For now, robots controlling and informing other robots about what's happening doesn't necessarily lead to action, but in the future it won't be hard to imagine an entirely unmanned vanguard scouting for a fleet or patrolling a slice of ocean and reporting back only the most relevant information to the humans in charge. None of the robots in this exercise were armed, their payloads instead contained sensors and cameras. And for the most part, we can expect unmanned vehicles at sea to primarily be scouts, much like how the vast majority of military drones flown over land are unarmed. Even ACTUV, the Navy's large experimental submarine hunting autonomous ship, is designed to find enemies, not destroy them. A team of smaller robots, operating on the edge of a fleet, could find foes while the armed and human-carrying vehicles are further out of range, almost forming a robotic vanguard between danger and people.