Defense procurement usually runs like a knockout tournament. Two companies build competing versions of the same thing, the Pentagon picks one, and the loser’s design goes in a drawer forever. That is the story behind more or less every fighter jet you can name. The Navy just did the opposite underwater.<\/p>\n
On March 25, the Defense Innovation Unit put L3Harris on contract for a system that fires an autonomous drone out of a submerged submarine’s torpedo tube and catches it again on the way back<\/a>. Five weeks later, on April 27, the same office handed HII a contract to do the same job with a different drone<\/a>.<\/p>\n Both systems answer to the same acronym: TTLR, for Torpedo Tube Launch and Recovery. Nobody lost. Neither award has a public price tag, and neither company will say how many units it is delivering.<\/p>\n Firing something out of a tube is a century-old solved problem. Getting it back inside a submarine that refuses to surface is the half that has been chewing through Navy programs for years, and the service has apparently decided it is not betting that capability on one supplier.<\/p>\n L3Harris got an Other Transaction Authority award, the fast-track contracting vehicle DIU uses to skip the usual paperwork marathon. The drone is the Iver4 900, a 2.5-meter, sub-230-pound machine rated to 300 meters that we went through spec by spec when the March award landed<\/a>. The company builds them in Fall River, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n Nino DiCosmo, president of L3Harris’ Maritime business, put the status bluntly in the March release, calling TTLR “not a future capability, it’s answering combatant commander needs today.”<\/p>\n HII’s version runs the REMUS family instead. The company has delivered more than 750 REMUS vehicles to over 30 countries, 14 of them NATO members, and says more than 90% are still in service after two decades.<\/p>\n It also happens to build the submarines. HII is one of the two American yards that assemble nuclear boats, so it is selling the Navy a drone launcher for hulls it welded itself.<\/p>\n You will see it written that the Navy canceled its tube-recovered drone, that it took three tries and two dead programs to get here, and that the effort called Yellow Moray died weeks after it worked. The Navy’s own program office says otherwise, and has said so on the record for a year.<\/p>\n Here is the record. Navy budget documents show the service terminated the Mk 20 Razorback on February 10, 2025, citing schedule delays and an inability to meet key requirements.<\/p>\n The Mk 20 was the torpedo-tube launch and recovery variant of the Razorback line, and its death is real. We covered the fallout in our look at the plan to pair underwater drones with the mini-subs that carry SEALs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yellow Moray is a different animal. A Naval Sea Systems Command spokesperson told The War Zone in July 2025 that it was never another name for the Mk 20, that it began as a separate special project, and that it has since been folded into the Mk 19 program of record as the Mk 19 Mod 1 variant.<\/p>\n NAVSEA went further. Killing the Mk 20, the spokesperson said, freed up resources that would go toward accelerating Yellow Moray.<\/p>\n That is the opposite of a cancellation, and the follow-through is on the record. Reporting from the Combined Naval Event conference on July 13 has the Virginia-class attack submarine USS Delaware operating in the Euro-Atlantic with a REMUS 600 it launches and recovers through its torpedo tube, and doing it since 2025, under Yellow Moray.<\/p>\n So the body count is one tube-recovery program, not two. Add Snakehead in 2023, a bigger drone killed partly because it would not fit the dry deck shelters that carry vehicles bolted to the outside of a hull.<\/p>\n The honest version is messier than the cancellation myth and messier than the press releases, and it sits in the Naval Institute’s own pages.<\/p>\n Writing in Proceedings last October, Submarine Force leadership laid out the timeline<\/a>: Delaware was fitted with the Yellow Moray launch-and-recovery system for two REMUS 600-based vehicles. Later in 2024, working up for deployment, the boat launched the first one. It was “lost and never recovered.”<\/p>\n A recovery system losing the thing it exists to recover is not a great opening night. Delaware sailed in 2025 with one of the two drones it was supposed to have.<\/p>\n Then February 2025, in a Norwegian fjord. Per the Navy’s own account, the vehicle refused to come back into the tube after repeated attempts. A surface support vessel fished it out, technicians found damage to a critical part, and the Submarine Force shipped the drone back to the United States rather than let the problem eat the boat’s deployment schedule.<\/p>\n The part came out, a new one went in, and the drone flew back to theater. At which point the crew hit a problem no engineer had budgeted for. There was no crane.<\/p>\n So the sailors worked out how to push the repaired drone into a torpedo tube from the harbor using divers. The Navy logged it as the first pierside diver torpedo tube load of a UUV, in Norway, and it happened because there was no other way to get the thing back in the boat.<\/p>\n A week later Delaware ran three sorties on the same vehicle, six to ten hours each, launching and recovering through the tube with nobody in the water. Vice Adm. Rob Gaucher, then commander of Submarine Forces, summed it up in the Navy’s release: “Delaware is just the beginning.”<\/a><\/p>\n L3Harris’ March release claims primacy outright: its system, the company says, was the first to successfully launch and recover an AUV from a submarine. The Navy’s release on Delaware credits Yellow Moray with the first-ever forward deployed submarine torpedo tube launch and recovery of a UUV to complete a tactical objective.<\/p>\n Both statements are true, because they are not the same claim, and the qualifiers are doing all the work.<\/p>\n Back in November 2023, Gaucher told Defense News that Submarine Force Atlantic had run Yellow Moray with an HII-built REMUS while Submarine Force Pacific ran a parallel effort called Rat Trap, which launched and recovered an L3Harris drone from a torpedo tube. Two coasts, two suppliers, two shots at the same trick, both live at once.<\/p>\n Which is why the fleet’s two current contracts look less like a photo finish and more like the Navy quietly refusing to close either door. When two vendors are both first, read the sentence to the end.<\/p>\n Vice Adm. Richard Seif, the current commander of the Submarine Force and Commander of Allied Submarine Command, spent his time at the Combined Naval Event conference this month describing what he calls “seabed superiority.”<\/a> Not awareness of the seabed. Control of it.<\/p>\n Seif said the Navy is deploying seabed warfare capability today, for survey, for attribution, and across defensive and offensive operations. The goal, he said, is to make it routine rather than occasional, plugged in continuously and delivered at scale.<\/p>\nTwo contracts, five weeks apart, for the same job<\/h2>\n
The program everyone keeps burying is deployed in Europe right now<\/h2>\n
The Navy lost a drone before it managed to catch one<\/h2>\n
Everybody in this story was first at something<\/h2>\n
The submarine boss wants these things to do more than look around<\/h2>\n