Norwegian defense contractor Kongsberg and Italian undersea specialist DRASS announced a strategic partnership on June 8, 2026 to jointly develop autonomous underwater vehicles and manned-unmanned teaming systems, positioning two of Europe's most capable undersea companies to compete directly for AUKUS Pillar II UUV procurement contracts that Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States formalized less than two weeks earlier. The partnership, announced ahead of the opening of ILA Berlin 2026 — one of Europe's premier aerospace and defense exhibitions — pairs Kongsberg's HUGIN autonomous underwater vehicle platform and sonar technology with DRASS's compact submarines, swimmer delivery vehicles, and saturation diving systems, addressing a fundamental engineering bottleneck in how NATO navies deploy and control unmanned systems in contested waters.
The two companies are not filling the same gap — they are solving a problem that neither can address alone. NATO's undersea warfare planners have identified manned-unmanned teaming as a near-term priority, and the capability gap is well understood: autonomous underwater vehicles excel at persistent survey, seabed mapping, and mine countermeasures, but they cannot perform precision physical intervention tasks, and when operated from surface ships they must surface for data transfer and retasking — a vulnerability in waters where adversaries can track surface signatures. DRASS's compact submarines change that calculus.
HUGIN AUVs Plus Compact Submarines: Why Architecture Makes Sense Together
Kongsberg's HUGIN platform family, developed since 1991 in partnership with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and now at its HUGIN Superior iteration, is the most widely deployed defense AUV in NATO service. The HUGIN Superior carries a HISAS 1032 dual-receiver synthetic aperture sonar — a sensor system capable of producing centimeter-scale imagery of the seabed at operational depths reaching 6,000 meters — and runs on a 62.5 kWh pressure-tolerant lithium-polymer battery that sustains missions of up to 72 hours at 3 knots. Kongsberg also brings expertise in navigation systems, sonar technologies, and systems integration that has made the company a primary AUV supplier to more than a dozen NATO navies.
DRASS, headquartered in Livorno, Italy, brings a complementary portfolio that starts at the human end of the undersea spectrum. Its DG-900 compact submarine can carry and deploy three autonomous underwater vehicles plus a swimmer delivery vehicle from its torpedo tubes and payload bays. The company's saturation diving systems — most recently contracted to the Italian Navy for the SDO-SuRS submarine rescue and special operations ship — allow human operators to work at depth for extended periods, and its DS-8 swimmer delivery vehicle can transport eight combat swimmers 60 nautical miles at depths of up to 30 meters.
The partnership's integration target, as stated by Espen Henriksen, Senior Vice President for Uncrewed Platforms at Kongsberg, is building systems that span "the broadest spectrum of assets and technologies for littoral waters and beyond." DRASS Chief Executive Sergio Cappelletti described the goal as creating "an integration bridge between DRASS's compact submarines and manned underwater systems, and KONGSBERG's unmanned surface vehicles and conventional autonomous underwater vehicles."
Acoustic Bandwidth Constraint Drives Need for Forward-Deployed Human Operators
The engineering rationale for combining these two portfolios runs deeper than complementary product lines. Radio frequency communications cannot penetrate seawater, which means all real-time communication between an underwater vehicle and its operators must travel through water as acoustic signals. Acoustic modems — the underwater equivalent of a radio link — operate at kilobits per second, compared with the megabits-to-gigabits throughput available in air. This bandwidth constraint is fundamental and physics-bound: it cannot be engineered away with better hardware.
At the data rates acoustic modems can sustain, an AUV operating from a surface ship tens of miles away cannot receive real-time retasking instructions, hand off sensor data quickly, or receive a timely recovery command if conditions change. The effective command-and-control range for practical manned-unmanned coordination underwater is measured in kilometers, not tens of kilometers. DRASS compact submarines — deployed forward into the operational area rather than stationed on the surface — close that distance. A DRASS DG-900 hosting three Kongsberg AUVs in the same patrol zone as its human operators resolves the acoustic bandwidth problem by eliminating most of the distance it creates.
This is what defense planners mean when they use the phrase "manned-unmanned teaming" in the undersea context: not just human oversight at a distance, but human operators and autonomous vehicles physically co-located in the operational environment, with the manned platform providing launch, recovery, retasking, and precision intervention capability that the unmanned vehicles cannot provide for themselves.
Italy and Norway Signed Off at Cabinet Level
The June 8 announcement was witnessed by Antonio Tajani, Italy's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Cecilie Myrseth, Norway's Minister of Trade and Industry — an unusual level of ministerial attendance for a commercial defense partnership announcement. The presence of cabinet-level officials from both governments signals that the Kongsberg-DRASS collaboration is being treated as a matter of industrial policy, not merely a business development agreement between two defense firms.
Italy has set an ambitious undersea warfare agenda in recent years. The SDO-SuRS contract — the special operations and submarine rescue ship that DRASS is supplying with saturation diving systems — is one element of a broader Italian Navy program to develop a comprehensive undersea capability spanning special forces operations, submarine rescue, and autonomous vehicle support. A partnership with Kongsberg, whose platforms are already embedded in the procurement programs of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and more than a dozen NATO navies, gives DRASS direct access to the alliance's primary AUV integration architecture.
For Norway, the deal extends Kongsberg's existing transatlantic defense relationships into a new domain partnership with a key Mediterranean NATO ally at a moment when undersea infrastructure protection — following the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage in 2022 and subsequent Baltic cable incidents — has become one of the alliance's most urgent operational priorities.
AUKUS Pillar II Opened 10 Days Prior: First Signature Project Seeks These Exact Systems
On May 30, 2026, at the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit in Singapore, the defense ministers of Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom announced the first named Signature Project under AUKUS Pillar II: joint development of payloads and enabling systems for uncrewed undersea vehicles, with first capabilities expected to reach service from 2027. The project focuses specifically on shared technology that will enable autonomous undersea vehicles to navigate, detect, and operate as part of combined AUKUS operations — protecting critical seabed infrastructure such as submarine communications cables, and enabling surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike capabilities.
The Kongsberg-DRASS announcement followed eight days later. The AUKUS Signature Project does not name specific vendors, but its stated scope — payload development and manned-unmanned teaming for undersea vehicles, with 2027 delivery — maps directly onto what the two companies say they are building together. Kongsberg already has a direct relationship with the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit, which awarded it a contract in 2024 for the U.S. Navy's Large Diameter Unmanned Underwater Vehicle program, and delivered the first HUGIN Superior to the U.S. Navy in early 2025 following acceptance testing at Kongsberg's facilities in Norway.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles highlighted at the Shangri-La announcement that Australia alone must protect 15 submarine communications cables through which nearly all of its internet traffic flows. British Defence Secretary John Healey acknowledged that AUKUS Pillar II had spent too much time talking and too little delivering. The 2027 deadline is firm. Kongsberg and DRASS are positioning to be among the vendors that help meet it.
How Does Manned-Unmanned Teaming Work in Underwater Warfare?
The core operational concept pairs an autonomous vehicle — capable of long-endurance survey, mapping, or sensor collection missions without real-time operator input — with a nearby manned platform that provides recovery, data download, retasking, and, where needed, physical intervention in the environment. NATO has codified the interoperability standards for manned-unmanned teaming through STANAG 4586, which defines five levels of interoperability ranging from basic remote control at Level 1 to full mission autonomy with self-launch and recovery at Level 5. Most operationally deployed AUVs in NATO service currently operate at Levels 2 and 3.
The undersea domain presents challenges that aerial manned-unmanned teaming — the more mature technology — does not face. In air, a human operator can communicate with an unmanned wingman over radio or data link in near-real-time. Underwater, acoustic communications impose hard physical limits: bandwidth is measured in kilobits per second, and latency increases with distance. An AUV that encounters an unexpected obstacle, detects a contact of interest, or completes its assigned task faster than planned cannot receive updated instructions in real time if its human operator is many kilometers away on a surface ship.
The DRASS-Kongsberg model addresses this by designing the manned platform — a compact submarine carrying both human operators and the AUVs they supervise — to operate within the same patrol zone as the autonomous vehicles, keeping the acoustic communication range short and practical. The AUVs conduct persistent survey and sensor collection; the human operators in the DRASS submarine handle recovery, data analysis, retasking, and any precision intervention tasks the autonomous systems cannot perform independently.
Kongsberg's $241 Million JSM Contract: Multi-Domain Momentum Across Alliance
The DRASS partnership was announced three days after the U.S. Air Force awarded Kongsberg a $240.9 million contract for Lot Two production of the AGM-184 Joint Strike Missile — the air-launched precision weapon designed to fit internally in the F-35A weapons bay, preserving the aircraft's stealth profile while striking land and maritime targets at ranges exceeding 217 miles. The contract, awarded June 5, 2026, on a sole-source basis, is the second production lot following the initial $141 million Lot One order placed in May 2024. Work runs through November 2028 at Kongsberg's facilities in Norway.
Together, the missile contract and the DRASS partnership establish Kongsberg as a vendor whose presence spans air, surface, and undersea domains across the NATO alliance within the same week — an alignment of announcements that reflects the company's deliberate strategy of expanding its defense footprint in both the United States and European markets at a moment of elevated defense spending across NATO member states.
For DRASS, the partnership with Kongsberg accelerates its entry into the NATO autonomous systems procurement pipeline at a time when the alliance's demand for undersea capability is outpacing domestic supply from any single country. The combination of DRASS's compact submarine and swimmer delivery vehicle expertise with Kongsberg's AUV platforms and sonar integration creates a more complete system offering than either company could bring to a procurement competition independently.
The broader undersea warfare market context underscores the timing. NATO's Task Force X, established in early 2025 to counter undersea threats to critical infrastructure following the Nord Stream and Baltic cable incidents, has accelerated demand for exactly the kind of persistent, manned-unmanned patrol capability that the Kongsberg-DRASS architecture targets. With AUKUS Pillar II's first concrete procurement now active and initial delivery expected in 2027, both companies are operating on a compressed timeline.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AUKUS Pillar II, and why does it matter for undersea warfare?
AUKUS Pillar II is the advanced capabilities track of the trilateral security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, established in September 2021. While Pillar I focuses on nuclear-powered submarine acquisition for Australia, Pillar II funds joint development of advanced military technologies including autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and electronic warfare. On May 30, 2026, the three nations announced the first Pillar II Signature Project: developing shared payloads and enabling systems for uncrewed undersea vehicles, with first capabilities expected in service by 2027. The project is designed to enable AUKUS partners to protect critical seabed infrastructure and conduct surveillance, strike, and anti-submarine operations using combined autonomous and manned undersea platforms.
How does manned-unmanned teaming work underwater, and why is it technically harder than aerial teaming?
Manned-unmanned teaming in the undersea domain pairs autonomous vehicles — which conduct long-endurance survey, reconnaissance, or sensor collection missions — with nearby manned platforms that provide recovery, retasking, and precision intervention capability. The fundamental engineering constraint that makes it harder underwater than in the air is communications bandwidth: radio frequency signals cannot penetrate seawater, so underwater communication relies on acoustic modems operating at kilobits per second rather than megabits or gigabits. This limits how quickly operators can retask an autonomous vehicle or receive its data, and caps the practical range at which real-time human oversight is possible. DRASS compact submarines address part of this problem by forward-deploying human operators into the same patrol zone as the autonomous vehicles, keeping the acoustic link short and practical.
What does Kongsberg bring to this partnership, and what does DRASS contribute?
Kongsberg contributes its HUGIN autonomous underwater vehicle platform — including the HUGIN Superior, which carries HISAS 1032 synthetic aperture sonar, operates to 6,000 meters depth, and sustains missions of up to 72 hours — along with navigation systems, sonar expertise, and systems integration experience built across more than three decades of defense AUV programs deployed across NATO navies. DRASS contributes compact submarines capable of carrying and deploying up to three AUVs, swimmer delivery vehicles for special forces operations, and saturation diving systems that allow human operators to work at depth for extended periods. Together, the two companies are developing jointly designed payloads and integration architectures that allow DRASS submarines to act as forward-deployed mother ships for Kongsberg AUVs in contested littoral and deep-water environments.
Why does the undersea domain matter so much to NATO right now?
The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 and subsequent damage to communications cables in the Baltic Sea demonstrated that undersea infrastructure — pipelines, data cables, and power interconnects — is both strategically critical and largely undefended against sustained hostile action. NATO established its Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Underwater Infrastructure in response, and the AUKUS Pillar II Signature Project announced in May 2026 explicitly names critical seabed infrastructure protection as a primary mission. With more than a dozen submarine communications cables carrying the majority of intercontinental internet traffic, and with adversary states demonstrating both the willingness and capability to attack undersea infrastructure, NATO navies have made persistent, manned-unmanned patrol of key seabed corridors a near-term operational requirement.
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