By Tom Sharpe*
On Oct 19, Pat Conroy, Australia’s defence industry minister, stood in front of an extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicle (XLUUV) in a Sydney factory and declassified what it carried. The Ghost Shark, built by Anduril for the Australian navy, can lay a dozen sea mines, drop supply caches on the seabed for special forces, and release swarms of strike drones: at least 24 per boat (according to USNI) tube-launched Altius aircraft can be launched from a rack that rises out of the hull when the boat surfaces.
“The Ghost Shark now has teeth,” said Mr Conroy. Two days later the video arrived to prove it.
So what? Several things.
First is cost. For just over a quarter of a century, Britain has been one of the few nations capable of striking the land from beneath the sea. For that time, this has meant a Tomahawk cruise missile fired from one of our small fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines. The US navy and now others can also shoot Tomahawks from the vertical-launch cells of a surface warship. Either way, the missile is about $2m (£1.5m) a shot.
A Ghost Shark XLUUV submarine fits in a shipping container and is coming off a production line that opened less than a year ago: “dozens and dozens” are to be supplied under a 1.7 billion Australian dollars (just under £900m) contract, the first delivered in January. An Altius drone carries about 4kg of explosive, not a Tomahawk’s 450kg, and it is comparatively slow once fired. But a magazine you can afford to lose, in a hull you can afford to lose (ish), is a different proposition in an era where dispersed and occasionally disposable lethality is increasingly the direction of travel. And having your explosive split up into 24 chunks means the enemy has to shoot down a lot more things to defend himself.
Second, this can go inshore while remaining covert. Ghost Shark is small, quiet and shallow-draft. A tall, multi-thousand-ton nuclear submarine will not go near a river estuary; a robot one can get a long way up it. One of these could, in theory, get through the Thames Barrier and arrive underwater in the middle of London with two dozen strike drones aboard, assuming it could cope with both the tides and the sewage. Arriving adjacent to the target (or in the middle of it) would go a long way towards mitigating the slowness of the munition.
This is also a case of the much-criticised Aukus pact working as intended. Aukus Pillar 2, the technology-sharing part of the deal that everyone forgets about, is all about this sort of thing. Australia is offering the mines and the drone payload to Britain and America, and it has already shown us the way with some of their advanced radar technology. Ghost Sharks took part in the Aukus Maritime Big Play exercise off California in October, and the Royal Navy’s experimental robot equivalent – Excalibur made by MSubs of Plymouth – fired an American heavyweight torpedo in Scotland in September: an old-school weapon, with a new delivery method.
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy’s Type 93 XLUUV programme opened its doors to industry a fortnight ago and asked firms to register interest by Thursday. What will we bring to the exchange, and do we now buy into the Australian system?
Whatever happens we need to move fast, much faster than defence in the UK is used to. In the eternal game of underwater warfare cat-and-mouse, if Australia is already doing this, then GUGI, Russia’s secret underwater sabotage force, will not be far behind. The answer is investment in our own anti-submarine warfare systems (Britannia’s trident) and counter-drone capability (her shield). I have written many times that we are thin on both. Here is yet another reason to fix that.
Tom Sharpe OBE served for 27 years as a Royal Navy officer, commanding four different warships.
This article first appeared in The Telegraph and is republished with permission of the author.
