The race to put robots on the oceans is not an abstract technological contest. It is a contest over presence, endurance, and the political will to accept new forms of risk and responsibility. On the surface the United States and China are both accelerating programs for unmanned surface and undersea vessels, yet their approaches and advantages diverge in ways that matter for strategy and for ethics.

The United States has chosen an evolutionary, experiment-driven path that privileges sophisticated autonomy, integration with manned fleets, and institutional learning. In Washington the Ghost Fleet Overlord work of the Strategic Capabilities Office, transferred into Navy programs in 2022, has been explicit about converting commercial hulls into government experimental platforms to accelerate CONOPS development and risk reduction. The Navy has layered prototypes into concept-forming organizations such as Surface Development Squadron One and the Unmanned Operations Center. Those experiments are not cosmetic. They inform the Navy’s plans for a family of systems including medium and large unmanned surface vessels and extra large uncrewed undersea vehicles for missions from persistent ISR to mine countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare.

Concrete investment reflects that posture. Congressional and service documents in 2023 show targeted funding requests for LUSV, MUSV and XLUUV enabling capabilities, indicating that the Navy sees unmanned vessels as a structural part of future fleet architecture rather than fringe toys. That funding buys autonomy software stacks, command and control links, and modular payload architectures designed to let unmanned platforms operate either as distributed sensors or as attritable effectors under a human supervisory model.

The prototype story is instructive. The Sea Hunter lineage, born in DARPA’s ACTUV effort and subsequently manifested in platforms delivered to Navy experimentation squadrons, has been a durable test bed for long endurance autonomy and compliance with maritime rules of the road. Industry deliveries of Sea Hunter class hulls and improved Medium Displacement USVs such as Seahawk demonstrate that the United States is solving the hard engineering problems of seakeeping, endurance and modular payload carriage as a prelude to operational fielding.

Operational learning has followed. Task Force 59 and other unmanned hubs have been stood up to integrate dozens of commercial and military unmanned systems into real maritime operations. By early 2023 the task force had openly stated ambitions to operate on the order of a hundred unmanned vehicles in theater and to provide partners with access to the resulting maritime picture. That is an important shift. It treats unmanned systems as force multipliers embedded in alliances rather than as isolated technological curiosities.

But the American route has constraints. Western acquisition norms, high unit costs for heavily instrumented systems, and a deliberate human-in-the-loop ethic produce platforms that are technically advanced but expensive and slow to proliferate. The result is a classic capability versus capacity tradeoff. The Navy is attempting to manage that tension by combining costly, enduring prototypes with a wider set of smaller, more affordable or attritable systems, but organizational friction and supply chain realities remain real limits.

China’s approach reads differently. Public reporting and open source observation in the early 2020s reveal a People’s Liberation Army and a commercial-industrial ecosystem willing to mount unmanned surface and undersea systems into gray zone operations, routine oceanographic collection, and displays of military effect. Chinese academic and industry actors have developed a range of gliders, medium UUVs and surface drones, and state media and exhibition appearances indicate experimentation with both persistence gliders and larger unmanned platforms. These systems are treated as dual use, exploitable for science and for surveillance, and they have particular value where continuous presence and data collection matter.

At exhibitions in 2023 Chinese builders displayed new JARI-class USVs and larger concept craft, some of which the press described as armed or armed-capable. Whether every public model will enter service is uncertain, but the pattern matters. China moves quickly from prototype to parade float to operational experimentation, and it levers a substantial shipbuilding and systems base to scale low cost hulls and modular payloads. That industrial throughput gives China an asymmetric advantage when the strategic objective is massed presence or platform proliferation in regional waters.

Strategy and moral calculus diverge with operational doctrine. The U.S. emphasis on human supervision, rules compliance, and integrated allies constrains reckless deployment but also limits how fast and how cheaply fleets can grow. China’s blend of dual-use science ships, glider fleets, and potentially armed USVs offers persistence and mass. It also erodes the clarity of attribution in peacetime gray zone operations. The result is a coercive middle ground in which unmanned systems become instruments of persistent pressure short of declared conflict.

What should worry strategists is not only technical parity or imbalance. It is the institutional shape of adoption. The U.S. model buys better interoperability, legal caution and sensor fusion. China’s model buys mass, deniability and the ability to saturate contested littorals with low cost effects. Neither model is inherently moral. Both raise questions about escalation, sovereign consent, and the obligation to avoid unintended harm when autonomous systems operate in dense commercial traffic and congested littorals.

Policymakers must therefore treat unmanned maritime forces as political instruments as much as technical ones. Investment decisions are also decisions about doctrine, escalation control, and alliance management. If the United States wants both quality and scale it must accelerate domestic production of attritable systems while hardening command and control and legal frameworks that govern autonomy at sea. China’s approach underscores why such acceleration is urgent. But acceleration without ethical guardrails and diplomatic norms is not an answer. It is an invitation to miscalculation.

The deeper lesson is philosophical. A navy is a social technology. Ships embody laws, responsibilities and civic expectations. When we replace sailors with algorithms and sensors we do not remove those obligations. We reassign them. The technical debate about LUSVs, MUSVs and XLUUVs must therefore be conjoined to a candid political debate about who takes responsibility when machines act at sea, how accountability is established across multinational operations, and which uses of autonomous force we as a society will accept. Until that debate is central, both the U.S. program of careful integration and the Chinese program of massed deployment will remain measures of engineering prowess but poor substitutes for clear political judgment.