Navy Spends $3 Million to Erase Line Between Watching and Killing

By Miriam Adler · August 10, 2026

Populations in littoral operations risk being tracked and eliminated by machines as the Navy removes human pilots to avoid the political crisis of a shot-down crew.

The Navy wanted a machine that could do everything: surveillance, reconnaissance, relay, targeting, and, when the mood shifted, attack. According to a program description mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, the Multi Role Endurance (MRE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was designed to operate across the "spectrum of conflict," targeting both land and sea-based objectives.

In the sterile language of the program, the MRE is distinguished from a UCAV—an Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle—because the latter "emphasizes lethality." The MRE, by contrast, is presented as a flexible asset. But flexibility, in this context, includes the ability to employ both "lethal and non-lethal ordnance." When a military document lists lethality as a secondary or "potential" feature of a surveillance tool, it is describing the erasure of the line between watching and killing.

"Lethal and Non-Lethal"

The MRE UAV was envisioned to provide a suite of capabilities known as RSTA—reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting, and attack. For the naval forces planning for the 2010 to 2015 timeframe, this wasn't just about efficiency; it was about survival. The program description notes that the drone should be capable of active and passive electronic warfare (EW) and providing targeting data, essentially acting as the eyes and the trigger for a wider network of violence.

The public record of military abbreviations defines the shorthand used here: ISR for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; C4I for command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence; and SEAD for the suppression of enemy air defenses. To the engineers and the officers, these are categories of functionality. To the people on the ground in the littoral operations mentioned in the text, these acronyms represent the different ways a machine can find them, track them, and eventually eliminate them.

The Marinization of the Predator

The Navy didn't start from zero. The FAS mirror notes that the Predator UAV system already possessed the range and endurance required to meet some of the MRE's needs. However, the Predator was not "organic" to naval forces. To make it work on a ship, the document states the system would require extensive "marinization" to become shipboard compatible.

This technical hurdle—making a land-based drone survive the salt spray and the violent deck cycles of a carrier (CV), an amphibious assault ship (LHA), or a guided-missile destroyer (CG/DDG/FFG)—was the primary engineering challenge. But the broader transition was one of labor and risk. The MRE was intended to replace a fleet of manned aircraft that were reaching the end of their service lives: the P-3, EP-3, S-3, E-2, EA-6B, and the F-14. Only the F/A-18 was expected to survive the transition past 2015.

By moving these roles to a UAV, the Navy solved the problem of "survivability." In military procurement, "survivability" almost always refers to the asset, not the human. A drone that is shot down is a loss of capital; a pilot who is shot down is a political and humanitarian crisis. The shift to the MRE was a move to maintain a constant, "around the clock" presence over a target without the inconvenient requirement of keeping a human being in the cockpit.

Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop

In April 2000, the Program Executive Office (Cruise Missiles and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) put the design of this future into the hands of the private sector. Four companies were selected for contract awards: The Boeing Company, General Dynamics Information Systems, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, and Northrop Grumman Corporation.

Collectively, these contracts were valued at $3 million. These were "Section 845 contracts," a specific mechanism for the study and design of multiple areas. The goal was a "risk assessment" to ensure the systems met the draft Mission Needs Statement (MNS), which was a compilation of over 20 validated requirements.

It is telling that the document frames the goal as finding "cost-effective naval solutions." The human cost is never mentioned. The "risk" being assessed is technical and financial—whether the drone can be launched from a deck or if the payload capacity is sufficient. There is no risk assessment for the populations that would be subjected to "non-lethal" ordnance or the psychological impact of permanent, organic surveillance.

A 2002 Deadline

While other archives, such as the NSArchive at GWU, hold later records regarding the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and annual threat assessments, this specific program description captures a moment of transition. It describes a world where space-based systems were already "heavily tasked" and not responsive enough to meet RSTA requirements, creating a vacuum that only a persistent, armed drone could fill.

The analysis produced by Boeing and Lockheed was intended to lead to documentation for approval by the Naval UAV Executive Steering Group in early FY02. The record stops there, leaving the eventual fate of the MRE's specific design iterations a matter for other files. It leaves us only with the image of a military planning for a decade of war where the distance between the observer and the target is bridged by a $3 million study and a mandate for flexibility.