The Ghost Shark: Australia's Autonomous Underwater Drone

The distances in the Indo-Pacific are staggering. From Australia's northern coast to the contested waterways of the South China Sea is over 3,000 nautical miles. Patrolling those waters with manned submarines requires enormous crews, nuclear reactors, and boats that cost billions of dollars each. Australia's answer to this problem is the Ghost Shark, an extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle (XL-AUV) that can operate independently across oceanic distances, conduct surveillance and anti-submarine warfare, and return to base without a single human ever entering the water. It is the most ambitious military autonomous underwater program in the Southern Hemisphere, and it represents a fundamentally different approach to undersea warfare, one where the machines go where the submariners don't.

Why Australia Needs Unmanned Submarines

Australia faces a submarine capability gap that is measured in decades. The Royal Australian Navy's six Collins-class submarines, diesel-electric boats commissioned between 1996 and 2003, are aging and reaching the limits of their service life. Under the AUKUS agreement announced in September 2021, Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines: initially Virginia-class boats from the United States, followed by the SSN-AUKUS design jointly developed with the UK. But the first SSN-AUKUS boat is not expected to enter Australian service until the early 2040s.

That leaves a gap of roughly 15 to 20 years where Australia's submarine capability will be stretched thin, precisely the period when strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific is intensifying. China's navy is expanding rapidly, building submarines, surface combatants, and anti-access systems at a pace that no Western navy has matched. Australia needs undersea presence it cannot currently provide with manned boats alone.

The Ghost Shark is designed to fill that gap, not by replacing manned submarines, but by extending their reach. An autonomous underwater vehicle that can conduct long-range surveillance, map the ocean floor, detect and track adversary submarines, and potentially deliver offensive payloads gives Australia undersea capability at a fraction of the cost and crew requirement of a nuclear submarine. One Collins-class boat costs over $1 billion to maintain per decade. A fleet of Ghost Sharks could provide persistent undersea presence across multiple operating areas simultaneously.

What Ghost Shark Is

Ghost Shark is an extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle, significantly larger than the tactical UUVs that navies have used for mine countermeasures and hydrographic survey for years. While exact dimensions remain classified, the vehicle is understood to be in the range of 10 to 20 meters long, large enough to carry substantial sensor and weapons payloads, with the endurance to operate across oceanic distances without recovery.

The program is developed by Anduril Australia in partnership with the Royal Australian Navy and the Australian Department of Defence. Anduril, the American defense technology company founded by Palmer Luckey in 2017, established its Australian presence through the acquisition of Dive Technologies, a company specializing in autonomous underwater systems. The Ghost Shark program builds on Dive Technologies' expertise in large autonomous underwater vehicles while integrating Anduril's Lattice autonomous command and control platform.

The modular payload bay is one of Ghost Shark's defining design features. The vehicle is built around a reconfigurable internal volume that can be loaded with different mission packages depending on the task: sonar arrays for anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures equipment, electronic warfare systems, intelligence collection sensors, or potentially offensive payloads like torpedoes or mines. This modularity means the same vehicle can be reconfigured between missions rather than requiring purpose-built variants for each role.

Autonomy and Lattice

What distinguishes Ghost Shark from earlier underwater drones is not just its size but its autonomy. Traditional UUVs operate on pre-programmed routes, they follow a set path, collect data, and return for analysis. Ghost Shark is designed to make decisions in real time, adapting its behavior based on what its sensors detect. If it encounters an adversary submarine, it can change course, classify the contact, trail it, and report, without waiting for human commands from a surface ship that may be hundreds of miles away.

This autonomous capability is powered by Anduril's Lattice platform, the same AI-driven command and control system that underpins Anduril's counter-drone, border surveillance, and autonomous vehicle products. Lattice processes sensor data, fuses information from multiple sources, and presents operators with a real-time operational picture. For Ghost Shark, Lattice provides the decision-making layer that allows the vehicle to operate independently while maintaining the ability to report back to human commanders when communication is possible.

The communication challenge is one of the hardest problems in undersea autonomy. Underwater vehicles cannot use radio waves for real-time communication, water absorbs radio signals almost immediately. Ghost Shark must be capable of operating for extended periods without communicating, making decisions based on its onboard intelligence. When it needs to report, it can surface briefly or use underwater acoustic communication links, but these are slow and limited in bandwidth compared to the satellite links available to surface ships and aircraft.

Missions

The Ghost Shark is designed for several mission categories that collectively provide the Royal Australian Navy with capabilities it currently lacks:

• Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), long-duration patrols in contested waters, monitoring chokepoints, tracking adversary naval movements, and mapping undersea infrastructure
• Anti-submarine warfare (ASW), detecting, classifying, and tracking enemy submarines using passive and active sonar arrays carried in the modular payload bay
• Mine warfare, both mine countermeasures (detecting and classifying mines) and potentially mine laying in denied areas
• Electronic warfare, deploying sensors to monitor adversary electronic emissions or deploying decoys and countermeasures
• Undersea domain awareness, providing persistent surveillance of the ocean floor, critical infrastructure (undersea cables, pipelines), and maritime chokepoints

The ability to perform these missions autonomously means the Royal Australian Navy can maintain undersea presence in areas where it would be too risky or too expensive to deploy manned submarines. A Ghost Shark operating in the South China Sea gathers intelligence without putting Australian submariners at risk. If an adversary detects and destroys it, the loss is measured in dollars, not lives.

How It Compares

Ghost Shark enters a growing field of extra-large underwater autonomous vehicles. The most direct comparison is the Boeing Orca, an XL-UUV developed for the U.S. Navy under the same conceptual framework. The Orca, at over 25 meters long, is designed for mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, and anti-surface warfare missions. However, the Orca program has experienced significant delays and cost overruns, with Boeing struggling to deliver operational vehicles on schedule.

China is also investing heavily in autonomous underwater systems, though specific programs remain largely classified. The People's Liberation Army Navy has demonstrated various UUV prototypes and is believed to be developing large autonomous underwater vehicles for surveillance and ASW roles in the South China Sea and Western Pacific.

What distinguishes Ghost Shark from the Orca and other programs is the integration of Anduril's Lattice AI platform and the program's focus on autonomous decision-making rather than remote operation. While the Orca is designed to execute pre-planned missions with limited autonomous adaptation, Ghost Shark is being built from the ground up to make independent tactical decisions, a capability that reflects Anduril's Silicon Valley approach to defense technology.

The AUKUS Connection

Ghost Shark exists within the broader framework of the AUKUS trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While Pillar I of AUKUS focuses on nuclear-powered submarines, Pillar II encompasses advanced capabilities including autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and undersea warfare.

Ghost Shark is arguably the most visible Pillar II program. It demonstrates that AUKUS is not just about nuclear submarines, it is about building an integrated undersea warfare capability that combines manned submarines, autonomous vehicles, seabed sensors, and AI-driven command and control into a networked system. A future Australian undersea force might deploy Virginia-class submarines for high-end missions while Ghost Sharks provide persistent surveillance and early warning across the broader theater.

The program also advances Australia's sovereign defense industrial capability, a core AUKUS objective. By building Ghost Shark in Australia through Anduril's local operation, the program develops Australian expertise in autonomous systems, AI, and undersea vehicle manufacturing that will be essential for maintaining and evolving the capability over decades.

Current Status and What Comes Next

The Ghost Shark program has moved from concept to prototype, with the Australian Department of Defence and Anduril conducting in-water testing of the vehicle. The prototype was publicly unveiled in 2024, and the program is progressing toward initial operational capability. Exact timelines remain partially classified, but the urgency of Australia's submarine capability gap suggests the program will move faster than traditional defense acquisition timelines typically allow.

The longer-term vision extends beyond individual vehicles. Australia's defence strategy envisions a fleet of autonomous underwater systems, not one or two Ghost Sharks, but dozens operating across the Indo-Pacific, networked together and integrated with manned submarine operations. This fleet approach leverages the core economic advantage of autonomous systems: they can be built faster and cheaper than manned platforms, allowing navies to generate undersea presence at scale.

The Ghost Shark represents a bet that the future of undersea warfare will look fundamentally different from its past. For over a century, submarines have been defined by the crews inside them, their skill, their endurance, their willingness to spend months sealed inside a steel tube beneath the ocean. The Ghost Shark asks a different question: what if the tube didn't need a crew at all? The answer to that question will shape naval warfare for the next fifty years.