Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles

Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) are part of the Navy's family of UUVs, in support of maintaining the Navy's undersea superiority. They are designed with mission sensors, communications, power, navigation, autonomy and target recognition, and payloads. Large UUVs provide the Navy with significantly increased endurance and payload capacity over small and medium class UUVs. They are deployed from vessels of opportunity and piers. The Navy initially developed the Snakehead Program to meet the requirement for large UUV. The Snakehead LUUV program was a CNO/ASN(RDA) approved Accelerated Acquisition that had a phased approach to grow capabilities at a manageable level of risk. The Snakehead Program is cancelled, starting in FY 2026. The Dragonfish LUUV program was developed to meet this requirement. The Dragonfish LUUV is a rapid and iterative prototyping project that addresses a priority Fleet requirement for a below-water Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) task with classification of targets of interest and activation of a purpose-built payload. The system consists of a vehicle, a payload, and a support system. The Dragonfish LUUV is a follow-on effort to a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) that assessed commercially available LUUVs. The project is rapidly prototyping with V1 vehicles and conducting in-water, system-level testing. This will inform prototyping for V2 vehicles, which are intended to be Minimal Viable Products (MVPs).