Maritime Unmanned

Maritime Unmanned recounts the promising beginning, demoralizing setbacks, and ultimate success of the visionaries who championed unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) technology for the U.S. Navy.  Ernest Snowden and Robert F. Wood Jr. dive deep inside the machinations of aerospace and defense industry leadership, strategy development, and execution to describe the process by which the Air Force’s Global Hawk was adapted to become the Navy’s Triton. This was the first time in the history of naval aviation that an unmanned aerial vehicle was adopted into frontline squadron inventories to become an enabling component of the maritime patrol and reconnaissance mission, a process that took more than twenty years as industry representatives and Navy counterparts developed and socialized an unfamiliar and unconventional concept of operations and senior government acquisition officials either advocated or purposely road-blocked its advancement.

—Military Writers Society of America Award: Bronze Medal