Dive-LD (LDUUV)

The Dive-LD is a large-diameter autonomous underwater vehicle developed and manufactured by Anduril Industries of the United States for military and commercial maritime missions. Anduril's family of undersea vehicles, including the Dive-LD, was selected by the Defense Innovation Unit and the US Navy in early 2024 to prototype distributed, long-range, persistent underwater sensing and payload delivery in contested environments.

The Dive-LD is designed for missions of up to 10 days' endurance, with an architecture Anduril states can scale to multi-week missions, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters. The vehicle uses a modular, software-first design that allows reconfiguration with different payloads for undersea battlespace intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, and seafloor mapping. Its exterior is 3D-printed, which Anduril says permits faster and cheaper customization for both military and commercial users. Autonomy is provided by Anduril's Lattice OS software, with pier-launched and surface-vessel launch options. Anduril operates a manufacturing facility at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, sized to deliver hundreds of Dive-LD vehicles annually, while a separate plant in Sydney, Australia, produces the larger Dive-XL, an extra-large AUV using the same modular architecture for longer-range and higher-payload missions. Related Anduril undersea systems include Copperhead, a family of high-speed AUVs carrying the Copperhead-M torpedo, and the Seabed Sentry detection system. A single Dive-LD was reported to cost approximately US$2.5 million as of 2024.

The Dive-LD was tested during the Navy's Integrated Battle Problem 24.1 exercise in San Diego Bay in March 2024. In August 2024, sources told DefenseScoop that the Pentagon had selected the Dive-LD for the second tranche of the Replicator initiative, the Defense Department effort to mass-produce attritable autonomous systems to deter China; the Navy's program office for advanced undersea systems, PMS 394, put the vehicle forward. Sailors of Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Group 1 and Undersea Vehicle Squadron 3 conducted hands-on training with the Dive-LD at Keyport, Washington, in December 2024. Anduril later announced delivery of the first Dive-LD to Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron 1 (UUVRON-1).

During the 2026 Iran war, the United States Navy deployed Dive-LD vehicles in a covert, months-long mine-clearing operation in the Strait of Hormuz, working alongside Navy divers and SEALs to search the seabed for explosives Iran said it had planted after the war began in February 2026. US officials confirmed in late August 2026 that underwater drones had identified more than 100 suspected mines in the strait's traffic separation scheme, which private contractors subsequently dealt with.

On 8 September 2026, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy announced it had captured an American unmanned undersea vehicle near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, which Iranian state media identified as an Anduril Dive-LD. The IRGC said the vehicle had been delivered to the US fleet in 2025 and was equipped for subsurface reconnaissance, seabed mapping, mine detection and inspection of undersea cables and pipelines. The same day, a US Central Command spokesman said the captured vehicle was an older, malfunctioning model that had been "essentially dead in the water for more than a day" before its capture, and that it "neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment."