Saab’s Enforcer-3 is a modified CB-90 combat boat equipped with various autonomy and sensing capabilities. (Photo provided by Saab)
Updated 10/20/2022 at 10:30 am ET after Saab corrected the number of CB-90 combat boats purchased by the Swedish military.
EURONAVAL 2022 – Saab recently worked with the Swedish Navy to see if it could turn what’s normally a combat boat into an unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance asset, a company official told Breaking Defense.
The vessel, a modified CB-90, is a workhorse amphibious landing craft for the Swedish military, which recently bought 18 of the company’s next generation version, Jörgen Olsson, a Saab official overseeing the CB-90 program, told Breaking Defense in an interview today. Now, Saab wants to take its proven platform and experiment with how it could be turned into an ISR asset using autonomy.
“We equipped the boat with a sensor system for navigation, communication and maneuver to be fully unmanned,” Olsson said of last month’s experiment at Saab’s booth here at Euronaval 2022 in Paris. “We took our Enforcer-3 into the joint trials with the Swedish surface flotilla and used the Enforcer-3 unmanned as forward surveillance platform far away from the mothership.”
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Olsson said the company used the CB-90 because it’s already a proven platform, meaning engineers could focus on autonomy and sensor packages rather than worrying about the craft itself.
“We have also equipped the boat for underwater surveillance with towed array sonar and underwater vehicles where you have catch-and-release functionality that is fully autonomous,” Olsson added.
The impetus for Enforcer-3 was a European initiative in 2020 that featured a number of companies collaborating on the future of autonomous technologies, according to Olsson. Once that program concluded, Saab continued development on Enforcer due to “expected requirements” from different navies.
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“Sweden is one of them and there are other countries as well that, like the US, we know there is a huge interest in finding out the future solutions of autonomous functionality,” he said.
Indeed, rising interest in unmanned systems has spread throughout all of Europe, a phenomenon noted by French Navy chief Adm. Pierre Vandier when he visited the US in June.
“The budgets in Europe will raise and so the effort [to develop new technologies] is back in France and Europe. It was not the case in the past,” Vandier told a small group of reporters at the time.
