The Navy Changed the Rules. Industry Showed Up.

Week 22 | May 2026

While booths at Sea Air Space were still being packed down, Seasats CEO Mike Flanigan posted something worth reading.

Seasats has logged 130,000-plus nautical miles of autonomous surface operations across military and civilian customers. Flanigan has done some useful arithmetic. Fast-boat USV missions under 24 hours run at roughly a 1:1.25 operator-to-platform ratio. Persistent missions over 30 days get closer to 1:4.5, depending on mission complexity. Useful numbers. Not ‘zero humans in the loop’ - what Flanigan called a chest thump from companies ‘probably more used to pitching VCs than to training operators’. He noted that the demos at the show had chase boats a few hundred yards offshore, human operators visible to anyone who zoomed out.

This is not a reason to dismiss what happened at Sea Air Space 2026. It is the right lens to look at it through. Autonomy marketing tends to run ahead of operational reality. The structural shift underneath it was real.

On 26 March 2026, the Navy’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Robotic and Autonomous Systems, Rebecca Gassler, cancelled the Modular Attack Surface Craft program and opened a new solicitation by 7am the same morning. The MUSV Family of Systems marketplace was live.

MASC was a $2.1 billion rapid prototyping effort structured around a single winner. Proposals in, evaluation, contract award, development. The standard model. Tridentis CEO David Jochum put the outcome plainly in a LinkedIn post: “Investors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the MASC program and ultimately we won’t get a single USV from it. Tremendous waste of resources and time and very bad for an industry that is becoming more reliant on outside investors especially in shipbuilding.”

What replaced it is structurally different. The MUSV marketplace is an Other Transaction Authority solicitation under 10 U.S.C. section 4022. Proposals closed 17 April 2026. On-water testing runs through the summer, with a hard deadline of 30 September 2026. Companies whose vessels pass testing receive $15 million. First production vessels are expected by 30 September 2027. Multiple vendors can qualify and there is no single winner. Gassler’s framing at the March briefing: “It’s the first of what will be a recurring marketplace. Our goal is to create a regular and recurring marketplace, not just for the MUSV, but for other classes of vessels as well, over time.”

That sentence is doing a lot of work. The Navy is not buying a platform. It is building a procurement architecture. CNO Caudle’s “Plan C-Cubed,” the Containerised Capabilities Campaign Plan he launched the same week, made the logic explicit: containerised, modular, swappable payloads across a recurring supplier base. “If you can put it in a container, I want it.”

Sea Air Space 2026 was the first real industry response to that architecture. The response was immediate and it followed a pattern.

Every significant MUSV announcement at Sea Air Space paired a platform specialist with an autonomy integration partner, a domestic manufacturing footprint, and a modular payload approach. Every one.

Saildrone unveiled the Spectre, a 52-metre, 250-tonne MUSV in two variants: Silent Endurance for ASW, Stealth Strike for kinetic missions. The hull goes to Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, capacity five vessels per year. Lockheed Martin is the mission integrator, embedding Mk-41 vertical launch capability in containerised form. Long-lead materials were ordered in October 2025. Sea trials are scheduled for early 2027. At roughly $40 million per vessel, Saildrone CEO Richard Jenkins told reporters the Spectre met 100 percent of the marketplace requirements.

Anduril announced two things simultaneously. First, a partnership with Kraken Technology Group for the K5 KRAKEN and K7 SABRE small USV family, manufactured under licence in the US with Lattice autonomy software integrated by Anduril. Kraken brought $49 million in USSOCOM OTA revenue and Project Beehive (UK) operational heritage into the partnership. 

Second, and less covered, Anduril confirmed a three-way arrangement for the MUSV marketplace itself: HD Hyundai designing and building the first hull in Ulsan, South Korea; Edison Chouest Offshore as the US production partner; and Anduril integrating Lattice autonomy and mission systems. The first Ulsan-built hull is expected in the water by the end of 2026, with Anduril taking ownership for US-coast testing at that point. ECO’s Gulf Coast yards handle the production run from there.

HII announced four new ROMULUS 151 vessels entering production at Breaux Brothers in Louisiana, and signed a strategic MOU with Applied Intuition on 21 April to integrate Warship OS across the ROMULUS fleet. The MOU covers autonomous surface operations, future manned combatant design, and REMUS UUV systems. Applied Intuition, valued at approximately $15 billion, has expanded from automotive AI into defence physical systems. HII is running three parallel autonomy partnerships in early 2026 and framing them as the foundation for an AI-defined shipbuilding capability.

Hanwha Defense USA and Magnet Defense announced joint development of the H38, a 38-metre MUSV. Magnet’s commercial thesis rests on the M48, a 48-metre catamaran predecessor that completed a 32,000 nautical mile uncrewed round trip from Miami to American Samoa in 2024, transiting the Panama Canal in Sea State 9. The H38 combines Magnet's endurance platform with Hanwha's containerised missile payload integration. Autonomy comes from Magnet's proprietary DriveAI stack, with production through Hanwha's existing US facilities.

Saronic, not at Sea Air Space but in Taipei two days later, signed an MOU with Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology on 24 April. The agreement covers AI-enabled command and control, modular USV design, and joint engineering exchange. NCSIST is already contracted to produce 1,320 indigenous Kuai Chi attack USVs. Saronic is positioning for what could become the largest allied USV industrial ramp outside the continental United States.

Five bids. Five teams. Every one: platform specialist, autonomy integrator, domestic manufacturer, modular payload capability.

OTI has been running a thesis since early on: the technology gap in maritime autonomy is close to zero. The institutional gap is everything. What blocks deployment is not engineering capability. It is procurement doctrine, regulation, certification pipelines, and risk-averse acquisition culture.

The MUSV marketplace is not proof the institutional gap is gone. It is proof the Navy found a way around it for one class of vessel. Other Transaction Authority sidesteps the Federal Acquisition Regulation's requirements -  the compliance machinery that makes traditional defence procurement so slow. Multiple winners eliminate the single-point-of-failure problem that killed MASC. A recurring structure prevents the technology-lock that killed Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk. On-water testing first removes paper proposals and forces operational demonstration before money flows. 

At Sea Air Space, industry built teams optimised for this specific procurement architecture, not the old one. When the structure changed, the teams changed. Fast.

Rear Adm. Christopher Alexander at the Surface Navy Association Symposium in January put the direction plainly: by 2045, roughly 45 percent of the surface force is expected to be unmanned systems. That is 19 years from now. The clock started in January. The on-water test deadline is September. The first production vessel lands September 2027.

The marketing may well remain ahead of the operational reality. Flanigan’s arithmetic is worth keeping in mind. Operator-to-platform ratios on persistent missions are still a significant improvement over crewed alternatives, and the economics only sharpen as endurance improves. Persistence is the cost driver. Saildrone, Seasats, Magnet, and HD Hyundai have all built their commercial theses around it.

OMB Director Russell Vought closed Sea Air Space on 22 April with an explicit threat to the established shipbuilders: “If we cannot get the ships we need from traditional sources at cost and on time, we will get them from other shipyards.” The Finland model for icebreakers, foreign-designed hulls built in US yards, has been named as the template for future frigate and destroyer procurement. A $1.85 billion FY2027 reconciliation study line item is already open for evaluation of foreign frigate and destroyer designs. The unmanned surface fleet is the first test of that logic at production scale. Sea Air Space was the opening round.

The marketplace has replied.

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Since you have been, thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Mick

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