“The US military had turned our maritime equivalent
of the Willy’s Jeep into a Cadillac Escalade with spinner wheels
and TV screens in the headrests.”
With no
full-time employees or outside investors, George Greenough and my unlikely team
took his greatest invention, the GARC (Greenough Advanced Rescue
Craft), from a crude sketch in 2005 to U.S. military
production in 2010.
Splichal
By 2013, our company, Rapid Response
Technology (RRT), had won three sole source U.S. government
contracts, built and delivered almost 30 GARCs to Air Force
Pararescuemen (and others), and submitted plans to Special
Operations Command (SOCOM) for a larger variant and to the Army’s
Combat Capabilities Command (DEVCOM) for the GARC X MAX Unmanned
Surface Vessel (USV).
Despite these accomplishments, like most
inventor-owned companies that dare venture up the swampy river of
corruption and cronyism that is the military industrial complex,
RRT had reached terminal financial velocity.
Even worse, the U.S. military had turned
our maritime equivalent of the Willy’s Jeep into a Cadillac
Escalade with spinner wheels and TV screens in the headrests.
With millions of dollars of Defense
Department contracts in hand, no bank would loan RRT money. Instead
of making a Faustian financial bargain with the predatory business
jackals who had been stalking me since the first GARC arrived in
the U.S., I took out a home equity loan to fund our military
production.
By 2012, I was all in and there was no
margin for error.
In 2013, some of the GARCs we delivered
to the Air Force began to blow shaft seals for reasons RRT could
not diagnose. I had no choice but to sell the boat and our
contracts to MAPC. Had I not made this painful, but necessary
decision, RRT would have gone bankrupt, and I would have lost my
house.
“This startup was beset with challenges
worthy of a Herman Melville novel,” I said in a 2013 MAPC press
release. “Our success was the result of an incredible, multi-year
effort by an unlikely team united by their belief in our innovative
product and in one another. George Greenough deserves enormous
credit for bringing this idea to life in such a short amount of
time.”
During the decade that Greenough and I
were barred from the military market due to a non-compete clause in
MAPC’s purchase agreement, I went back to teaching and writing.
Three books and a New York Times bestseller later, I
began to write The Voyage of the GARC: One Taxpayer’s
Journey Into the Heart of Military Industrial Complex
Darkness. You will be able to read an excerpt in The
Surfer’s Journal soon.
In 2024, after a decade of R&D and
lobbying, MAPC received a 160 million-dollar contract for
their autonomous version of George Greenough’s GARC.
Although they have renamed the boat the
“Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft,” this semantic shift can’t
disguise the distinctive lines of Greenough’s modified cathedral
hull.
George and I will not see a penny from
this massive contract, but my hat is off to MAPC for their
successful navigation of the military industrial complex—game
recognizes game.
The GARC is now part of the “Hell Hounds”
unit of the Navy’s newly formed Unmanned Surface Vessel Squadron 3
(USVRON 3). “The Navy is aiming to boost production of Global
Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft to a rate of 32 systems per month
amid a broader push by the sea service to field more robotic
platforms to counter China in the Pacific,” wrote Defense
Scoop earlier this year. “The Defense Department has already
obligated more than $160 million for the system, according to
government contracting data.”
Although MAPC has shared no information
about their GARC program with Greenough or me, it is difficult to
believe that a diesel powered, aluminum vessel with a civilian halo
radar dome can successfully conduct reconnaissance, much less
survive the first hour of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
When news of MAPC’s Navy contract broke,
I was contacted and congratulated by many old associates from my
days as a military contractor. Some were now in the front lines of
the war in Ukraine and shared their intimate knowledge of the USVs
that were being used against Russian ships. The Russians have also
been successful in adopting defensive counter measures. Due to
strategic and military necessity, the design parameters for USVs in
Ukraine are constantly being redefined.
In early 2023, I received a request to
design a family of manned and unmanned vessels. George and I talked
about it at length. For both of us, the GARC was unfinished
business. RRT had delivered the world’s best small rescue boat, and
now it was a drone of death.
George and I agreed to design the new
boats on two conditions: we would never again allow ourselves to be
rushed or depart from our original designs. When the prospective
investor asked for a business plan, prices, and a timeline, rather
than making promises that we could not keep, I sent a 2011 business
plan and a two-word response: “Cost plus.”
Instead of rushing to market like we did
with the GARC, George and I formed Greenough Technology (GT) in
2024. CEO Emeritus George Greenough and I (CEO) assembled some of
the world’s subject matter experts and have spent the last two
years studying new developments in rescue boats (manned and
autonomous), engines, and propulsion systems, USVs and the counter
measures that have been used successfully against them.
Once again, we saw the same blind faith
in overcomplicated technology that Ivan Trent and I outlined in our
2011 paper, “False Paradigms in Maritime Security: Unmanned Surface
Vessels.”
While many defense contractors are
rushing into the multi-billion-dollar USV market, most of their
vessels will be outdated by the time they are delivered and will
suffer the same ignominious fate as the Navy’s Zumwalt Destroyer.
As important as recognizing and utilizing new technology is
recognizing the limits of the possible.
Greenough Technology is presently putting
the finishing touches on the GAC, a waterjet-powered vessel for the
littoral zone, the GAM, a manned and unmanned rescue boat, and the
GAS, a USV.
We will conduct our first sea trials this
summer.
