From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark. But these 30-foot-long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance. Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as "Voyagers," have been put into service by Denmark's armed forces for a three-month operational trial, reports the AP.
Built by California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Two of the Voyagers launched Monday from Koge Marina, about 25 miles south of Copenhagen. Powered by wind and solar energy, these sea drones can operate autonomously for months at sea. Saildrone says the vessels carry advanced sensor suites—radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar, and acoustic monitoring. Their launch comes after two others already joined a NATO patrol on June 6.
The trial comes as NATO confronts a wave of damage to maritime infrastructure—including the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions and the rupture of at least 11 undersea cables since late 2023. The most recent incident, in January, severed a fiber-optic link between Latvia and Sweden's Gotland island. Some of the maritime disruptions have been blamed on Russia's so-called shadow fleet—aging oil tankers operating under opaque ownership to avoid sanctions. One such vessel, the Eagle S, was seized by Finnish police in December for allegedly damaging a power cable between Finland and Estonia with its anchor.
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"The challenge is that you basically need to be on the water all the time, and it's humongously expensive," said Peter Viggo Jakobsen of the Royal Danish Defense College. "It's simply too expensive for us to have a warship trailing every single Russian ship, be it a warship or a civilian freighter of some kind. We're trying to put together a layered system that will enable us to keep constant monitoring of potential threats, but at a much cheaper level than before," he added.
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