Scientific Systems is helping ensure U.S. “military superiority” with the creation of drone boats to help target cartels, Kunal Mehra, CEO of Scientific Systems, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
Host Mike Slater laid out Operation Southern Spear, which involves a robotic fleet to target cartels which President Donald Trump has designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
The military operation and surveillance campaign involves “deploying an unprecedented mix of robotic air and sea vessels to counter Latin American drug trafficking cartels,” Slater said, speaking to Mehra, who heads one of the companies making these products.
“We are a defense tech software company based in the Boston area, and our entire focus is on ensuring U.S. military superiority through the rapid deployment of these very affordable, low cost swarming drones. And we do this in every domain, literally from the sea floor to space,” Mehra said, detailing these autonomous boats to be used against the cartels.
“So we call this capability affordable mass, and it’s powered by artificial intelligence and autonomy software,” he explained, noting that the days of matching the enemy “system to system” are done.
“You know, perfect capability to perfect capability, because it’s just become unaffordable. So once the Ukrainian military showed us, you know, better than anything is that bigger ships don’t win wars. It’s all smart, software driven systems that do,” he explained.
“So the idea is to really take high numbers of very low cost drones that you can produce and mass numbers quickly using commercial production lines, and enable those with software, with really innovative software,” he said. “So instead of trying to fight our adversaries one to one, we have 8, 10, 20 of these systems come all at once at an adversary’s warship or aircraft, and just overwhelm their defenses, you know, by coming at them from every side.”
These sea drones, or unmanned surface vessels, are essentially turned into weapon systems.
“But basically, you know, we’ve taken recreational boats, the kind of thing you might take your kids fishing on a weekend, and we’ve turned them into weapon systems,” he said.
“Basically, these are low cost commercial boats that can be produced in very high numbers, and our system is called VENOM. Our boat is, you know, quite innovative. It happens to be produced by in this kind of very rugged plastic,” he said, describing it as “tough, hard, inexpensive and something that can be produced quickly,” Mehra added.
“But what really makes VENOM unique is our artificial intelligence software that’s on the platform. And we call this whole software stack, CMA, collaborative mission autonomy. And what it does is, you know, think about kind of self-driving car technology in a Tesla. We put that on a boat, and then we take it one step further by enabling 10 of these systems to talk to each other and swarm so that they can, you know, sail into a enemy warship from multiple angles and overwhelm their defenses,” he explained.
Mehra noted that they have partner who produces the boats for them and then walked through how it would work with their technology in targeting cartels.
“They have kind of a layered set of systems, right?” he said, speaking of the Southern Sphere operation.
“You’re going to use air assets and these stationary, kind of center buoys across the Caribbean to be able to initially detect, you know, illicit boats coming into the Caribbean and into American waterways. What VENOM is is we actually call this an interceptor, because VENOM has a lot of range,” he said.
“So these systems can go up to 1,000 nautical miles in the current configuration, and they can sail it up to 35 knots at speed, which is pretty fast. So we can set these up, you know, in a very diversified way, like almost as a trip wire, where we’re just looking and surveilling the waterways for potential enemy ships coming in,” he said, explaining that their platforms will share data with each other and “triangulate on what they think are, you know, darker illicit ships coming in.”
“And then at the touch of a button, we can order one of our platforms, one of our VENOMs, to go and actually track one of these systems, right — chase them down, provide video, imagery and surveillance to the military so that they can make a judgment on what these people are actually doing,” he said. “Is this actually a commercial fishing vessel, or is this potentially a drug smuggler, and with that video, they can then make the determination on what kind of action they want to take.”
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