams in various oceans around the world, equipped with cameras and GPS systems in order to collect the largest amount of data, especially from those remote parts of the oceans that scientists do not usually reach.

By analyzing this data, Celderon says that this helps monitor the safety and security of water bodies, and looks at some of the processes that affect humans and their safety, such as carbon cycling, global fishing, weather forecasting, and climate change.

The company has launched a mission that is a first of its kind to collect data on hurricanes before and during their occurrence.

In 2021, five of the company's drones set off towards different parts of the Atlantic Ocean, equipped with "hurricane-resistant wings" that can withstand winds of up to 145 kilometers per hour, and waves of up to 15 meters in height.

Indeed, one of these boats witnessed the formation of "Hurricane Sam" in September of last year near the coast of "Puerto Rico".

The unmanned boat remained in the water for hours during the hurricane, whose wind speed reached more than 193 km / h, and its waves reached a height of more than 15 meters.

The boat continued to send almost instantaneous data from inside the hurricane to Selderon's control unit, and the company said at the time that the mission was a prelude to expanding its hurricane forecasting missions.

Almost two years earlier, in 2019, Celderon launched another unprecedented mission to explore the Antarctic Ocean with drones.

The boats set off on their journey in January 2019 from New Zealand, and lasted 196 days, covering a distance of 22,000 kilometers in the vicinity of Antarctica.

The company says that the data collected by the guided boat is important because large areas of the ocean of the southern continent have not been explored to this day due to the harsh climatic conditions.

The Antarctic Ocean plays a pivotal role in the issue of climate change, as scientists believe that it absorbs an estimated 550 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which was confirmed by the Seldron flight.

Seldron collaborates on these missions with many prestigious universities around the world, as well as government agencies and private entities in the United States and abroad such as NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the German Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research.

The armies will not miss the opportunity

Although the use of drones is a recent experience, the first experiment to develop and test a propulsion boat dates back to 1898, when the scientist Nikola Tesla developed the first remote-controlled boat, which he called "Tele-automaton".

The first use of drones for a military mission dates back to World War II, when the army of Nazi Germany used a remote-controlled boat equipped with explosives to target Allied ships.

But according to a study conducted by the "Rand" Research Foundation and its results were published in 2013, the drones still perform military missions to a lesser extent, and they do not participate in combat battles and are not supplied with weapons.

Examples of these military missions are: exploration, gathering information, laying or combating mines, securing sea navigation and small boats, for training and testing purposes, and for defensive purposes against submarine warfare.

Until 2013, the United States had a little more than 30 locally-manufactured guided boats, while other countries friendly to Washington manufactured less than this number, and then the number of globally marched boats reached 63 boats, of which Britain owns 9 boats, while Britain owns 9 boats. Israel only two boats, as is the case with China, all of which have reached advanced stages of testing and proving efficiency, and are used in civilian or military applications.

According to RAND researchers, the US share of the drone market has shrunk due to the entry of manufacturers from other countries into the market. Companies in Israel, Sweden, Singapore, Italy, Britain and even Russia are developing and manufacturing drones capable of carrying both lethal and non-lethal weapons. With advanced sensors that can receive and send data.

Indeed, the navies of Nigeria, Israel, and Singapore employ these unmanned boats on missions for the purpose of exploration, surveillance and intelligence gathering, helping them secure ports and harbors, combat terrorism and drug smuggling, and protect oil and natural gas infrastructures.

While a number of European navies in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Britain are targeting the use of these drones as minesweepers.

Things did not stop at this point, as the US Navy can today use types of drones that are still under development in collecting intelligence information, monitoring and exploration in different water environments, as it did in the Gulf recently, according to a number of media outlets.

These boats could also be used to quickly counter an air attack, possibly disabling an opponent's sensors, and possibly launching a short, medium, and long-range attack aimed at land in the near future.

Iran hijacks drones

Iran may want to play all its available cards to the United States, and perhaps this is what prompted an Iranian warship to try to "hijack" two unmanned boats belonging to the American company "Sildron".

(Selderon)

With all these promising capabilities of drones, it may be worrying for US adversaries, especially Iran, whose relations with Washington have deteriorated greatly since former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action known as the "Vienna Agreement" (the Iran nuclear deal), He imposed more sanctions on Iran, and designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

With the ongoing negotiations in the Austrian capital Vienna still stalling between representatives of Iran and their European counterparts to agree on the terms of the United States' return to compliance with the nuclear agreement, Iran may want to play all its available cards to the United States, and perhaps this is what prompted an Iranian combat ship to try to "hijack" two unmanned boats. It belongs to the American company "Seldron".

According to a statement issued by the US Fifth Fleet on September 2, the Iranian warship "Jamaran" captured the two drones.

However, the fleet command "spotted" the Iranian ship pulling the two boats out of the water, so it moved two destroyers and a military helicopter to block the Iranian ship, while its crew covered the two boats with cloth covers to hide them.

The two destroyers asked the Iranian ship to release the two drones, and in the end the Iranians released the two boats, while "Reuters" quoted Iranian state television as saying that Iran's naval forces had seized the two boats to avoid an accident, and that they returned them after securing the shipping lanes.

This was what the US Fifth Fleet responded to, saying that the unmanned boats did not pose a threat to maritime navigation, and that they had been operating in the southern Red Sea safely for 200 days.

Perhaps "reverse engineering" is the key to understanding Iran's motives for such actions.

In 2014, the Iranian-made Shahed 171 Simorgh drone flew for the first time, and its design was a mirror image of the American R-Q 170 drone, which is the drone that Iran seized after it was shot down in December 2011. The Iranians are what is known as reverse engineering, that is, dismantling the march and studying all its components with the aim of building an analogue.

An Iranian drone "Shahid 171" drops a bomb as part of a military exercise in the Gulf (Reuters)

It seems, then, that human competition to fight wars without carrying weapons and going to the battlefield will continue to intensify until the predictions of some science fiction films are fulfilled and humans fight each other from their places in control rooms, using vehicles that travel by sea, air and land.

Until the present moment, the drone boats are still less efficient and spread at the military level than the drones, but the possibility of their transformation into a weapon in the naval battlefields is not far away, only if one of the major countries decided to initiate its experiment on a large scale, and led dozens of countries to a race behind them. New for drones.