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The US military’s first-ever sea-drone strike, carried out in Iran earlier this month, is opening up a new way of warfighting for NATO, a top commander overseeing the alliance’s modernization told Business Insider.
“I think it’s coming,” French Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, said in an interview this week. The strike demonstrated a new combat role for sea drones, he said, though NATO still has work to do before it can effectively field them across its forces.
NATO militaries are exploring how to integrate sea drones into traditional naval fleets, but the vessels have historically been used for surveillance rather than strikes like the one in Iran.
Vandier, one of NATO’s two strategic commanders, said that the alliance is working on standardization and compatibility for sea drones so they can operate seamlessly alongside warships of any nationality.
In a naval task force, all parties involved should be able to effectively process the data and fully grasp the mission, Vandier said.
“If we don’t do that, that means that each nation will have a different understanding of drones, and we won’t be able to fight as one,” he said. “The force of NATO is integration — the ability to fight as one nation in a big group.”
NATO is increasingly pushing sea drones into naval operations. Allies are using them to conduct maritime security patrols to guard critical undersea infrastructure, including the Task Force X Baltic mission, as well as for various defensive exercises. The US is the only one that has used them on offense.
The US Navy has been using sea drones for surveillance in the Middle East for years, but over the past few weeks, they have been involved in two unprecedented missions for the Pentagon: rescuing an Apache crew from the water after their helicopter was shot down and striking an Iranian port.
The US military said the July 12 strike on Bandar Abbas was “the first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.”
The operation closely resembled what Ukrainian forces have done for years in the Black Sea, where they have used exploding sea drones to strike Russian warships and port facilities.
As Ukraine often does after these kinds of attacks, the US released footage captured from a camera mounted on the sea drone as it approached the target. Another angle showed a massive fireball at the moment of impact.
Vandier said that the strike demonstrated how the US is absorbing lessons from Ukraine, leveraging the battlefield feedback loop and using one of Kyiv’s tactics in its own fight.
The biggest impact here, he said, is that this technology cheaply expands a military’s tactical options, giving commanders new ways to pressure an enemy. “And we see that in Ukraine.”
The US could have used a fighter jet to strike the Iranian port, but it instead created a scenario where Tehran now has to consider defending the surface, not just the air, Vandier said.
The strike also validates NATO’s investments in sea drones, he added. A protracted war like the one in Ukraine requires new ways of fighting because complex platforms, like warships, take too long to build. Uncrewed systems are ideal for augmenting the existing arsenal because they can be mass-produced. They are both cheap and attritable.
For NATO military leadership, the groundwork for such an approach to naval warfare has already been set. “It gives us a good reason to trust what we’ve done before,” Vandier said.
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