America Built a Handful of Exquisite Submarines. Now It's Building 200 Undersea Drones a Year.
America's First Purpose-Built AUV Production Line
Anduril Industries is building a 150,000-square-foot production facility in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, designed from the outset to manufacture autonomous underwater vehicles at a rate no U.S. facility has attempted before. The factory opens in late 2025, begins operations in early 2026, and reaches full capacity by year's end: 200 Dive-LD hulls annually, starting from an initial baseline of 50. Until Quonset is operational, Anduril continues building Dive-LD vehicles at its Quincy, Massachusetts maritime engineering center, where output is capped at 12 to 24 units per year.
Anduril is funding the aggressive timeline with its own money plus state support, a bet that demand materializes before the concrete cures. Chris Brose, Anduril's chief strategy officer, said the Navy's question has been blunt: "Can Anduril ramp production to really hit high-rate manufacturing numbers?" The Quonset facility is the answer. "We're going to lean forward. We're going to invest in ourselves," Brose told reporters June 11. "We're going to put the facilities in place to meet a demand that we expect to grow," rather than wait for a contract and scramble to catch up.
The Navy's $18.6 million contract, awarded in February through the Defense Innovation Unit's Commercial Solutions Opening process, validated the Dive-LD's performance after a swim-off event. But that contract funds procurement. The Quonset bet targets something different: proving that a defense-tech company can build AUVs the way commercial manufacturers build automobiles, using commercial-off-the-shelf components, modular design, and scalable manufacturing techniques. The facility will include dedicated service bays, testing laboratories, and space for lifecycle work from research through sustainment.
Quonset Point is no random choice. The peninsula has served as the birthplace of most of the U.S. Navy's crewed submarine fleet for fifty years. The Naval Undersea Warfare Center and multiple major undersea contractors operate in the region. Brose called it a "phenomenal center of undersea expertise and production" with access to the water. Shane Arnott, Anduril's Maritime Division senior vice president, framed the strategic logic directly: "Affordable, distributed mass is a central tenet of undersea deterrence."
The facility will create more than 100 jobs in Rhode Island over five years. Anduril's live job board already lists roles tied to the Quonset operation, including a Materials Supervisor for the Dive-XL program. The first purpose-built AUV production line in the U.S. is not just a factory. It signals that the undersea warfare calculus is shifting from bespoke crewed platforms to mass-produced autonomous systems, and that the industrial base to support that shift is being built now, on a peninsula in Narragansett Bay.
What 200 AUVs Per Year Actually Means
The Dive-LD is a 5.8-meter, 2,700-kilogram autonomous underwater vehicle rated to 6,000 meters depth (full ocean depth) with up to 10 days of autonomous operation at 2.5 knots. It carries over one cubic meter of payload volume and integrates side-scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, sub-bottom profilers, multi-beam echo sounders, magnetometers, and cameras in configurable mission kits. Those specs place it in the same class as the Navy's other large-displacement UUV programs. What separates it is the production math.
That number reframes what an AUV program looks like. The Navy's existing large UUV efforts, Boeing's Orca XLUUV and the Snakehead LDUUV, are structured as bespoke platforms, built in small numbers, with unit costs that reflect handcrafted production. A run rate of 200 Dive-LDs annually signals a different operating assumption: that undersea drones are consumable assets fielded in volume, not curated assets maintained like submarines.
Dive-LD's modular architecture lets operators swap sensor suites in weeks rather than months or years, per Anduril's specifications. For Pacific naval operations, a single hull configuration can shift between mine countermeasures, seabed mapping, undersea ISR, and anti-submarine warfare support without requiring a separate platform for each mission. The Navy's Program Office Advanced Undersea Systems (PMS 394) and the Defense Innovation Unit selected Anduril alongside Oceaneering International and Kongsberg Discovery in February 2024 for prototype development, with live demonstrations beginning that year. The first Dive-LD delivery to UUVRON-1 arrived in April 2025, Anduril confirmed on LinkedIn.
The navigation suite is built for GPS-denied environments, a practical requirement for undersea operations across the first island chain, where communications denial is the baseline condition. Dive-LD uses an aided inertial navigation system coupled with a Doppler velocity log and pressure-based depth sensors, with acoustic navigation aiding via USBL and LBL. The system supports terrain-referenced and magnetic anomaly navigation for extended submerged runs, with position error estimated below 0.1% of distance traveled over short unaided intervals. That accuracy matters when the vehicle is mapping seabed infrastructure or hunting mines in littoral waters near contested coastlines.
Mass production also changes the attrition calculus. If a Dive-LD conducting mine countermeasures in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea is damaged or lost, a production line capable of 200 units per year can replace it in weeks, not the years it takes to repair or replace a crewed mine countermeasures vessel or a hand-built prototype UUV. The Navy's interest in distributed, persistent undersea sensing depends on having enough hulls to maintain coverage across vast ocean areas without pulling assets from other missions.
The 10-day endurance and pier-to-pier autonomous operation (launch, execute, return without human intervention) further compresses the logistics chain. Anduril designed Dive-LD to ship in a 20-foot ISO container and operate with as few as two to four personnel. A crewed vessel performing the same mission profile requires a dedicated ship, crew billets, and underway logistics. The cost differential per sortie drops dramatically, and the personnel risk drops to zero.
Two hundred Dive-LDs a year, each carrying multiple sensor payloads and operating autonomously for days at full ocean depth, represents a shift in how the Navy thinks about undersea presence: from a few expensive platforms patrolling key chokepoints to distributed networks covering broad areas simultaneously. The Quonset Point production line is built to deliver exactly that.
Building the Workforce No One Has Built Before
Anduril's Quonset Point facility isn't just building autonomous undersea vehicles. It's building the first workforce trained to mass-produce them, a talent pool that doesn't yet exist at scale in the United States.
The company's open roles tell the story. A Factory Manager posting for the Quonset site lists a salary range of $143,000 to $191,000, plus equity and benefits. That's not a defense-industrial wage. That's a tech-industrial wage, for a manufacturing role. The gap between those two worlds is exactly where Anduril is recruiting.
The job description reveals what the company actually needs: someone who can run a multi-product, multi-business-line facility building Dive-XL, Dive-LD, and Copperhead systems simultaneously. That's not a conventional production line where the same widget comes down the belt for years. It's a flexible manufacturing architecture that scales from small to extra-large vehicle sizes. The person running it needs to context-switch between platforms, manage shared infrastructure across business lines, and stand up processes that don't exist yet.
Seven to ten years of manufacturing or site leadership experience. Engineering or technical background. Comfort with what the posting calls "radical autonomy," receiving a problem statement and expected outcome, then owning everything in between. And a U.S. Secret security clearance, which shrinks the talent pool to cleared candidates before filtering for skills even begins.
The preferred qualifications narrow it further. Anduril wants people who've worked in hyper-growth tech environments, not mature defense contractors. People who've stood up multi-product production sites from scratch rather than inherited established processes. That's a direct signal about the kind of culture the company is building in Rhode Island, and the kind of experience it values over traditional defense manufacturing credentials.
Zero G Talent's board lists 223 Anduril roles added in the past week alone, including a materials supervisor for the dive xl program in Quonset. The Maritime Division is one of the company's fastest-growing divisions. That throughput demands a manufacturing technician pipeline the company has to build itself. The Factory Manager posting explicitly includes responsibility for centralized technician hiring, training, and development, with annual, quarterly, and monthly resourcing plan cadences.
The skills required sit at the intersection of mechanical assembly, pressure testing, AI-driven system integration, and classified program handling. Traditional submarine manufacturing at General Dynamics Electric Boat or Huntington Ingalls demands deep nuclear-qualified welding and naval architecture expertise. Anduril's production line needs people who can work with autonomous software stacks, sensor fusion hardware, and flexible manufacturing systems that reconfigure between vehicle classes.
Crewed submarine programs train a workforce measured in the hundreds over decades. Anduril is building toward a workforce of over 100 in Rhode Island for a single facility, producing autonomous units at a rate no U.S. undersea program has attempted. If the Navy's demand signal holds (the contract suggests it does) that workforce scales further.
Can Rhode Island supply it? The state has maritime manufacturing heritage through Electric Boat's supply chain and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport. But Anduril's hiring profile pulls from a different labor market: tech workers willing to work on-site in a factory environment, cleared or clearable, comfortable with the pace of a company that says it deploys capabilities in months, not years. That profile is more Silicon Valley than submarine capital, and importing it to Quonset Point means competing with Boston, Austin, and the broader defense-tech corridor for people who can do both the mechanical work and the software-adjacent integration.
The Factory Manager role is the leading indicator. Fill that position, and the technician pipeline follows. Miss on it, and the 200-units-per-year target stays a slide deck. Anduril is betting that the wage structure, the equity upside, and the mission pitch can pull that talent to Rhode Island. The job posting doesn't say "naval architecture." It says "translating operational problems into data problems." That's the hiring brief for a new kind of defense manufacturer.
How Quonset Connects to Anduril's Trans-Pacific Drone Strategy
The Dive-LD production line in Quonset doesn't exist in isolation. It's the U.S. manufacturing anchor of a trans-Pacific drone buildout that Anduril has been assembling for the better part of a year, one that stretches from Japanese defense ministry briefing rooms to the factory floors of Australia's automotive industry.
The logic is straightforward: if the U.S. Navy and its Pacific allies intend to contest undersea dominance against a numerically superior adversary, they need mass-produced autonomous platforms distributed across allied theaters. Quonset supplies the Stateside volume. But the Pacific-facing volume has to come from somewhere closer to the point of need.
That's where Australia enters the picture. Anduril has been in active discussions about securing manufacturing capacity on the continent, with reports pointing to talks involving a former Nissan production facility, the kind of existing industrial infrastructure that would let Anduril stand up AUV production without the years-long timeline of a greenfield build. The pitch to Canberra is the same one Anduril has made to Washington: autonomous undersea drones, produced at scale, integrated into allied naval operations.
Japan represents the other node. Anduril has engaged directly with Japan's defense establishment about co-production and procurement of autonomous undersea systems, aligning with Tokyo's broader shift toward unmanned maritime platforms in its defense planning. A Japanese production or final-assembly partnership would place Dive-class AUVs within the logistics chains of the Maritime Self-Defense Force, reducing deployment timelines in the Western Pacific.
The workforce implications compound. A Quonset line building 200 Dive-LD units a year requires manufacturing technicians, integration engineers, and quality supervisors, the same skill categories Anduril is now hiring for in Rhode Island. If Australian and Japanese production follow, those roles multiply across three continents, creating a distributed manufacturing talent pool that doesn't currently exist at scale anywhere.
The Navy contract attached to the Dive-LD program funds early production. The Quonset facility converts that contract into hardware. And the reported Pacific conversations suggest Anduril is betting that 200 units a year for the U.S. is a floor, not a ceiling, and that allied demand will push the company to replicate the Quonset model in allied industrial bases before the decade is out.
Legacy Primes Are Scaling for a Different War
Northrop Grumman's $1 billion propulsion expansion and Boeing's Orca XLUUV program show the legacy defense industry scaling for a different conflict than the one the Pacific is preparing for. Anduril's Quonset operation sits on the other side of a line that is hardening fast.
The distinction is not about technology alone. It is about production philosophy. Northrop Grumman's recent manufacturing investments center on solid rocket motors and missile propulsion: the company says it has delivered over 1.3 million SRMs across facilities spanning 10 million square feet and plans to double capacity by 2027. Boeing's Orca program, which the Government Accountability Office reported on in June 2025, is delivering extra-large uncrewed undersea vehicle prototypes to the Navy under a $1.13 billion acquisition framework for 16 units. Both programs reflect the legacy model, with low annual unit counts, high per-unit cost, bespoke integration, and years between contract award and initial operational capability.
Anduril's Dive-LD production target is a different order of magnitude entirely. The company won a U.S. Navy program of record for the XL-AUV through the Defense Innovation Unit, and separately landed a five-year A$1.7 billion Ghost Shark XLUUV program with the Royal Australian Navy in September 2025, a contract that required Anduril to build a dedicated production facility in Australia on timelines the company says traditional programs could not match. The Quonset facility is the American mirror of that bet: purpose-built for recurring manufacturing, not prototyping.
The contrast shows up in hiring velocity. Zero G Talent's board lists 223 roles added at Anduril in the past seven days, including a supervisor for the dive xl program in Quonset. Northrop Grumman added 27 roles in the same period, many in software and supply chain planning at existing sites. Boeing added 33. Anduril's pace reflects a company staffing a production line. The primes' pace reflects companies managing programs.
This is not a criticism of Northrop Grumman or Boeing. The SMART Demo program (Northrop's company-funded annual effort to design, build, and test a new solid rocket motor in under 12 months) demonstrates genuine manufacturing innovation. Boeing's Orca fills a genuine capability gap in long-endurance undersea missions. Both serve real requirements.
But the Pacific naval calculus is shifting toward mass. The Navy's contract with Anduril, combined with the Ghost Shark program in Australia, signals that undersea warfare planners are moving from a world where the U.S. builds a handful of exquisite platforms to one where allied navies need dozens or hundreds of autonomous systems fielded fast enough to match the pacing threat. A 200-unit annual production line for a vehicle the Dive-LD's size, modular and AI-driven, built in a facility designed for throughput rather than custom assembly, is the industrial expression of that shift.
The legacy primes can compete. Northrop Grumman's scale, nearly 100,000 employees, facilities in all 50 states, decades of propulsion heritage, gives it advantages in supply chain depth and government integration that no startup can match. Boeing's installed base and test infrastructure are real assets. But neither company's public undersea manufacturing footprint looks like Quonset. Neither has committed to a production rate measured in hundreds per year for an autonomous undersea platform.
Anduril's Quonset hiring (production technicians, materials supervisors, manufacturing engineers for a line designed to run at rate) is building a skill base that does not yet exist at scale in the U.S. defense industrial base. The legacy primes will continue to hire for their programs. But if the Pacific strategy holds, the manufacturing workforce for undersea warfare will look less like Boeing's Orca production and more like Anduril's Quonset floor.
Why Quonset, Why Now
Anduril's 150,000-square-foot facility at Quonset Business Park didn't land in a vacuum. It plugged into a defense-industrial base that has been scaling up for years and is now the densest undersea manufacturing corridor in the United States. The park crossed 15,000 jobs in 2025 across 267 companies, according to the Quonset Development Corporation's annual report. That milestone matters because it shows the infrastructure, workforce pipeline, and supplier network already exist when a company like Anduril says it needs to hire 100 people and start building.
The anchor tenant is General Dynamics Electric Boat, which has been manufacturing at Quonset since a 2018 groundbreaking on a 1-million-square-foot, $800-million expansion. The Navy's $18.4 billion contract modification for two Virginia-class submarines, announced in April 2025, guarantees that work runs through 2036. Senator Jack Reed, ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, called the contract "a major win for Rhode Island's workforce that will provide added stability for the Ocean State's industrial base." Electric Boat has over 24,000 employees across Rhode Island and Connecticut and is in the middle of a hiring boom driven by both Virginia-class production and the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program.
That production load creates the supplier density Anduril is now drawing on. A 2022 report by the Southeastern New England Defense Industry Alliance found defense spending in Rhode Island accounted for $7.6 billion in direct and indirect economic impact and supported over 34,000 jobs with an annual payroll of $3 billion. The state also hosts the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport, Naval Station Newport, and the Naval War College, which means the test-and-evaluation infrastructure for undersea systems is local, not shipped across the country.
Anduril's $8.3 million investment was supported by state tax breaks and incentives, and Brose credited Quonset Development Corporation Managing Director Steve King directly: "None of this would have been possible without Steve and the QDC. It's rare that you find a partner that moves as fast as we do." The QDC's Flex Industrial Campus, a public-private partnership, let Anduril get from lease to ribbon-cutting in under 16 months. The building will expand by another 50,000 square feet in 2026.
The workforce pipeline is being built in parallel. Reed helped SENEDIA secure multiple Department of Defense grants for a regional workforce development partnership aimed at connecting as many as 5,000 workers to submarine production jobs. The state's broader manufacturing modernization push, coordinated through the PolarisMEP's Ocean Tech Hub and the Rhode Island AI Task Force, is layering AI and smart manufacturing training onto a workforce that already knows how to build submarines.
Quonset's constraints are real. Over 95% of its 3,200 acres are developed or in lease negotiations, and only about 21 acres of undeveloped land remain. That scarcity is pushing QDC to develop the Rhode Island Ready program, which uses $40 million in voter-approved bond funds to pre-permit industrial sites statewide. But the demand signal is clear: REGENT Craft is building a 255,000-square-foot electric seaglider factory at the park, Edesia Nutrition is adding 200,000 square feet, and Electric Boat just expanded its coating facility by 30,000 square feet.
Anduril's Quonset factory is one tenant in a broader buildout. The question is whether the state's workforce pipeline and supplier base can keep pace with three simultaneous production ramps: submarines, autonomous undersea vehicles, and electric seagliders, all within the same 3,200-acre park.
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