Defiant Redefines Naval Defense with Autonomous Operations

The Nomars (No Manning Required Ship) program is rewriting the rules of naval design with Defiant, a fully autonomous vessel built from the keel up to sail without a single crew member aboard. Unlike retrofitted ships, Defiant isn’t bound by human-centric design—no need for bunks, bridges, or break rooms—just pure autonomy. The challenge? Making a ship tough enough to handle real seas without human hands. That’s where the ATC demonstration comes in: a high-stakes, long-duration test to prove Defiant’s endurance and resilience in the wild. This isn’t just automation—it’s the future of unmanned maritime operations.

Transcript

00:00:01 No Mars means no manning required ship. That's the name of the program. Defiant is the name of the ship. One of the challenges that we were really trying to tackle in Nomar is how do we take on building a ship that can go to sea for a long period of time with autonomy. There's really two pieces of an autonomy problem. There's the actual autonomy, but then there's the platform the

00:00:23 autonomy is operating on. And if you're taking a platform that was designed for people and you try to make it autonomous, you can do that. The issue with that though is a lot of times the requirements that were designed into it for humans make it suboptimal for the autonomy problem. What can you do with a ship design where you don't have the constraints of the people? The other

00:00:47 side of the coin though is how do you make it reliable? It's hard enough if there are people there to fix it. And really the only way you can prove that is by giving it a hard test. Giving it a test that requires resilience and endurance. The ATC demonstration that Defiant will undertake is designed for a long period of time in a real world environment in real sea states, proving

00:01:09 that the ship can operate untouched for a very long period of time.