Nearly a century ago on this South Baltimore waterfront, an army of workers mass-produced hundreds of supply boats that were crucial to America’s victory in World War II.

Today, at the same waterfront, BlackSea Technologies is launching boats that could win the wars of tomorrow.

Goodbye, Liberty ships. Hello, drone boats.

In past decades, militaries focused on aerial technology, using drones to surveil enemies, strike strategic locations and kill people from the sky. But recently, Ukraine’s use of naval drones to stymie the Russian Navy in the Black Sea caught the world off guard and is sparking a new technological race.

The U.S. government wants to spend billions of dollars into building naval drones, and one of the early winners appears to be BlackSea Technologies — and Baltimore. The company said this summer that its drone boats were active in a U.S. counternarcotics mission in the Caribbean, Central America and South America.

BlackSea’s facilities in South Baltimore are buzzing with activity as welders, buffers and other workers churn out 32 drone boats a month, according to company executives.

BlackSea is a new name, but the company has deep roots in Baltimore as Maritime Applied Physics Corporation, or MAPC, a longtime naval engineering business that built the Inner Harbor water taxis. In June 2022, Virginia-based private equity firm Razor’s Edge bought MAPC for an undisclosed price.

Then Razor’s Edge combined MAPC with two related businesses, rebranded as BlackSea and created a new logo featuring the octopus-like deity Cthulhu.

“The private equity firms saw this coming,” said Jason Lamb, BlackSea’s chief strategy officer. “They saw the need.”

The combined company not only builds drone boats, but also develops the technology that pilots them and offers training and operational support to customers.

Since MAPC was acquired by Razor’s Edge and rebranded as BlackSea, the company has gone from about 57 employees in Baltimore to about 235, according to executives. BlackSea also has employees based in Florida, North Carolina and California.

Officially, the drone boats made by BlackSea are called global autonomous reconnaissance crafts, or GARCs (pronounced “Gark”).

In 2022, MAPC had a $2 million contract with the U.S. Navy starting to build five GARCs. That year, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and experts generally expected the Russian Navy to dominate the Black Sea.

Ukraine used a fleet of unmanned naval drones to level the battlefield — and even go on the offensive. In 2023, Ukrainian naval drones loaded with explosives traveled hundreds of miles to a Russian port and rammed into a warship.

As Ukraine proved that these relatively cheap and quickly built drones could immobilize a superior navy, the U.S. Navy’s contract with MAPC, then owned by BlackSea, dramatically changed in scale.

That contract is now worth up to $213 million to churn out GARCs, according to a government database.

A spokesman for BlackSea said the company does not comment on how or where the U.S. Navy uses its GARCs.

However, BlackSea said in June that it was contributing two GARCs and a larger supply boat to the U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command’s Southern Spear mission. In September, President Donald Trump ordered the military to attack boats of suspected drug traffickers in international waters. Since then, at least 37 people have been killed in nine fatal strikes, mostly off the coast of Venezuela, according to the Associated Press.

This summer, Congress passed a budget bill that pumps billions of dollars into shipbuilding and related industries, including more than $4 billion for unmanned vessels.

Already, dozens of GARCs are parked in and around BlackSea’s Wagners Point facility, where you can watch unmanned boats zip around the harbor on test runs.

From a distance, the 16-foot drones look like fishing boats. But these aluminum GARCs can travel about 1,000 miles on a tank full of diesel gas and reach speeds of about 45 mph, according to Timothy O’Connor, BlackSea’s director of advanced technologies.

Each GARC can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds, O’Connor said, in addition to heavy-duty computers and a variety of sensors. Humans can control the GARCs using an Xbox-like controller, but the boats can also run autonomously.

Last month, one of BlackSea’s “mother ships” — a transport ship carrying eight GARCs — docked in the Inner Harbor after taking part in a demonstration off the East Coast.

Military contracting can be a tough business, with alternating cycles of boom and bust as companies spend years vying for lucrative government contracts, according to BlackSea’s executives.

But the money from private equity allowed the company to move much more rapidly than a traditional government contractor, O’Connor said.

The company is planning to build new classes of vessels in Baltimore, he said, including 66-foot autonomous ships as well as underwater drones.

“You’ve got an emerging defense industry here in Baltimore, and it’s something we’re all very passionate about,” O’Connor said. “We want to grow here.”

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Timothy O'Connor's name.