Lockheed Martin recently announced that it will invest $50 million in Saildrone, a maritime autonomous system, in order to deliver commercially available unmanned surface vehicles equipped with lethal defense technology.
The companies said they would collaborate with a goal of delivering integrations, including on-water, live fire demonstrations, in 2026. The relationship will marry a trusted defense technology company with an operationally-tested USV technology, a partnership the companies said will help the U.S. Navy’s USV vision for critical missions like fleet defense, undersea surveillance, reconnaissance and attack.
“Lockheed Martin and Saildrone are leading the way to answer President Trump’s call for the defense industry to act differently and leverage the strength of all of industry for our national defense,” said Stephanie C. Hill, president of rotary and mission systems at Lockheed Martin. “Together, we are combining the most sophisticated commercial and defense technologies to deliver a lethal naval solution at speed and scale. The nation needs this capability to maintain dominance over our adversaries, and we will deliver it.”
Officials said work will begin immediately and will apply an open architecture approach along with secure command and control capability to integrate Lockheed’s JAGM Launcher system into the Saildrone Surveyor platform. Larger Saildrone vehicles are already in development to support larger payloads and capabilities.
“For the last 10 years we have focused on evolving the reliability, endurance and autonomy of the Saildrone platform, which has been demonstrated in over 2 million nautical miles of active customer missions. With our technology proven, de-risked and mission ready, now is the right time to augment Saildrone USVs with sophisticated payloads to meet warfighter needs,” Richard Jenkins, founder and CEO of Saildrone, said. “This collaboration will give Saildrone the tools we need to transform the capabilities of our platforms, to include electronic warfare, anti-submarine warfare, sophisticated surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as deploying kinetic effects, all seamlessly integrated with Lockheed Martin’s trusted command, control and fire control systems.”