A new stealthy, autonomous submarine being developed by Anduril Industries for Australia’s navy has been designed with a software-first approach that will leverage the company’s artificial intelligence-based operating system and onboard payloads to act as a “mothership” for other autonomous systems, company officials said last week.
Ghost Shark is designed to be at sea for months at a time conducting long-range missions that encompass persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and strike, and will include Lattice, Anduril’s AI command and control platform that introduces autonomy to the battlespace.
The extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle (XL-AUV) has a large bay for payloads that combined with Lattice will enable “autonomy controlling autonomy,” Shane Arnott, senior vice president of engineering or Anduril Industries, told reporters during a virtual media briefing last Thursday evening.
Arnott said Anduril cannot speak to specific missions or applications but highlighted “the mind can run wild with what you can do with a very large payload bay. Having a brain that can be all the way on the edge of smaller things plus a bigger thing plus working with crewed assets. This is part of a vision of what Lattice is about.”
The XL-AUV is designed to be modular and flexible and able to quickly integrate new missions, he said.
Australia’s Ministry of Defence last week unveiled Ghost Shark for the first time, although the initial prototype has been undergoing sea trials for “some time,” Arnott said. Those trials began a little more than a year after Anduril contracted with the Defence Ministry, Christian Brose, the company’s chief strategy officer, said during the briefing.
The $140 million contract calls for three prototypes with the final vessel expected by June 2025. The first production variant is expected by the end of 2025, Pat Conroy, Australia’s Minister for Defence Industry, said last Thursday in a speech introducing the prototype.
Due to sensitivities around the autonomous submarine, Arnott said no performance parameters or the dimensions of Ghost Shark are being disclosed. The XL-AUV builds on Anduril’s Dive unmanned undersea vessel and is being developed by Anduril’s business unit in Australia, Anduril Australia.
The contract is equally co-funded between Anduril and the Australian government, although Arnott said the company is investing more than $70 million of its funds and the government’s commitment includes in-kind contributions such as ranges and partnerships.
California-based Anduril is a defense technology startup that sees itself as a disruptor in large part by self-funding commercially-developed solutions it believes its national security customers need. Ponying up the company’s own money “has lit a spark in us and created the incentives for us to move quickly and be successful,” Brose said. From initial talks to the signing of the contract took three months, he noted.
The speed at which the program has progressed so far demonstrates what can be done with the “right team, government and industry,” Brose said. He contrasted Australia’s approach to Ghost Shark to how the U.S. Defense Department manages programs, noting they are not “wildly smarter than their American counterparts” and do not have more money.
“And yet, they are fielding a world leading capability in wildly less time than it would take the U.S. system at a time where that U.S. system is…currently bollixed up in…programs that aren’t going so well,” Brose said.
The U.S. Navy has an extra-large unmanned undersea vessel program called Orca, an 85-ton diesel electric submarine being developed by Boeing [BA] with shipbuilder HII [HII] as a key teammate. The first prototype was delivered last year, although the program is challenged by schedule delays.
There are government-to-government talks ongoing between the U.S. and Australia with regards to Ghost Shark, Brose said. With the successful debut of the XL-AUV, “I think that is now going to accelerate as the Australian government has kind of built its conviction in this program, you know, is demonstrating its commitment to it,” he said.
Ghost Shark is leveraging a supply chain that stretches across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., the executives said.
These suppliers are building the extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle (XL-AUV) “with a view to the future,” which entails scaling to production in 12 to 18 months, Arnott said.
Brose said Australia is committing “billions” of dollars in the coming years to take Ghost Shark from prototype to large-scale production. There will be more details to come on this, he added.
Conroy said that Australia will spend up to $7.2 billion in Australian dollars in undersea, uncrewed maritime systems.
Anduril is already building out the factory to produce Ghost Shark, which is expected to be produced in “very large numbers,” and is also “proving out the supply chain,” Arnott said. The company is applying “additive approaches” to the manufacturing of the unmanned submarine but is not using “exotic materials,” which will help as production ramps up, he said.
The company is also directly investing in its suppliers to build out their capabilities in support of the program, Arnott said. Anduril said it has 42 companies in Australia that are helping with Ghost Shark but Arnott said the company would not disclose specific suppliers in Australia, the U.K., or the U.S.
In September 22021, Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. formed a trilateral security partnership, dubbed AUKUS, that consists of two pillars, the first focused on helping Australia acquire nuclear-powered, conventionally-armed submarines, and the second is cooperation on critical technologies such as undersea capabilities, artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and others.