Anduril says it has received active interest in integrating more than a dozen new military and commercial payloads onto its Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle (XL-AUV). Payload testing and otherwise demonstrating the Ghost Shark’s highly modular design are core focuses of new work on the underwater drone that is now set to occur in the United States.
The War Zone learned these and other new details about Ghost Shark in an interview earlier this week with Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead.
The Ghost Shark’s U.S. debut, which Anduril announced this week, came at the biennial U.S. Navy-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in Hawaii, where the uncrewed undersea vehicle (UUV) was displayed to attendees. RIMPAC 2024 wrapped up on August 1. Development of Ghost Shark began in Australia in 2022 for that country’s navy, which is looking to acquire at least three of the UUVs by 2025. The Ghost Shark now in the United States is an additional example that Anduril built using its own funds.
Ghost Shark, which also leverages previous work on another large-displacement UUV called the Dive-LD, only first broke cover in April. The Dive-LD, which you can read more about here, was originally designed by Dive Technologies, a company Anduril acquired in 2022. Details about Ghost Shark’s performance specifications, such as maximum range, speed, and endurance, as well as its intended roles and missions, remain limited.
Australian authorities have said in the past that they plan to use Ghost Sharks to conduct “persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance [ISR] and strike” missions, but without any real elaboration. How the Royal Australian Navy, or any other operator, might launch and recover the UUVs during actual operations is also unclear. The example that went to Hawaii around RIMPAC got there in a standard shipping container with the help of a Royal Australian Air Force C-17A Globemaster III transport plane, as seen below, highlighting one option for at least moving it rapidly to a forward location.
“It’s the nature of the beast with subsea [warfare systems],” Anduril’s Arnott said, referring to the historical secrecy surrounding submarines, crewed and uncrewed, and other underwater military capabilities. He did say that “these are very, very long-range assets.”
What we do know is that Ghost Shark was designed to be extremely modular, flexible, and readily reconfigurable. Arnott explained that the overall payload portion of Ghost Shark can be readily configured in different ways using modular hull sections. Each of the sections has integrated data and power buses and can then be filled with whatever might fit inside.
“So the nose and the tail are different pieces, and then the payload in the middle is expandable,” he said. “We make it pretty clean and our idea is to get the maximum mix of effects possible onto this system.”
“If you look at the [payload] sections alone, they are much bigger than a lot of UUVs by themselves, just each section,” he added. “The nice thing… about being in water is the extensibility of how many of those sections you can add. [It] is pretty forgiving in that space in the water domain. So we cannot say how big this thing can grow, but it’s a lot.”
Arnott further highlighted how Ghost Shark is designed to provide additional flexibility in terms of how payloads, including very large ones, can been oriented inside the modular hull sections.
“We don’t have big masts running down the backbone of our vehicle that a lot of other designs do that then preclude the ability for the payloads to come out in different directions… of the payload module itself,” he said. “So we have… in effect, unlimited flexibility in this design, just the way that we’ve configured the vehicle and the payload bay itself could be almost anything within a size configuration that you can dream up. We haven’t encountered crazy idea yet from a customer that … we can’t fit.”
When Ghost Shark emerged in April, The War Zone pointed out its lack of large, extendable masts found on many other comparable designs, such as the Orca that Boeing is developing for the U.S. Navy. On other UUVs, masts like these are generally used to support sensors, communications, and propulsion systems. Ghost Shark does have a lower-profile swept-back sail on top of its nose section.
On the military side, in addition to the capabilities being developed for Australia’s Ghost Sharks, “we’ve had requests for over a dozen new payloads, which we’ve got some level of conceptual design on, and there are active discussions on,” according to Arnott. The company is also exploring commercial applications for the UUVs.
Specific details about any of these payloads remain scant. A suite of sonars and other sensors would be needed to meet the Royal Australian Navy’s persistent ISR requirements. What the “strike” capabilities for the RAN might entail remains unclear, but Ghost Shark could well be configured to launch torpedoes or missiles, as well as loitering munitions, or lay mines. Systems capable of launching non-kinetic attacks, such as electronic warfare jammers, are another possibility.
Anduril’s Arnott regularly describes Ghost Shark as a “mothership,” as well, and has alluded to it being capable of serving as a launch platform for other uncrewed systems, including ones designed to operate in highly autonomous networked swarms, in the past. Swarms inherently offer flexibility in how their individual components can be configured and, by extension, in what missions they can be tasked to perform.
“A big part of why you have an extra large vehicle is as a mothership,” Arnott told The War Zone and other outlets at a media roundtable after Ghost Shark’s public unveiling in April. “So you know, having autonomy controlling autonomy. This is actually a masterclass in use of Lattice.”
Lattice is Anduril’s proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package, which it has been developing in parallel with its still-growing portfolio of uncrewed systems across all domains.
“I think the mind can run wild with what you can do with a very large payload bay. But having 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 kind of the vision … of what Lattice is about,” Arnott also said in April, speaking generally, in response to a specific question about whether Ghost Shark might act as a mothership for smaller uncrewed platforms. “I’ll let you connect some dots there.”
In his more recent interview with The War Zone, Arnott also said that interest Anduril has been seeing in Ghost Shark on the commercial side has had to do with employing the UUV as an alternative to tethered remotely operated vehicles and larger vessels on the surface “primarily around … seabed survey [work] and seeing how to interact with things on the seafloor.”
Though Arnott did not explicitly make this link, new and improved ways of surveying the seafloor and manipulating objects on the seabed are things that would also be of clear interest to armed forces, as well as intelligence agencies.
As already noted, proving out new payloads and demonstrating Ghost Shark’s readily reconfigurable architecture are key aspects of the work Anduril now expects to do on the design in the United States. The company also says it wants to showcase its ability to manufacture and otherwise support the platform outside of Australia for future customers, possibly including the U.S. Navy.
So, our intent here is to have this vehicle be able to take U.S. payloads, and for those payloads to be 100% built here in the United States. So, with U.S. steel, U.S. engineers, U.S. guts for these payloads, and add it to the vehicle,” Arnott said. “The intent is to start to work with the U.S. customer community, of which, you know, there’s a number of parties, including the US Navy, etc, to start to prove that out and show that we can build our mission capability at the edge… [and not] always have to go back to the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] location.”
“We’re very much thinking about manufacturability, so the ability to kind of push these things out at scale,” Arnott added. “We’ve announced two different factories, one in Australia, one in the U.S. Both of those will be set up in order to build… both [Ghost Shark] vehicles and payloads.”
“Scaling has been kind of a central tenant to the program. … some of the mistakes in the past of similar subsea capabilities [is that they] are kind of created with quite exotic designs, and typically, subsea and submarine capabilities are built in small numbers,” Arnott also said at the roundtable back in April. “We’re expecting this to be built in very large numbers. So proving out that supply chain, proving out the production system, has been actually part of this program. … We’ve been very deliberate in the design of the vehicle … no exotic materials [and] approaches that are easily scaled.”
You can read more about Anduril’s planned “hyperscale” factory in the United States, where it expects to produce an array of other products unrelated to Ghost Shark, and its broader vision for manufacturing here. With the U.S. military especially, there is growing interest in not only being able to accelerate the development of new capabilities, but also the ability to quickly start producing them in useful quantities, a broader trend The War Zone has been tracking closely.
Having a Ghost Shark in the United States will offer other testing opportunities, including when it comes to work to expand the UUV’s performance envelope and autonomous capabilities. Arnott stressed the continued need to build “trust” in the UUV’s ability to perform tasks autonomously, which is an increasingly common theme in such developments more generally. This, in turn, requires massive amounts of repetitive testing to help refine underlying software algorithms. Uncrewed undersea platforms add additional challenges given that they can more easily find themselves operating alone and out of contact with a human operator than drones in the air or on the ground.
“There’s just a lot of test points for us to hit. So, having the ability to have multiple Ghost Sharks, and particularly in different waters around the world, such that we can burn down those test points and just grow our trust and the customer’s trust by testing and ‘show me, don’t tell me,’ is kind of a really big part of why we’ve done this” and brought the UUV to the United States, Arnott explained.
While much remains to be learned about Ghost Shark and its capabilities, a picture is emerging of a highly adaptable design that could find itself tasked with a wide variety of missions in the future. With what happens beneath the waves emerging as an especially critical area of future warfare, this is also an arena where Anduril may face increasing competition.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com