The Navy plans to purchase several lots of HII’s Remus 300 UUVs for its Small Unmanned Undersea Vessel program. (Photo courtesy of Huntingon Ingalls Industries.)
WASHINGTON: The Navy is preparing to purchase “multiple production lots” of a small unmanned undersea system from Huntington Ingalls Industries.
The service announced its intent to buy HII’s drone, the Remus 300, for its Lionfish SUUV program in a presolicitation notice published on Friday. Presolicitation notices are routine announcements the military makes prior to most weapon systems acquisitions but do not imply any money has changed hands yet.
HII and L3Harris were both under consideration for the program and participated last year in operational evaluations hosted by the Defense Innovation Unit. Although the public notice says the service will move forward with HII, it is not clear whether the Navy could still award further contracts to L3Harris. The military does occasionally award contracts to multiple vendors following technology evaluations.
Part of the Navy’s planned family of systems, Lionfish’s main role will be intelligence gathering with the Navy’s expeditionary mine countermeasures company. As its name suggests, the SUUV is only 150 pounds and requires just a few sailors to deploy it. It will be based on HII’s Remus 300, a “man-portable UUV” that is “designed for modularity… [and] can be reconfigured with a range of sensors and payloads to meet mission requirements,” according to a statement the company published last year when announcing the government of New Zealand had ordered four UUVs.
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Contacted today by Breaking Defense, a company spokesman could not immediately comment on the Navy’s notice.
Being selected to fulfill the Lionfish program is a big win for HII, which has spent recent years making aggressive moves to better position itself to compete in the unmanned systems market.
Capt. Dan Malatesta, the officer overseeing the Lionfish program, said last year that the drone’s predecessor, the Mk 18 Mod 1 Swordfish vehicle, has “maxed out its capability for computing power and those sorts of things,” Defense News reported.
The announcement comes just days after President Joe Biden signed the Pentagon’s fiscal 2022 budget into law — a factor that likely held up the Navy’s announcement as well as a bevy of other military contract actions — and follows Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday’s remarks that he wants to bring more unmanned systems to the fleet in the short term.
Beyond making a decision following DIU’s competition, Navy budget justification documents state the service this year will focus on developing, integrating and testing various sonar technologies for the drone as well as bringing it into compliance with the Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture, an overarching technology document that aims to standardize the technologies onboard all Navy unmanned vessels.
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