Blue Water Autonomy on February 11, 2026, introduced the Liberty Class, a 190-foot autonomous ship designed for U.S. Navy missions, with construction slated to begin in March 2026 at Conrad Shipyard in Louisiana. The vessel, built under a licensing agreement with Dutch shipbuilder Damen, carries deliberate echoes of the mass-produced Liberty ships that sustained Allied supply lines during World War II. If the program delivers on its promise of affordable, rapidly scalable unmanned vessels, it could mark the Navy’s clearest step yet from experimental prototypes toward a production-ready autonomous fleet.
A 60-Meter Autonomous Warship Takes Shape
The Liberty Class is a 60-meter steel ship with a range exceeding 10,000 nautical miles and a payload capacity above 150 tonnes, according to details released by Damen and Blue Water Autonomy in their partnership announcement. Those numbers place it squarely in the large unmanned surface vehicle category the Navy has been trying to fill for years. Rather than designing a hull from scratch, Blue Water Autonomy selected Damen’s Stan Patrol 6009 hull design, a patrol-ship baseline Damen markets for government and naval users. That choice aligns with an acquisition logic often discussed around unmanned programs: using commercial-derived designs to shorten development timelines while still aiming for the seakeeping and endurance needed for blue-water operations.
Blue Water’s own announcement describes the Liberty Class as a 190-foot vessel tailored for U.S. missions and emphasizes that it will be built under license from Damen using a commercial patrol hull as the baseline, an approach laid out in the company’s program overview. Construction is slated to begin in March 2026 at Conrad Shipyard in Louisiana, positioning the yard as an early player in the Navy’s unmanned surface ecosystem. The decision to license an existing foreign hull design and build domestically is a calculated bet: it sidesteps years of developmental engineering while keeping production jobs and supply chains on American soil. For a Navy that has struggled with shipbuilding delays and cost overruns on crewed combatants, the Liberty Class offers a different acquisition model, one that trades design novelty for speed and predictability.
From Ghost Fleet Prototypes to Production Programs
The Liberty Class does not emerge from a vacuum. The Navy has spent several years testing autonomous surface vessels under the Ghost Fleet Overlord initiative, which fielded prototype unmanned ships in major fleet exercises. According to the Navy’s own fact file on the Overlord vessels, those prototypes participated in events including RIMPAC 2022, Integrated Battle Problem 23.2, and Autonomous Warrior, operating alongside crewed warships and demonstrating long-endurance transits under sparse human supervision. The goal was never to turn those testbeds into a production class but to prove that large unmanned platforms could navigate, avoid collisions, and integrate into fleet command-and-control networks.
That transition from experiment to more formal acquisition pathways is now taking shape. The Navy, through NAVSEA, is exploring the Modular Attack Surface Craft program, known as MASC, which would merge medium and large unmanned surface vessel concepts into a single multi-mission family. Naval Sea Systems Command has asked industry for feedback on this approach, describing MASC as a modular surface craft that can accept different payloads for roles ranging from sensing to strike. MASC relies on Other Transaction Agreements rather than traditional defense procurement contracts, a deliberate move to attract commercial shipbuilders and technology firms that might otherwise avoid the Pentagon’s lengthy acquisition process. The Liberty Class, with its commercial hull and ample payload volume, appears tailored to fit this emerging model, even though the Navy has not publicly tied the design to any specific MASC award.
Why Acquisition Speed Matters More Than Design Perfection
The strategic logic behind the Liberty Class becomes clearer when set against the Navy’s broader budgetary and programmatic struggles. A Congressional Research Service survey of large unmanned platforms has documented repeated restructures, shifting acquisition pathways, and persistent oversight concerns about how the service plans to buy and field autonomous ships at scale. In its analysis of unmanned surface and undersea vehicles, CRS notes that Congress has frequently slowed or fenced funding until the Navy could provide more detailed concepts of operations, reliability data, and lifecycle cost estimates. Lawmakers have questioned whether the Navy’s unmanned ambitions are backed by realistic funding profiles or whether they will suffer the same schedule slippage and cost growth that have plagued high-profile crewed ship programs.
The Liberty Class licensing model offers a partial answer to those concerns. By building on a hull that already exists in production, the program compresses the timeline between contract award and delivery and reduces the engineering risk that has historically driven cost overruns in naval shipbuilding. The tradeoff is that a licensed commercial design may lack the survivability features, compartmentalization, or signature reduction of a purpose-built military vessel. For an unmanned ship that carries no crew, however, that calculus shifts: the cost of losing a vessel is measured in dollars, not lives, which changes how much the Navy needs to invest in each hull. In a conflict where attrition is expected, a larger number of “good enough” unmanned ships may offer more operational value than a handful of exquisite but scarce platforms.
The Gap Between Ambition and Oversight
Most coverage of the Liberty Class has focused on its technical specifications and the World War II branding. What deserves more scrutiny is whether the Navy’s acquisition framework can actually deliver autonomous ships at the pace the fleet needs. Other Transaction Agreements, the contracting mechanism NAVSEA described for MASC, can allow faster awards and more flexible terms than standard defense contracts. But they also reduce congressional visibility into spending decisions, a tension the CRS report has flagged as a recurring oversight issue. If the Navy plans to buy dozens or hundreds of unmanned vessels through OTAs, Congress will eventually demand the same level of cost reporting, testing milestones, and long-term sustainment planning it applies to traditional shipbuilding programs, potentially slowing the very speed OTAs are meant to enable.
There is also a workforce question that the Liberty ship analogy obscures. The original Liberty ships were built by tens of thousands of welders and riveters in an industrial mobilization that reshaped the American economy. The 21st-century version requires far fewer shipyard workers per hull but far more software engineers, autonomy specialists, and cybersecurity experts. Conrad Shipyard can bend steel, but the harder challenge is building and sustaining the software stack that lets a 60-meter vessel operate independently across 10,000 nautical miles of open ocean. That capability does not come from a hull license alone; it depends on robust testing regimes, secure update pipelines, and a cadre of technicians capable of diagnosing failures that may occur far from human operators. The Liberty Class will be a test not just of autonomous ship design, but of whether the Navy and its industry partners can align acquisition speed, technical rigor, and democratic oversight in time to matter for the next maritime crisis.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
