The quiet revolution below the surface. Who leads the underwater drone race and where Poland stands

For decades, naval warfare played out on the surface and in the air, while the depths remained the preserve of a handful of submarine fleets. That order is now ending. Uncrewed underwater vehicles, until recently treated as niche tools for hydrographers and mine countermeasure forces, have become one of the hottest fronts of the global arms race. Australia is commissioning autonomous mini-submarines, China parades entire families of extra-large underwater drones, Russia is testing its nuclear-powered Poseidon, and Ukraine has built an industry from scratch in three years that now threatens the Kerch Bridge. Against this backdrop Poland, a country operating one of the most modern mine countermeasure fleets in Europe, is still searching for an answer to a fundamental question: does it want to remain a customer, or become a producer as well.

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18 july 2026   |   22:08   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Australijski Departament Obrony

From tether to full autonomy

Before looking at the world map, the terminology deserves some order, because the phrase underwater drone covers very different machines. The basic division runs between remotely operated vehicles, ROVs, connected to the operator by cable or fibre optic, and autonomous underwater vehicles, AUVs, which execute pre-programmed missions independently, without any link to a human. The tether gives ROVs power, real-time video and the precision needed for manipulation work, but limits their reach to the length of the line. AUVs pay for their freedom with finite battery capacity and the challenge of navigating without GPS, which does not work underwater.

At the top of this pyramid a new category has emerged in recent years: the XLUUV, the extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicle. These are no longer survey probes or inspection robots but full-scale crewless submarines, more than a dozen metres long and weighing tens of tonnes, capable of carrying mines, smaller drones, sensor packages and, in time, strike weapons. It is in this class that the most consequential competition is now playing out.

The market is growing at double-digit rates. Even before the current defence boom, analysts valued the global UUV segment at around 6.5 billion US dollars, and today, after a wave of military contracts and investment in subsea infrastructure protection, the real figure is almost certainly higher. Several engines drive that growth: offshore energy and subsea inspection work, ocean science, but above all the lessons of the war in Ukraine and the string of incidents around cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

Orca, or how America got stuck in its own procurement

The United States has long been regarded as the natural leader of this revolution, and in pure technology terms it still is. The flagship programme is Boeing's Orca XLUUV, an 85-tonne autonomous submarine with diesel-electric propulsion and lithium-ion batteries, a stated range of 6,500 nautical miles and a payload bay more than ten metres long. Orca is designed to lay mines, conduct electronic warfare, deploy smaller drones and operate inside heavily defended waters where risking a crewed boat would be unacceptable.

The problem is that the programme has become a textbook case of the pathologies of American defence acquisition. The 2019 contract envisaged five vehicles delivered by the end of 2022. In reality, a test asset reached the US Navy only in late 2023, the second production vehicle, designated XLE2, was christened in March 2026, and the US Government Accountability Office openly concedes it is unclear whether the effort will ever transition into a programme of record, because the Navy cannot define requirements that fit within its budget.

In parallel, DARPA is pursuing Manta Ray, a vehicle built around an entirely different philosophy. It is a large underwater glider that uses buoyancy changes rather than conventional thrusters, allowing it to drift through the water column for months on minimal energy, anchor itself to the seabed and hibernate in a low-power state until a mission command wakes it. Following full-scale trials, 2026 has seen the concept discussed as a genuine tool for ultra-long-endurance missions rather than an experiment.

In the smaller classes, the Americans field the proven REMUS family from Huntington Ingalls and the Iver line from L3Harris. The latter was recently demonstrated very close to home: during BALTOPS 2026 off Liepaja in Latvia, the US Navy's Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Group 1 showed how autonomous vehicles search the seabed, identify objects and monitor underwater activity, explicitly framed around Russian threats to Baltic critical infrastructure. It was a clear signal that NATO now treats underwater drones as a permanent element of the defence of its eastern flank, this sea included.

Ghost Shark, an Australian humility lesson for the whole West

Anyone looking for proof that this field allows speed should look at Australia. The Ghost Shark programme, run jointly by Anduril Industries and the Australian Department of Defence, went from concept to commissioning at a pace that would recently have been dismissed as impossible. An order for three prototypes was announced in May 2022, the first vehicle was launched in April 2024, the prototype contract was completed a year ahead of schedule, and in September 2025 Canberra signed a 1.7 billion Australian dollar deal for series production. The first operational Ghost Shark entered service in January 2026, and the Royal Australian Navy plans to acquire dozens of them.

The financial side is the most telling. The entire research and development phase of Ghost Shark cost around 100 million US dollars, half of it contributed by Anduril itself, sharing risk with the government. By comparison, the United States has spent several times more on the delayed Orca and still has no series programme. The conclusion, drawn openly by American commentators, is brutal: advantage in this segment is no longer decided by technology alone, but by the acquisition model and a state's willingness to share risk with industry. It is a lesson worth remembering on the Baltic coast too.

China is building a fleet no one has seen in full

While Western programmes can be tracked through contracts and audit reports, the scale of Chinese work surfaces mainly at parades and in satellite imagery analysis. What surfaces is striking. Analysts assess that the People's Liberation Army Navy runs the largest XLUUV programme in the world, with at least five types in the water for several years, and that China's pursuit of undersea autonomy is currently unmatched in scale, scope and speed.

At the September 2025 parade, Beijing publicly displayed, among others, the AJX-002, a torpedo-shaped design 18 to 20 metres long with pump-jet propulsion, together with a second, larger type featuring a superstructure that could house satellite communications. Observers counted at least six vehicles of this class. In size they resemble Russia's Poseidon, yet experts consider it almost certain they are not nuclear powered, with their intended roles spanning reconnaissance, transport and strike missions. Internal Chinese military writings state plainly that large underwater drones are meant to neutralise a key American advantage, the extensive network of undersea sensors in the Pacific. For planners in Washington and Taipei, this is an entirely new variable in the equation around Taiwan.

Poseidon, doomsday weapon or propaganda tool

Russia occupies a category of its own in this survey, having taken a path unlike anyone else's. Poseidon is not a classic underwater drone but a gigantic, nuclear-reactor-powered intercontinental torpedo, capable, according to Moscow, of carrying a nuclear warhead of enormous yield. In October 2025 Vladimir Putin announced the first test of the vehicle with its atomic propulsion running, boasting that the reactor is a hundred times smaller than those aboard submarines and that the weapon cannot be intercepted.

Western analysts treat these declarations with far-reaching scepticism. Available assessments indicate that the first examples delivered in 2023 were not capable of carrying nuclear weapons, contrary to earlier Kremlin claims, and that service entry has slipped to 2027. Poseidon thus remains a weapon whose real capabilities are difficult to separate from its propaganda function. That does not mean Russia's underwater uncrewed programme can be ignored: alongside Poseidon, smaller systems of the Klavesin family are in development, and Russian manufacturers keep unveiling new surface and subsurface vehicles at domestic arms shows. From a Baltic perspective, more relevant than the atomic torpedo are Russia's capabilities for sub-threshold operations on the seabed, around cables, pipelines and wind farms.

Ukraine's school of survival goes underwater

The biggest surprise of recent years, however, is Ukraine. A country with practically no tradition of building underwater vehicles before 2022 has created a dynamic sector from nothing under wartime conditions. It began with Toloka's TLK-150, adopted by the Ukrainian Navy as early as the beginning of 2023. It is a small, semi-submersible vehicle with a warhead of around fifteen kilogrammes and a range of roughly one hundred kilometres, operating in effect as a smart electric torpedo that can loiter for days waiting for its target.

The real leap came in 2025, when Toloka unveiled the TLK-1000 at an exhibition in Lviv, a large underwater vehicle with a payload of around five tonnes, designed for minelaying and the destruction of large stationary targets. Commentators had no doubt that the description fits, above all, the Kerch Bridge and Russian ports. In 2026 the Ukrainian Sea Trident ST-1000 made its debut at Eurosatory in Paris, an XLUUV sized to fit inside a standard ISO shipping container so it can be moved by ordinary road transport. Once again, Ukraine demonstrates that wartime pressure can compress a decade of development into three years, and that mobility and low cost often matter more than perfection.

Europe of suppliers, a continent without its own Ghost Shark

Against this backdrop, Europe looks solid but conservative. The continent has excellent producers of medium-class autonomous vehicles: Norway's Kongsberg with the Hugin family, regarded as the world standard in seabed reconnaissance and mine warfare, France's Exail with a range of military AUVs from man-portable to mid-sized, Germany's Atlas Elektronik supplying drones for minehunters, Sweden's Saab and Iceland's Teledyne Gavia. The British are among the few to have entered the XLUUV class, ordering from MSubs first the Manta demonstrator and then the production Cetus design, with a large payload bay and, again, container-compatible dimensions.

Beyond Europe, Israel's Blue Whale from IAI deserves note, equipped with a retractable electro-optical mast and satellite communications and a declared range of 1,000 kilometres, as does Japan's Long Endurance UUV programme, whose prototype, with a baseline length of ten metres, has been in the water since 2023. The list of countries with ambitions grows every year, and the common denominator of most new projects is container transportability and modular payloads.

Range and endurance are the new currency of the deep

Comparing underwater drone ranges is like comparing a bicycle with a lorry, because the spread across classes is enormous. Small mine countermeasure vehicles such as Gavia or REMUS work for hours and cover distances measured in kilometres or tens of kilometres. Medium AUVs of the Hugin class offer tens of hours of autonomy, enough to survey large areas of seabed. Ukraine's TLK-150 reaches about one hundred kilometres, Israel's Blue Whale claims a thousand, and America's Orca, in the XLUUV class, has a stated range of 6,500 nautical miles, the ability to cross half an ocean on its own.

The real qualitative shift, however, is happening not in kilometres but in time. Concepts such as Manta Ray, with buoyancy-driven gliding and seabed hibernation, push the mission horizon from days to months. A vehicle that can lie dormant on the bottom and wake on command blurs the line between a drone and a stationary weapon system. One caveat applies to every specification table in this business: manufacturer figures describe ideal conditions, and real operational performance almost always remains classified.

Poland, an excellent operator looking for a path to production

How does Poland compare? The honest answer is ambiguous: it is one of the most experienced operators of underwater drones in the region, and at the same time a country with no series production of its own in this field.

The operational side genuinely impresses. The first autonomous underwater vehicles reached the Polish Navy as early as November 2013, when its mine clearance diver groups received two Icelandic Gavia vehicles together with software and a full training package. The real leap came with the Kormoran II class minehunters, regarded as among the most modern ships of their type anywhere. Their equipment amounts to an entire ecosystem of uncrewed systems: Norwegian Hugin 1000 vehicles for the search, classification and identification of mine-like objects, further Gavias, ROVs, and the domestically developed Głuptak, an expendable mine disposal vehicle. Significantly, some of the Hugins, thanks to pipe-tracking software, can be used to monitor subsea critical infrastructure, a capability that Baltic hybrid warfare has elevated from niche to front-rank.

The capability set is growing on the training side as well. At the end of 2024, Poland's Armament Agency accepted the AUV 62-AT system for the Navy, an autonomous underwater vehicle that simulates the physical signatures of a submarine. It allows ship crews, the future Miecznik class frigates and AW101 helicopters to train anti-submarine warfare scenarios realistically and at low cost, without committing an actual submarine.

The industrial side looks weaker. Poland consciously took a different route from Norway or France, which equip their fleets with vehicles from national champions, and bought its AUVs abroad, paying for instance around 3.3 million euros for each Hugin 1000. Domestic competence exists, but in isolated pockets. Gdańsk University of Technology has for years been developing the AUV-S, a demonstrator of a low-observable autonomous vehicle built with stealth technology for special forces, though the work is classified and long ran on very modest funding. The private company SR Robotics is building a position in subsea infrastructure surveillance, offering a national capability where foreign suppliers were previously the only option. Add to this the research base of the Maritime Technology Centre and the academic institutions of the Tricity. What has been missing is what the Norwegians, the French and lately the Australians have: a programme that binds academia, industry and the customer into a single chain leading to a series-produced product.

The Gdańsk triangle that could change the rules

That is precisely why the events of 18 March 2026 carry such weight. On that day in Gdańsk, PGZ Naval Shipyard, Gdańsk University of Technology and Kraków's AGH University of Science and Technology signed an agreement on the joint development and production of a new generation of autonomous underwater drones, intended for reconnaissance, maritime area monitoring and the protection of critical infrastructure, including sea lanes and subsea installations. The solutions are to be dual-use and ultimately reach the Polish armed forces.

The division of labour is well thought out. Gdańsk University of Technology takes responsibility for sensor and detection systems, GPS-denied underwater navigation, communications and onboard systems integration. AGH will develop artificial intelligence algorithms for data analysis and object detection, multi-sensor data fusion and the solutions enabling autonomous swarm cooperation. PGZ Naval Shipyard will provide production infrastructure, testing and at-sea technology demonstrations. In other words, for the first time a single project gathers all the links: science, algorithms and a yard capable of production and sea trials.

Honesty requires adding that, for now, this is a letter of intent, not a contract with a schedule and a budget. The Australian experience suggests what it takes for intent to become a fleet: a customer prepared to share risk, funding counted not in single millions but at least in tens of millions of euros, and the schedule discipline that took Ghost Shark from prototype order to service in under four years. The Ukrainian experience adds a second lesson: what counts is a product that is good enough and cheap, available quickly and in numbers, not a perfect demonstrator that never leaves the test basin.

A window that will not stay open forever

The conclusions of this survey form a coherent picture. First, underwater drones have ceased to be an accessory to navies and have become a capability category in their own right, one in which every serious player is investing, from superpowers to mid-sized states. Second, the entry barrier has proved lower than assumed: Australia and Ukraine have shown that the gap to the leaders can be closed in three to four years if the state and industry pull in the same direction. Third, for Poland the stakes are not prestige but the security of specific installations: the Baltic Pipe gas link, power and telecommunications cables, LNG terminals and the offshore wind farms now under construction, whose protection without autonomous underwater systems will be practically impossible.

Poland today has everything needed for a start: an experienced operator cadre raised on Gavias and Hugins, strong research centres in the Tricity and Kraków, a shipyard with production ambitions and, most importantly, a pressing operational need just beyond the breakwater. What is missing is decision, money and pace. The race beneath the surface of the Baltic is already under way, and it will run whether or not Poland takes part. The only difference is whether, in five years, the country will patrol its own seabed with its own vehicles, or queue once again for foreign suppliers, this time in a longer line than ever, because half of Europe will be standing in it.

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