Sea battles are shifting quietly into a new dimension—one not of speed or dimension, but of stealth, tenacity, and intellect. Underneath the waves, the U.S. Navy is heavily betting on one basket: the Orca Extra-Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle, or XLUUV. One order of magnitude larger than another underwater robot submersible, Orca is an entire paradigm shift in American underwater power projection.
Developed by Boeing, the Orca is the key to the Navy’s push toward a hybrid force—a force in which man and machine work together to dominate the most hostile oceans on the globe. It’s a concept so easy and yet so revolutionary: reserve the too-long, too-boring, too-risky missions for manned subs and let machines do the rest. As Admiral Lisa Franchetti has noted, the goal is not to augment sailors but to increase their reach and ability. Orca is to be that force multiplier that never sleeps.
What makes the Orca unique is its size and autonomy. Designed from Boeing’s Echo Voyager, this behemoth is about 26 meters long and has a payload of up to eight tons. Its hybrid powertrain allows it to cruise more than 6,500 nautical miles in silence without surfacing, one of the longest-operating unmanned systems conceived. It’s designed to slip into the depths for months, in silence, watching, surveying, and conducting operations where easily reachable human crews can’t go.
But what truly distinguishes the Orca from other subs is not necessarily its range or dimensions—it’s its brain. With advanced sensors and guides, it can cruise along the ocean floor GPS-free, using acoustic comms to navigate underwater and encrypted sat comms when it breaks through to the surface. It’s less a robot than a self-guided undersea detective in many ways.
Its modularity provides another level of flexibility. The internal bay of the Orca awaits to be shaped to suit a variety of missions, from reconnaissance and mine hunting to electronic warfare or strike. It’s a tabula rasa for the Navy’s most ambitious ideas—a submerged workhorse to experiment with new technologies, from artificial-intelligence-governed autonomy to coordinated “swarm” attacks with a fleet of drones.
The Navy’s vision is not to supplant traditional submarines but to give them new companions under the sea. Orca can deploy from coastal bases, big ships, or even repurposed civilian ships refurbished for submarine missions. Under the sea, they can scout, deploy mini-drones, or lie in wait in contested seas—missions that would fatigue or put human crews at risk. Effectively, they are the eyes, ears, and reach of the Navy where manned platforms are unacceptably risky.
Already, the program is moving from the concept phase to reality. The first test vehicle, XLE-0, was delivered to Boeing late in 2023, with sea testing underway off Southern California since early 2024. The first operational Orca, XLE-1, was tested in 2025 and should now be coming into the fleet. Those early prototypes will be flown by Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron 3, the Navy’s new squadron tasked with putting these devices into routine operations. The fleet could grow to nine or more units in the future, increasing the Navy’s ability for sustained undersea presence.
But the battle for control of the deep is not America’s alone. Other nations are creating their own enormous autonomous underwater vehicles, some of which are armed or ocean-going. Most of these platforms challenge the line between civilian and military technology and pose new issues regarding how they might be used—and misused—outside the borders of national territorial waters. The outcome is an entirely new type of undersea competition, one where silence and ambiguity are part of the calculation.
Jurists are running to keep pace as well. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was written without autonomous subs in mind. If an unmanned ship invades another person’s territorial waters, or if it is confused for hostile forces, who is responsible then—the machine operator, the maker, or the nation that launched it? All these grays shroud the legal and moral bases of drone warfare as much as they make the technology itself confusing.
The Orca XLUUV is not a project—it’s a vision of what naval power will be in the future. It’s a step in the direction of machines that can reason, live, and perform independently beneath the waves, propagating the Navy’s reach without putting human life at risk. At a time when war and peace are becoming more gray areas, the humble capability of the Orca may be the most significant tool in the Navy’s arsenal.
As the seas grow more contested and technology improves, the oceans of the world will be the next great battlefield of domination and control. And in that battle, the American Navy’s new submarine horror won’t just patrol the depths—it will re-engineer dominating them.