EXCLUSIVE: HII lifts the veil on secretive Dark Sea Labs tech integration office

The crew of an HII-owned boat prepare to deploy a Remus 300 into the water. (Photo by Justin Katz/Breaking Defense)

WASHINGTON — Shipbuilder HII has established an office focused on integrating technologies from across its various business units, with the aim of replicating similar cross-cutting endeavors at the Pentagon, a senior executive recently revealed to Breaking Defense.

The idea for what HII calls its Dark Sea Labs (DSL) is to do “what no single HII division can do on its own,” Executive Vice President of Strategy and Development Eric Chewning told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview.

On paper, that means proactively looking for opportunities where the research and development of one business unit might stand to benefit another — if only the right conduit was in place to bring the two together.

In practice, Chewning said DSL has had a hand in integrating the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike weapon onboard the Zumwalt-class destroyers; using artificial intelligence to improve HII’s shipyards’s output; and working on the launch and recovery of unmanned undersea vehicles from traditional submarines.

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Much of the efforts revolve around HII’s Mission Technologies, which, in contrast to the company’s shipyards in Virginia and Mississippi that hold premiere shipbuilding contracts, is focused on technologies such as unmanned systems, C5ISR and artificial intelligence. For example, Mission Technologies is largely responsible for developing the company’s unmanned underwater vehciles (UUVs) that HII hopes will one day operate from the Navy’s submarines.

In a similar vein, HII hopes DSL’s efforts will help the company expand its work inside the Pentagon. Chewning pointed to the recent other transaction agreement (OTA) HII received from the US Army to develop a high-energy laser as a potential future opportunity.

That weapon, HII’s first public debut into the field of directed energy, is envisioned to help Army bases and vehicles defend themselves from small- to medium-sized drones.

“The Army is leading investment in the counter-UAS [mission] and so there’s an opportunity here for us to obviously excel in this program for the Army,” Chewning said. “As the technology is validated and proven, [the goal is to demonstrate] that to other services, and given our deep relationship with the Navy, being able to demonstrate that we’re able to marinize the capability to address the Navy’s problem sets with the same counter-UAS mission.”

Directed energy has proven to be a stubborn technology for the Defense Department. Senior officers from all services have for years expressed interest in using laser weapon systems and funded dozens of research and development efforts. Despite that, the Navy still lacks a program of record to equip its ships with such a weapon.

Chewning, who served in various senior civilian Pentagon roles during the first Trump administration, said demonstrating a technology’s capability successfully through OTAs will be the company’s approach to seeing them turned into programs of record — a strategy that HII has previously had success with through the Navy’s Lionfish program.

Overall DSL, Chewning said, is about “how we can take capability across the different portfolios, whether it’s Ingalls, Newport News or Mission Technologies, and then bring that together … to solve a customer problem set that any single division couldn’t solve on its own.”