At the Combined Naval Event from 19 to 21 May in Farnborough, the American shipbuilder HII pushed its uncrewed underwater vehicles toward the Royal Navy through a British partner.1 An uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) is a submarine-shaped robot that runs without a crew, used to hunt mines, inspect seabed cables, and scout ahead of manned ships. HII said it has delivered more than 750 REMUS UUVs to over 30 countries, and that a REMUS 600 was launched and recovered through the torpedo tube of the submarine USS Delaware. That manoeuvre lets a submerged boat send a robot ahead to scout or hunt mines without surfacing.
The UK hook is the tie-up with Britain's Babcock on the Autonomous Maritime Operations and Recovery initiative (ARMOR Force) for the Royal Navy, plus an enlarged HII facility at Portchester in Hampshire, positioned as a European hub for allied navies. Routing the pitch through Babcock and a UK site converts a US export bid into a British industrial presence that is harder to displace on sovereignty grounds, the same ground on which European buyers are pressing for home-built kit.
L3Harris said on 27 May its sub-launched Iver4 900 underwater vehicle is in delivery to the US Navy under a Defense Innovation Unit contract, a marker of how fast torpedo-tube-launched robots are reaching the fleet.2 Both HII and L3Harris demonstrated the launch-and-recovery trick within the same window. For European navies the read is procurement urgency, since seabed cables and pipelines now sit inside the threat picture and the robots to defend them are arriving from American primes first.
