Ukraine’s ship-killer drone is coming to U.S. shipyards

A Ukrainian drone maker that helped push the Russian Navy out of much of the Black Sea is bringing its combat-tested kamikaze boats to American shipyards.

UFORCE, the London-registered parent of Ukraine’s MAGURA unmanned surface vessel program, signed a memorandum of understanding this week with RECONCRAFT, the Alaska-founded builder of Special Operations combatant craft, to manufacture the MAGURA family of autonomous maritime drones in the United States. The two companies announced the deal Tuesday at a ceremony hosted by the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, framing it as a template for how battlefield lessons from Ukraine can be transferred directly into American production lines.

Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate has used the low-slung, jet-propelled boat since 2022 to hunt Russian warships in the Black Sea, and by most public accounting it has been the single most effective naval weapon of the war. The V5 carries an explosive payload of up to 320 kg (705 lb), runs on a waterjet that pushes it to a top speed near 42 knots with reported bursts as high as 54 knots, and can range out to roughly 800 km (500 miles) while sitting barely 0.5 meters (1.6 feet) above the waterline, which makes it difficult for radar to pick up. Ukrainian and Western naval analysts have credited the V5 and its siblings with sinking or damaging more than a dozen Russian vessels and with helping push the Black Sea Fleet’s surviving units away from Crimea and toward more distant ports. UFORCE says its broader MAGURA lineup, which also includes the heavier-payload V7 variant capable of shooting down helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, holds the most combat-proven track record of any unmanned surface vessel family in the world, a claim no rival manufacturer currently disputes given the volume of confirmed Black Sea engagements.

UFORCE itself is a relatively young holding company, built by consolidating nine separate Ukrainian drone and autonomy developers into a single UK-registered entity so it could raise Western capital and sell into NATO markets more easily. Its American subsidiary, UFORCE USA, will lead the RECONCRAFT partnership, and the company has already entered the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance competition, one of a wave of contests the Department of War has launched to speed lower-cost autonomous systems into the fleet faster than traditional acquisition programs typically allow.

RECONCRAFT brings a different kind of credibility to the partnership: it already builds boats the U.S. military actually operates. The company, which does business as ReconCraft LLC, holds an Other Transaction Authority agreement awarded by U.S. Special Operations Command in August 2025 to develop the Combatant Craft Medium Mark 2, the intended replacement for the Mark 1 boats that have carried Naval Special Warfare operators on long-range missions since 2015. RECONCRAFT has also sold Combatant Craft Medium vessels to Norway’s special forces and has a manufacturing history stretching back more than a decade building low-observable amphibious and riverine craft for U.S. and allied units. Pairing that shipbuilding infrastructure with MAGURA’s software and hull design is meant to let the companies skip years of prototyping that a from-scratch American USV program would otherwise require.

“RECONCRAFT is building multiple combatant craft platforms trusted by U.S. and Partner Special Operations Forces in the world’s most demanding environments,” said Joe Silkowski, co-founder of RECONCRAFT.

“Partnering with UFORCE combines our manufacturing expertise and capabilities with the combat-proven autonomy of the MAGURA platform, allowing us to deliver greater capability to American warfighters faster than developing a new system from the ground up.”

Sean Plankey, CEO of UFORCE USA, will lead the initiative after spending more than a decade as a Coast Guard officer, deploying to Afghanistan with special operations units, and later holding cybersecurity posts at the Department of Energy and the National Security Council during the first Trump administration. He most recently served as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security overseeing the Coast Guard and was twice nominated by the President to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“Today’s combat environments show that autonomous warfighting capabilities are a must-have. UFORCE is exceptionally positioned to deliver capabilities already tested by some of the world’s most sophisticated militaries under the most demanding battlefield conditions,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, chief executive of UFORCE.

“Working with RECONCRAFT, we will help ensure these proven autonomous capabilities become available to the U.S. It’s exactly the kind of industrial partnership the Arsenal of Democracy is designed to enable,” said Plankey.

The MoU falls under what the companies call the Arsenal of Freedom initiative, language that echoes the Pentagon’s own attempts to rebuild American shipbuilding capacity as China’s navy grows and the Department of War pushes services toward cheaper, expendable unmanned systems instead of exquisite manned platforms. The U.S. Navy has spent years struggling to field its own attritable surface drones at scale, and the Marine Corps and Army have run parallel experiments with smaller autonomous boats, but none has matched the sheer combat volume MAGURA has racked up in the Black Sea. That track record, built under real fire rather than in a test range, is the central selling point UFORCE and RECONCRAFT are making to potential American buyers, though neither company has disclosed a contract value, unit quantity, or delivery timeline for U.S.-built MAGURA boats, and neither has said whether the Navy, Marine Corps, or Special Operations Command has committed to buying any.