The notion of a "crew optional" ship is a bit silly. It might have some utility for coastal defense: when it breaks down close to shore you can send a tugboat to tow it back. But I can't see how uncrewed surface vessels would be of much use to an expeditionary blue-water navy. Anything constantly exposed to salt water and vibration will break down. We're decades away from having robots that can do maintenance and repair.
Routine maintenance like cleaning, inspection, and consumables replacement is very easily automated. Breakdowns can easily be prevented with a combination of redundancy and preventative maintenance. Without a crew you can eliminate many systems that are necessary for sustaining a crew's long term presence which leaves a lot fewer failure points and a lot of room for redundant systems. With modular design you don't need an advanced robot that can fix an arbitrary problem, you just rip out whatever module contains the problem and replace it. It's unlikely on any given deployment that you'd run into a particular problem that can't be handled by an automated system and must be addressed prior to the next return to base, but if you did then telepresence robots, or a team flown over from a nearby ship in the battlegroup would likely be sufficient. If your ship is having a problem that is likely to cause the loss of the ship and a team of experts alone is not enough to fix it, do you really want to have more bodies on that ship?
People are not available though. Navies and militaries in all western nations have huge recruiting problems and that's before dropping fertility rates will shrink the entire pool of able bodied potential recruits.
"DoD IG: Army, Navy Miscounted Recruits With Low Academic Scores
The Army and Navy exceeded the legal level of recruits with the lowest acceptable Armed Forces Qualification Test scores, according to a report from the Pentagon’s Inspector General released this week.
The services, which are in the midst of reversing years of stagnant new enlistments, each created preparatory courses that would allow potential recruits with low AFQT scores to spend weeks studying under military teachers, in order to raise their scores and then move to boot camp.
While both the Army and Navy have seen success with the preparatory programs, helping the services to meet recruiting goals, following the Pentagon’s guidance on how to count these recruits may have violated federal law, the new report alleges.
Under U.S. law, a service can only have 4 percent of its recruits that score in the lowest percentiles on the AFQT, unless it gets the permission of the secretary of defense, which would bring additional Congressional oversight. As of March 31, 2025, the Navy exceeded that percentage, without permission of the secretary of defense, with 11.3 percent of recruits falling into what the military calls category IV scores, according to the Dec. 11 OIG report...."
That's a common misconception. The days of taking anyone who walked into the recruiting office are long over. US Navy recruits are, on average, regular middle class youths with a high school diploma or some college. Most of them could do fine in the civilian labor market if they wanted to.
The truly desperate people don't even meet recruiting standards due to criminal records, health conditions, drug use, low fitness, bad test scores, lack of a high school diploma, etc.
