Navantia Uncrewed Landing Craft Concept

SH Defence and Navantia Australia pair autonomous hull design with the Cube modular mission system to turn an uncrewed landing craft into a multi-role bridge between ship and shore.

Danish defence engineering house SH Defence has joined forces with Navantia Australia to push forward the Navantia uncrewed landing craft concept, pairing the Spanish-designed autonomous hull with the Danish firm’s Cube modular mission system. Announced in the wake of the Indo Pacific 2025 maritime exposition in Sydney, the collaboration aims to move the design from trade-show standout to operational capability for the Royal Australian Navy and like-minded partners. By fusing a purpose-built uncrewed connector with a containerised mission architecture, the programme promises to deliver a far more flexible bridge between ship and shore than legacy landing craft. For navies grappling with contested littorals, manpower constraints, and budget pressure, the Navantia uncrewed landing craft offers a test case in how autonomy and modularity can be combined at scale.

Key Facts

Programme focus: Advancing the Navantia uncrewed landing craft concept as a modular, autonomous ship-to-shore connector.
Industrial partners: Navantia Australia (uncrewed landing craft design) and SH Defence (Cube Payload and Twist Lock modular mission system).
Design intent: No embarked crew, with multiple craft able to combine into floating bridges, jetties, or logistics platforms.
Modularity: ISO container-based Cube mission modules allowing rapid re-role between logistics, sensing, minelaying, and other mission sets.
Operational theatre: Littoral, coastal, and riverine environments where traditional infrastructure is limited or at risk.

A modular bridge between ship and shore

At its core, the Navantia uncrewed landing craft functions as a multi-role logistics and manoeuvre platform that navies can reconfigure within hours. The 27-metre craft with a six-metre beam fits existing Royal Australian Navy amphibious ships and carries roughly 90 tonnes of payload, depending on configuration. Naval architects designed the hull for open ocean, coastal, and riverine environments, enabling ship-to-shore, ship-to-ship, and shore-to-shore movements while keeping embarked personnel away from direct fire. Because no crew sails on board, commanders can accept greater risk in mined, missile-threatened, or heavily surveilled waters than with traditional manned connectors.

Topology formations and improvised infrastructure

The most striking aspect of the concept is its topology formation capability. Multiple uncrewed landing craft can be lashed together to form an improvised jetty, floating bridge, or forward logistics platform, creating infrastructure on demand in areas where piers and port facilities are damaged, denied, or simply do not exist. In humanitarian and disaster relief scenarios, the same topology could support the rapid delivery of medical teams, engineering stores, and emergency supplies to coastal communities cut off by storms or earthquakes. For amphibious forces, the modular bridge function could extend the reach of larger ships, allowing them to remain over the horizon while uncrewed landing craft shuttle vehicles, pallets, and fuel to austere beachheads.

Autonomy and control modes

Autonomy drives the entire design. The Navantia uncrewed landing craft can operate as a remotely supervised asset under line-of-sight control or as a more independent system guided by satellite communications and navigation algorithms. In practice, a small watch team on a mothership or ashore can manage a flotilla of craft and reroute them as threats, sea states, or tasking change. Over time, the same autonomy stack can support wider maritime surveillance and reconnaissance missions when the craft is not fully committed to logistics duties.

SH Defence’s Cube system as the modular backbone

SH Defence’s contribution to the project is its Cube Payload and Twist Lock system, a modular mission architecture already being adopted by a growing number of European and NATO navies. The Cube concept is built around ISO-standard container footprints that house mission packages ranging from mine countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance payloads. These containers can be slid into a mission bay equipped with twist locks and power, data, and cooling interfaces, allowing a ship or uncrewed landing craft to be reconfigured in a matter of hours alongside, rather than spending weeks in a refit yard. For the Navantia uncrewed landing craft, this means the same hull can be rapidly re-roled from amphibious logistics to minelaying, sea denial, or sensor picket duties.

In operational terms, the Cube system gives designers a clean separation between the platform and its payload. Once the interfaces for power, data, and physical securing are standardised, navies can compete, upgrade, or even locally develop their own mission modules without touching the core ship design. That has important industrial implications for Australia’s sovereign shipbuilding ambitions, as well as for partners who may want to plug indigenous payloads into the Navantia uncrewed landing craft while still benefiting from a common hull. It also accelerates technology insertion cycles: when new electronic warfare systems, loitering munitions, or sensing suites become available, they can be rolled into new modules and brought to sea without an expensive rebuild.

SH Defence argues that this approach also reduces whole-life cost and operational risk. Because modules can be embarked only when needed, navies avoid sailing high-value payloads through contested waters on every patrol. Maintenance can be performed in sheltered facilities on the module itself, while the uncrewed landing craft continues to operate with a different load-out. When combined with autonomy, this modularity enables the creation of task-tailored flotillas in which each Navantia uncrewed landing craft carries a different mix of logistics, sensors, and weapons, stitched together into a wider kill web.

Australian priorities and allied relevance

For Australia, the collaboration taps directly into long-running efforts to strengthen amphibious and littoral capabilities. The Royal Australian Navy already operates Canberra-class landing helicopter docks and associated LLC landing craft as the backbone of its amphibious force, but those platforms require embarked crews and operate at a premium in high-threat environments. A family of modular, attritable uncrewed landing craft could absorb many of the highest-risk ship-to-shore runs, acting as a disposable buffer between capital ships and the beach. In a crisis across the Indo-Pacific archipelagos, where distances are vast and infrastructure scarce, such platforms could multiply the practical throughput of limited amphibious assets.

The Navantia uncrewed landing craft also aligns with the alliance trend toward distributed maritime operations. Rather than concentrating logistics and fires on a handful of large hulls, navies are experimenting with dispersed constellations of smaller, harder-to-target craft connected by resilient communications networks. In that context, an uncrewed platform that can move cargo, form bridges, and host modular payloads becomes a force multiplier rather than a niche gadget. Australia’s selected design partner already supplies amphibious ships to multiple allied fleets, making the ULC concept an attractive candidate for export or co-development with other Indo-Pacific and NATO navies.

De-risking autonomy and certification

One of the main barriers to fielding uncrewed surface vessels at scale is not technology alone, but the regulatory and safety framework around them. Navantia Australia has already signalled that it is working with classification societies and autonomous vessel experts to ensure the uncrewed landing craft meets stringent standards for safety, reliability, and cyber resilience. That work is critical if such vessels are to operate regularly in busy sea lanes, alongside manned ships, or near civilian traffic. For defence customers, certified autonomy also underpins political confidence: governments are more likely to authorise routine use of uncrewed platforms when third-party validation confirms that collision-avoidance, fail-safe behaviours, and secure communications perform as advertised.

SH Defence’s experience fielding the Cube system on manned warships should help shorten that path. The company has already demonstrated containerised minelaying, mine countermeasures, and other payloads on board European surface combatants, proving that modular systems can meet naval safety and performance requirements. Extending that modularity onto a purpose-built uncrewed hull is a logical next step. The collaboration with Navantia Australia therefore does not start from a blank sheet of paper, but from two mature product lines being recombined to create a new category of amphibious connector.

Strategic implications: beyond the beachhead

Resilient and distributed amphibious logistics

Looking beyond the immediate technical benefits, the Navantia uncrewed landing craft concept carries several strategic implications. First, it moves amphibious logistics away from concentrated, crewed connectors and toward a more distributed layer of unmanned assets. That shift makes it harder for an adversary to paralyse a landing force with a small number of missile salvos aimed at traditional landing craft or port facilities. Second, by using a common modular architecture across different hulls, navies can share payload designs, reduce integration risk, and build coalition task groups where each nation contributes its own mix of modules to a shared flotilla.

Third, the concept blurs the line between logistics, sensing, and combat. A flotilla of Navantia uncrewed landing craft moving supplies to a beachhead could simultaneously host passive sonar modules, electronic support measures, or counter-drone systems, feeding real-time data into a wider joint fires network. In peacetime, the same craft could conduct hydrographic survey, environmental monitoring, or port security patrols under civilian contracts, before being rapidly reconfigured for higher-end contingencies. This dual-use flexibility fits broader defence trends in which scarce industrial capacity must serve both military and civil resilience tasks.

Finally, the partnership underscores how mid-sized defence firms are increasingly acting as catalysts for innovation in the maritime domain. Navantia Australia brings deep experience in designing and supporting amphibious platforms tailored to Australian requirements, while SH Defence contributes a focused, export-ready modular system that has already caught the attention of NATO navies. Together, they are turning the Navantia uncrewed landing craft from a static trade-show model into a candidate building block for future allied amphibious operations. How far and how quickly that vision scales will depend on procurement decisions in Canberra and beyond, but the direction of travel is clear.

As great-power competition intensifies in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, navies are searching for ways to move forces, supplies, and sensors through contested littorals without exposing crews to unnecessary risk. The Navantia uncrewed landing craft, underpinned by SH Defence’s Cube modular mission system, offers one of the more concrete answers emerging from recent maritime expositions. If the concept delivers on its promise, commanders may soon think less in terms of individual ships and more in terms of reconfigurable, unmanned task groups assembled on demand. For defence planners and industry alike, this collaboration is therefore less about a single vessel and more about a new grammar for amphibious power projection.