The Netherlands Ministry of Defence authorised Dutch Naval Design on 4 August to begin designing 12-metre anti-submarine warfare (ASW) uncrewed surface vessels, and to complete the purchase of an adapted Compact FLASH dipping sonar 1. The boats will be built by the USV Alliance, a consortium inside Dutch Naval Design, and the sonar comes from Thales Underwater Systems France 2. The frigates they will work from are a joint Dutch-Belgian order, two hulls each, designed and built by Damen Naval 3.
The tactical point sits in who makes the noise. A dipping sonar hunts by emitting a pulse and listening for the echo, which also tells every submarine in range exactly where the emitter is floating. Hang that sonar off a small robot several miles off the frigate's beam, and the warship hears the return while keeping its own transducer dry and its position unadvertised. The robot becomes the thing worth shooting at, and it costs a fraction of a frigate.
Thales agreed to buy Exail Technologies for EUR3.9bn on 6 July and signed definitive terms at the end of the month , so the group selling this sonar is also the one consolidating Europe's undersea vehicle and inertial navigation base around itself. Two navies' uncrewed programmes now route through the same corporate parent.
Belgium, which shares the frigate order, went the other way on subsea equipment. It tendered in July for twelve tethered remotely operated vehicles, where a cable runs to the boat and a human decides what the manipulator arm touches . The Dutch are cutting that cable and handing the judgement to the machine.
