Coast Guard Deploys Maritime Surveillance Drones to Great Lakes

Posted on June 18, 2026

As reported in The Guardian, the US Coast Guard will deploy at least six “sailing drones” sometime in the next few months. The stated reason for the new autonomous surveillance craft is to “track illicit activity”, despite an acknowledgment that the public safety profile of these waterways remains unchanged.

With the Great Lakes bordering Canada, and allowing transit to international waters via the St. Lawrence Seaway, the US Coast Guard maintains jurisdiction of the US’s side of the waterways. The Coast Guard announced that it will soon deploy Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) to the region for the purposes of, among others, narcotics and human trafficking detection. A spokesperson for the Coast Guard stated that it has not assessed the safety profile of the Great Lakes to have degraded, but maintained that the deployment was intended to anticipate threats. Furthermore, as the article points out, the Coast Guard would not share data on illicit substance interception on the Great Lakes.

The “Voyager” model drones are provided by Saildrone, a US-based military hardware manufacturer, and are designed to be fully autonomous, mobile maritime monitoring platforms. They can operate continuously for 100 days before requiring maintenance or refueling. For surveillance, the craft are equipped radar arrays, cameras, and microphones for underwater acoustic data collection. Sensor data is then fed into Saildrone’s proprietary “vessel detection” AI.

Of concern is the high degree of control over the USVs retained by Saildrone, a feature that is commonplace today among commercial military hardware vendors. Saildrone maintains the command center that directly operates the crafts’ navigation. What’s more, Saildrone describes its offerings as a “service” more so than a product. As outlined on Saildrone’s website, “Saildrone USVs operate on a mission-as-a-service (MAAS) model, which means the vehicles themselves are not for sale. Instead, Saildrone provides fully managed data services to its users, similar to a satellite network”. And because Saildrone owns and operates the drones, they also own the data collected by them—they merely allow the government to browse the data through a web portal, so long as the contract is in force. This has become a favored tactic for government spying programs, as private sector data tenancy insulates agencies from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on the grounds of protecting trade secrets.

Fielding the Saildrone USVs was years in the making, and ties into a larger surveillance strategy by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to which the Coast Guard is subordinate. The Coast Guard awarded their first contract to Saildrone in 2020 for a trial evaluation.

By 2024, the Coast Guard Office of Shore Forces authored a slide deck called “Maritime Sensing and Data Sharing Across DHS”, illustrating that interest in building out DHS’s surveillance capacity attracted the interest of both Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, the document focuses on the Coast Guard’s supporting role in the department’s maritime spying operations, as it mentions “DHS” far more than “USCG” (United States Coast Guard), and notes supplemental support from Customs and Border Protection and ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). A focal diagram depicts a network connecting human-piloted ships, buoys, planes, aerial drones, and an icon resembling the craft pictured in The Guardian’s piece. In an accompanying caption, AI not dissimilar in description from that of Saildrone’s is cited as a key component of the dragnet. Together, these nodes and their capabilities form what the presentation dubs “Persistent Wide-Area Maritime Surveillance (PWAMS)”.The document goes on to list a stunning array of additional surveillance hardware from blimp-like “untethered high-altitude aerostats” to “NOAA Earthview Maritime Optical Surveillance”.

The initial drone presence, in itself, will fall far short of the surveillance and military capabilities of the most cutting-edge maritime drones. Indeed, the Coast Guard has not announced any plans to use armed Saildrone models, which the company can develop thanks to its partnership with Lockheed Martin.

Nor do the number and specifications of the Voyager models licensed by the Coast Guard pose the most serious surveillance threat to Americans, even from DHS alone. The surface area of the Great Lakes is too vast for six craft, or even 60, to cover, and the Voyager model does not have the hardware to conduct radio signal monitoring or electronic warfare of the type that could identify or snoop on cellular devices. Just last summer, CBP admitted that it flew a Predator drone over anti-ICE protests in LA.

The true danger of these drones is its desensitization of Americans to being watched by their government at all times and places, in the absence of any suspicion of wrongdoing, by peering into previously unmolested corners of daily life. Once the drones hit the water, the hundreds of thousands of boaters transiting the Great Lakes recreationally will be subject to a system intended for border enforcement.

While commercial vessels must enable an AIS transponder, recreational ones below a certain size are exempt from this requirement. Now, just as sprawling camera networks (Chicago’s being a crowning example) can track movement by correlating a face with a timestamp as it passes from camera to camera, maritime drones would technically have the power to track boaters who would otherwise remain anonymous. As DHS’s PWAMS initiative matures, anonymity and privacy on the Great Lakes could become a thing of the past.

Timely reporting exposing programs like PWAMS in their infancy are vital to curtailing surveillance programs before they become entrenched. With such a meager fleet of drones bound for America’s most treasured waterways, it is not too late to impose limits before serious damage is done.

You can read the full piece from The Guardian here.