NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — California-based maritime drone manufacturer Saildrone unveiled a new medium unmanned surface vessel (MUSV) that the company said can be optimized for anti-submarine warfare (AWS) and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations.
The new MUSV comes in two variants: the Spectre Silent Endurance that employs a Saildrone wing and is geared for anti-submarine warfare and other acoustically sensitive missions, and the Spectre Stealth Strike, which doesn’t have a wing and is designed to accommodate higher sprint speeds, and features a lower-profile configuration for kinetic strike roles.
“Spectre is the result of 25 years of continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. A unique design evolved through the hard lessons of operational experience in the real world,” Richard Jenkins, Saildrone’s founder and CEO, said in a statement as the systems were unveiled at the Sea Air Space Exposition here. “Spectre is not a craft hurriedly readied to meet a particular RFP [Request for Proposal], but diligently evolved over multiple years to meet the operational requirements of our customers and fill critical capability gaps in the ASW domain.”
Spectre, which has been in the works for two years and is 52-meters long, includes a concealed payload deck to hold two 40-foot containers, up to five 20-foot containers, and other combinations that weigh more than 70 tons.
The Navy announced in March a new MUSV marketplace as it seeks to acquire USVs quickly by focusing on production-ready, mission capable platforms already in the MUSV space. The first iteration of the marketplace closed on Friday, and Jenkins said that Saildrone submitted a Spectre proposal to compete.
Meanwhile, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle has said he is developing a “containerized capability campaign” that aims to deploy modularized payloads like drones or missiles quickly.
That initiative could also be relevant for Spectre, for which Saildrone teamed up with Lockheed Martin to configure the platform to accommodate multiple Lockheed Martin payloads, including the Mk70 VLS Launcher.
“It’s a lower price way of putting more players on the field, which the CNO has said is an important thing,” Paul Lemmo, vice president and general manager of sensors, effectors, and mission systems at Lockheed Martin, told reporters today. “So you’ve got more shooters on a fairly inexpensive platform, instead of a multi-billion dollar destroyer.”
Each of the vessels cost approximately $40 million, depending on the payload and configuration, according to Jenkins.
The Spectre will be built at Fincantieri’s shipyard in Green Bay, Wis., that Saildrone says has the bandwidth to produce five of the MUSVs annually. Construction on the first vessel is imminent, and sea trials for that MUSV are expected in early 2027.
