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.
An American scientist convicted of lying to US authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen, China, to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain. Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and restoring movement in paralyzed people. It also has potential military applications: Scientists at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting
Jailed media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai (黎智英) has been awarded Deutsche Welle’s (DW) freedom of speech award for his contribution to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The German public broadcaster on Thursday said Lai would be presented in absentia with the 12th iteration of the award on June 23 at the DW Global Media Forum in Bonn. Deutsche Welle director-general Barbara Massing praised the 78-year-old founder of the now-shuttered news outlet Apple Daily for standing “unwaveringly for press freedom in Hong Kong at great personal risk.” “With Apple Daily, he gave journalists a platform for free reporting and a voice to the democracy movement in
PHILIPPINE COMMITTEE: The head of the committee that made the decision said: ‘If there is nothing to hide, there is no reason to hide, there is no reason to obstruct’ A Philippine congressional committee on Wednesday ruled that there was “probable cause” to impeach Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte after hearing allegations of unexplained wealth, misuse of state funds and threats to have the president assassinated. The unanimous decision of the 53-member committee in the Philippine House of Representatives sends the two impeachment complaints to deliberations and voting by the entire lower chamber, which has more than 300 lawmakers. The complaints centered on Duterte’s alleged illegal use and mishandling of intelligence funds from the vice president’s office, and from her time as education secretary under Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Duterte and the
Burmese President Min Aung Hlaing yesterday cut all prisoners’ sentences by one-sixth, a blanket measure that a source close to deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi said would further shorten her detention. Aung San Suu Kyi has been sequestered since a 2021 military coup, but the senior member of her dissolved National League for Democracy (NLD) party said that while her term had been reduced, her remaining sentence is still unclear. “We also don’t know exactly how many years she has left,” the source told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. The military toppled Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government
RSS