AUKUS partners test underwater autonomous systems

Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS partners) have jointly tested their ability to communicate with underwater autonomous systems at Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025, as part of AUKUS Pillar II’s Maritime Big Play series.

Maritime Big Play is an AUKUS Pillar II exercise series to enable Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to test and integrate autonomous systems with conventional platforms rapidly. For the first time, Japan also joined these activities as a participant.

The AUKUS partners and Japan worked together to enhance their use of underwater acoustic communications to task an underwater uncrewed vehicle to conduct activities at sea.

In October last year, the AUKUS partners demonstrated their ability to remotely control each other’s uncrewed systems from great distances using common control technologies.

The technologies tested during the October event supported various operations, including software-defined acoustic modems, multi-model autonomous underwater and surface vessels, and unmanned surface vehicles.

This effort continued at Talisman Sabre by demonstrating the ability for Australia to transfer mission control of a United Kingdom extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle, located in the UK, back to the UK remotely from Jervis Bay.

“Maritime Big Play tangibly contributes to AUKUS’ partners interoperability in the maritime domain, and supports collective deterrence and stability in the Indo‑Pacific. Communicating underwater is no easy feat – but Maritime Big Play is helping make this happen faster,” Stephen Moore, First Assistant Secretary AUKUS Advanced Capabilities, said.

“The multilateral scale and complexity of Talisman Sabre provided the ideal ground for Maritime Big Play to test cutting-edge technologies, and to advance AUKUS partners operational integration and interoperability in the maritime domain.”

Exercise Talisman Sabre 25 started on July 15 with the flight deck of HMAS Adelaide in Sydney Harbor, launching military activities involving 19 nations and over 30,000 service members across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. This marks the largest bilateral military training event between the United States and Australia to date.

US service members from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and Space Force are all participating, integrating their capabilities across all domains with the Australian Defence Force and multinational partners.