HSV-2 Swift stands for “High Speed Vesse” is a catamaran leased by the United States Navy as a mine countermeasures and sea basing test platform, homeported at Naval Station Ingleside, Texas. It is the second catamaran the Navy has leased to test new technologies and concepts associated with the Chief of Naval Operations’s “Seapower 21″ plan.
It is a wave-piercing, aluminum-hulled, commercial catamaran with military enhancements, such as a helicopter flight deck, strengthened vehicle deck, small boat and unmanned vehicle launch and recovery capability, and an enhanced communications suite. It features a new, modular design, which will allow the ship to be refitted to support any mission without requiring long shipyard periods. Its control system, “Combatss”, was first used aboard the Sea Shadow experimental ship, and allowed the Navy to remotely control a ship more than 3,000 miles (5,600 km) from shore. Users interface with Combatss using a Mozilla browser.