Self-made millionaire Gregory Sancoff has spent a decade and $19 million building a highly unusual stealth boat. Called Ghost, it’s designed to be faster, more stable, and more fuel-efficient than anything currently in the U.S. Navy’s fleet, he says. “It’s such a smooth ride, you can sit there and drink your coffee going through six-foot swells,” he proudly told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014.
But there’s a problem: The Pentagon doesn’t want Sancoff’s boat—and also won’t let him sell it abroad.
Last year, Sancoff was served government secrecy orders, which means he's not permitted to show his patents and technology to anyone. Since then, his Portsmouth, N.H.-based startup, Juliet Marine Systems Inc., has had to lay off 17 of its 20 employees, and Sancoff sued the government to recoup damages. “We’ve fallen into a very weird place,” he says. “If the U.S. doesn't want this, fine. But why not let us sell to friendly nations? We’ve had so much interest from countries like Japan, Korea, Qatar.”
The Navy and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment. The Ghost, which Sancoff says was intended as a kind of “attack helicopter of the sea,” looks more like a spacecraft than a boat. Its hull travels above the water, eliminating the jarring impact of waves. Underwater, long tubes, with propellers in front, power it with gas turbine engines, while simultaneously producing an air bubble around themselves to reduce friction. (See a video and more complete description here.)
Sancoff’s hope in building the boat was to honor his father, who served under General George Patton in World War II. Although Sancoff didn’t have a government contract for the project, as is normally required for weapons platforms, he hoped the novel vessel would so impress the Navy that it would adopt it.
As it turned out, many government officials were impressed. Former New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu joined Juliet's board, as did several retired naval officers, including four-star Admiral James Hogg, Rear Admiral Thomas Richards, who once oversaw all of the country’s Navy SEALs, and Rear Admiral Jay Cohen, who served as the Pentagon’s chief of naval research and as undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. Sancoff says active Navy officials also showed interest but ultimately declined to work with him.
After being served secrecy orders, Sancoff filed his lawsuit against the government in July 2015 to recoup damages, and hopes for a trial by next summer.
“We’re spending outrageous amounts of money fighting the Justice Department. It's killing us. We had to lay off the majority of our employees,” says Sancoff. “I never wanted to sue the government; it was the last thing I wanted.”The outlook for Juliet isn't great. Last year, the U.S. patent office issued 95 secrecy orders—one for every 6,628 applications, as Joshua Brustein wrote in June. Most of those inventions were developed by large companies, specifically for the military or other government agencies. But as Brustein points out, the orders "are a different sort of ordeal for private inventors, about a dozen of whom file patent applications that are made secret by government mandate each year." Inventors who break gag orders can lose their patent rights, or face fines or incarceration. And while some secrecy orders are reversed each year, others date back as far as the 1940s.
As for recouping funds? “There is a legal process to ask the government for compensation," says Brustein, "but it takes years and almost never pays out.”
Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) has weighed in on Sancoff’s behalf.