UK Buys £90M Atlantic Net Drone Network to Hunt Submarines

The British government announced on the 10th that it will invest £90 million in “Atlantic Net,” an uncrewed surveillance network designed to find Russian submarines and protect undersea cables in the North Atlantic. The contractor is Hampshire-based Ocean Infinity Solutions, and the UK Ministry of Defence will not buy the network of uncrewed vessels, underwater sensors and AI outright but will receive it as a service operated by the company.

The announcement was made at the International Sea Power Conference in Oslo, Norway. Luke Pollard, the UK Ministry of Defence’s minister for defence readiness and industry, said: “The threats beneath the North Atlantic are changing, and we are changing with them.” The British government described Atlantic Net as “a new network of autonomous systems operating across the North Atlantic.”

The system has three strands: advanced sensors that detect Russian submarines and suspicious activity; uncrewed systems that patrol underwater and track threats; and a single surveillance service that fuses this information and passes it to anti-submarine surface ships and Astute-class submarines. Ocean Infinity will provide a bundle of maritime equipment, underwater detection, communications, remote operations and data services. The Ministry of Defence said the project will create about 200 new skilled jobs.

Atlantic Net’s most distinctive feature is its contracting model. The program is structured as a “Contractor Owned, Contractor Operated, Navy Oversight” (COCONO) service. The company owns and operates the equipment, while the navy receives the resulting surveillance information and provides only oversight. Ocean Infinity’s uncrewed vessel Armada 86-06 took part in pre-qualification trials earlier this year, and the target for operational service is 2027.

Details of the selection process were also made public. The Ministry of Defence announced its intention to tender in October last year, and in January this year Minister Pollard reviewed 26 qualifying proposals after engaging with about 327 companies. On the same day, Saab also won a contract to integrate its lightweight Giraffe 1X radar into the K3 Scout uncrewed vessel.

Why the North Atlantic

Atlantic Net is the first phase of “Atlantic Bastion,” a broader Royal Navy concept. Bastion is a plan to hunt enemy submarines and protect undersea infrastructure such as cables and energy networks with a “hybrid navy” that mixes crewed and uncrewed vessels, and it was a core recommendation of the UK Strategic Defence Review. The British government said this will better protect its nuclear deterrent and undersea infrastructure from Russian underwater threats in the North Atlantic. It will also be operated together with NATO and Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) allies.

British military outlets identified the “GIUK gap,” linking Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom, as the initial focus area. This stretch of sea is the gateway through which Russian Northern Fleet submarines reach the Atlantic and has been a central arena of anti-submarine warfare since the Cold War. In the next phase, the navy’s own Type 92 uncrewed surface vessels and Type 93 uncrewed underwater vehicles are expected to be deployed.

It is not yet clear what exactly the £90 million buys. Local media reported the sum as an “initial” investment, but how much goes to sensors, vessels, operations and AI analysis has not been disclosed. No performance figures have been released either. How well Ocean Infinity’s experience in commercial seabed survey translates to military anti-submarine warfare is likely to become clear only after operations begin in 2027.

It is a large-scale case of buying maritime uncrewed systems as a surveillance “service” rather than procuring them like warships. It can fill surveillance gaps faster than the traditional approach, in which equipment development and acquisition take years, but questions of control and security that come with entrusting a core surveillance capability to a private company remain to be resolved. The US Navy is also accelerating deployment of medium unmanned surface vessels (MUSV) and the fielding of uncrewed underwater vehicles, so the program could serve as a benchmark for comparing how allied navies are making the shift to uncrewed systems.