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Using Drones For A SINKEX
June 26, 2026: Last year, the American Navy used four aerial drones and a single naval drone in a SINKEX\Sinking Exercise. The target was a retired frigate. The drones attacked the frigate several times before the ship went down. The methods used to carry out a SINKEX have been around for half a century and have been largely unchanged. Two years ago, the American Navy disposed of two retired amphibious ships by having ships and warplanes fire on them. The two ships were equipped with electronic sensors to record the extent of the damage and transmit the data to nearby technicians.
The Navy does not conduct SINKEX exercises every year. For example, from 2015 to 2024, no SINKEX were carried out in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023. During the six years when there were SINKEX events, a total of eight ships were sunk.
The American Navy uses SINKEX exercises to gather information needed to improve techniques for handling ships damaged in future combat. Some exercises are conducted while towing a 40,000-ton burned-out ship to the scrap yard. A battle damage assessment team was put aboard the ship to record damage as they would in wartime. The assessors had never been on the ship before and were able to perform a realistic assessment. The ship in question was wrecked by a shipyard fire in July 2020 and decommissioned in April 2021.
For half a century, the Navy has conducted SINKEX training. In the last two decades, one or two ships a year were sunk, most off the coast of California or Hawaii. SINKEX enables the Navy to test new theories on how vulnerable or invulnerable modern warships are and how effective new or current weapons are. With the advent of smaller, cheaper, and more reliable sensors and broadcasting gear, it's possible to get a lot more data out of a SINKEX target and monitor the damaged ship as it is hit until it goes under. This leads to changes in ship design and damage control techniques. From now on, the ship to be sunk will first be damaged by a smaller explosion, and a damage assessment team will be put about to assess the damage. After that, the SINKEX will be completed using ship or aircraft weapons.
Increasingly, the navy is equipping the SINKEX ships with sensors that transmit back to the SINKEX control staff what happened and when. This information is used to modify existing ships, tactics, onboard techniques, and the design of future warships. This makes SINKEX more productive for the Navy and encourages staging more SINKEX exercises, perhaps using foreign ships scheduled for disposal.