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Next-generation Sea Archer small uncrewed surface vessels surge across the ocean, several close in on adversary targets to engage with loitering munitions or Naval Strike Missiles while others carry out electronic warfare missions alongside Royal Australian Navy warships or transfer crucial supplies to front-line Australian Defence Force littoral troops.
That’s the ambitious vision proposed by Leidos Australia; cheap and attritable Sea Archers produced en masse using Australia’s existing recreational aluminium boat builder network.
It’s a plan that the Victorian-headquartered company is funding themselves with self-confidence, as the first Sea Archer prototype prepares to begin harbour acceptance trials in Townsville next month, and if successful, undertakes sea acceptance trials in Darwin during April and May this year.
Initial production is expected later this year, despite no current Defence contract for the vessel, with a targeted construction time of less than three months and cost of US$1 million per vessel. More than 16 shipyards have reportedly been approached to confirm their interest in the build.
Leidos chief of maritime engineering and technology and Royal Australian Navy Captain (Ret’d) Zoe Chadwick said the next-generation dazzle-camouflaged craft is designed with multi-mission capability and rapid manufacturing capacity in mind.
“Sea Archer was designed from the outset to support a distributed sovereign build capability. When we first looked to build Sea Archer in-country we approached 16 different boat builders, mostly in local and regional sort of areas, the smaller type shipyards and boat yards. That is so that we can support surge capability or parallel builds if it was required,” she said.
“This vessel was built in Toronto, just north of Sydney and it demonstrates that we are able to build a Sea Archer in-country, utilising our local workforce and our local supply chains.
“Sea Archer fits inside a standard 40 foot ISO high cube container, making it ideal for covert transport around Australia and, of course, globally … We can launch it from any boat ramp and recover it from any boat ramp around Australia. A very versatile piece of equipment.
“Sea Archer has very impressive speed and endurance. It’s capable of up to 40 knots, which means that we can deploy it quickly, we can redirect missions quickly, and if there’s a time-critical mission, we can get there at speed.
“Sea Archer has a range of 1,500 nautical miles ... We can loiter on station for up to 23 days with the standard fuel tank.
“We do have three different variants of Sea Archer, and we do have a longer variant and a wider variant of Sea Archer, so that we’re a bit more sort of versatile in capabilities.
“Each Sea Archer has an integrated electronic warfare system and it’s a sovereign system, that does support electronic support/attack and it can form a coordinated information-sharing network of EW between different Sea Archers as well. You’ll be able to share your EW picture. If one vessel collects information about an adversary vessel, they’ll be able to share that with another vessel that is not co-located with the first vessel, form a coordinated picture of what is going on around them so that you can coordinate a response.
“At the end of sea trials (in April/May), that is what we would consider ready for use in May this year.”
At the heart of the small uncrewed surface vessel strategy is an advanced autonomy platform, Leidos Autonomous Vessel Architecture (LAVA), which enables high-speed, long-range and smart mission execution across diverse maritime environments out to a range of 1,500 nautical miles.
The autonomous system has been installed on 25 different platforms for the United States Navy, clocking more than 140,000 nautical miles across uncrewed craft such as the Sea Hunter and the Seahawk.
It’s understood that Sea Archer’s LAVA can utilise leading or following behaviours and even take over control if signal is lost to use programmed behaviour to reorientate itself and maintain connectivity.
Sea Archer itself can be carried via boat trailer, is powered by two commercially available 300 horsepower outboard motors, has survivability up to sea state seven and can be easily launched at civilian boat ramps before being controlled remotely or tasked to complete navigation using its LAVA autonomy platform.
The low-radar cross section vessel navigates using a Starlink uplink, electro-optical cameras, forward-looking infrared cameras and a pan-tilt zoom camera to achieve 360 degree visibility. The vision is augmented with artificial intelligence to identify and track people, sea buoys, other seagoing boats and even whales.
“We are moving at pace on this program. It’s a fast moving and agile program to get this thing ready to go out on deployments … These are Australians working on an Australian asset in and for Australia. I think that’s a very, very important point,” according to Kevin “Q” Quarderer, Leidos Australia international science and technology director and former US naval attaché to Australia, who previously acted as a project manager for the first US Navy uncrewed surface vessel in 2002.
“We’re doing this in anticipation that there will be opportunities to show the operational capabilities. We expect there will be operational capabilities that we’ll have a chance to demonstrate.
“I think teaming is a really important one in that Sea Archer can go out there, it can support the mission as a single, or if you wanted to put multiple Sea Archers out there they can work together and support the mission.
“In the hybrid fleet of the future, you’ll have uncrewed vessels working with crewed vessels. And so you may have Sea Archer goes out there, does the initial work, and then potentially hands off to a crewed vessel and says, ‘Hey, I’ve been escorting this vessel for this amount of time. I’ve seen these types of behaviour’, and then turns it over to the crewed vessel. So there’s a lot of opportunity in the teaming side.”
Without a current destination with the Royal Australian Navy, the Sea Archer is being targeted across multiple roles with its 900-kilogram flexible payload bay and 3,000-litre diesel fuel tank.
With a change of the main bay module, the vessel can complete strike missions using a choice of either 16 Innovaero OWL precision loitering munitions or two Kongsberg Naval Strike Missiles, electromagnetic deception and electronic warfare operations, logistics and resupply or border protection tasks using intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) technology.
EW, logistics and ISR capability is considered baseline technology contained in each vessel.
“There are four main missions that we’ve got Sea Archer tackling out of the get-go right now. So the first one is ISR – intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. That’s kind of a baseline mission,” according to Quarderer.
“The second one is what we would call micro logistics. So being able to take cargo, supplies, whatever you need in a contested environment in a controlled way, probably using some level of autonomy on that … It could be between surface vessels, it could be into a port, it could be into an area where you may have troops in contact and you need to bring new resupply. It’s 900 kilograms of whatever you care to do.
“Then electronic warfare, which contains two sub-brackets. So, you’ve got electronic support and then electronic attack.
“Electronic support would be to vacuum up all those (radiating electronic) signals and I’m going to give you a fingerprint of what that looks like … Identifying, characterising or sometimes when we talk about combatants (showing that) they’re in a mode that may cause you some kind of concern. So, the electronic support is kind of characterising who are you looking at and what are their intentions.
“And then the last mission is my favourite; it’s the kinetic strike … We have loitering munitions, we have a memorandum of understanding with Kongsberg for surface-to-surface weapons, like the naval strike missile, that type of thing.
“But let’s be honest, the adversaries of the future are not going to stick just to those areas. They’re going to keep evolving. When you take a look at Sea Archer out there, you’ve got the ability to customise, to grow into those areas. You’ve got a bunch of space. So if you need to adapt and put the latest modules into Sea Archer, this is customisable for the missions of the future.”
Naval warfare expert and former Navy officer Jennifer Parker said the Sea Archer prototype taps into Australia’s often forgotten commercial boat-building industry.
“I think that the Leidos Sea Archer as a prototype is an impressive capability. I think that it is good to see companies thinking outside the box and building capabilities in Australia that we could potentially build at scale to complement the fleet,” she said.
“In terms of the roles that the Sea Archer could play, I think there’s a number of roles that would be very beneficial from the EW role highlighted to logistics.
“I personally remain sceptical of the idea of uncrewed surface vessels with anti-ship missiles on them as a good solution. But I think the key point here is building these capabilities and testing them. It’s fantastic to see Leidos doing it and funding it themselves.
“We can have theoretical concepts of how we think USVs will be employed, but it’s not until you actually get them out, do trials, get them operating with a fleet, that you really know the answers to those questions.
“What matters is they’ve got the prototype, they’re testing it, and I would really like them to be embraced by the Navy with trials to see what role it could play in the fleet.
“One of the things we often forget when we think about boat building in Australia is although Australia does not have many shipbuilders … Australia has a really significant boat building industry, and so this is tapping into that. How do we use our adjacent industries to develop scale in a capability?
“This is exactly what the government needs to be thinking about, not just in terms of our boat builders, and this is the example of the Sea Archer, but also adjacent industries like our mining industry, for our uncrewed ground vehicles, our uncrewed aerial vehicles.
“There’s lots of industries in Australia that are actually fairly world leading, that are adjacent industries, including uncrewed ground vehicles in the mining industry, that are adjacent industries that could very much help Defence’s ability to innovate at scale.
“I think to Leidos’ credit, they are trying to identify the capability gaps and they’ve brought some SMEs in with specific naval knowledge to do that. But for this to be a success, the trials, and moving forward, will need to demonstrate that this is something that the Navy needs.
“What I would love to see, honestly, is a new squadron established within Navy for USVs, like we did for UAVs, that becomes the SMEs in testing and operating these capabilities … The solution would be to stand up a permanent squadron that become the experts in this and work with the companies to test, evaluate and develop concepts on how we could use and employ these capabilities.
“That allows the government to get to the point of a quick yes or a quick no, because they know the platform intimately and they’ve worked out exactly where it integrates into the fleet.”
Defence Connect travelled to Leidos Australia’s Mulgrave facility to review the Sea Archer prototype.
