Taiwan's coast guard signs deal for US-designed Devil Ray T24 drone boats

Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration has agreed to buy an undisclosed number of Devil Ray T24 autonomous surface vessels from US company Maritime Tactical Systems (MARTAC), the first dedicated drone-boat programme for the service. The Florida firm announced the agreement on 13 October 2026 and described it as one of the most significant international purchases of US-made uncrewed surface vessels to date.

The boats will be co-produced. MARTAC said some will be built at a strategic partner's facility in Edgewater, Florida, and the rest by its Taiwanese partner Confucian in Taiwan. Neither the contract value, the delivery schedule nor the split between the two production lines has been disclosed, Baird Maritime reported.

The sale grew out of a three-way memorandum of understanding that MARTAC, Confucian and the state-owned National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) signed at the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition in September 2025. MARTAC said the two Taiwanese partners had moved the project from a framework agreement to a procurement.

Confucian chief executive James Lee said one of the main reasons the government chose MARTAC was that the company had been willing from the start to set up production in Taiwan. He called it a project of national importance that had drawn close attention from senior government leaders.

The South China Morning Post said the deal comes as sightings of Chinese coast guard, research and other government ships around Taiwan reached record levels in June, July and August, according to defence ministry figures it analysed. Beijing has also kept up regular coast guard patrols east of Taiwan since June, which it calls routine law enforcement, and Taiwanese media have named NCSIST as the main contractor for a wider coast guard plan to acquire 25 uncrewed vessels.

According to MARTAC's specifications, the T24 is 8.4 metres long with a 3-metre beam, carries up to 816 kilograms and can sprint at more than 50 knots, with a range of up to 600 nautical miles. Its modular design can take payloads for surveillance, electronic warfare, mine countermeasures and anti-submarine reconnaissance, and it can launch smaller drone boats. One of the vessels ran sea trials at Taipei Port on 7 October, Baird Maritime said, citing the Liberty Times.

Coast Guard Director-General Chang Chung-lung said the boats and aerial drones would mainly be used for long-range search and reconnaissance, investigation and remote rescue. The agency said they would eventually work with its cutters as one network for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

That network matters beyond peacetime policing. Taiwan's National Defense Act allows the coast guard to be folded into the armed forces in a conflict, and its Anping-class cutters are built to carry Hsiung Feng II and III anti-ship missiles; the cutter Qijin fired a Hsiung Feng III in September. A T24 also launched an exercise torpedo during US Navy-backed trials in Sweden in December 2024, but Taipei has not said whether its boats will be armed.

For now the buy is about watching, not fighting: more hulls at sea for longer, without putting crews in the way of China's coast guard and maritime militia. How much it adds will depend on whether the boats are tied into the coast guard's existing command network, a condition Taiwanese analysts have flagged, and on how quickly Confucian can build its share at home.