Hey friends, Wes O’Donnell here, Army vet, Air Force vet, journalist, law grad, and self-confessed naval technology nerd. Today, we’re diving into a stealthy monster that didn’t roll off a dry dock but arrived quietly aboard a C-17: Australia’s Ghost Shark drone submarine. This thing just landed in Hawaii for joint testing with the U.S. Navy, and it might be the most disruptive undersea platform in decades.
Built by Anduril Industries, Ghost Shark is a next-gen Extra-Large Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (XL-AUV), modular, AI-powered, and crewless. It’s not a concept. It’s operational, ahead of schedule, and now being tested in RIMPAC 2025 next month, one of the world’s largest naval exercises. This thing doesn’t surface. It doesn’t talk. It just gets launched and disappears into contested waters to spy, strike, lay mines, or make rival admirals very nervous.
In this video, I break down:
How Ghost Shark was developed, from contract to prototype in just three years
What makes it different: AI autonomy, no need for real-time comms, and no human crew
Why its production is scalable and mass-ready by 2025—no boutique tech here
Why it’s already being tested by the U.S. Navy (spoiler: this thing is built on Anduril’s Lattice AI platform, and yes, it can think for itself)
Why it matters for the Pacific theater and how it undermines China's maritime strategy
Strategic implications: deterrence by ambiguity, cheap naval presence, and underwater swarm warfare
This is modern naval warfare: quiet, scalable, and algorithmically lethal. Ghost Shark is what happens when you throw out the rulebook and build something that doesn’t need permission slips, periscopes, or photo ops.
If you’re into next-gen defense tech, AI on the battlefield, and watching the U.S. and its allies deploy asymmetric capabilities that keep adversaries guessing, hit that subscribe button. Let’s build a smarter, more informed defense community together.
Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes. And to our Australian friends, cheers for skipping the bureaucracy and getting the job done.
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