Boeing sells the Orca on distance. The company advertises 6,500 nautical miles of range, months on station with nobody aboard, and a hull about as long as a semi-trailer. Every uncrewed submarine on the market gets pitched the same way, because the swimming is what the customer is buying.<\/p>\n
The Navy is now funding an undersea weapon built on the opposite premise.<\/p>\n
Liberator does not move. An Orca lowers it onto the floor of a strait and leaves, and the thing stays down there for months with a heavyweight torpedo sealed inside it, listening. Carter Johnston at Naval News<\/a> pulled the newest details out of the Navy’s fiscal 2027 research and development budget on August 26. Liberator has now surfaced in two straight budget cycles without a single Navy announcement attached to it.<\/p>\n Johnston found the name for the first time in July 2025<\/a>, buried in the fiscal 2026 research, development, test and evaluation documents published by the Navy and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. The Navy had attached $50 million to it and described it as a way to launch torpedoes, or similar devices, by some method other than a submarine’s torpedo tube. The documents named no platform, no test schedule and no delivery date.<\/p>\n This year’s paperwork says considerably more. The Navy files Liberator under torpedo and mine warfare and calls it a “stationary system placed on the seabed to launch various payloads”. Fiscal 2026 money went into the prototyping phase for design and fabrication of a full-scale test asset, and the Navy requested $27 million for fiscal 2027 against the $50 million it put behind the program in fiscal 2026, according to ExecutiveBiz<\/a>.<\/p>\n Program Executive Office, Unmanned and Small Combatants runs the effort, and the engineering sits at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s Newport Division in Rhode Island. PEO USC briefed industry partners on Liberator and a companion payload called Hunter at a classified event in October 2025. Navy officials declined to comment on the specifics.<\/p>\n The Mk 48 has been the only heavyweight torpedo on American submarines since 1972, and Lockheed Martin builds the Advanced Capability version in service today. Navy and Lockheed figures put the weapon at 21 inches across, 3,520 pounds loaded, and a 650-pound (295 kg) warhead. The torpedo is meant to go off in the water underneath a hull instead of striking it, so the gas bubble lifts the ship, drops it, and snaps its back. Public estimates of the ADCAP’s range run past 12 to 21 nautical miles (14 to 24 miles), while the Navy’s own released figure stays deliberately vague at greater than five miles. We went through the economics of that torpedo<\/a> back in July, and none of it is cheap.<\/p>\n General Dynamics Mission Systems already builds the Navy a weapon on this principle. Hammerhead is a moored mine with a Mk 54 lightweight torpedo sealed inside a capsule, waiting on acoustic sensors to pick out a submarine.<\/p>\n Hammerhead’s Mk 54 carries a 100-pound (44 kg) warhead, and the Mk 48 that Liberator is built around carries 650 pounds (295 kg). Naval News describes a warhead that size as capable of badly damaging almost any ship afloat, from a corvette to a carrier.<\/p>\n Hammerhead hunts submarines. Liberator waits for the carriers too.<\/p>\n Money for encapsulated weapons has climbed fast. General Dynamics won $92.9 million in 2021 to design, test and deliver Hammerhead prototypes, took a $20.7 million modification in 2024, and then picked up $229.7 million in early August<\/a> for 188 more units and eight sets of support equipment.<\/p>\n That work runs to October 2028. Both weapons descend from the same Cold War ancestor, the Mk 60 CAPTOR, which sealed a lightweight Mk 46 inside an aluminum shell, anchored it to the bottom and left it listening.<\/p>\n Boeing’s Orca measures 51 feet in its base configuration, and a 34-foot (10-meter) payload module adds up to 17,600 pounds (8 metric tons) of dry cargo and stretches the vehicle to about 85 feet. Boeing handed the Navy the first test asset, XLE0, in December 2023, and Boeing christened XLE2 in March 2026.<\/p>\n The Government Accountability Office reported in 2022 that the program was $242 million over budget and three years late. The Navy ran the vehicle through a 1,000-nautical-mile Pacific transit in July, its first long-range run, according to Rear Adm. Chris Cavanaugh, commander of Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet. Our earlier piece on the Navy’s largest uncrewed submarine<\/a> covers how that hull got here.<\/p>\n Naval News reads the fiscal 2027 language as pointing straight at that payload module, because the requirement attached to Hunter depends on Liberator. Older renderings of the Orca’s mission bay showed at least twelve heavyweight torpedo launchers mounted inside the vehicle, which would have parked the drone itself inside torpedo range of whatever it was shooting at. Naval News frames Liberator as the way to keep the uncrewed submarines out of direct combat.<\/p>\n Liberator takes the launcher off the drone and leaves it on the bottom. The Orca drops and goes home.<\/p>\n Hunter is the Orca’s expeditionary mining payload, the one meant to work in contested and denied water. The fiscal 2027 documents state that Hunter’s acquisition strategy will be developed by the first quarter of fiscal 2028, timed to Liberator’s schedule. One program is now the gate for the other.<\/p>\n ExecutiveBiz reports the Navy requested $98 million in fiscal 2027 for the Combat Autonomous Maritime Platform effort that carries Hunter and leans on stationary systems like Liberator.<\/p>\n The same request puts $89 million behind the Compact Rapid Attack Weapon, a new lightweight torpedo, against the $24 million provided in fiscal 2026. Naval News flags CRAW as another payload Liberator could eventually hold, along with one-way attack drones developed through the Defense Innovation Unit.<\/p>\n Other Transaction Authority is the mechanism the Pentagon uses to hand several companies money at once, watch what comes back, and skip most of the paperwork that governs a normal defense contract. Several vendors build competing prototypes. The Navy then decides which design, if any, goes into production.<\/p>\n Johnston’s report names both as the water where a seabed launcher would matter, with adversary submarines, carriers, amphibious ships and replenishment vessels held at risk inside the First Island Chain. He argues that systems mounted to the seafloor would be extremely difficult to disable. The Navy’s budget language is drier and says only that the targets sit in hard-to-reach places.<\/p>\n Seabed hardware keeps showing up in American programs, from the Pentagon’s underwater sensor lines<\/a> to seafloor power nodes for recharging drones<\/a>. A launcher with a Mk 48 in it is the loudest thing anyone has proposed putting down there.<\/p>\n Naval News is a single outlet reading a budget document, and the “carrier killer” framing belongs to the publication rather than to the Navy. Nobody in uniform has stood at a podium and described any of this.<\/p>\n The Navy expects to award a competitive Other Transaction Authority contract to several vendors for prototypes in the current fiscal quarter, according to Naval News, and fiscal 2026 ends on September 30. Production contracts would follow in fiscal 2027. A maintenance and operational test plan gets finalized during 2027, alongside initial training for fleet sailors, ahead of an end-to-end demonstration at sea late that year.<\/p>\n Carter Johnston, the George Washington University undergraduate who found the program in the first place, filed his report on August 26, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Boeing sells the Orca on distance. The company advertises 6,500 nautical miles of range, months on station with nobody aboard, … <\/p>\nThe Navy wrote a line and a half about it, then stopped<\/h2>\n
A sealed Mk 48 kills a different class of ship<\/h2>\n
Orca is the truck, not the weapon<\/h2>\n
Hunter cannot move until Liberator does<\/h2>\n
Naval News points at the Taiwan and Luzon Straits<\/h2>\n
The prototype contracts land before September 30<\/h2>\n