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.