Why the coast guard drone boats promised on 10 November 2026 will be a trial for Taiwan, not yet a fleet

The timeline

In an interview published by the Italian defence magazine FW Mag on 10 November 2026, MARTAC chief growth officer Seamus Flatley said the first two of 17 Devil Ray T24 boats ordered by Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration would be delivered within the next couple of weeks, with further deliveries running into the first half of 2027. The Taiwanese outlet SHOTNEWS relayed his remarks on 15 November and described the order as the coast guard's first programme for unmanned surface vessels.

MARTAC announced the deal on 13 October without giving a number or a value. Some boats are to be built at a partner facility in Edgewater, Florida, and the rest by the Taipei contractor Confucian, under an arrangement that grew out of a memorandum signed with the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology at the 2025 Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition. Flatley told FW Mag that production in Taiwan is due to start in the first half of 2027.

That order of events matters more than the headline. The first boats will arrive before the Taiwanese production line exists, so the early fleet will be built in the United States, and the promise of co-production is a 2027 milestone rather than something the coast guard can count on today.

How many boats?

Public reporting has not settled the size of the buy. In October, Flatley told Taiwan News that the coast guard had purchased 25 T24s, to be delivered in batches with the first two shipped before the end of the year. The figure he gave FW Mag in November was 17, and SHOTNEWS repeated that number.

Neither outlet explains the gap, and none of the reports reviewed carries a Coast Guard Administration statement with a final number. A first contract inside a larger plan is one possible reading, but that is an inference, not a reported fact. Until the agency publishes a figure, the programme is best treated as somewhere between 17 and 25 boats. For planning purposes, a gap of eight hulls is not a rounding error.

What the boats are for

The T24 is an 8.4-metre craft with a burst speed above 50 knots and a range of up to 600 nautical miles, according to Taiwan News, which reported that Director-General Chang Chung-lung said the boats and drones would help expand operations, including long-range search and rescue, and support patrol ships within the agency's surveillance network. MARTAC brought a T24 to Taiwan for a live demonstration on 2 November, the day before the MATURE Taiwan expo opened in Tainan, Naval News reported.

The need is visible in the coast guard's own records. On 12 November the cutter Hualien detected China Coast Guard ship 2503 about 40 nautical miles south-east of Orchid Island, 14 nautical miles outside Taiwan's restricted waters, and the Chinese crew claimed by radio to be conducting a law-enforcement patrol, the agency said in a statement reported by TaiSounds. The Taiwanese cutter rejected the claim, and by the morning of 14 November the Chinese ship had moved to about 67 nautical miles south-east of Hualien port, still under watch.

Episodes like that are the work drone boats are meant to take on: long hours of shadowing far from port that tie up crewed cutters. Two boats cannot cover Taiwan's east coast, and even 25 would add to the crewed fleet rather than replace any part of it. The near-term value is learning how to hand a contact from a cutter to an unmanned hull and back. That makes the first months less about deterrence than about procedure: who watches the feed, how far out the boats can stay, and how quickly a cutter can take over when a Chinese ship turns towards Taiwanese waters.

What to watch

The coast guard order is one strand of a wider push into uncrewed systems. FW Mag noted that the Taiwanese firm Thunder Tiger signed a memorandum with AeroVironment in October to study fitting Switchblade loitering munitions to its unmanned boats and ground vehicles, while Naval News reported that shipbuilder CSBC showed its Endeavor Manta drone boat, designed for the navy, at MATURE Taiwan.

Three markers will show whether the T24 becomes a working capability: confirmation that the first two boats have been delivered and accepted, an official figure for the total order, and the start of production in Taiwan in 2027. Until those arrive, the programme is best judged as a trial run for a coast guard learning to operate unmanned hulls alongside its cutters, with most of any grey-zone payoff a question for 2027.