Taiwan's first patrol drone boats run on US autonomy while the homegrown Endeavour Manta waits

When Taiwan's coast guard showed off its newest uncrewed boat in early October 2026, the craft on display was not the one many Taiwanese expected. It was a T-24 from the US company MARTAC, not the Endeavour Manta that Taiwan's state-linked shipbuilder CSBC unveiled with some fanfare in March 2025. On 10 October the Liberty Times put the obvious question to a defence analyst: why buy American when the island has its own attack drone boat?

The answer he gave, and the details of the coast guard programme itself, point to a gap that matters well beyond one purchase. Taiwan can build the boats. What it cannot yet build on its own is the proven autonomy and system integration that turns a fast hull into a useful weapon or patrol asset.

What the coast guard actually bought

According to Storm Media, the Coast Guard Administration is buying 25 uncrewed boats from a US firm through the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), using the special budget for economic, social and national-security resilience. NCSIST acts as prime contractor, sets the coast guard's mission needs and integrates them with MARTAC. The first T-24 test took place at Taipei Port on 7 October, with a coast guard special-operations K92 assault boat standing by as escort, and series production is due to follow if the trials go well.

The local share is real but narrow. Storm reported that the T-24 hull is built entirely in Taiwan, while the software is MARTAC's existing system, adapted by NCSIST to coast guard requirements. NCSIST had signed a cooperation memorandum with MARTAC at the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition in September 2025, covering AI target recognition and tracking, autonomous interception, multi-boat coordination and obstacle avoidance.

Ocean Affairs Council minister Kuan Bi-ling, National Security Council secretary-general Joseph Wu and coast guard chief Chang Chung-lung inspected the T-24 and Shield AI's V-BAT drone at the Taipei Port base on 7 October. The coast guard said uncrewed craft like these will be used routinely in the waters around Taiwan, working alongside its cutters on surveillance and law-enforcement patrols.

Why the Endeavour Manta was passed over

CSBC's Endeavour Manta, developed by its subsidiary CSBC Power, is a trimaran built to operate in rough seas up to sea state 7 and can carry a light torpedo or high explosives. Newtalk reported it is about 3.7 metres wide, can exceed 35 knots and carries more than a tonne of payload, and that it received approval in principle from the American Bureau of Shipping in September 2025. It has become a familiar sight escorting the Hai Kun submarine in and out of Kaohsiung harbour.

Chi Tung-yun, who heads the Taiwan Security Development Association, told the Liberty Times the boat is still a prototype. He said it can currently be driven only by remote control or by a crew on board and lacks AI-based autonomous navigation, which would take a long time to develop from scratch. A mature US product, in his view, lets the coast guard field a capability faster.

CSBC is buying autonomy too

CSBC appears to have reached the same conclusion. On 10 September 2026 it announced a partnership with the US autonomy company Havoc to pursue licensed co-production of autonomous surface vessels, with CSBC building and maintaining the boats in Taiwan and Havoc supplying its collaborative autonomy software. Havoc chief executive Paul Lwin linked the deal to Section 1266 of the US FY2026 defence authorization act, which calls for US-Taiwan co-production of uncrewed systems.

Newtalk noted that neither company has announced a boat type, quantity, schedule or contract value, so the deal remains a framework rather than an order. The Commercial Times described the pair as the first US-Taiwan team to surface in the race for work under Taiwan's new NT$240 billion uncrewed vehicle procurement act, which lists three types of small suicide drone boats among the defence ministry's needs.

What to watch

The pattern is consistent across both programmes: Taiwanese yards supply hulls and maintenance, and American firms supply the software brain. That is a reasonable shortcut for a military in a hurry, but it means Taiwan's drone-boat fleet will depend on foreign autonomy code for its most important function unless NCSIST and CSBC absorb that know-how through these partnerships.

The tests that matter next are concrete. One is whether the T-24 trials lead to the planned 25-boat production run on schedule. Another is whether the Havoc deal produces a named contract under the uncrewed vehicle act, and whether an autonomous Endeavour Manta variant is ever offered. Until then, the boat that escorts Taiwan's submarine is a showpiece, and the boats that will patrol its coast are American by design.