U.S. Navy Anti-Submarine Warfare Gets Boost as Lockheed Martin Buys Naval Company Ultra Maritime.

Lockheed Martin will acquire Ultra Maritime for $3.45 billion, strengthening its control over key undersea warfare technologies as U.S. and allied navies face growing submarine threats. The agreement, announced on July 6, 2026, brings sonobuoys, sonar arrays, torpedo defense systems and acoustic countermeasures into Lockheed Martin’s Rotary and Mission Systems business.

The deal gives Lockheed Martin a wider role in how naval forces detect, track, attack, and defend against submarines. Its value lies in combining sensors, acoustic processing, and defensive systems at a time when anti-submarine warfare is becoming central to North Atlantic and Indo-Pacific naval planning.

Related topic: Thales Moves to Buy Exail to Build France’s Unmanned Mine Warfare and Seabed Security Chain.

Lockheed Martin's $3.45 billion acquisition of Ultra Maritime will add sonobuoys, sonar arrays, and torpedo defense systems to its naval portfolio, strengthening U.S. and allied anti-submarine warfare capabilities (Picture source: Ultra Maritime).

The acquisition should be viewed as a move deeper into the undersea kill chain. Ultra Maritime does not simply manufacture support equipment; its products sit at the point where detection quality determines whether a frigate, destroyer, maritime patrol aircraft, or helicopter can classify a contact with enough confidence to release a torpedo. The U.S. Navy’s Mk 54 lightweight torpedo, for example, is a 12.75-inch, 607-pound anti-submarine weapon with a 100-pound high-explosive warhead, launched from aircraft and surface ships, but its tactical value depends on prior localization by acoustic sensors and mission systems. The Navy also lists Ultra Electronics among the Mk 54 contractor team, linking Ultra’s legacy directly to the weapon chain rather than only to surveillance equipment.

The most immediate capacity issue is sonobuoy production. Ultra Maritime states that it produces about 250,000 buoys annually and offers U.S., UK, and Canadian specification variants, including passive directional, active, and multistatic types. This matters because sonobuoys are expendable items consumed in training, patrols, and crisis operations; a P-8A or MH-60R crew may need to lay a pattern across a thermal layer, chokepoint, or suspected submarine track before it has enough data to form a firing solution. In practical terms, production capacity becomes part of readiness. A navy with limited buoy stocks may preserve inventory during peacetime, reducing crew proficiency and narrowing wartime search options.

Ultra’s AN/SSQ-53G DIFAR buoy is a useful example of the technical capability Lockheed Martin is buying. It is a 21-pound U.S. Navy A-size passive directional buoy with GPS reporting, a 97-channel RF transmitter operating between 136.000 and 173.500 MHz, and selectable endurance of 0.5, 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours. It can be launched from fixed-wing aircraft, rotary-wing aircraft, or a ship deck, at altitudes up to 30,000 ft and speeds up to 370 KIAS. Its selectable depths include 90, 200, 400, and 1,000 ft, while its DIFAR mode covers 5 to 2,400 Hz. In tactical use, that means an aircraft can build bearing history while remaining outside the immediate submarine contact area, then hand a refined track to another aircraft, ship, or helicopter.

The active buoys address a different part of the problem. The AN/SSQ-62E DICASS is a 36-pound fifth-generation active sonobuoy designed to detect and localize submarines before attack, providing range and bearing for position fixing. It has four selectable sonar channels, a 97-channel RF transmitter, 100 ping-seconds, at least four hours of operating life, and selectable depths down to 1,500 ft. The newer AN/SSQ-62G adds GPS reporting and an 800-ft depth option. The operational trade-off is straightforward: active transmission may reveal that a search is underway, but it can reduce ambiguity when passive bearings alone are insufficient for weapon employment.

The AN/SSQ-125B is more significant for modern multistatic tactics. It is a NATO A-size active source buoy used with AN/SSQ-53 DIFAR and AN/SSQ-101 ADAR receivers, can generate commandable waveforms, has an eight-hour operating life, 200 ping-seconds, and selectable depths of 65, 175, 300, and 500 ft. Ultra received a sole-source firm-fixed-price U.S. Navy award in April 2026 for low-rate initial production of the Q-125B to support training, peacetime operations, testing, and inventories for major combat operations. This is relevant because multistatic fields separate the acoustic source from the receivers, complicating a submarine commander’s ability to determine where the threat is located and how to maneuver out of the search area.

The acquisition also brings towed and hull-mounted sonar lines that are relevant to frigates and destroyers. Ultra’s Sea Lancer second-generation system combines low-frequency active variable-depth sonar and passive sensing in a single tow, using a Horizontal Projector Array with independently driven projectors and QUAD receive sensors to resolve port-starboard ambiguity. Its published data show operation between 1.5 and 3.5 kHz depending on configuration, up to 32 active transmit channels per aperture, deployment and recovery speeds from 4 to 15 knots, and optional integration with hull sonar for bistatic operation. For a surface combatant in shallow water, these details are not academic; they address reverberation, own-ship noise, and the difficulty of detecting quiet diesel-electric submarines near seabed clutter.

Torpedo defense is the other half of the acquisition. Ultra’s Sea Sentor surface ship torpedo defense system is designed to detect, classify and localize incoming torpedoes, recommend maneuvers and cue acoustic countermeasures. The published configuration includes a 4,170 kg winch and tow, a 271 kg processing cabinet, console equipment, and pneumatic launchers for expendable acoustic devices. The system can classify weapon make, model, type, and operating mode, then adapt tactics during salvo attacks. Ultra says Sea Sentor is operated by the UK, U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, and India, while its broader acoustic device countermeasure line has delivered more than 35,000 devices to the U.S. Navy, Royal Navy, and Royal Australian Navy.

The industrial logic is also concrete. Advent says it acquired Ultra Maritime in 2022 and invested about $170 million over three years in product development, manufacturing and supply chain capacity, with annual revenue growth of about 17 percent during that period. Ultra now operates across the U.S., Canada, the UK and Australia, which gives Lockheed Martin a production and customer base aligned with AUKUS, NATO and Canadian surface combatant requirements. It also builds on existing cooperation: Ultra secured a roughly $19.5 million order from Lockheed Martin Canada in 2022 for hull-mounted sonars for the Canadian Surface Combatant, where Lockheed Martin Canada is responsible for combat system design and integration.

For U.S. and allied navies, the strategic implication is that undersea warfare competition is moving toward distributed sensing, unmanned aircraft, modular sonar, and faster acoustic data processing rather than relying only on larger manned ships. Ultra has already worked with General Atomics to integrate small-form sonobuoys and receivers with the MQ-9B SeaGuardian, with the stated purpose of increasing unmanned airborne anti-submarine warfare capacity, including in GPS-denied conditions. The force that detects earlier, classifies faster, and preserves more expendable sensors will have more usable firing opportunities and fewer avoidable torpedo-defense emergencies. Lockheed Martin’s purchase of Ultra Maritime therefore narrows a gap between combat systems, aircraft, acoustic sensors, and defensive countermeasures, while also concentrating a critical segment of the allied undersea warfare industrial base inside one U.S. prime contractor.

Explore More Defense News

• Land Defense News
• Naval Defense News
• Defense Aerospace News

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.