Pentagon’s tech hub brings on Anduril to deliver Navy’s new large underwater drone

The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Anduril Industries a contract that will get its Dive family of large-diameter autonomous underwater vehicles into the hands of sailors for operations this year. The award comes after DIU selected the Dive-LD platform to perform in a “swim-off” last year that put commercially available large unmanned underwater vehicles through an obstacle course to assess their maturity and applicability to conduct “distributed, long-range, persistent underwater sensing and payload delivery in contested environment,” according to a Feb. 8 Anduril news release. Anduril’s chief strategy officer, Chris Brose, told Defense News the company had worked on maturing and demonstrating the Dive-LD vehicle for the last two years, but the contract now provides a mechanism to get the drone into the hands of sailors across varied geographies and unit types so they can “start solving a lot of different problems across the seabed and undersea domain.” A unit that has never worked with an autonomous underwater vehicle may want to experiment with one for a couple weeks or months, while another unit with a more refined concept for how they’d use the Dive-LD vehicle may want to buy several right off the bat. The Navy also pursued an Orca extra-large UUV program, first selecting Boeing as one of two companies for a 2017 design contract and then selecting the firm as the sole winner of a 2019 contract to build four prototypes. The program has seen developmental and manufacturing delays. The company in December delivered a pre-prototype test asset but has not yet completed and delivered any of the prototypes on contract. Anduril Industries acquired the Dive-LD when it bought Dive Technologies in 2022. In addition to this contract with DIU, Anduril signed a three-year agreement with Australia in 2022 to create something akin to an Orca XLUUV. Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.