From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark. However, these 10m-long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance.
Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as “Voyagers,” have been put into service by Denmark’s armed forces for a three-month operational trial.
Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels are to patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Photo: Reuters
Two of the Voyagers launched on Monday from Koge Marina, about 40 km south of Copenhagen. Powered by wind and solar energy, the sea drones can operate autonomously for months at sea. Saildrone says the vessels carry advanced sensor suites — radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar and acoustic monitoring.
Their launch comes after two others already joined a NATO patrol on June 6.
Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins compared the vessels to a “truck” that carries sensors, and uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to give a “full picture of what’s above and below the surface” to about 30km to 50km in the open ocean.
Maritime threats such as damage to undersea cables, illegal fishing, and the smuggling of people, weapons and drugs are going undetected simply because “no one’s observing it,” he said.
Saildrone is “going to places ... where we previously didn’t have eyes and ears,” he said.
The Danish Ministry of Defense says the trial is aimed at boosting surveillance capacity in undermonitored waters, especially around critical undersea infrastructure such as fiber-optic cables and power lines.
“The security situation in the Baltic is tense,” said Lieutenant General Kim Jorgensen, director of Danish National Armaments at the ministry. “They’re going to cruise Danish waters, and then later they’re going to join up with the two that are on [the] NATO exercise. And then they’ll move from area to area within the Danish waters.”
The trial comes as NATO confronts a wave of damage to maritime infrastructure — including the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions and the rupture of at least 11 undersea cables since late 2023. The most recent incident, in January, severed a fiber-optic link between Latvia and Sweden’s Gotland island.
The trial also unfolds against a backdrop of trans-Atlantic friction — with US President Donald Trump’s administration threatening to seize Greenland, a semiautonomous territory belonging to Denmark, a NATO member. Trump has said he would not rule out military force to take Greenland.
Jenkins said that his company had already planned to open its operation in Denmark before Trump was re-elected.
He did not want to comment on the Greenland matter, saying the company is not political.
Some of the maritime disruptions have been blamed on Russia’s so-called shadow fleet — aging oil tankers operating under opaque ownership to avoid sanctions.
One such vessel, the Eagle S, was seized by Finnish police in December for allegedly damaging a power cable between Finland and Estonia with its anchor.
Western officials accuse Russia of being behind a string of hybrid war attacks on land and at sea.
Amid these concerns, NATO is moving to build a layered maritime surveillance system combining uncrewed surface vehicles like the Voyagers with conventional naval ships, satellites and seabed sensors.
“The challenge is that you basically need to be on the water all the time, and it’s humongously expensive,” said Peter Viggo Jakobsen of the Royal Danish Defense College. “It’s simply too expensive for us to have a warship trailing every single Russian ship, be it a warship or a civilian freighter of some kind.”
“We’re trying to put together a layered system that will enable us to keep constant monitoring of potential threats, but at a much cheaper level than before,” he added.
Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96. The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she lived. Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who cofounded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice. “The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
‘DISRESPECTFUL’: Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s most influential adviser, drew ire by posting an image of Greenland in the colors of the US flag, captioning it ‘SOON’ US President Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his claim that Greenland should become part of the US, despite calls by the Danish prime minister to stop “threatening” the territory. Washington’s military intervention in Venezuela has reignited fears for Greenland, which Trump has repeatedly said he wants to annex, given its strategic location in the arctic. While aboard Air Force One en route to Washington, Trump reiterated the goal. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “We’ll worry about Greenland in
PERILOUS JOURNEY: Over just a matter of days last month, about 1,600 Afghans who were at risk of perishing due to the cold weather were rescued in the mountains Habibullah set off from his home in western Afghanistan determined to find work in Iran, only for the 15-year-old to freeze to death while walking across the mountainous frontier. “He was forced to go, to bring food for the family,” his mother, Mah Jan, said at her mud home in Ghunjan village. “We have no food to eat, we have no clothes to wear. The house in which I live has no electricity, no water. I have no proper window, nothing to burn for heating,” she added, clutching a photograph of her son. Habibullah was one of at least 18 migrants who died
RSS