KNVTS lecture: Uncrewed Maritime Airpower

Modern Naval Warfare is undergoing a significant transformation period. As Navies move towards expanding persistent surveillance capabilities, distributed operations, and cost-effective force projection across the maritime domain, Uncrewed Maritime Systems are emerging as critical enablers of these capabilities. However, their integration into naval forces presents formidable operational, strategic, and technical challenges.

This lecture will focus on one of these types of systems: Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS). The lecture will examine how navies worldwide are implementing Maritime UAS, contrasting high-end carrier-integrated systems with attritable and asymmetric platforms, relevant operational and strategic challenges, as well as integration constraints from a ship designer’s perspective.

Using a regional comparative framework, from the Black Sea to the Indo-Pacific, the session analyses how strategic context drives divergent solutions, and distinguishes mature operational capabilities from experimental or demonstrator programs. The objective is to provide a force design and naval engineering perspective on what maritime uncrewed airpower means in practice for fleet development.

Speaker: Rui Costa, former Portuguese Navy Officer, Author, and Unmanned Maritime Systems SME