alt Hacker News> This will not primarily be for rescue ops
It seems like combat SAR in the maritime environment is what these are best at.
> The "Viceroy" craft that Regent has mocked up on their website claims 180 mile range, 3500lb of cargo / 2 crew + 12 passengers.
This is like 1/4th the size needed for minimum scale sustainment and support. Not to say that it won't be used for that in a pinch or for special operations, but it's pretty limited. Of course, there's been talk about building huge ones.
The company press release states "The second phase of work will examine seaglider capabilities across missions including contested logistics and medevac/casevac".
I agree that this would be useful for medevac/casevac, but I'm less sure about the search part of SAR. 180 miles is not a lot of range for searching.
I still believe this is primarily about contested logistics, because the USMC still hasn't solved that issue. One of the stand in force concept's biggest weakness right now is how will the marines go about sustaining the force. There's a lot of good ideas written down, but concretely they still don't have good solutions.
I think it's fairly clear that the Marines will look to unnamed undersea vehicles as one vector, but I think they're looking for flexibility and redundancy (and certainly the speed that these guys offer would be interesting).
What's written about SIFs is that the Marines anticipate the majority of SIFs to be deployed in the crisis building phase. They do not envision on day one of a shooting war, somehow dispersing all of their forces across the first island chain - they take for granted that they will somehow do that in the build up. After that, then ya, maybe just med/casevac and resupply is what they're after.
I have a hard time finding concrete examples, but I always envisioned an example detachment being roughly platoon sized. Basically, imagine being able to man a NMESIS launcher or two, ISR, and a squad or two of infantry for security. I think at that point, these vehicles become more viable for certain types of sustainment. You could for example priority rush more NSMs to a detachment.