The company will use its own money, plus some support from the state of Rhode Island, to establish the factory in Quonset Point.

The factory is set to open in late 2025, being operations in early 2026, and then reach full capacity by the end of that year: 50 hulls a year, with the ability to scale up to 200 a year if customer demand calls for that.

Until the facility opens, the company will continue to build Dive-LD hulls in its Quincy, Massachusetts, maritime engineering center. Anduril in February received a contract to provide the Defense Department with Dive-LD vehicles through Defense Innovation Unit’s Commercial Solutions Opening process. The U.S. Navy subsequently awarded the company an $18.6 million award using that contract vehicle.

Anduril’s chief strategy officer, Chris Brose, told reporters June 11 the company proved the maturity and utility of its Dive-LD vehicle during a swim-off event last year that led to the DIU contract. But a remaining and recurring question from the government has been, “can Anduril ramp production to really hit high-rate manufacturing numbers?”

He said the Quonset Point factory will “show the U.S. government that we are ready to and able to deliver on large contracts, if those contracts are forthcoming.”

The standup of the 100,000-150,000 square foot production facility will create more than 100 jobs in the next five years.

It will also allow Anduril to try to realize its vision to build a massive fleet of AUVs. A company statement notes the Dive-LD family of vehicles is “designed from the ground-up for production at scale, with a heavy emphasis on commercial-off-the-shelf components with robust supply chains, a modular design, and advanced, scalable manufacturing techniques that enable rapid iterations based on customer needs.”

The company can build 12 Dive-LD vehicles at the Quincy facility today, or could scale up to 24 a year if needed by adding extra shifts.

“We’re out of space in terms of our ability in the Quincy facility to meet the demand that we’re seeing from the Navy at present, let alone where we believe that’s going in the future,” Brose said.

“This is the challenge that I think all defense companies have in terms of, how much to facilitize in order to meet a demand that is not always crystal clear,” Brose continued. “Our approach to that is, we’re going to lean forward. We’re going to invest in ourselves; we’re going to invest in our ability to produce these kinds of systems in a totally different way. And we’re going to put the facilities in place to meet a demand that that we expect to grow,” rather than wait for the government to award a contract and have to play catch-up in building a larger factory.

As for the location in Quonset Point, Brose said the region is a “phenomenal center of undersea expertise and production.”

“Nav[al] Undersea Warfare Center, other major contractors that are performing on significant undersea programs, access to the water — you just have an enormously rich environment of undersea expertise, talented workforce, and it’s phenomenal for Anduril to be a part of that and plug into that,” Brose said.

What’s less clear is how the Navy will procure them and with what funding — but one company says it’s moving ahead in developing disruptive systems now and will figure out the business model later.

Jon Rambeau, L3Harris’ president for Integrated Missions Systems, told Defense News the company had a couple of one-off efforts with the Navy already — two of its Arabian Fox autonomous surface vessels are operating out of Bahrain as part of U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59, and L3Harris successfully demonstrated the ability to launch and recover an unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV, from a submarine’s torpedo tube.

In neither of these cases, though, did the company actually sell its unmanned system to the Navy.

Rambeau said he views these opportunities — through fee-for-service contracts or urgent operational needs statements — as beginning to pave a path for future small unmanned systems acquisition.

The Pentagon’s Replicator program will also help, he said. But, of course, “we’d always like it to go faster.”

Rambeau said his company is set up to go fast. L3Harris integrates commercial sensors onto commercial unmanned underwater and surface vessels whose procurement lead times are “weeks or months, versus years” for large warships.

In addition to looking for ways to sell a small quantity of UUVs to the submarine fleet to begin operations this year, Rambeau said L3Harris is pitching the Navy on a passive sensing and targeting capability that could be installed on a unmanned surface vessel, or USV, and sent out ahead of a manned ship, allowing it to keep emissions low and avoid becoming a target itself.

Rambeau said the cost of this payload and USV is a budgetary “rounding error, as compared to a ship or a combat system or a large active radar array. These are very affordable technologies that can really augment what’s existing today. So we see it as complementary, we see it as a bit disruptive, and it’s exciting.”

But, in a way, the small cost makes it hard to get anyone’s attention, he acknowledged.

“The cost of these capabilities is minimal. The budgeting discussions tend to focus more on the larger, bigger-ticket items, and so making sure at least we pay a little bit of attention to these things and there’s an opportunity to tack on that incremental funding year by year to start to get past proof of concept into low-rate production quantities,” is something he’s been talking to the sea service about.

Rambeau said these discussions at the flag officer level have gone well, with agreement on both sides for the usefulness of small unmanned systems and the desire to buy them. They just haven’t gotten to the point of the Navy getting past various hurdles and actually buying them.

U.S. Undersecretary of the Navy Erik Raven told Defense News the week the service released its fiscal year 2025 budget request in March that, “what you’re really seeing is an ecosystem of how the Department of the Navy is starting to embrace unmanned technologies. We’ve learnt learned a lot through initiatives like Task Force 59, and … we’re starting to bring in that learning of how to adapt unmanned technologies, and also be able to scale them.”

Depending on the capability, some “more enduring priorities” may become programs of record that would be sustained over a longer period of time. Others may be things the Navy buys in limited quantities to use and then replace with a different system, to ensure it’s “getting the best of breed of what’s coming out of industry, and then being able to iterate and move more quickly.”

Though Raven called this technology area a “great strategic advantage,” the Navy could not provide any details on how much it plans to spend on small unmanned systems in its FY25 budget proposal.

Raven told reporters in March while unveiling the budget request that two large unmanned systems were being delayed in the budget plan but that small unmanned systems would be funded through Replicator, the Navy’s Disruptive Capabilities Office and other means.

“We continue to see unmanned as a feature of so many important naval capabilities, and we are making those investments in this budget,” the undersecretary said.

Seven weeks after Defense News submitted a request asking about the nature of those investments, a Navy spokesperson did not provide any totals.

Rather, the spokesperson said, “the Navy continues to invest in unmanned system programs of record as well as emergent operational needs across the air, surface, and undersea domains as part of the [FY25] President’s Budget request.”

The statement highlights two programs: the Lionfish UUV program, which will replace the MK 18 Mod 1 Swordfish used by the explosive ordnance disposal community; and the Production Ready, Inexpensive Maritime Expeditionary (PRIME) Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit under the Replicator initiative.

“Overall, the Navy’s FY25 investment in unmanned systems continues to increase as we learn and experiment across the fleet with unmanned capabilities and position ourselves to enter into production,” the spokesperson concluded.

For companies like L3Harris, the details may be missing, but the sentiment is enough.

“We do move quickly, some of the components of these systems we produce already at a reasonably large scale, so we are ready when the call comes,” Rambeau said.

The service’s Program Executive Office Land Systems is eyeing its newly reorganized portfolios — including ground-based air defense, expeditionary radars and light armored vehicles — to find efficiencies and build upon existing technology to rapidly field new systems and expand the portfolio.

Here are three notable areas the Corps is focused on:

Radars

One example involves the expeditionary radars program, which previously housed only the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar. The office’s chief, Stephen Bowdren, told Defense News the G/ATOR is an active radar that has proved itself in the field and is now pivotal to future aspects of warfare like expeditionary advanced base operations.

But the Corps is still seeking a passive radar to complement G/ATOR and help Marines sense the battlefield without giving away their location.

Bowdren said his expeditionary radars program office is starting with an existing Army passive radar prototype to form the basis of a MuDRaCE — or Multi-Domain Radar for a Contested Environment — family of systems, as well as a Medium-Range Air Defense Radar, or MARAUDER, to field “as soon as possible.”

Bowdren noted he hopes this new passive radar will be ready for operations within two years given the service is approach the effort with an existing prototype.

Countering drones

Bowdren said his ground-based air defense portfolio is a prime example of “running fast with scissors.”

“Within the next year, we will have operationally assessed [the Medium-Range Intercept Capability]. We will have completed [initial operational test and evaluation] on, I think, both [the light and regular versions of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System. We are looking to field both of those systems probably within the next 12 to 18 months, easily,” he noted.

He said this portfolio has been able to move rapidly because the government serves as the systems integrator, pulling together existing sensors, computers, effectors and more to create kinetic and non-kinetic anti-drone technology.

Bowdren said the program office started with the assumption that its tech-integration effort would be a wild success: If the technology came together and was ready for fielding on a short timeline, what work did the program office need to do to ensure the training, the tactics development and the sustainment strategy were also ready to go on a short timeline?

It would have been a wasted effort if the tech integration failed and the program had to restart with a different radar or a different missile, for example. Indeed, there’s some risk in doing all this work in parallel, he said, but with that risk comes the reward of being able to field critical capabilities on a short timeline.

PEO Land Systems is considering further expanding that ground-based air defense portfolio, even as the original counter-drone systems continue through final test and evaluation. It could become a broader counter-intrusion portfolio, with Bowdren saying he sees benefits to incorporating an existing but separate Ground-Based Operational Surveillance System into the portfolio.

“Is that something that we add to our GBAD portfolio so that when you deploy a solution for counter-air to a base, it’s not a whole other separate suite of systems and boxes and screens, but it’s built in and plugged into the already existing security system?” he said.

He added that the Corps also must consider how to counter unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned surface vessels. “So is there really a counter-UxS portfolio we should be looking at?”

Recon vehicles

The light armored vehicle portfolio — specifically, the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle — is in limbo, as the Marine Corps reconsiders how it wants to meet its reconnaissance mission and with what combination of manned and unmanned vehicles on the ground, on the water and in the air.

Bowdren said the recon community is still experimenting to help define that future suite of programs and equipment. The Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, or ARV, will be at the center of that suite of systems, but the new vehicles could be supplemented by Ultra Light Tactical Vehicles, manned and unmanned surface craft, unmanned aerial systems, and more.

Bowdren said that study would be completed “soon.”

Even as those discussions and the related question of funding continue, Bowdren said his office is preparing to move as fast as it’s allowed with the available resources.

The program office is working with industry to develop ARV-30 prototypes that use the same 30mm cannon as that on the Amphibious Combat Vehicle. This would be the second ARV variant, following the command, control, communications and computer/uncrewed aerial systems (C4/UAS) variant that the Corps has tested since prototypes were delivered in December 2022.

Bowdren said his office is “committed” to pushing forward on the ARV family of vehicles even though the start date for procurement remains in flux.

Airbus announced this week Naval Air Systems Command awarded it an other transactional authority agreement to develop a prototype for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector program.

In April, Carl Forsling, Airbus’ senior manager of business development and strategy for Marine Corps programs, told Defense News the company had already been developing its UH-72 Unmanned Logistics Connector using internal company funds.

Forsling said the Marines are looking at light and medium unmanned aerial systems to resupply squads and other small units operating away from ships and logistics hubs. This effort aims to create a large platform that can resupply larger units, such as the Marine littoral regiments the Corps is establishing in the Pacific to conduct expeditionary advanced base operations.

He said the UH-72 Unmanned Logistics Connector would leverage the Lakota platform — its mature airframe, its low flight hour costs, its well-understood maintenance needs — but would be built on the production line to be autonomous.

The biggest physical change to the aircraft would be a fly-by-wire capability, so the helo’s hydraulic actuators are commanded by an electronic signal rather than a pilot physically moving a control stick.

But Forsling said there are two challenges the company will tackle under this Marine Corps contract: adding autonomy such that the aircraft can make flight decisions on its own, and integrating the system into the larger Marine Corps command-and-control network.

The Marine Corps briefing slides showed at the Modern Day Marine conference note this Aerial Logistics Connector will be the aviation contribution to a larger contested logistics effort. Service leaders signed an acquisition decision memorandum in March to begin this prototyping phase, and the slides show four companies will be awarded contracts to build prototypes.

NAVAIR spokeswoman Megan Wasel told Defense News only one contract, the Airbus agreement, has been awarded to date.

These vendors will demonstrate their prototypes in late summer into early fall of this year, according to the slides.

Forsling told Defense News that basing its offering on a helicopter with a “huge number of flight hours and platform maturity” will help it create a successful prototype.

The Navy awarded the company a $54 million contract in September to design and build the decoy, which the company says will be one of the most advanced radio frequency countermeasures in the world.

The system will consist of a towed unit connected by fiber-optic cable to electronic warfare equipment onboard the aircraft, BAE Systems said in a news release. The decoy is meant to lure missiles away from the aircraft and disrupt the enemy radars that target American jets.

The Navy in 2019 awarded both BAE Systems and Raytheon contracts to develop and demonstrate a decoy system. However, the service ultimately disqualified Raytheon from competing for the manufacturing contract, citing Raytheon’s hiring of a “retired Navy technical expert [that] gave rise to the appearance of impropriety,” according to documents from the United States Court of Federal Claims.

“Raytheon contends that the agency’s decision to exclude the firm from the competition because of an actual or apparent unfair competitive advantage resulting from the employment of a former government employee was unreasonable, and so delayed that it deprived Raytheon of any opportunity to mitigate the issue,” according to the Government Accountability Office decision.

GAO denied the protest in August, and the Navy awarded BAE Systems a contract in September. Raytheon moved its claim to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which in March ruled against Raytheon.

BAE Systems announced the contract May 15, with Don Davidson, director of the Advanced Compact Electronic Warfare Solutions product line at BAE Systems, saying the “Dual Band Decoy delivers broad capability that can be installed on a variety of aircraft and is upgradeable to address future threats.”

The new system will build on the AN/ALE-55 Fiber-Optic Towed Decoy, which was fielded around 2010. BAE Systems has since produced more than 3,000 ALE-55 decoys for customers around the world. The new decoy uses BAE’s custom integrated circuits that enable greater performance with reduced size, weight and power, the company stated.

The Navy has moved to make its Super Hornet fleet more survivable as enemy sensors and weapons grow more advanced. The Navy and Boeing developed a Block III design that features a reduced radar signature. Boeing is delivering new Block III jets and is also upgrading some Block II jets to the Block III configuration during their life-extension modernization periods.

BAE’s statement notes the decoy will be initially fielded on the Navy’s fleet of F/A-18E-F Super Hornets. The Navy has more than 500 of these planes in the inventory, but BAE Systems did not provide additional information on how many decoys this contract covers, nor did it provide information on the value of the contract or delivery timelines.

The Corps’ work on networks and command-and-control systems comes as it prepares for operations involving small units deployed as observers and shooters for a larger coalition force.

“It’s all about data,” Kevin Murray said April 30 during a panel discussion at the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington, D.C. After all, Marines can’t conduct small-unit operations if they lack additional surveillance data from other sources or are unable to pass along targeting data they collect.

To that end, Murray said, the Corps is working on both Project Dynamis — the service’s contribution to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative, or CJADC2 — and a network unification plan.

During a recent reorganization of its acquisition offices at Marine Corps Systems Command and Program Executive Office Land Systems, the service created a Marine Air-Ground Task Force Command and Control program office. Previously, ground-based command-and-control systems fell under MCSC, while aviation-related C2 systems fell under PEO LS.

Despite the new program office, Murray said the Corps still lacked the ingredients to build and coordinate its contribution to CJADC2.

“We’re not going to solve CJADC2 for the joint force, but we are going to figure out how we contribute and fit into that,” he said of Project Dynamis. Work is ongoing to align with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Joint Fires Network, a battle management system; the Navy’s secretive Project Overmatch initiative; the Army’s experimental series Project Convergence; and the Air and Space forces’ DAF Battle Network and Advanced Battle Management System.

Brig. Gen. David Walsh, the head of Marine Corps Systems Command, said “the ability to communicate across the Marine Corps, across the joint force, across our coalition of partners — it is the No.1 capability I think we need to accelerate.”

For his part, Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, the director of the Capabilities Development Directorate that oversees Marine Corps requirements, said that as much as the service enjoys its self-sufficient Marine Air-Ground Task Force, “we are probably never going to go into any battle in the future as the Marine Corps; we’re going to go into it as the United States with our allies and partners.”

“And that’s how we’re going to have to fight, which just shows the criticality of CJADC2,” he added. “If our systems don’t work together, then we’ll have to be partitioned. They have to work together so that we can work together.”

Even as the Corps considers how data will flow between joint and combined C2 systems, it’s also worried about how data flows inside its own web of networks.

Murray said all the services have various network modernization plans underway, noting Marines are focused on ensuring the Marine Corps Enterprise Network can extend all the way to the tactical edge.

Cloud computing and processing power has evolved such that Marines in the field can posses significant data processing power in a very small form factor. But they could have even more processing power for even greater data-informed operations if they were connected to the Corps’ larger network.

However, the fleets worry that setup will diminish their effectiveness if they lose connectivity.

Murray said the goal for network unification is to allow for any Marine on the ground in Luzon, Philippines, for example, to “connect all the way back into the big-data clouds, but if he gets cut off he can still operate tactically with his [Ultra Light Tactical Vehicle] and the amount of storage and capability he’s got right there, continue to work off the data he has locally available to him. And then when they reconnect back into [the cloud], when it becomes more permissive, then the opportunity to re-synchronize with the greater architecture is all about what we’re trying to do for the network unification.”

Murray said the plan also comes with cybersecurity benefits.

“Our legacy network architecture was not really defensible. It was all over the place; some of it was tactical networks that didn’t have a cyber defense plan,” he noted. “This unification really helps us to streamline the network, visualize it and then defend it.”

Pillar 2 of the agreement focuses on advanced tech the nations can develop and field together. There are eight working groups focused on cyber, quantum, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, hypersonics, undersea warfare, information sharing, and innovation, each with a list of ideas to quickly test and push to operators.

Leaders told Defense News how this process is playing out in the undersea warfare working group and how they aim to bring new capabilities to the three navies as soon as this year.

Dan Packer, the AUKUS director for the Commander of Naval Submarine Forces who also serves as the U.S. lead for the undersea warfare working group, said April 4 that the group has four lines of effort: a torpedo tube launch and recover capability for a small unmanned underwater vehicle; subsea and seabed warfare capabilities; artificial intelligence; and torpedoes and platform defense.

On the small UUV effort, the U.S. Navy on its own in 2023 conducted successful demonstrations: one called Yellow Moray on the West Coast using HII’s Remus UUV; and another called Rat Trap on the East Coast using an L3Harris-made UUV.

L3Harris’ Integrated Mission Systems president Jon Rambeau told Defense News in March that his team had started with experiments in an office using a hula hoop with flashlights attached, to understand how sensors perceive light and sound. They moved from the office to a lab and eventually into the ocean, with a rig tethered to a barge that allowed the company’s Iver autonomous underwater vehicle to, by trial and error, learn to find its way into a small box that was stationary and then, eventually, moving through the water.

Torpedo tube launch

Rambeau said the UUV hardware is inherently capable of going in and out of the torpedo tube, but there’s a software and machine learning challenge to help the UUV learn to navigate various water conditions and safely find its way back into the submarine’s torpedo tube.

Virginia-class attack submarines can silently shoot torpedoes from their launch tubes without giving away their location. If submarines can also fill their tubes with small UUVs, they’d gain the ability to stealthily expand their reach and surveil a larger area around the boat.

During a panel discussion at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference on April 8, U.K. Royal Navy Second Sea Lord Vice Adm. Martin Connell told Defense News that his country, too, would accelerate its work on developing this capability. He said the U.K. plans to test it on an Astute-class attack submarine this year, and then based on what worked for the U.K. and the U.S., they’d determine how to scale up the capability.

Packer said this effort will “make UUV operations ubiquitous on any submarine. Today, it takes a drydock shelter. It takes divers. It takes a whole host of Rube Goldberg kinds of things. Once I get torpedo tube launch and recovery, it’s just like launching a torpedo, but they welcome him back in.”

He added that the team agreed not to integrate this capability onto Australia’s Collins-class conventionally powered submarines now, but Australia will gain this capability when it buys the first American Virginia-class attack submarine in 2032.

On subsea and seabed warfare, Packer said all three countries have an obligation to defend their critical undersea infrastructure. He noted the U.K. and Australia had developed ships that could host unmanned systems that can scan the seabed and ensure undersea cables haven’t been tampered with, for example.

Connell said during the panel the British and Australian navies conducted an exercise together in Australia involving seabed warfare. This effort took just six months from concept to trial, he said, adding he hopes the team can continue to develop even greater expeditionary capability through this line of effort.

Packer said a next step would be collectively developing effectors for these seabed warfare unmanned underwater vehicles — “what are the hammers, the saws, the screwdrivers that I need to develop for these UUVs to get effects on the seabed floor, including sensors.”

The primary artificial intelligence effort today involves the three nation’s P-8 anti-submarine warfare airplanes, though it will eventually expand to the submarines themselves.

Packer said the nations created the first secure collaborative development environment, such that they can all contribute terabytes of data collected from P-8 sensors. The alliance, using vendors from all three countries’ industrial bases, is working now to create an artificial intelligence tool that can identify all the biological sources of sounds the P-8s pick up — everything from whales to shrimp — and eliminate those noises from the picture operators see. This will allow operators to focus on man-made sounds and better identify potential enemy submarines.

Packer said the Navy never had the processing power to do something like this before. Now that the secure cloud environment exists, the three countries are moving out as fast as they can to train their AI tools “to detect adversaries from that data … beyond the level of the human operator to do so.”

For now, the collaboration is focused on P-8s, since foreign military sales cases already exist with the U.K. and Australia to facilitate this collaboration.

Connell, without specifying the nature of the AI tool, said the U.K would put an application on its P-8s this year to enhance their onboard acoustic performance.

Packer noted the U.S. is independently using this capability on an attack submarine today using U.S.-only vendors and algorithms, but the AUKUS team plans to eventually share the full automatic target recognition tool with all three countries’ planes, submarines and surface combatants once the right authorities are in place.

And finally, Packer said the fourth line of effort is looking at the collective inventory of torpedoes and considering how to create more capability and capacity. Both the U.S. and U.K. stopped building torpedoes decades ago, and the U.S. around 2016 began trying to restart its industrial base manufacturing capability.

“The issue is that none of us have sufficient ordnance-, torpedo-building capability,” Packer said, but the group is looking at options to modernize British torpedoes and share in-development American long-range torpedoes with the allies ­— potentially through an arrangement that involves a multinational industrial base.

Vice Adm. Rob Gaucher, the commander of U.S. Naval Submarine Forces, said during the panel discussion that these AUKUS undersea warfare lines of effort closely match his modernization priorities for his own submarine fleet.

Pursuing these aims as part of a coalition, he said, strengthens all three navies.

“The more we do it, and the faster we do it, and the more we get it in the hands of the operators, the better. And then having three sets of operators to do it makes it even better,” Gaucher said.

The collaboration could take many forms, including pairing current Anduril software capabilities with Hyundai’s manned and unmanned platforms, according Anduril Chief Strategy Officer Christian Brose, who told Defense News the companies — one predominantly focused on hardware, the other on software — are “phenomenally complementary.”

“What Hyundai brings in terms of its world-leading shipbuilding expertise, mass manufacturing capability, and just modern shipbuilding practices — paired with what Anduril has been able to do on the design of new programs, the mission autonomy and software side of it, and then the broader missionization of platforms, sensors, comms, weapons, and then how those become useful to generate mission outcomes — I think really lend themselves well together,” he said in an April 15 interview.

More exciting, Brose said, is “conceiving, designing, developing and building new types of systems, and I think that’s where a lot of the energy of this partnership is going to go.”

He said leaders from both companies hoped to look beyond their current portfolios and consider new ideas that would help create more seapower and more deterrence for the Republic of Korean Navy and the U.S. Navy, including work with large unmanned surface and undersea vehicles.

Brose noted that his company’s largest offering to the Navy, the Dive-LD UVV, is small in size compared to what Hyundai typically builds. Still, Hyundai’s ability to mass produce ships using world-leading manufacturing processes opens the door to a lot of possibilities for very large unmanned or optionally manned systems for the navies, he said, noting the collaboration would question “what are the types of capabilities that are missing that we could create together and do quickly.”

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has cited Hyundai as a global leader in shipbuilding that he wants to see the U.S. work with, specifically through the company buying an American shipyard and overhauling it to reflect their modern manufacturing processes and technologies.

Though that’s not what this partnership with Anduril will do, Brose noted the general climate in the Navy that’s open to innovative ideas and said he hopes the sea service will be open to whatever new ideas Anduril and Hyundai ultimately develop and pitch.

“I’ve never seen a time where people are more open and interested to doing different things, having different ideas and approaches, and being willing to entertain things that even five years ago people would have said is just off the table,” he said.

According to Anduril’s news release, HD Hyundai has five decades of experience in developing and producing commercial vessels, warships, submarines, and other maritime systems, and is the largest company in the South Korean shipbuilding industry — which today builds the second-most ships in the world, second only to China.

Anduril has developed a family of low-cost autonomous military systems and weapons built on its Lattice software platform, which delivers AI-enabled sensor fusion, mission autonomy, distributed network management, and command and control for robotic systems.

The March 28 test was the first time this pairing — central to Japan’s Aegis System Equipped Vessel program dedicated to providing missile defense platforms — successfully detected and tracked an object in space, then passed along the data to the combat system for further processing.

The test took place at Lockheed Martin’s Production Test Center in Moorestown, New Jersey. The Missile Defense Agency led the test, with U.S. Navy Aegis program representatives and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel on hand.

A Lockheed Martin representative told Defense News this week that this was the first of a series of land-based tests the SPY-7 would go through before installation on the first Aegis System Equipped Vessel. This test involved one radar face; the next will involve all four radar faces, as Lockheed Martin ensures full system integration before shipping the hardware to Japan for installation on the first ship.

Japan expects to commission one Aegis System Equipped Vessel in March 2028 and another in March 2029. The ships will bring an integrated air and missile defense capability that will provide regional missile defense to the island nation.

The Lockheed-made SPY-7 radar is based on the same technology as the ground-based Long Range Discrimination Radar fielded at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska. That MDA-developed radar, which hit initial fielding in 2021, continues to go through testing. Its eventual delivery to the U.S. Space Force is delayed amid testing challenges.

Because the radar for the Japanese ships — smaller than the ground-based Long Range Discrimination Radar, but larger than the other shipboard radars — shares the same hardware and software backbone as the others in the program, much of the integration work was already done, the company said.

The ongoing round of live testing is meant to ensure the current iteration of hardware and software are fully integrated with the combat system, as a means of reducing risk before installing them on the ship.

Versions of the SPY-7 radar will also be fielded on the Spanish Navy’s F-110 frigate and the Canadian Surface Combatant.

This effort will include finalizing a vision for what role the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel will play, with the range and payload capacity to do much more than the small drones currently conducting surveillance missions in the Middle East and Latin America, he said during a panel discussion at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference

The service is continuing down a path to incorporate unmanned technologies into routine fleet operations. One year into operating a hybrid manned-unmanned fleet, U.S. 4th Fleet is using unmanned surface vessels to map patterns of behavior and common trafficking routes in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said in a keynote speech at the event.

Rear Adm. James Aiken, the 4th Fleet commander, said during a panel discussion that these operations are beneficial.

“We’re putting unmanned vessels in the hands of operators, and so we see what the challenges are, being at sea for six, eight, nine months now with some of the unmanned surface vessels. And it really has challenged us” to reconsider where and how they employ these vessels, he explained.

Smith said during the same panel that learning by using basic unmanned systems — or the “minimum viable product,” as he put it — is important. But at some point, he added, “we need to get beyond surveillance” and begin using these sea drones for more warfare-focused operations.

To that end, he said, the Navy will conduct an analysis of alternatives this year to determine what payloads can equip the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel. He added that this would go beyond surveillance and instead incorporate that information-gathering capability into the detect-identify-track-engage kill chain.

Also speaking at the conference, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said unmanned systems are not only tools for sailors but also “players on the field.”

Asked by Defense News about the move beyond experiments and into routine operations with this hybrid fleet, Franchetti said she doesn’t want to squash the momentum of experimentation just yet, as sailors are collaborating with industry to find new uses for unmanned systems.

“The most important thing,” she explained” “is to cohere [lessons from experimentation] together into a concept of operations that can apply broadly across our Navy, and I’m really focused on getting to that point. But right now, I really like the fleets having this creative spirit unleashed and being able to get all their ideas out there, so then we can think about how would we elevate that into a concept of operations that we can train to, that we can resource to and that we can continue to use.”

“I’m confident that the future of our Navy is going to be a mix of conventionally manned platforms with unmanned and autonomous platforms all teamed together, so these are all the building blocks that we need to take right now to be able to get there,” she added.

Even though 4th Fleet and 5th Fleet are focused on maritime domain awareness in support of counter-trafficking missions — whereas 7th Fleet focuses on using unmanned systems in support of sea denial and sea control missions — the CNO said there would have to be some sort of common concept of operations across the whole service.

“But you always need to have tailored concepts below it because each theater is different. The geostrategic environment is different. The adversaries are different. The partners are different. And so everything will need to be tailored to that,” Franchetti said. “But I think having a common understanding of the who, what, why we employ unmanned — I think that will be very important for our Navy going forward.”