Leidos to build Sea Archer USV in Australia

US company Leidos will manufacture its aluminium, 37-foot (about 11.3m) Sea Archer Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) in Australia. The first of class is currently under construction in the US but the second will be built in Toronto on the mid-north coast of New South Wales by small boatyard Oceans Rivers Lakes.

Harbour acceptance trials of the first vessel are scheduled for the first quarter of 2026 with customer trials due to start in the second quarter. Next year also the craft will undertake Electromagnetic Warfare trials.

The RAN and US Navy have both expressed interest in the design, as has Australian Border Force along with an undisclosed number of other international customers.

The craft is managed by Leidos’s own Leidos Autonomy Visual Architecture (LAVA) system, according to the company’s Australian subsidiary Leidos Australia. The same autonomy system is used by the US Navy’s so-called Ghost Fleet of missile-armed Leidos-built USVs based in San Diego and which self-deployed from San Diego to Guam, Japan, Hawaii and Sydney for Indo Pacific 2023.

Sea Archer displaces 9 tonnes fully loaded, has a 1,500nm range at her most economical speed, and uses two 300hp outboard motors which bestow a maximum speed of 40kt. The vessel has a maximum payload of 900kg and the model on display at Indo Pacific showed it armed, under protective hatches, with a battery of 16 OWL-X loitering munitions manufactured by Perth-based Innovaero; these Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) have a range of more than 100km, but Innovaero declined to disclose exact performance figures.

The Sea Archer is designed to be attritable, says the company, so its construction is deliberately simple – any boatyard anywhere in Australia could manufacture it. It has a low-coast EO-IR camera manufactured by FLIR Inc, with a Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) optical camera.