The Navy is beginning development of a con-cept of operations for the persistent intelli-gence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) of wide swaths of the world's oceans by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The mission will be accomplished with new hardware. The Navy is developing high-flying UAVs that can stay aloft for many hours and perform missions such as scanning the maritime approaches to the nation's coasts and tracking all ships approaching U.S. points of entry. Specialized, long-range maritime patrol missions — for signals intelligence and antisubmarine warfare, for example — have long been performed by the service's P-3 family of surveillance aircraft.
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