Swordfish Sale

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division plans to buy a Swordfish variant of the REMUS unmanned underwater vehicle from Pocasset, MA-based Hydroid LLC, according to a Sept. 20 announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.

The center gave the following reasons why the purchase "is not suitable for full and open competition":

a. This contract is necessary to provide an additional Mk 18 Mod 1 UUV for use in evaluation of future capabilities to improve the performance of the fielded MK 18 Mod 1 Systems. The MK 18 Mod 1 Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are based on Hydroid's commercially available Remote Environmental Monitoring Units (REMUS) 100 UUV.

b. Hydroid Inc. is the only U.S. licensed manufacturer of the REMUS UUV variants and maintains the proprietary design and all data rights to the REMUS.

Inside the Navy reported in June that Senate authorizers were in agreement with their House counterparts that creating a separate fund for developing UUVs are a critical national security interest, according to a report accompanying the Senate's mark of the fiscal year 2015 defense authorization bill:

As for UUVs, the committee is "concerned" the Navy may not be able to develop the necessary capabilities to achieve its goal of deploying the "large-displacement" UUV squadron on independent missions by 2020. The Navy refers to the LDUUV as the large-diameter UUV.

"Further, the committee believes that budget constraints may further hamper the development of these critical capabilities," the report reads. "Particularly with respect to the LDUUV project, the committee encourages the Navy to take full advantage of existing expertise and infrastructure at the public shipyards."

Public shipyards may be able to assist with engineering, configuration management, acquisition support, technical problem solving, and operations and logistics support, including life-cycle maintenance and mission package support.

The committee directs the Navy to submit a report no later than Sept. 30, 2014, detailing how the service is using and plans to use the public shipyard infrastructure and expertise for UUV research, development, engineering, configuration management, acquisition support, technical problem solving, and operations and logistics support.