Sailors assigned to the Small Craft Action Team aboard the USS Mount Whitney train on a deck-mounted weapon during an unmanned vessel swarm exercise in the Baltic Sea, June 13, 2026. A recent NATO exercise underscored the need to train sailors on detecting and countering surface drones, a potentially deadly threat to warships with limited defenses against the technology. (Chad M. Butler/U.S. Navy)
BALTIC SEA — These northerly waters recently served to show Navy sailors how to spot and destroy deadly surface drones, whose devastating consequences for ships have been demonstrated from the Middle East to Crimea.
The lessons were on display earlier this month during BALTOPS, an annual NATO maritime exercise in the Baltic. Stars and Stripes observed U.S. and U.K. sailors training in rainy, rough conditions.
That effort builds on lessons learned by watching Ukrainian surface drones batter Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and force its ships to stay bottled up close to shore.
It also draws on insights gleaned from surface drone and fast-boat attacks on ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen and, more recently, by Iranian forces.
The training builds the readiness the fleet will need to handle the complexities of dealing with such systems in conflict, said Lt. Nick Anderson, the weapons and anti-terrorism officer aboard the command-and-control ship USS Mount Whitney, which also participated in the exercise.
“Kind of like a football team, if your defensive line doesn’t have a plan on how to react to a play and doesn’t have a shared mental model, it’s much, much harder to stay coordinated in your spots,” Anderson said.
BALTOPS aims to sharpen the skills of NATO navies in defending the Baltic Sea and keeping allied forces and supplies moving through the region during a crisis.
In this year’s iteration, poor weather added realism to the drone training by making it more difficult to spot the low-profile craft in rain and choppy seas.
Sea state and weather conditions as well as an unmanned boat’s low profile and fast speed all make the craft difficult to detect. While radar is useful, a ship’s best defense against any threat at sea is sailors’ eyes, likely enhanced by a pair of binoculars, Anderson said.
In the training scenario, Mount Whitney and participating allied ships practiced detecting, identifying and evading Navy Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft, or GARC, from the San Diego-based Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 32, established in January.
Surface drones “are intended to be small and sneaky and to exploit blind spots,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for a New American Security.
A Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft assigned to Unmanned Surface Vessel Squadron 3 approaches the USS Mount Whitney during a swarm exercise in the Baltic Sea, June 13, 2026. A recent NATO exercise underscored the need to train sailors on detecting and countering surface drones, a potentially deadly threat to warships with limited defenses against the technology. (Chad M. Butler/U.S. Navy)
While sailors may be on the lookout for other vessels, such as enemy warships, surface drones can catch them unaware, she added.
Protecting ships from explosive-laden boats has been a longtime challenge, Navy officials and analysts note, pointing to the October 2000 suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole as it was refueling in a Yemeni port. The attack killed 17 sailors and injured more than three dozen.
Now, the threat of inexpensive, radar-evading drone swarms is pushing the Navy to rapidly shift unmanned systems out of the lab and into active operational training while it works to develop and deploy new technologies to defend against them.
The urgency reflects the rapidly evolving nature of naval warfare. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown how relatively inexpensive unmanned boats can damage or sink much larger warships, while repeated Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden have forced commercial vessels and Western navies to adapt to drone and missile threats.
“They’re trying to learn on the fly,” Pettyjohn said. “They’re deploying the prototypes into the exercises, into operations, even as they’re still sort of shaping requirements.”
A sailor assigned to the Small Craft Action Team aboard the USS Mount Whitney scans for a target during an unmanned vessel swarm exercise in the Baltic Sea, June 13, 2026. A recent NATO exercise underscored the need to train sailors on detecting and countering surface drones, a potentially deadly threat to warships with limited defenses against the technology. (Chad M. Butler/U.S. Navy)
Differentiating an attack drone from a fishing boat or other vessel, determining its intent and potentially eliminating it require coordination and clear communication between a ship’s bridge and small-craft action team members manning guns on deck, said Petty Officer 2nd Class Marcus Guy, a member of Mount Whitney’s small-craft action team.
That can be challenging in the heat of the moment when multiple teams are tracking and calling out the position of a potential threat, he said.
Lt. Sarah Weinstein, commander of USVD 32, said that for many U.S. and NATO sailors, the exercise offered a firsthand look at drone tactics and a critical opportunity to apply knowledge and skills learned in previous training.
The division was operating in support of the Navy’s Task Force 66, which is focused on integrating robotic and autonomous systems with manned platforms.
Internal lessons and operational feedback gained during counter-drone training with unmanned surface vehicles in the Baltic have fleetwide implications, she said.
The GARC “operates the same way no matter what ocean or sea you happen to be in,” Weinstein said. “The lessons learned while employing it are entirely universal.”
