Anduril wants to build dozens of autonomous ships a year. So it’s teaming up with global shipbuilding titan HD Hyundai Heavy Industries to manufacture the type of autonomous ships the U.S. Navy wants for its hybrid fleet vision, Defense One has learned.
The first prototype, a dual-use autonomous surface vessel, will be built in Korea, but future vessels will be made in the U.S. at the former Foss Shipyard in Seattle, Wash., the company said. The Puget Sound facility “will serve as Anduril’s initial U.S. hub for low-rate vessel assembly, integration, and testing of ASVs for the MASC program,” Anduril said in a news release announcing the partnership.
But the goal is to have infrastructure in place to compete for the Navy’s Modular Attack Surface Craft, or MASC program, which is a combination of the service’s previous large and medium unmanned surface vessel programs. The Navy requested, and is still evaluating, pitches from industry earlier this year for three prototypes: a standard MASC, one with high capacity, and one for a single payload.
“We’ve been working this for some time. So we’re cutting steel in the U.S. We’re cutting steel in Korea already, you know, we’ve been working in advance of this competition to get ready for it. So, you know, we’re hopeful that it comes our way, and that will certainly accelerate the plans,” Shane Arnott, Anduril’s senior vice president of programs and engineering, told Defense One.
The partnership with HD Hyundai will help Anduril—which has made unmanned submersibles but not surface vessels—produce the autonomous vessels more quickly if the Pentagon asks.
“We’re talking dozens of ships per year…but it’s an order of magnitude beyond what current production methods can achieve,” Arnott said. “Scale is the problem that we’re trying to solve. We’ve been very deliberate in our partnership. We’ve been very deliberate in material selection. We’ve been very deliberate with the workforce. There’s further things into the supply chain and advanced manufacturing approaches that we’ve taken from other industries.”
HD Hyundai, already one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, has been expanding, including through partnerships with U.S. shipbuilders like HII to help increase domestic capacity. But shipbuilding is a historically challenging arena that newcomers such as Eureka Naval Craft, Havoc AI, Saronic, and Blue Water Autonomy are trying to navigate with shipyard partnerships and plans to build their own.
“Anduril has never built an autonomous warship like this. We’ve never delivered it at scale, but we’re teamed with one of the world’s largest and leading ship builders that does significantly more [deliveries] of far larger vessels,” said Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and head of strategy. “So with that [HD Hyundai] partnership, through the design, the development and then ultimately, the delivery of scale, we’ll feel very confident that the Anduril-Hyundai team can deliver what the U.S. Navy needs, and a lot more beyond that.”
The partnership also sets Anduril up to supply other countries with autonomous ships as global defense spending increases.
“There’s an enormous global demand for maritime capacity and autonomous warships and thinking differently about how to change naval warfare,” Brose said. “We’re eager to see where the U.S. Navy decides to go, but there’s an enormous amount of global demand out there. And for a system that is relatively low cost in terms of the maritime capability that it brings to bear, I think it is something that will have a lot of interest from a lot of partners, allies and partners.”
