Industry responding to Navy’s interest in small unmanned systems
The U.S. Navy’s message to industry is coming through: the service is committed to buying and operating small unmanned systems on and under the water.
What’s less clear is how the Navy will procure them and with what funding — but one company says it’s moving ahead in developing disruptive systems now and will figure out the business model later.
Jon Rambeau, L3Harris’ president for Integrated Missions Systems, told Defense News the company had a couple of one-off efforts with the Navy already — two of its Arabian Fox autonomous surface vessels are operating out of Bahrain as part of U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59, and L3Harris successfully demonstrated the ability to launch and recover an unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV, from a submarine’s torpedo tube.
In neither of these cases, though, did the company actually sell its unmanned system to the Navy.