Richard Jenkins said Saildrone crossed a new line this summer, when one of its autonomous vessels launched missiles during Navy training exercises. The founder and CEO said the company once faced laughter from the Navy, but now its platform is moving from surveillance to weapons testing in the Elon Musk Palmer Luckey Pentagon panel debate over faster defense adoption.
Jenkins said, "I tried to sell to the U.S. Navy in 2013, and they literally laughed at me and said, 'How do we possibly use unmanned systems?' and I said, 'Well, believe me, one day it'll be a thing,'" He also said the company now has customers wanting more sophisticated payloads, including signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and kinetics.
Richard Jenkins and the Navy
Saildrone now works with the Navy, the Coast Guard, Homeland Security, and many of America's allies. Its vessels can remain at sea for months at a time and carry cameras, radar, and other sensors, which is how the company built a role in maritime surveillance before this summer's missile launch.
The missile test adds a different function to that platform. Instead of only detecting what is happening at sea, one of Saildrone's newer vessels took part in Navy training exercises with a weapons payload, showing that the system has moved into a category the Navy once dismissed.
DIU and the Pentagon
Saildrone began its path to the Pentagon in 2015 with the Defense Innovation Unit. Sarah Pearson said Saildrone was one of the early programs stood up at DIU, and she said DIU now leads the charge as the Pentagon works to bring in more commercial defense-tech companies.
That shift matters for the way companies get from prototype to field use. DIU's role is to move commercial technology into military hands faster, and Saildrone's jump from sensing to missile launch fits that push.
Dan Berkenstock on Silicon Valley
Dan Berkenstock said the moment in Silicon Valley reminds him of the Golden Era in the 1950s and 1960s. He tied that shift to entrepreneurs who were motivated by 9/11 and to a new Pentagon business model, saying the change runs in both directions.
Jenkins' account leaves one practical question in front of the company and the Navy: what specific missile system was used during the exercises this summer. For now, the clear change is that Saildrone is no longer being discussed only as a maritime sensor platform; it has already entered weapons testing.
