US Marines are copying drug cartels for their island chain war with China

In the early 2000s, Latin American drug cartels developed a new tactic for smuggling large quantities of illegal drugs into the United States. They custom-built boats that were semi-submersible—that is, almost the entire vessel was underwater with only minimal structure above the waves—in order to evade detection by U.S. security forces. A few smuggling vessels were built with the ability to fully submerge, although this never became common practice.

These semi-submarines, “narco-subs” or “narco-boats,” don’t always work: the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard routinely intercept them, and the Royal Navy captured one earlier this month. But the underlying idea—stealth by low profile—is sound. So sound that the U.S. Marine Corps is trying to copy it for one of its core missions: resupplying remote island outposts during a potential war with China.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory recently began testing two 52-foot-long robotic semi-submarines off the coast of California.

“Frankly, this is just a narco-boat,” said Brigadier Simon Doran. “We stole the idea from friends down south.”

The so-called Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel has a range of thousands of miles. The Marines could launch an ALPV from Hawaii and sail it all the way to the First Island chain, which stretches between Japan and the Philippines and is expected to be the front line in a major battle between the United States and China, possibly over Taiwan. The Marine Corps is transforming itself from a relatively conventional land force into a missile-heavy, mobile maritime organization designed to use Pacific islands as firebases against Chinese forces.

One of the biggest challenges in deploying the ALPV is safety. Operators stationed halfway around the world must chart a course for the ship that avoids the busiest shipping lanes — and potential collisions with civilian vessels. It’s critical that the ship “not come into conflict with commerce and other things out there,” Doran said.

The semi-submersible is designed to be easy to operate. For the first tests in February, the Marines trained a cook for three weeks to operate the ship via satellite. Doran compared the ALPV’s operating system to a smartphone app.

Early experiments are encouraging, and enthusiasm is growing. “The Marines wanted it yesterday,” Doran said of the semi-submersible. And for good reason. Many of the other vessels the Marines rely on for resupply missions in the islands are unreliable — or have development problems.

The Marines fly hundreds of long-range MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors that are ideal for island resupply flights while they’re on duty, but the controversial rotorcraft were grounded for months after a deadly crash in November. It was hardly the V-22’s first safety crisis — and it likely won’t be the last.

The Marines are also working with the Navy to develop a new class of small, stealthy landing ships that, in theory, could sail between islands in the western Pacific without attracting the attention of Chinese forces because they would look like a merchant ship upon close inspection. But construction of the first of potentially dozens of ships has fallen two years behind schedule, to 2025 at the earliest, amid worrying cost increases.

The Pentagon has been tinkering around the edges of technology with a few concepts for seaplanes and floatplanes—aircraft types that the U.S. military hasn’t used in decades. But none of these initiatives has made much progress.

While the ALPV’s primary mission would be to ferry supplies to remote island outposts where the Marine Corps plans to establish missile bases as part of its new island-hopping strategy, it’s also possible to arm the low-lying vessel. USMC testers have concluded that it’s possible to equip the ALPV with a pair of 800-pound Naval Strike Missiles, which can hit ships and land targets from as far as 100 miles away.

At least one of the ALPVs will go to Okinawa, Japan – the main base of the III Marine Expeditionary Force – for further testing in increasingly realistic conditions. If all goes well, the Marines could buy the narcoboats in large numbers in the coming years.

If the Marines are smart, they will do what the cartels have done: keep the vessels as simple as possible so that they can be produced quickly, on a large scale, and at a reasonable cost. The cartels need that capability because they can count on police patrols to intercept a certain percentage of their drug-trafficking semisubmersibles. The Marines can also count on Chinese patrols to intercept some of their semisubmersibles.

Overall, the ALPV is a good idea. If executed well, it could make the Marines’ island-hopping plans for war against China much more successful.