Navy League 2025: Demand signal continues to grow UUVs

HII says the demand signal is strong for its REMUS UUVs. (HII)

US Navy (USN) and industry officials said they see a continuing increasing demand for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and a growing mission set for the vehicles.

“On the uncrewed underwater, we really have the only production vehicle in place,” according to Chris Kastner, president and CEO of HII, whose Mission Technologies union produces the UUVs.

“We're just starting our production run,” Kastner said on 2 April during a media briefing in advance of the the Navy League Sea-Air-Space 2025 annual conference and exposition, which started on 7 April. “We have a very good demand signal right now.”

He added, “We paid very close attention to the technologies that the DoD [Department of Defense] was focused on. And we replicated that within the division.”

The HII UUV was the first underwater launch and recovery from a Virginia-class submarine, Kastner noted.

Other HII and USN officials have been recently underscoring the growing importance of UUVs – and the desire to adapt the vehicles particularly to submarine operations.

“We've been launching and recovering UUVs from submarines for a little over 10 years now,” Duane Fotheringham, president of the Unmanned Systems group in HII's Mission Technologies division, said on 25 March during an online panel on autonomous undersea warfare hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank.

“Initially we were doing it out of the dry deck shelters and then there was some efforts where we were launching out of the torpedo tubes and swinging back into dry deck shelters or being recovered by other platforms,” Fotheringham added.