Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher

US Navy

Sean Gallagher

















NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—At this week's Navy League Sea-Air-Space exposition (an annual seapower conference and trade show for the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard) Ars got a chance to board and tour a craft called the Stiletto. The Stilleto is prototype boat built for the Navy in 2006 that has become the military's on-call floating laboratory for rapid research and development of new sensors, weapons systems, and communications. With a carbon fiber hull, the Stiletto is light enough (45 tons, unloaded) to be craned onto a cargo ship for transport—but it can also carry 20 tons of cargo and tear through most sea states at high speeds.

Now operating from Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek near Norfolk, Virginia, the Stiletto was originally intended to be part of a new Navy combat concept—groups of small, highly networked boats carrying sensors and weapons and working as a group to take on enemies in coastal, river, and shallow ocean waters. Built with special operations in mind, the Stiletto has a stealthy profile and a unique pentamaran hull that essentially acts as a surface effect hull at high speeds, allowing the craft to rise out of the water and reach speeds of 60 knots (69 miles an hour, or 110 kilometers per hour).

After being used in several exercises in the mid-2000s, the Stiletto was deployed to the Caribbean for counter-narcotics operations in 2008 with a joint Navy-Coast Guard team. Since then, it has served as a "maritime demonstration craft" operated by the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock, Combatant Craft Division. But it is funded directly by the Department of Defense's Office of Research, Test, Development and Evaluation (RDT&E). (Full disclosure: my last tour of service in the Navy was with "special boats," so the Stiletto is my 1990 self's technological dream.)

Aside from special tasks—like retrieving NASA's test Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle 3 (IRVE 3) after its launch and splash-down in 2012—Stiletto is on call for use in testing the latest and possibly greatest gear that military and defense industry researchers prototype, from drones to stabilized gun platforms to networked weapons control systems. Earlier this year, Stiletto served as the "sea" leg of a Marine Corps Warfighting Lab test of using teamed ground robots and aerial drones to find and direct fire against targets ashore.

Listing image by Sean Gallagher