The Royal Navy has commissioned its first squadron of crewless boats in Portsmouth, with 55-knot Kraken drones, so Solent yachtsmen may soon find themselves giving way to nobody at all.
Anyone who has ever motored out past the Round Tower on a busy Saturday, dodging the Gosport ferry, a departing Brittany Ferries ship and a flotilla of dinghies all apparently aiming for the same patch of water, may have assumed that Portsmouth Harbour could not possibly accommodate another category of traffic, although the Royal Navy has now politely disagreed. On 5 November, in a ceremony at His Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth attended by more than 200 navy personnel, dignitaries, media, families and friends, the 1st Autonomous Squadron was formally commissioned, and the highlight of the afternoon was a demonstration in which its Kraken and Rattler uncrewed surface vessels were manoeuvred around the harbour from a control hub rather than by anybody actually standing at a helm.
The Navy is keen to stress that this is a squadron in the full, old-fashioned sense rather than a laboratory experiment with a smart name, because the unit comprises around 180 personnel, the same number as a Type 23 frigate, split into two watches so that it can sustain operations around the clock. It replaces Project Beehive, the programme set up to procure a fleet of autonomous and crewless boats as a proving ground, and it sits inside what the service calls the hybrid navy, a mixture of traditional warships and uncrewed technology that the Royal Navy says is backed by £1.5bn of investment over four years. Fleet Commander Vice-Admiral Steve Moorhouse called it “a genuinely historic occasion”, adding that for generations the Fleet had been built around ships, submarines and aircraft, and that from now on an autonomous squadron takes its place alongside them.
The boats themselves are rather more interesting to anyone with a powerboat licence than the organisational chart, because the Kraken K3 Scout is, at heart, a fast and very purposeful sportsboat with nobody aboard. Kraken Technology Group lists it at 8.4m overall with a beam of 1.93m and a draft of 0.8m, a maximum displacement of 2,500kg, an inboard diesel driving a sterndrive and a top speed of 55 knots, which is the sort of figure that would make most owners of 40ft sportscruisers quietly reach for their brochures to check their own numbers. More remarkable still is the range of 650 nautical miles at 25 knots and an endurance of up to seven days, together with a 600kg payload bay that the builder says can be reconfigured for roles running from maritime awareness and force protection to logistics, casualty evacuation and precision strike.
There is a slightly surreal detail that has caught the public imagination, which is that the people driving these craft are doing so with something rather close to the equipment found in a teenager’s bedroom, with Lieutenant Reece McCarthy of the squadron telling the BBC that “we use Xbox controls and PlayStation controls to drive the craft” and describing the job as “100% a young person’s game”. Before anyone at the yacht club bar starts muttering about the decline of proper seamanship, it is worth remembering that Kraken’s own description of the K3 talks about multiple modes running from supervised autonomy to remote piloting, with human oversight retained, autonomous navigation handling route holding and collision avoidance, and Kraken building the system around the Auterion operating system with open interfaces for other equipment.
The squadron’s commanding officer, Commander Helen Coxon, said the job now was to put the vessels to work, whether on their own or as part of a task group alongside allies, and to bring new uncrewed systems into the Fleet as quickly as could responsibly be done, working with Navy Develop, the Disruptive Capabilities and Technologies Office and the Capability Accelerator. That last team, set up in 2025 and partly funded by UK Defence Innovation, has opened a new hub in the Portsmouth naval base, and the Navy points to the Kraken and Rattler boats as an example of taking off-the-shelf technology and adapting it for military operations far faster than the traditional procurement cycle, which in the past could make the design of a new frigate feel roughly as quick as the building of a cathedral.
For Solent sailors the practical question is simply what any of this will look like from the cockpit, and the honest answer is that nobody outside the Navy yet knows how often these craft will be seen in the harbour, the Eastern Solent or beyond, since the squadron’s purpose is front-line operations rather than displays for the Gunwharf Quays lunchtime crowd. What is already clear is that Portsmouth, which has long been the place to watch grey warships come and go from the Round Tower and Southsea seafront, has acquired a new kind of naval traffic, and that the small, low, very fast boats now being driven from a control room are just as entitled to their share of the water as the rest of us, even if nobody aboard is ever going to wave back.
