By Robbin Laird
In August 2025, the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, issued a sole-source solicitation for three C2 Robotics “Speartooth” Large Uncrewed Underwater Vessels, 11-metre variant. The justification was blunt: Speartooth was the only autonomous underwater vehicle that met Navy design, size, and mission requirements for long-range, stealthy undersea delivery of ordnance and other kinetic effects. The customer was not named in C2 Robotics’ public announcements about its first international export sale. But the procurement record speaks clearly enough.
This is not a minor acquisition footnote. It is a signal that a different logic for undersea force design is now maturing, one that the United States Navy, at least at the operational level, is beginning to take seriously. Understanding why requires stepping back from the specifics of the Speartooth platform and engaging with the broader strategic argument that has been building across the drone wars, from the Black Sea to the Western Pacific.
The Lesson the Drone Wars Have Already Delivered
In Lessons from the Drone Wars: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Maritime Operations, I argued that Ukraine’s experience has already rewritten the foundational equation of modern warfare. The argument is not merely about drones as a technology. It is about what happens when a smaller, less-resourced combatant makes a deliberate strategic choice to invest in affordable, distributed, attritable systems rather than in exquisite, high-cost platforms that can only be acquired in small numbers.
The evidence is striking. Operation Spider Web, executed on June 1, 2025, deployed 117 low-cost explosive drones across five Russian airbases spanning 4,300 kilometers, destroying 41 aircraft worth approximately seven billion dollars at an equipment cost that would register as rounding error in a traditional defence procurement budget. The operation did not succeed because the drones were technologically superior. It succeeded because Ukraine had built a production ecosystem capable of generating mass, scaling from 1,000 drones annually to 4.5 million, while simultaneously developing the operational concepts to employ that mass intelligently.
Below the surface, a parallel story unfolded. Ukraine’s Sub Sea Baby underwater strike drone successfully penetrated the defended harbor at Novorossiysk and demonstrated the ability to hit a Kilo-class submarine moored inside a Russian port. That success was not simply a platform achievement. It was the product of an operational concept that first suppressed Russian ISR architecture before executing the strike, a lesson that translates directly to any navy contemplating undersea autonomous operations in a contested environment.
The core lesson I drew from both campaigns is captured in what I call the tension between “intelligent mass” and “exquisite scarcity.” Western militaries have spent decades optimizing for peak performance per hull, per aircraft, per submarine. The drone wars have demonstrated that in a protracted, high-intensity conflict, that equation breaks down. What matters is not the single most capable platform but the ability to generate and sustain enough force across enough vectors to deny the adversary decisive advantage.
Speartooth and the Industrial Philosophy That Made It
Against that backdrop, the Speartooth LUUV is not primarily a story about an impressive piece of Australian engineering. It is a story about an industrial and design philosophy that takes the lessons of the drone wars seriously and applies them to the undersea domain.
C2 Robotics built Speartooth from the outset as a platform for undersea mass. Several choices flow from that intent. First, the vehicle is payload-agnostic, designed as an undersea truck that can carry sensors, weapons, communications relay packages, or seabed warfare tools without requiring a full redesign of the platform. Second, it exploits the absence of a human crew to optimize hull volume and energy budgets for range, endurance, and payload rather than for habitability. Third, and most consequentially from an industrial perspective, Speartooth leans heavily on commercial electric-vehicle style components and manufacturing approaches, targeting a unit cost in the hundreds of thousands to low millions of dollars at scale.
That cost discipline is what makes mass possible. It is also what distinguishes Speartooth structurally from the trajectory of the U.S. Navy’s Orca Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicle program. Orca was conceived with ambition: a large, highly capable autonomous submarine with substantial modular payload capacity for missions including minelaying. Yet independent assessments from the Government Accountability Office documented cost growth of at least 64 percent over original estimates and delays of more than three years, with roughly $242 million in additional costs on top of an already ambitious baseline. The culprit was familiar: the program moved into fabrication before resolving key technology risks and before demonstrating that the industrial base could reliably produce the design.
Orca remains a valuable learning vehicle for autonomy, power management, and undersea system integration. But it is not a model for generating the kind of undersea mass that a serious Indo-Pacific conflict would demand. Boutique systems, however technically impressive, do not change the force balance when they can only be fielded in single digits.
C2 has made a strategic virtue of that contrast. Smaller platform, fewer grandiose promises, ruthless focus on what can actually be built, afforded, and sustained in real industrial conditions. The NUWC Division Newport procurement of three Speartooth hulls suggests that at least some corners of the U.S. Navy have absorbed that argument.
The Australian Ecosystem Behind the Platform
The Speartooth sale to the U.S. also needs to be read in the context of what Australia is building. The April 2026 National Defence Strategy confirmed Speartooth as part of the Australian Defence Force force structure, not a developmental experiment, but an operational system. That endorsement matters because it reflects accumulated operational experience. Speartooth has been trialled in demanding environments including exercises such as Talisman Sabre and the Maritime Big Play autonomous warfare series. C2 and potential customers have real-world data on how the platform behaves under operationally representative conditions.
Speartooth does not sit alone in Australia’s undersea portfolio. Anduril’s Ghost Shark, a larger Extra-Large Autonomous Underwater Vehicle developed with the Defence Science and Technology Group and the Royal Australian Navy, is moving into serial production with plans for dozens of vehicles and a program value around 1.7 billion Australian dollars. Ghost Shark is designed for the most demanding deep-penetration missions where range, payload capacity, and survivability require a larger, more complex and capable platform.
The relationship between Ghost Shark and Speartooth is not competition. It is layering. Ghost Shark for the most demanding missions. Speartooth for presence, persistent ISR, seabed warfare, and networked roles where higher numbers and lower unit cost matter more than peak per-hull capability. Beneath both, smaller UUVs for mine countermeasures, harbour defence, and distributed sensing. This is the portfolio logic that serious undersea force design now requires, not a single exquisite answer but a tiered architecture calibrated to the range of operational problems.
Australia is not merely acquiring platforms. It is building an ecosystem: industrial capacity, operational experience, regulatory and export frameworks, and accumulated doctrine that could give it a durable position in the emerging global market for pragmatic maritime autonomous systems. The Speartooth export sale to the United States, if that is indeed what the NUWC solicitation represents, is evidence that the ecosystem is already producing internationally credible results.
What the U.S. Acquisition Signals
The significance of the NUWC procurement is not merely transactional. It reflects a recognition, at the operational requirements level, that no domestically available LUUV design met the specific combination of range, stealthiness, size, and kinetic delivery capability that the Navy needed. That is a remarkable statement about the current state of U.S. undersea autonomous systems development and a pointed commentary on what years of investment in higher-complexity, higher-cost XLUUV programs have not yet delivered at the LUUV tier.
It also signals something about the strategic logic of allied industrial cooperation that goes beyond traditional foreign military sales. Speartooth was developed with Australian Defence collaboration and has been validated through Australian exercises and operational integration. When the U.S. Navy buys it, it is not simply purchasing a platform. It is accessing accumulated operational learning, an industrial supply chain designed for contested logistics conditions, and a design philosophy specifically calibrated for the kind of attritable undersea mass that the Indo-Pacific demands.
That is precisely the kind of allied interdependence that sound AUKUS industrial cooperation should be generating,not just interoperability at the platform level but genuine cross-pollination of design philosophy, operational concept, and industrial practice.
Undersea Mass and the Strategic Argument Ahead
The broader argument embedded in the Speartooth story connects directly to what I have been developing across the Lessons from the Drone Wars and in The Age of Chaos. The strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific is not a competition that will be decided by which side fields the most capable individual platform. It will be decided by which side can generate and sustain force across enough vectors, at enough scale, and with enough operational resilience to deny the adversary the ability to concentrate and exploit advantage.
In the undersea domain, that means mass, genuinely attritable mass that can be produced in dispersed industrial facilities, transported in standard containers, supported with commercially available components, and replaced when lost without triggering a capability crisis. Speartooth is designed for exactly that condition. Its commercial component strategy, its containerised logistics footprint, its modular payload architecture, all of these flow from a clear-eyed assessment of what undersea operations under sustained contested conditions actually require.
The August 2025 NUWC solicitation is three hulls. That is a beginning, not a solution. But it represents something more important than its modest numbers suggest: a concrete acknowledgment, grounded in operational requirements, that the logic of intelligent mass is now being applied to the undersea domain, and that an Australian company has built the platform that embodies that logic most credibly at this moment.
The drone wars taught us that affordability, manufacturability, and operational simplicity at scale can generate strategic effects that exquisite complexity cannot. Speartooth is undersea warfare’s answer to that lesson. The U.S. Navy, it appears, is beginning to listen.
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The Autonomous Revolution: How Australia Could Transform Defense Through Maritime Robotics