Barefoot surfing genius George Greenough’s “drone of death!”

"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.

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.