Blue Water Autonomy, a private defense firm, is pitching the U.S. Navy on a 190-foot steel autonomous warship designed to operate without a human crew. The company’s Liberty Class vessel, designed in partnership with Dutch shipbuilder Damen, is set to begin construction next month at a Louisiana shipyard. The pitch arrives as the Navy faces growing pressure to expand its fleet under President Trump’s Golden Fleet initiative, raising hard questions about whether uncrewed combat ships can deliver on their promise fast enough to matter.
A Steel Warship With No Crew Aboard
The Liberty Class is not a concept sketch or a Silicon Valley prototype. It is a 190-foot steel autonomous ship that Blue Water Autonomy says was purpose-built for the U.S. Navy. At that length, the vessel sits roughly in the range of a patrol ship or corvette, large enough to carry meaningful weapons systems and sensors but far smaller and cheaper than a traditional destroyer or frigate. The company designed the ship in partnership with Damen, a Netherlands-based firm with decades of experience building military and commercial vessels for navies around the world.
Construction is scheduled to begin at Conrad Shipyard in March 2026. Conrad, based in Morgan City, Louisiana, has a track record of building steel vessels for government and commercial clients along the Gulf Coast. Choosing an established U.S. yard signals that Blue Water Autonomy wants to position the Liberty Class as a domestic production program rather than an imported solution, a distinction that matters politically as lawmakers push to rebuild American shipbuilding capacity. The timeline is aggressive: steel cutting next month would put the company well ahead of most Pentagon acquisition cycles, which routinely stretch years before a hull touches water.
Trump’s Golden Fleet and the Demand Signal
The Liberty Class pitch lands against a specific political backdrop. President Trump on December 22 announced an ambitious new plan for the Navy called the Golden Fleet, a vision for a larger, more capable naval force. The Heritage Foundation, in a January commentary, argued that making this concept real would require building more ships at a larger number of shipyards, a direct acknowledgment that the Navy’s current industrial base cannot keep pace with demand. That gap between ambition and capacity is exactly the opening Blue Water Autonomy is trying to exploit by offering a ready-made hull that can be slotted into the force structure without waiting for a new program of record.
For years, the Navy has struggled to maintain even its existing fleet of roughly 290 battle force ships, let alone grow toward the 350-plus target that multiple administrations have endorsed. Maintenance backlogs, labor shortages at the big yards, and cost overruns on major submarine and surface combatant programs have squeezed the service’s ability to add hulls. An autonomous vessel that can be built at a mid-tier commercial shipyard, without the crew berthing, life support systems, and personnel costs of a manned warship, represents a fundamentally different cost equation. That is the core argument Blue Water Autonomy is making: robot ships can fill the fleet faster and cheaper than traditional warships, potentially helping the Navy meet Golden Fleet expectations without waiting decades for new yards and workers to come online.
What Autonomy Buys and What It Risks
Removing the crew from a warship does more than save on salaries. It eliminates the need for galleys, sleeping quarters, medical bays, and the extensive ventilation and damage-control systems designed to keep sailors alive in combat. That frees up internal volume for weapons magazines, fuel tanks, and electronic warfare equipment. A 190-foot uncrewed vessel could, in theory, carry a weapons load disproportionate to its size, turning it into a floating missile battery or sensor node that operates for extended periods without resupply runs for food and fresh water. The ability to accept greater risk is another selling point: commanders can send an uncrewed ship into minefields, contested chokepoints, or heavily defended coastal waters where the loss of a manned vessel would be politically and emotionally explosive.
But the risks are real and largely untested in contested waters. No autonomous surface vessel of this size has fought in a peer naval engagement, and the Navy’s own experiments with medium and large unmanned surface vessels remain in the prototype stage. Cybersecurity is the most obvious vulnerability: a ship controlled by software and satellite links presents a target for electronic warfare, jamming, and hacking by adversaries that have invested heavily in those capabilities. Spoofed navigation data, corrupted targeting information, or a simple denial-of-service attack on communications could render an uncrewed warship useless or even dangerous to its own side. Blue Water Autonomy’s public materials do not detail the ship’s armament, speed, or endurance specifications, leaving open questions about whether the Liberty Class is truly combat-ready or still a flexible platform in search of a mission and weapons fit.
There is also a legal and ethical dimension. Current U.S. military policy requires a human in the loop for lethal force decisions, and senior Pentagon officials have repeatedly emphasized that autonomous systems must remain under meaningful human control. An autonomous warship that carries weapons will need to comply with that standard, which means some form of remote human oversight for any engagement. How that oversight works in a communications-denied environment, where satellite links may be jammed or severed, is a problem the Pentagon has not publicly solved. If Liberty Class ships are expected to operate forward, close to hostile shores and under electronic attack, the Navy will need robust fallback modes that keep weapons safe while still allowing the vessel to defend itself and nearby forces.
Private Capital vs. Pentagon Procurement
Blue Water Autonomy’s approach represents a broader shift in how defense technology reaches the fleet. Rather than waiting for a Navy requirement, a formal request for proposals, and a multi-year competition, the company is building a ship on its own dime and presenting it as a finished product. This mirrors the model that venture-backed firms have used in other defense sectors, where private capital funds development and the military buys off the shelf once a capability is proven. The advantage is speed: a hull in the water within a couple of years, not a decade. The disadvantage is that the Navy has no contractual leverage over design choices made before it was involved and may be forced to accept tradeoffs, such as hull form, internal layout, or sensor placement, that do not align perfectly with its doctrine or logistics.
The partnership with Damen adds credibility but also complexity. Damen builds ships for dozens of navies, including coast guards and commercial operators worldwide, and has well-established design families for patrol vessels and corvettes. Any Navy evaluation of the Liberty Class would need to address supply chain security, intellectual property protections, and the risk that design knowledge could migrate to competitors or be constrained by export controls. Conrad Shipyard’s role as the U.S. builder helps on the domestic production front, but the underlying design DNA is international. Whether Congress and the Navy’s acquisition bureaucracy will accept that arrangement is an open question, particularly as “Buy American” sentiment hardens and lawmakers scrutinize foreign involvement in critical defense programs. If Liberty Class is to scale beyond a demonstrator, Blue Water Autonomy will have to convince skeptics that an internationally designed but domestically built robot warship can be both secure and politically sustainable.
A Test Case for the Future Fleet
In many ways, the Liberty Class is a test case for what the future fleet could look like under the Golden Fleet banner. Advocates of distributed maritime operations envision a Navy made up of a mix of large, exquisite manned platforms and swarms of smaller, cheaper, and more expendable ships and drones. An uncrewed 190-foot combatant fits neatly into that picture, able to act as a forward sensor, decoy, or missile truck while larger crewed ships remain farther from enemy fire. If Blue Water Autonomy can deliver a seaworthy hull quickly, demonstrate reliable long-endurance autonomy in blue water, and integrate standard Navy combat systems, the Liberty Class could give planners a concrete example of how such concepts might work in practice rather than in PowerPoint.
The stakes, however, go beyond a single vessel. If the Navy embraces privately developed autonomous ships, it could signal a broader shift toward faster, more iterative procurement in which industry takes on more risk up front and the Pentagon buys mature products instead of funding every step of research and development. If the service balks, citing cybersecurity, legal concerns, or discomfort with foreign design partners, it will reinforce the dominance of traditional shipbuilding programs that prioritize evolutionary change over disruptive leaps. For now, Liberty Class remains a promise on paper and a set of steel plates waiting to be cut in Louisiana. Whether it becomes a fixture of the Golden Fleet or a cautionary tale about the limits of autonomy at sea will depend on how convincingly Blue Water Autonomy can turn its ambitious pitch into a warship the Navy is willing to send into harm’s way.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
