U.S. Navy orders six stealth recon boats designed by Australian veterans

The U.S. Navy bought six specialized reconnaissance boats designed by former Australian Navy frogmen, built in North Carolina, and validated through two years of testing with Marine Corps special operations units.

Naval Sea Systems Command awarded The Whiskey Project Group USA a $17.5 million contract for six Multi Mission Reconnaissance Craft (MMRC), expeditionary watercraft designed for littoral and distributed operations in contested coastal environments. The contract includes options that, if exercised, would bring the total value to $36 million.

Work will be performed at the company’s Edenton, North Carolina facility and is expected to be completed by September 2029. The award came through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Commercial Solutions Opening process and represents a follow-on production agreement authorized after successful completion of prototype milestones under the company’s earlier Other Transaction Authority agreement with the Department of War.

The Whiskey Project Group is an unusual defense contractor. The company was founded by former Australian Navy Clearance Divers, the Australian military equivalent of Navy SEALs, who set out to build the watercraft they wished they had during their careers conducting covert maritime infiltration, reconnaissance, and direct action missions. TWPG CEO Darren Schuback served as an Australian Navy diver before founding the company with fellow veterans, and the design philosophy of every MMRC reflects operational priorities that only come from people who have actually conducted the missions these boats are meant to support. The company describes itself as drawing on more than 50 years of combined experience spanning end-to-end design, manufacturing, maintenance, and sustainment of high-performance specialist watercraft.

The Multi Mission Reconnaissance Craft is an 11-meter (36-foot) vessel capable of reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition, interdiction, and battlespace shaping operations. Each craft incorporates a range of systems, sensors, modular mission sets, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. The modular architecture means the boat can be reconfigured for different mission profiles by swapping sensor and weapons packages, carrying electro-optical cameras and signals intelligence equipment for reconnaissance, or adding weapons stations for interdiction missions, without requiring depot-level maintenance to make the change. The design reduces its signature from adversary sensors, extends the operational reach of commanders, and facilitates multi-domain collaborative operations while remaining compatible with air, rotary wing, and Navy ship platforms.

The relationship between TWPG and the U.S. military began with the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley-based technology scouting and acquisition organization that specializes in connecting non-traditional defense companies with military customers through commercial procurement pathways. DIU evaluated the Whiskey Bravo MMRC through its Commercial Solutions Opening process, which allows the military to contract with companies that are not traditional defense contractors without the full burden of Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements. That pathway is specifically designed to bring commercial innovation into military service faster than conventional procurement allows, and it is why an Australian company founded by special operations veterans was able to put boats into the hands of U.S. Marines within a timeline that would be impossible through standard defense acquisition.

TWPG delivered the first two 11-meter Whiskey Bravo MMRC boats to the United States Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, Southern California in April 2024 under a contract facilitated by AUKUS Pillar II, the technology sharing framework established between the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory accepted the vessels and used them extensively to test mission payloads and validate performance against operational requirements. Following pre-delivery inspection trials, TWPG delivered four additional Whiskey Bravo MMRC-B vessels to the USMC in California in August 2025, with the Marine Corps noting that the craft not only met but exceeded U.S. naval standards for small craft performance. The current Navy contract for six additional craft builds directly on that validated performance record.

The operational context for this procurement is the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 transformation and the broader Pentagon focus on distributed maritime operations in the Indo-Pacific. Littoral operations, meaning military activity in the coastal and island environments where land and sea meet, have become central to how the United States plans to contest Chinese maritime expansion in the western Pacific. The islands of the first island chain, stretching from Japan through the Philippines, represent both the geographic boundary that China seeks to dominate and the terrain where Marine Corps and Navy special operations forces would operate in any Taiwan contingency. Small, fast, low-signature boats that can be launched from ships, moved between islands, and used to observe, report, or interdict without being easily detected by Chinese radar and surveillance systems are exactly the kind of capability that the distributed operations concept requires.