For about two years, if you asked the Australian government what its Ghost Shark drone submarine was actually for, you got the same four words back: intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike. Which is the defense-industry way of saying “stuff.” Anduril, the American company that builds it, wasn’t much more forthcoming, and the few photos that got out showed a long black hull with its doors shut.<\/p>\n
Then on Monday, October 19, Defense Industry Minister Pat Conroy stood in front of one at Anduril’s factory in Sydney with the top of the hull open, and two days later Anduril put out a video of the thing surfacing and firing an aerial drone off its back.<\/p>\n
So now we know what the “strike” part means, or at least part of it.<\/p>\n
The video Anduril posted on October 21<\/a> is short, and it’s pretty much all you need. The Ghost Shark comes up to the surface, a pair of doors on top of the hull slide apart, and a launcher built from 12 angled tubes rises out of the bay.<\/p>\n Then an ALTIUS drone leaves one of the tubes. The sub stays on the surface the whole time, so if you were picturing something coming up through the water like a missile, that isn’t what’s happening here.<\/p>\n There’s a second launcher sitting in the other upper bay. It stays folded down in the footage. TWZ, which went through the video frame by frame, thinks it’s the same type but points out it could have a different arrangement of tubes, and I can’t tell from the clip either.<\/p>\n If it’s a twin, you’d get two dozen drones per sortie. That “24” is TWZ’s math, not Anduril’s. Conroy was asked for a number and declined, citing operational security.<\/p>\n The drone itself is from Anduril’s ALTIUS-600 family, which the company inherited when it bought a Georgia firm called Area-I. The video doesn’t say which variant. The basic ALTIUS-600 weighs between 20 and 27 pounds depending on what’s in the nose, has a wingspan of about 8 feet once the wings pop open, and according to Anduril can fly roughly 275 miles and stay up for at least four hours.<\/p>\n There’s also an ALTIUS-600M, which is the one with a warhead. Anduril brought both to the Sydney event. Whether Ghost Shark launches the armed one, neither the company nor the government has confirmed, so I’m not going to claim it does.<\/p>\n If you’ve never run into the term, a loitering munition is basically a small drone that flies to an area, circles for a while looking for a target, and then dives into it. The unarmed version does the first two parts and comes home.<\/p>\n Or it’s supposed to. TWZ notes the unarmed ALTIUS is designed to be recoverable, and I have no idea how you’d recover one onto a submarine with nobody on it.<\/p>\n The drones got the video, but they were one of three payloads Conroy announced that day. The other two are sea mines and what the government calls logistics caches.<\/p>\n On mines, the number is 12 per mission, and that one’s official. “Ghost Shark now has teeth,” Conroy told reporters, per the official transcript<\/a>, and he said the sub would lay mines at lower cost and lower risk than sending a crewed ship to do it.<\/p>\n I buy that completely. Laying a mine in a strait is a job where the main expense is the risk to the people doing it, and a hull with nobody inside changes that math pretty dramatically.<\/p>\n The cache idea is the odd one. Ghost Shark drops a sealed container of supplies on the seabed, and someone comes along later and picks it up. Who that someone is, Conroy wouldn’t say.<\/p>\n TWZ’s read is that the caches would probably be capsules shaped like the mine, with special operations teams as the obvious customers, which seems like a reasonable guess to me. The Defense Science and Technology Group is developing them, and none were on display in Sydney.<\/p>\n This is my favorite detail of the week. The Australian Department of Defense put out photos from the Sydney event with the bay open, and the Navy chief, Vice Adm. Matthew Buckley, gave his speech standing right in front of it.<\/p>\n Behind him, inside the bay, you can see cylindrical spacers built up from segments. TWZ looked closely and said they appear to be made from plywood or something like it.<\/p>\n So is the sub full of plywood? Sort of, probably.<\/p>\n Either the spacers are ballast, standing in for real payloads during trials, or the whole bay is a mockup for the cameras. Both are normal.<\/p>\n Nobody tests an uncrewed vehicle with live mines in it, and you have to put something of the right weight in the hole so the boat trims correctly. But it’s a frankly funny thing to leave in frame when the message of the day is “this thing has teeth.”<\/p>\n The 21-inch Rheinmetall Asteria mine that sat on a stand beside the hull wasn’t installed in it. Rheinmetall says the Asteria is built to go out of a submarine’s torpedo tubes, which is the standard diameter, so fitting it in a Ghost Shark bay isn’t a stretch. Whether Australia has actually bought that mine for the job, I can’t find anywhere.<\/p>\n The thing in the video that surprised people who follow this program is a pair of masts. Anduril’s engineering boss, Shane Arnott, told TWZ in an earlier interview that Ghost Shark deliberately didn’t have big masts running down its spine the way other designs do, because masts get in the way of payloads leaving the hull.<\/p>\n Well, it has two now. The bigger one lies flat along the centerline between the two upper bays and swings up like an arm, with an antenna on the end. The smaller one sits farther aft and rises straight up out of its own housing.<\/p>\n TWZ’s guess is that the tall one carries a line-of-sight link to the drones and the short one is a satellite terminal, possibly Starlink or its military sibling Starshield. Anduril hasn’t said what either mast does, so treat that as an educated guess from people who look at this stuff for a living.<\/p>\n Why does a drone sub need to talk to its drones at all? It doesn’t, necessarily.<\/p>\n It could launch them, dive, and let them run their missions on their own. But if you want a human somewhere watching the video feed and picking targets, something has to carry that signal, and a surfaced sub with a short mast is a lot harder to spot on radar than a ship.<\/p>\n The container is what I think matters most for anyone reading this in the United States, and the Australians seem to agree. Ghost Shark fits inside a standard shipping container.<\/p>\n Anduril has already flown one across the Pacific in its box in the back of a Royal Australian Air Force C-17, and the commercial version is described as sized to fill a 40-foot container. Conroy’s line on Monday was that an adversary now has to assume any container on an Australian wharf might have a Ghost Shark in it, and that the Ghost Shark has mines.<\/p>\n I’ll admit I can’t give you a length or a weight. Anduril doesn’t publish them for Ghost Shark, and the Australian government hasn’t either.<\/p>\n “Fits in a 40-foot box” and “roughly the size of a school bus,” the program’s own early description, is about as precise as it gets in public. If that bothers you, it bothers me too.<\/p>\n Some of the new payloads are at Exercise Maritime Big Play Pacific this month, which runs off San Diego from October 5 to 25. That’s an AUKUS Pillar II event. Pillar I is the famous half of AUKUS, the nuclear-powered submarines.<\/p>\n Pillar II is the less famous half where Australia, Britain and the US work together on autonomy and drones, and the US Navy says<\/a> this year’s demonstration involves more than 40 systems, run out of its information-warfare center in San Diego. Conroy also said he hadn’t given up on selling the sub itself to the Americans and the British.<\/p>\n He may not have to sell very hard. Ghost Shark is the Australian version of a vehicle Anduril calls the Dive-XL, and in March the Navy and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit picked the Dive-XL<\/a> for a program called CAMP, a fast-track effort to get extra-large drone subs into American hands. Anduril was due to run a long demonstration within four months of the award, and it builds the US version at a plant in Quonset Point, Rhode Island.<\/p>\n The Navy’s other big drone sub, Boeing’s 80-ton Orca, is built around a similar idea. We covered how an Orca drove itself more than 1,000 nautical miles across the Pacific<\/a> in July, and its first job is laying mines too. The Orca launches from a pier, though.<\/p>\n It’s far too heavy for a crane. Ghost Shark goes in a container and on a truck, and that difference is, if you ask me, the whole reason Australia is showing it off at an American exercise.<\/p>\n Australia isn’t only betting on the big sub. The same October 19 announcement covered payloads for the smaller Speartooth drone sub and the Ocius Bluebottle, the 24-foot solar-and-wind drone boat that spent four weeks watching shipping lanes for Fiji<\/a>. The government says it’s putting up to A$5.8 billion, around $4.05 billion, into uncrewed undersea warfare over the decade, and A$1.7 billion of that, about $1.19 billion, buys the Ghost Shark fleet Anduril is building in Sydney.<\/p>\n Anduril posted the launch video on October 21. Maritime Big Play Pacific wraps up off San Diego on October 25, and Conroy said some of the payloads he announced in Sydney would be in the water for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For about two years, if you asked the Australian government what its Ghost Shark drone submarine was actually for, you … <\/p>\nMines, and a care package on the seabed<\/h2>\n
Is that plywood in the payload bay?<\/h2>\n
Two masts on a sub that wasn’t supposed to have any<\/h2>\n
From a shipping container to San Diego<\/h2>\n
The US Navy wants one too, basically<\/h2>\n