Anduril is taking to the high seas in a big way. Just a few days after announcing its new Seabed Sentry underwater sensor network, this morning the company unveiled a new-age family of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) called Copperhead.
The vessel is Anduril’s answer to a torpedo, but designed to be deployed from unmanned vessels. Plus, it can be produced for a “fraction of the cost” of its legacy counterparts, Shane Arnott, senior VP of programs and engineering at Anduril, told reporters during a press briefing.
Ride the wave: Maritime autonomy is all the rage these days, especially with the looming specter of a fight with China over Taiwan. In the face of stagnating shipbuilding in the US and China’s vast maritime force, the Navy is building up a hybrid fleet of interoperable drones and manned vessels.
- Late last year, then-U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday said the goal was to have 350 manned and 150 unmanned vessels. Currently, they’re at about 300 manned and a few dozen unmanned vessels.
- The service has pumped hundreds of millions into Project Overmatch to build out autonomous capabilities for CJADC2. In the next five years, it plans to spend $716.7M more.
Anduril was selected to prototype its Dive family of autonomous submarines for the Navy last year. It delivered the first Dive-LD sub to Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron 1 (UUVRON-1) at the end of last week.
Work the system: Copperhead is designed to fit seamlessly into the Navy’s hybrid fleet and works a dream with Anduril’s Dive LD and XL subs, according to the company. The torpedo:
- Comes in two flavors: normal Copperhead and Copperhead-M, which is the munition version.
- Will be produced in two sizes: Copperhead-100 and Copperhead-500, which can carry, well, 100 and 500-pound payloads, respectively.
- Is designed to be mass-produced. It’s square-ish rather than cylindrical, which the company says enables it to produce thousands of Copperheads a year.
- Can carry dozens of Copperhead-100s or “multiple” Copperhead-500s in its DiveXL configuration.
- Links into Anduril’s Lattice and thus still works in contested environments.
- Is also designed to work with other non-Anduril unmanned vessels and C2 systems.
Anduril says Copperhead is already “in the water” and that it will finalize testing before it begins mass-production. The company has not yet announced where Copperhead will be produced.
Power in numbers: Arnott said that cheaper, attritable underwater weapons will be critical to a fight increasingly crowded by drones. As Trevor Philips-Levine pointed out to Tectonic last week, it’s silly to waste expensive, exquisite munitions on cheap, unmanned systems. (For context, a single Mk 48 Mod 7 torpedo costs approximately $4.2M.)
“It doesn’t really make sense that you would expend a Mk 48, for instance, on an enemy, UUV or a USV, when that munition actually costs multiple times the cost of a UV,” Arnott said.