Leidos Sea Hunter

DESCRIPTION

Sea Hunter is Leidos' medium unmanned surface vessel (MUSV) and the vessel that established the type. Leidos designed and built it as DARPA's Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), with the goal of a highly autonomous unmanned vessel able to operate over thousands of kilometres of open sea for months at a time; it was renamed Sea Hunter. It has since done exactly that, and Leidos describes "months-long, open-ocean autonomous operations across thousands of nautical miles". Its mission set is anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures and distributed maritime operations, and it is integrated into fleet command and control rather than run as a standalone experiment. It took part in RIMPAC 2026. It runs on LAVA, the Leidos Autonomous Vessel Architecture: full autonomy across navigation, obstacle avoidance and mission execution without human intervention. Across its autonomous fleet Leidos claims a 50-year heritage with the US Navy and more than 200,000 operational autonomous nautical miles at sea. Leidos publishes no dimensions, displacement, endurance or speed for Sea Hunter itself. Its sister vessel Seahawk — an improved design drawing on over 300 lessons learned from Sea Hunter — is documented at 145 long tons fully loaded with a composite trimaran hull and 14,000 gallons of fuel for its twin diesels, the closest published indication of the class's scale.

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