The Navy has High Aspirations for its Multidimensional, Very Lightweight Torpedo

*A Top Warrior Maven Story – Republished for Viewer Interest

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

Helicopters, drones, destroyers and submarines will soon be armed with a new, high-speed, explosive Very Lightweight Torpedo weapon designed to destroy enemy submarines, ships and other targets of interest.

The new weapon, slated to enter production within the next several years, represents a series of collaborative efforts between U.S. Navy weapons developers, academic researchers at Penn State University and industry partners from Northrop Grumman. 

Existing heavyweight torpedoes have been receiving numerous electronics, explosives and guidance systems in recent years through a series of upgrades, yet this Navy Very Lightweight Torpedo effort is the first Torpedo solicitation the Navy has put out since the 1980s.

Very Lightweight Torpedo 

“We have a prototype. We learned a lot by building that prototype and then consulting with the Navy with where we saw the risks and the opportunity. We are also working on reducing the cost overall by trying to cut 50-percent of the current cost of some subcomponents,” David Portner, Senior Northrop Grumman program manager, told Warrior in an interview.

The Very Lightweight Torpedo program emerged from a previous effort to engineer and test a first-of-its-kind Torpedo defense system designed to track, intercept and destroy attacking enemy torpedoes. Interestingly, Northrop engineers adjusted the software to enable an offensive capability for the weapon, which still retains the ability to be programmed for Torpedo defense as well.

“It is a software-enabled hardware which has not lost its anti-torpedo software system so it could easily fill both roles,” Portner explained.