# Anduril Dive-LD A large autonomous undersea vehicle built by [[Anduril]]: roughly **5.8 metres** long, close to **three tonnes**, rated to about **6,000 metres** depth with around **10 days** of autonomous endurance. Mission set: mine countermeasures, seabed mapping, intelligence gathering, anti-submarine work, and inspection of undersea infrastructure such as cables and pipelines. It was among the capabilities the Pentagon moved to mass-produce under the [[Replicator Initiative]], priced in 2024 reporting at roughly **$2.5M per unit**. ## The Strait of Hormuz incident — September 8, 2026 On **Tuesday, September 8, 2026**, the **Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy** announced it had captured a U.S. autonomous undersea vehicle near the entrance to the [[Strait of Hormuz]]. Iranian state media footage showed an Anduril-branded hull, identified across reporting as a Dive-LD. **U.S. Central Command's account, from spokesman Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins:** the vehicle was "essentially dead in the water for more than a day," was "an older model" in the Dive-LD line, had been "surveying regional waters in support of ongoing operations," and "neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment." CENTCOM added that "U.S. operations in area waters continue." **Anduril's account:** "Dive-LD is an attritable autonomous system, meaning it is designed from the outset to operate in dangerous environments where loss of the vehicle is an expected possibility. Its purpose is to keep warfighters out of the most dangerous parts of the undersea mission." The company said the vehicle "had already delivered significant value operating thousands of hours in months-long operations in CENTCOM." ⚠️ **Iran's claim of a capture and CENTCOM's account of a malfunctioning derelict are not the same story.** Both are in the record; neither has been independently confirmed. The load-bearing fact is CENTCOM's, not Anduril's or Iran's: the drone **malfunctioned and sat disabled for over a day** before recovery. ## Why it matters **"Attritable" is doing two jobs at once.** It is a real engineering category — a system built cheap enough to lose, deliberately, so that people are not risked instead. It is also an answer that makes any individual loss unfalsifiable as a performance datapoint: if losing the vehicle was always acceptable, no loss can count as evidence about the vehicle. The distinction that survives this framing is the one CENTCOM supplied. **A drone recovered after being destroyed on a dangerous mission is attrition. A drone that malfunctioned, went dead, drifted for a day and was then collected intact by an adversary is a reliability event**, and the attritable-by-design answer does not reach it. Set beside [[Anduril Altius]]'s failure against Russian electronic warfare in Ukraine, this is the second documented instance of an Anduril system underperforming in a contested environment and the company reframing the outcome as intended behaviour. Together they are the spine of a combat-performance record that the dossier's contract ledger cannot show. The propaganda dimension is separate and real: an intact, visibly branded American autonomous hull, paraded during **Operation Epic Fury**, recovered at the chokepoint the entire Hormuz mine-clearing campaign exists to keep open. ## Open questions - Whether Iran exploits the vehicle and displays internals — the test of CENTCOM's "no classified equipment" claim. - What "an older model" means in a product line that has been in Replicator mass production since 2024, and whether the fleet's fielded configuration is older than the marketed one. - Whether any U.S. statement addresses the malfunction itself, as distinct from the capture. ## See Also - [[Anduril]] · [[Anduril Product Ecosystem]] · [[Anduril Altius]] · [[Anduril Contracts]] - [[Replicator Initiative]] · [[Strait of Hormuz]] · [[Iran]] - [[Anduril Watch Log]] — entry 2026-09-08