This report examines the development of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) in Australia and India and the case for bilateral cooperation in the undersea domain. It argues that the two national ecosystems are complementary rather than competitive, and that a phased, capability-driven partnership that begins with benign and civil applications is more likely to endure than early collaboration in sensitive undersea warfare technologies.

The two countries have organised their innovation bases differently, and the difference is the point. Australia’s UUV ecosystem is coherent in policy and effective at moving systems from prototype into service, but it is narrow and concentrated around a small number of programs and industrial actors. India’s is broad and institutionally diverse, with substantial manufacturing depth, but uneven in technological maturity and still dependent on imported high-end subsystems.

That asymmetry is what makes cooperation worth pursuing. Australia’s strengths in operational experimentation, systems engineering and high-readiness integration meet India’s strengths in industrial scale, software-intensive innovation and engineering capacity. Mine countermeasures, hydrography, seabed mapping and underwater ISR offer the most practical early ground. Legal ambiguity over the status of uncrewed systems under the Law of the Sea, alliance sensitivities and unresolved intellectual property arrangements remain the binding constraints.

The report proposes a framework built on four concurrent pillars: operational cooperation, technological collaboration, industrial partnership and institutional coordination. It sequences them across near-term, medium-term, and long-term horizons and sets out eleven policy recommendations to advance them.