- The US Navy stood up a new task force last year to explore innovation for future wars.
- The task force is closely watching how Ukraine has leveraged asymmetric tactics against Russia.
- It is training warships to survive some of the threats that hit Russia's fleet hard.
Amid rapid changes in naval warfare, a ship today could find itself suddenly facing a swarm of small, fast, uncrewed vessels ready to strike hard right at the waterline — a potentially critical hit. With this growing threat in mind, the US Navy is training warships to defend against attacks by hostile drone boats.
Navy leadership is closely watching how drones are shaping the conflict in Ukraine and studying how it can integrate uncrewed systems into the traditional fleet for future operations.
Drone boats, specifically, are dangerous and innovative weapons that Ukraine used to inflict pain on Russia's fleet in the Black Sea. Top commanders see the offensive potential, as well as the need to be ready to defend against them.
"These asymmetric capabilities can be used against us, too," Rear Adm. Michael Mattis, commander of the Navy's Task Force 66, told Business Insider in a recent interview. Asymmetric warfare refers to employing cheap weapons en masse against expensive enemy targets.
Last month, the Navy participated in multiple training exercises aimed at preparing warship crews for the kind of threats they could face in future conflicts, simulating drone boat attacks on US warships. It exposed crews to an emerging threat with devastating potential.
Mattis serves as the director of strategic effects for US Naval Forces Europe-Africa, which launched Task Force 66 last year to merge robotic and autonomous systems into fleet operations. The initiative underscores the Navy's efforts to operate drones alongside conventional crewed naval combat platforms as it explores innovative and asymmetric warfighting tactics.
In the Black Sea, Ukraine has demonstrated to the US and its NATO allies the dangers of ignoring these capabilities.
At the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainians didn't have much of a navy to project maritime power, so Kyiv leaned into asymmetric warfare and relied on a campaign of missile strikes and attacks with domestically produced naval drones to wreak havoc on Moscow's Black Sea Fleet.
Ukraine's operations damaged or destroyed dozens of Russian warships and forced Moscow to relocate the bulk of its fleet from its long-held headquarters in the occupied Crimean peninsula to the port of Novorossiysk in the eastern part of the Black Sea.
Mattis said that the Ukrainian campaign has seen Kyiv defeat around 40% of the Russian naval force in the Black Sea. But it has also highlighted what he described as an action, reaction, and counteraction cycle of innovation on the battlefield, where one side fields a capability, the other side fields a counter-capability, and then the first side fields a counter to that counter.
Russia, for example, found it difficult to stop Ukraine's naval drone attacks with warship defenses alone, so it responded by increasing its combat patrol aircraft presence to better monitor the Black Sea. Ukraine reacted to this development by outfitting its naval drones with surface-to-air missiles, which have already shot down Russian fighter jets and helicopters.
Despite being able to generate significant combat power in the air, Russia's naval forces have been relatively constrained to Novorossiysk. Its limited operations suggest that Moscow is either unwilling or unable to project power in the Black Sea and can't achieve its objectives to control the waterway, Mattis said.
"Ukraine has been incredibly successful in achieving strategic effects in the Black Sea and essentially leveraging their asymmetry against the Russians," he said.
'No ideal tactic'
The Navy watched this asymmetric warfare cycle unfold in the Black Sea and realized the pressing need to reduce it down to its most basic form in a "red-versus-blue" training scenario.
"We want to put our ships into a defensive area where they have to think and react to this problem set," Mattis said, sharing that most have done training in this, but not a lot.
"We know that this is an evolving capability," he said. "We know that the Russians were slow to adapt defensive measures against it, and as a result, they lost more ships than perhaps they should have, had they been able to adapt faster."
During a recent exercise called Baltic Operations 2025, Task Force 66 used uncrewed surface vessels to simulate attacks on two Navy ships: the command and control vessel USS Mount Whitney and the guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Ignatius.
The task force deployed a naval drone called the Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft and other systems for the exercise. This system, made by the US company BlackSea Technologies, resembles a small speedboat and can sprint up to 40 knots, or 46 mph.
Mattis said that the goal was to put the ships in a situation where they had to react on an uncomfortably short timeline. In some of the training scenarios, operators would have a drone tail one of the larger vessels and then suddenly sprint out from behind it, forcing it to react. In other situations, multiple drone boats attacked from different angles.
One of the challenges with naval drones is that they are small, making them more difficult to detect and differentiate from various commercial boats. When operating in a normal routine, like in port, the watch team might not be able to identify the threat before tragedy struck.
Mattis said the exercise took place at the basic level, with the purpose of creating what he described as a dilemma. He said this specific exercise was designed so sailors could understand the operating characteristics of the fast and agile naval drones, which can appear almost undetected out of nowhere and quickly swarm a vessel.
There were no live-fire engagements during the training exercise, meaning the ships didn't shoot at the drone boats. However, the Navy does train for that. At a different European exercise held in May, sailors on the destroyer USS Thomas Hudner practiced using the warship's guns to defend against a naval drone attack.
Task Force 66 is experimenting with some more advanced tactics and aims to eventually build more complex training scenarios, which Mattis said will likely resemble a "free play" mode, where participants learn how to operate and react on the fly rather than via scripted runs designed for safety and repeatability.
"Going back to the fundamentals, because of this iterative nature and innovative nature of this changing character of war with drones, what we're seeing is that there's no ideal tactic, there's no ideal capability," Mattis said, explaining that "there's only a combination of tactics and capabilities that have to change over time to continue to generate dilemmas and surprise for the adversary to be ultimately defeated."
'Innovate to survive'
The naval drone exercises last month are just one way Task Force 66 is taking key lessons learned from the Ukraine war and applying them in training scenarios. It is also trying to see how it can replicate some of the low-cost, high-return effects that it has observed in the Black Sea and apply them in other theaters, like the contested Indo-Pacific region.
Navy leadership is increasingly preparing for the rise of artificial intelligence, drones, autonomous systems, and other emerging technologies in future conflicts, but Mattis acknowledged that one of the challenges of addressing the changing nature of warfare — fast enough to keep up with the speed of adaptation — is figuring out how to do it when you're not facing an existential threat.
He explained that "when someone pushes a gun in your face, as Russia did with Ukraine, and you are forced to innovate to survive — when it is absolutely 'figure it out or die' — the ability to get after problem-solving and the ability to remove barriers and eliminate excuses is incredible."
"We've seen our Ukrainian partners do that in ways that are incredibly inspiring," he said. The US Navy isn't in that kind of fight, but it realizes it needs to be ready for one.
