Northrop Grumman plans to submit its Very Lightweight Torpedo for the Navy’s Compact Rapid Attack Weapon competition. (Photo courtesy of Northrop Grumman.)

WASHINGTON: After a congressional budget cut forced a schedule day, Northrop Grumman says it expects a Navy solicitation for a new torpedo will come later this year.

David Portner, senior program manager for undersea weapons at Northrop Grumman, told Breaking Defense in an interview last week that he expects a request for prototype proposals on the Compact Rapid Attack Weapon to be published in late August or early September.

The RFPP was originally scheduled for January 2021, but a cut in the fiscal year 2021 appropriations bill forced the Navy to delay. Lawmakers slashed approximately $12 million from the associated account citing “compact rapid attack weapon concurrency.”

The Navy has a pre-existing contract vehicle, established by the Undersea Technology Innovation Consortium, which is made up of dozens of companies ranging from small firms to defense primes. Only members of that consortium will be allowed to compete for the contract.

The competition will mark the Navy’s first new torpedo in over two decades and comes during a sustained push to pay much more attention to the subsurface threats posed by China and Russia.

Northrop, which is touting its Very Lightweight Torpedo as its entry for the competition, is the only major company to have announced its intention to go for the contract award. In addition to being about a third of the weight of most torpedoes, Portner said VLWT’s strength is in its modular design which segregates the weapon into four compartments.

“You don’t have to rewrite the software every time you improve the capability and say, the sensor, or the warhead, or the power plant, or the control system in detail,” he said. The company or the Navy can “make improvements without having to do extensive testing throughout the entire weapon because of the modularity both of the hardware and the software.”

While the Compact Rapid Attack Weapon will be an offensive capability, the technology was originally designed to be defensive — marketed as the “anti-torpedo torpedo — and was installed onboard several aircraft carriers. Penn State, which has played a major part in the technology’s development since its inception, and the Navy eventually started looking at ways to give the torpedo multiple mission sets.

The Navy in 2018 ultimately canceled that program and has since been sundowning the system from its carrier fleet. But Portner said if the service wanted to employ the VLWT as a defensive capability, it would largely be a matter of using different software.

“Frankly, I think it would not be a stretch that you could actually make it do both simultaneously but that would be a third software package,” he added.

A spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command did not respond to questions about the forthcoming competition.