The Navy has hired Gecko Robotics to send autonomous, hull-climbing machines aboard Pacific Fleet ships to cut repair times and raise fleet availability as competition with China heats up. This five-year effort deploys AI-powered inspection tools on key surface combatants to spot corrosion, weld defects and fatigue faster than human inspection alone.
The contract is billed as a roughly $71 million program with an initial task order worth up to $54 million and work slated on 18 ships in the Pacific Fleet. The purchasing structure lets other services tap the same capability if they choose, making it a broader readiness play. Republican leaders will point to this as practical, no-nonsense modernization that focuses on outcomes, not buzzwords.
This comes at a critical time for readiness: only about 60 percent of Navy hulls are routinely available because maintenance backlogs keep vessels tied up. That gap matters when an adversary is racing to expand its footprint and capacity. Fixing how we maintain ships is as strategic as building new ones.
China now fields roughly 370 to 390 warships and submarines compared with about 300 in the U.S. Navy, and Beijing’s state-backed yards churn out hulls at a startling clip. Some independent analyses estimate China’s shipbuilding capacity exceeds America’s by more than 200 times when measured by tonnage output. That raw industrial muscle forces the U.S. to get smarter about keeping its existing fleet ready to sail.
These robots are not weapons. They are inspectors, designed to climb steel, scan tight corners and log defects so shipyards and fleet commanders can act before small problems balloon into months-long drydock jobs. Using machines for repetitive, dangerous inspection work is a simple efficiency play with a direct readiness payoff. Conservatives will like that it stretches limited manpower while cutting risk to sailors and workers.
Gecko’s systems crawl hulls, flight decks and other hard-to-reach steel surfaces, scanning for corrosion, metal fatigue and weld defects. Instead of point-by-point checks done by sailors on ropes or scaffold, the machines gather millions of data points and feed a digital platform that flags structural trouble early. That data-first approach is what the Navy needs to shorten repair timelines and avoid surprises.
“Where value hasn’t improved, that’s where opportunity lives. Cracking the cost equation is just as important as cracking the physics equation,” said Justin Fanelli, Chief Technology Officer for the Department of the Navy said in a statement on the new deal. “We’re now seeing solutions that make innovation adoption easier and in doing so save time, money and risk.”
“It’s no good having 300 vessels if 40% of them are in a dry dock somewhere,” Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian said, cutting to the heart of the readiness problem. The inspections will concentrate on destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships, the vessels that matter most in the Indo-Pacific contest. Getting those hulls back to sea faster is a straightforward national security priority.
The chief of naval operations has set a goal of 80 percent fleet readiness by 2027, a step change from today’s status. Gecko says its robots can detect structural issues far faster than traditional manual inspections, which should shrink maintenance timelines and let commanders plan with confidence. Faster problem detection also helps keep deployments on schedule.
Longstanding maintenance delays have sidelined ships for months when hidden defects surface after work has already started, creating expensive schedule slips. Shipyards also face a chronic shortage of skilled welders, electricians and technicians, and high early turnover among new hires makes workforce growth slow and fragile. Those bottlenecks mean smarter tools are not optional; they are a force multiplier.
Automation and AI reduce the dangerous, labor-intensive inspection tasks that sap shipyard capacity and threaten workers. “First destroyers we were on, we saved about three months worth of time to create a plan of action and execute on it,” Jake Loosararian said, arguing the tech accelerates planning and execution. “It reduces the amounts of dangerous and hazardous work hours that humans have to have, it also increases speed.”
Deploying these systems during both maintenance and construction, where welds and structure can be verified early, keeps rework from piling up later. The United States may not match China hull-for-hull in output, but a fleet that is available and well-maintained is a fleet that can deter and defend. That practical, results-focused approach should guide policy and budget choices going forward.
