Hunting sea mines is one of those jobs that’s exactly as dangerous as you’d think. For decades, navies have done it with small ships built so they won’t set off the very mines they’re out looking for, and a crew sitting a lot closer to the problem than anyone would like.<\/p>\n
The Royal Navy has spent a while trying to get its sailors out of that line of work. And it’s now picked the underwater drone it wants doing a big part of the searching.<\/p>\n
On November 3, Britain’s defense buying agency named HII as the winner of a competition to supply drones for the next phase of its mine-hunting program. The vehicle is HII’s REMUS 620, a torpedo-shaped drone that’ll carry a sonar made by Thales. According to Janes<\/a>, each package the Royal Navy is buying comes with three of these drones plus a launch-and-recovery rig that puts them in the water and gets them back out. There are eight packages, so that’s 24 drones.<\/p>\n Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, though, nothing’s been signed yet.<\/p>\n Not quite. Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), the arm of the UK’s Ministry of Defence that buys and supports the military’s equipment, posted a contract award notice on Find a Tender<\/a>, the British government’s procurement site, on November 3. It names HII Unmanned Systems, based in Pocasset, Massachusetts, as the supplier and puts the contract at \u00a3303 million, not counting VAT (Britain’s version of sales tax). Janes converts that to about $404.8 million.<\/p>\n That notice also starts a clock. Under Britain’s procurement rules, a government buyer that’s chosen a winner has to wait out what’s called a standstill period before it signs anything. Basically, the losing bidders get a summary of how their bids were assessed and a short window to challenge the decision if they think something’s off.<\/p>\n This standstill runs eight working days and ends on November 12. The notice gives November 16 as the earliest date the contract will be signed, and Janes says the MoD expects to make the award on or around that day. So at this point, the Royal Navy has picked these drones. It hasn’t ordered them.<\/p>\n The program is called Mine Hunting Capability, or MHC, and it’s the Royal Navy’s plan to replace its older crewed minehunters with drones and remote-controlled gear. The drones go into the risky water while the people running them stay back on a host ship or ashore. DE&S says operators working from those remote command centers can find and deal with mines from a distance, which frankly seems like the only sane way to do this job in the first place.<\/p>\n Some of that gear’s already in service. In March, the Royal Navy said the program had delivered two uncrewed surface boats and three sets of SeaCat underwater drones, and that sailors were training on mission planning, launch and recovery, maintenance, and making sense of the data the drones bring back.<\/p>\n Block 2 is the next round of buying. DE&S opened the underwater drone competition with a tender notice last October, and the award covers the drones, the launchers that go with them, other equipment and in-service support. In-service support is just the official way of saying somebody keeps the things working once the Navy has them. Think of it as an extended warranty on your car, except the dealer’s on the hook for years.<\/p>\n So why buy them in threes?<\/p>\n Nobody’s explained that publicly, so take this as my read rather than anything official. HII’s spec sheet lists a 12-hour recharge for the REMUS 620’s batteries inside the vehicle, and one launcher looking after three drones would let one search while another charges and a third waits its turn. That’s the kind of rotation I’d want if the goal is to keep a patch of seabed covered without everybody standing around on deck.<\/p>\n HII calls the REMUS 620 a medium-class underwater drone, and its product page<\/a> lists mine countermeasures alongside seabed surveys, intelligence gathering and surveillance. It’s 12.75 inches wide, and HII rates it to dive to 1,969 feet.<\/p>\n How long it is depends on how many battery sections go in. According to HII’s current spec sheet, the bare vehicle is 105 inches long and weighs 414 pounds with one battery section. With three, it’s 169 inches and 719 pounds, or a hair over 14 feet. HII rates it at 2 to 8 knots, so it tops out at a little over 9 mph. With all three battery sections and nothing extra on board, the company says it can run for up to 110 hours and cover up to 275 nautical miles, which is about 316 miles.<\/p>\n But those are the numbers for a bare drone, and the Royal Navy’s won’t be bare. HII hasn’t published a length, weight or endurance figure for a REMUS 620 carrying the Thales sonar, and the contract notice doesn’t give one either. The spec sheet does show what happens with a different sonar HII uses as an example. A two-battery drone with that payload grows to 206 inches and 797 pounds, and its endurance drops from 80 hours to 50. So I wouldn’t expect the British drones to get anywhere near that 110-hour figure.<\/p>\n The sonar is what actually finds the mines. Thales calls its SAMDIS 600 a multi-aspect synthetic aperture sonar, which, let’s be honest, is a mouthful. A synthetic aperture sonar sends out pings as the drone moves and stitches the echoes together, so a small sonar can produce a picture about as sharp as you’d get from a much bigger one. Multi-aspect means it looks at the same object from more than one angle. That’s supposed to help when you’re trying to tell a mine from a rock or a piece of junk on the seabed.<\/p>\n The timing here is a bit funny. On the same day DE&S posted its award notice, HII and Thales put out a joint release<\/a> about a demonstration of this exact drone and sonar pairing. It doesn’t mention the Royal Navy once.<\/p>\n The demo ran under Thales’s Expeditionary PathMaster setup, and the companies split it into find, fix and finish, which is military shorthand for spotting a target, pinning down what it is and dealing with it. A REMUS 620 carrying the SAMDIS 600 searched the seafloor on its own for anything that looked like a mine. Thales software then used AI-based automatic target recognition to sort through the contacts and locate the mine-like ones. Finally, an ANGLER remotely operated vehicle from Thales AAC went back to the object, confirmed it was a mine on camera and neutralized it. HII’s Sea Launcher handled putting the REMUS in the water and pulling it back out automatically.<\/p>\n The release doesn’t say where or exactly when the demo happened. It does say the work built on a test last year, when the two companies first fitted the SAMDIS 600 to the REMUS 620. Whether the Royal Navy’s launch-and-recovery systems will be Sea Launchers, I can’t tell you. The award notice only says launch and recovery systems, and I haven’t found anything from DE&S or HII naming them.<\/p>\n Four companies bid, and all four made it to the final round of assessment, according to the notice. The three that lost make for a pretty interesting lineup.<\/p>\n Exail Robotics is French. Teledyne Gavia is based in Iceland, but it belongs to Teledyne, an American company. So if you pictured a clean US-versus-Europe fight, this wasn’t quite it. TKMS Atlas UK sits in Dorset, England, and is part of Germany’s TKMS group. DE&S credits Atlas Elektronik, from that same group, with the SeaCat drones the Royal Navy already uses, which arguably made it the closest thing this contest had to an incumbent.<\/p>\n DE&S hasn’t published the scores, so there’s no way to tell from the outside why HII came out on top. The losing bidders got their assessment summaries on November 3, and as far as I can tell those aren’t public.<\/p>\n HII also brought some British help. The notice lists five UK firms associated with its bid: Thales UK in Reading, SeeByte in Edinburgh, Feritech Global in Cornwall, Infinity Systems Engineering in Bristol and Philspace in Hampshire. It doesn’t say what each one does. It lists both the US and the UK as contract locations, so it isn’t clear yet how much of the hardware gets built in Massachusetts and how much in Britain.<\/p>\n The money pays for the eight mission systems, the extra equipment and the support work, with estimated contract dates running from November 17, 2026, to May 17, 2031. You might be tempted to divide \u00a3303 million by 24 and call that the price of a drone. I wouldn’t, because the total also covers the launch gear, the extra equipment and years of support. DE&S hasn’t published a unit price.<\/p>\n The deal could grow, too. The contract has two options that extend in-service support by a year each, and the notice gives a possible end date of May 17, 2033. A third option lets DE&S buy as many as 12 additional mission systems. If those come in threes like the first eight, that’d be as many as 36 more drones, though the notice doesn’t say what an extra system would contain. That’s a big if.<\/p>\n The notice doesn’t include a delivery schedule, and I couldn’t find anything naming the Royal Navy ships or units that’ll operate these drones. HII hadn’t posted about the selection in its newsroom as of November 10, and its latest REMUS 620 news there is still the Thales demo.<\/p>\n The REMUS 620 has been busy elsewhere lately. We covered a Japanese one passing data through an Australian relay to US equipment<\/a> just yesterday, and in September the US Navy placed its largest order yet for HII’s much smaller two-person Lionfish drones<\/a>, which it uses mainly for mine hunting.<\/p>\n Assuming the standstill wraps up quietly on November 12, DE&S can sign with HII as early as November 16, and the notice has the contract starting the following day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hunting sea mines is one of those jobs that’s exactly as dangerous as you’d think. For decades, navies have done … <\/p>\nSo has Britain actually bought these drones?<\/h2>\n
The Royal Navy wants its sailors out of the minefield<\/h2>\n
The REMUS 620 is a midsize drone built to carry heavy sensors<\/h2>\n
HII and Thales have already run the whole job end to end<\/h2>\n
Three rival bidders lost out<\/h2>\n
Here’s what \u00a3303 million covers<\/h2>\n