Raytheon and Composite Energy Technologies have demonstrated a new uncrewed undersea vehicle launching from beneath the surface during a United States Navy exercise, the first time the service has seen the integrated capability in the water, the companies stated.

The vehicle, called HADALUS, completed a series of missions on a Navy undersea test range and demonstrated the ability to launch while submerged. The companies say the work points towards a single uncrewed platform performing detect, reacquire and engage functions within one mission.

HADALUS is 34 feet long with a six-foot cross section and an endurance the companies put at more than 2,000 nautical miles. Its hull is a free-flooded carbon fibre exoskeleton, an arrangement in which water is allowed into the structure rather than kept out, which removes the need for a heavy pressure-tight body and allows a lighter and cheaper vehicle carrying more payload.

Cost is the argument the companies are making. They say the vehicle is designed to come in at roughly a third to a fifth of the price of comparable long-endurance vehicles, offering what they describe as a scalable path to fielding affordable undersea capability.

Jen Gauthier, vice president of naval systems and sustainment at Raytheon, said: “This demonstration is an important step in a broader roadmap to deliver autonomous, end-to-end undersea capabilities that are far less detectable than surface platforms. By tightly coupling design, integration and at-sea experimentation, we’ve proven we can bring new autonomous solutions to the fleet quickly and cost-effectively.”

The two companies took the vehicle from a conceptual sketch to a prototype demonstrated in water in under 18 months, funded by their own investment, covering the design and build of the vehicle along with integration of the launcher, sonar and electronics.

Chase Hogoboom, chief executive and president of Composite Energy Technologies, said: “HADALUS demonstrates that the undersea industrial base can move with greater speed and dynamism than traditional development cycles allow. By combining CET’s advanced composite vehicle architecture with Raytheon’s mission systems, sensors and integration expertise, we have created a highly capable platform that can be produced at a fraction of the cost of conventional alternatives.”

An uncrewed vehicle that can find a target and then engage it is a step beyond what most undersea drones currently do, which is search, survey and report. Existing large vehicles such as Boeing’s Orca are configured principally for mine laying and payload delivery, while the bulk of the fleet handles survey and reconnaissance and hands its findings to a manned platform to act on.

Britain has pursued similar ground through the Royal Navy’s Project Cetus, a large uncrewed submersible built by MSubs of Plymouth and delivered in 2024 for trials work, and through the autonomous mine countermeasures systems now entering service. The Strategic Defence Review of 2025 set out an intention to pair crewed submarines with uncrewed underwater vehicles as part of the Atlantic Bastion effort to monitor the North Atlantic.