The US Navy released video on July 24 showing two Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft (GARC) uncrewed surface vessels detonating at the waterline of the ex-USS Peleliu during a July 17 sinking exercise held as part of Exercise Rim of the Pacific 2026, roughly 50 nautical miles (93 km) north of Kauai. The strike was the first live-fire employment of the GARC platform in an attack role, executed by the newly established Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 32 with the second vessel filming the first's impact before its own. The GARC was originally built by Baltimore-based BlackSea Technologies as an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance craft; this configuration carried a full autonomy package from Anduril's Lattice software and a 1,000-pound (454 kg) payload including the warhead. The former Peleliu had already been struck by Harpoons, Spike missiles, and Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles before the USVs went in, and the ship ultimately sank to approximately 15,000 feet (4,570 m).

The Read: The RIMPAC strike puts the US Navy on the same architectural page as Ukraine's Black Sea campaign, formalising the one-way attack USV as a fielded American capability roughly two weeks after CENTCOM's July 12 combat use of Saronic Corsairs against Bandar Abbas. The interesting engineering choice is that the GARC was not purpose-built as a strike platform; it was designed as an ISR vessel and reconfigured. That is the same logic that produced the Ranger torpedo-tube USV, the H145-derived U145 uncrewed helicopter, the Jaguar-derived FENRIS fire-support vehicle, and the CAPINT tank on a Leopard 2 hull. Fielded platforms with existing production lines and certification pathways are getting new mission kits faster than clean-sheet designs can graduate. USVDIV-32's existence, with a surface warfare officer as its first commanding officer, closes the organisational side of that architecture: a dedicated unit tasked with operating the retrofitted vessels alongside crewed surface combatants.

Sikorsky completed initial ground and flight testing of the Nomad 100 uncrewed aerial system under DARPA's Early VTOL Aircraft Demonstration (EVADE) program, moving the Group 3 tail-sitter into an intensive test campaign at a government facility that will replicate multiple Nomad mission profiles. The 18-foot (5.5 m) wingspan aircraft uses a rotor blown wing architecture in which twin proprotors mounted on the wing blow rotor wash across the airfoil to increase lift during and after the transition from vertical to horizontal flight, letting the entire airframe rotate through 90 degrees rather than requiring separate propulsion for each mode. Nomad 100 uses hybrid-electric propulsion and runs on Sikorsky's MATRIX autonomy, the same stack the company has flown on the autonomous Black Hawk conversion. Sikorsky is positioning the family for reconnaissance, light attack, and contested logistics from austere forward operating bases, ship decks, and unimproved landing zones, and the same rotor blown wing architecture is designed to scale from Group 3 through Group 4/5 aircraft.

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