A new class of underwater drones designed to mimic marine predators is entering development for the U.S. military, blending biological camouflage with lethal capability. Two separate programs, one from a defense startup and another from Lockheed Martin, are racing to field autonomous undersea vehicles that can latch onto warships undetected and carry out missions ranging from surveillance to anti-submarine warfare. The timing is no accident: as the Pentagon accelerates its push toward unmanned naval systems, these biomimetic machines could reshape how navies project power beneath the surface.
An Orca-Shaped Stealth Drone Built to Disappear
The SP-7V2, a maritime stealth drone developed by Cardona Marine Group, measures 13 feet long and 5 feet wide, roughly the proportions of a juvenile orca. That resemblance is deliberate. The drone’s profile is meant to blend with marine life, reducing the chance that enemy sonar operators or visual surveillance systems flag it as a threat. John Cardona, the company’s founder, described the vehicle in a direct interview as capable of ship-launched or air-dropped deployment, meaning it can reach operational areas without requiring a dedicated submarine or surface vessel to carry it the entire way.
What sets the SP-7V2 apart from conventional torpedo-shaped unmanned underwater vehicles is its propulsion concept. Rather than relying on a traditional motor and propeller, the drone uses an underwater glide and buoyancy system to move through the water column with minimal acoustic signature. Cardona told National Defense Magazine that the vehicle can attach to ships or submarines for extended periods, effectively turning any host vessel into an unwitting carrier. That parasitic capability opens the door to long-duration intelligence gathering or the pre-positioning of sensors in contested waters without alerting an adversary.
Lockheed Martin’s Lamprey Clings to Warships
Cardona Marine Group is not alone in pursuing this approach. Lockheed Martin introduced its own take on the concept earlier this month with the Lamprey, a multi-mission autonomous undersea vehicle named after the jawless fish known for fastening itself to larger hosts. The Lamprey attaches to a host surface vessel or submarine without requiring any modifications to the host platform, a critical design choice that allows rapid adoption across existing fleet assets. Once attached, the drone can detach on command, execute its mission, and return, potentially repeating this cycle many times over a single deployment.
Energy endurance has long been the limiting factor for undersea drones. Lockheed’s answer is a set of onboard “hydrogenators” that recharge the Lamprey’s batteries, potentially extending mission duration well beyond what lithium-ion packs alone can sustain. The company lists intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance among the Lamprey’s mission sets, though the vehicle’s modular design suggests a wider range of payloads could follow as the Navy experiments with mine countermeasures, electronic warfare, or decoy roles. The parallel between the Lamprey and the SP-7V2 is striking: both treat attachment to manned vessels as a force multiplier rather than a limitation, turning every ship in a fleet into a potential drone mothership.
Arming Unmanned Surface Vessels With Missiles
The undersea drone push is only one dimension of a broader strategy to arm unmanned platforms. Lockheed Martin has invested $50 million in Saildrone, the autonomous vessel maker, with the explicit goal of advancing unmanned surface vehicle capabilities for the U.S. Navy. That investment is not simply a bet on surveillance boats. According to a Saildrone press release, the partnership plans to integrate Lockheed’s JAGM Quad Launcher onto the Saildrone Surveyor, a large uncrewed surface vessel, turning a platform originally built for ocean mapping into a missile-carrying combatant.
The roadmap goes further. Saildrone’s announcement also references the potential inclusion of the Mk70 Vertical Launch System and thin-line towed arrays on future uncrewed surface vehicles. A Mk70 launcher on a drone boat would give the Navy the ability to fire Standard Missiles or Tomahawks from a platform with no crew to protect, fundamentally changing the risk calculus of forward-deployed strike assets. Thin-line towed arrays, meanwhile, are passive sonar systems used to detect submarines, meaning these same drone boats could hunt undersea threats while carrying their own offensive weapons. The combination collapses what used to require a crewed destroyer into a vessel that costs a fraction as much and risks zero lives.
Why Biomimicry Changes the Detection Game
The common thread running through these programs is not just autonomy but deception. Traditional unmanned underwater vehicles look and sound like machines. They produce motor noise, emit electromagnetic signatures, and move in patterns that trained sonar operators can identify. A drone shaped like an orca or engineered to cling silently to a ship’s hull exploits a gap in existing detection systems, which are optimized to distinguish man-made objects from marine biology. If a sensor array registers something that swims like a whale or sits motionless like a barnacle, the default response is often to discount it as background clutter.
That creates a tactical problem with no easy fix. Navies cannot simply recalibrate sonar to flag every marine creature without drowning operators in false positives. The ocean is full of large animals, and distinguishing a 13-foot drone from a dolphin or small whale at range requires processing power and algorithms that most legacy sonar suites were never designed to handle. The SP-7V2’s buoyancy-driven glide, in particular, produces almost no acoustic footprint, which means passive sonar, the primary tool for submarine detection, may be nearly useless against it. For defenders, the answer may lie in new machine-learning classifiers and multi-sensor fusion, but those tools will take years to field at scale, leaving a window in which biomimetic drones enjoy a substantial edge.
The Strategic Bet on Swarm Parasitism
Taken together, these developments point toward a concept that might be called swarm parasitism: a future in which small, relatively inexpensive drones hitch rides on larger platforms, peel off to conduct missions, and then return to recharge, rearm, or simply remain hidden. An aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship could, in theory, deploy dozens of SP-7V2-style undersea vehicles along with Lamprey-like clingers, each assigned to monitor chokepoints, shadow adversary submarines, or mark safe passages through minefields. On the surface, a flotilla of Saildrone Surveyors armed with missiles and towed arrays could extend the Navy’s sensing and striking reach far beyond the horizon of its crewed combatants.
This model changes how naval power is counted. Instead of tallying hulls and tonnage, planners will have to account for how many autonomous parasites a fleet can sustain and coordinate. A single destroyer escorted by a cloud of undersea and surface drones might control more water, collect more data, and threaten more targets than an entire Cold War-era task group. For adversaries, every merchant ship, tanker, or fishing vessel becomes a potential host platform for hidden devices, blurring the line between civilian and military traffic. That ambiguity could complicate rules of engagement and heighten escalation risks in already tense maritime regions.
Risks, Countermeasures, and the Next Phase
The same characteristics that make these systems attractive also raise difficult questions. A drone that can latch onto a ship undetected and wait for a signal to act is, by design, hard to attribute. In a crisis, a damaged vessel might not be able to prove whether it was attacked by a state military, a proxy, or a non-state actor that acquired similar technology on the gray market. The prospect of covert sabotage against commercial shipping lanes or critical undersea infrastructure, from data cables to energy pipelines, will likely spur calls for new norms or treaties governing autonomous maritime systems, even as states race to field them.
Defensive innovation is already trying to catch up. Navies can experiment with hull-mounted sensors tuned to detect subtle anomalies, routine dives by inspection drones, or protective measures such as textured coatings that make it harder for devices to cling securely. Surface vessels may deploy their own counter-swarms of small robots tasked with scanning for and removing parasites. Yet each layer of defense adds cost and complexity, while attackers can iterate on cheaper, disposable designs. As the SP-7V2, Lamprey, and armed Saildrone concepts move from prototype to operational testing, the underwater and surface battlespace is poised to become more crowded, more autonomous, and far harder to read, an environment where the line between predator, prey, and passenger is increasingly blurred.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
