Capability as a Service: Rethinking How Navies Buy Undersea Awareness
A program of record can take years. It's time to let operators buy the answer instead of the asset.
Colin Corridan, Head of Government and Defense, Bedrock Ocean
On the last day of 2025, Finnish authorities boarded and seized a cargo vessel suspected of dragging its anchor across the fiber-optic cable linking Helsinki to Tallinn. It was not an isolated event. Since late 2023, at least eleven undersea cables and pipelines have been damaged in the Baltic alone, and in February 2026 the European Commission responded with a €347 million subsea infrastructure package; its largest such investment to date.
Gulf of Finland Coast Guard (SLMV)/Anadolu/Getty (Source: CNN)
This is a math problem. The incidents unfold in hours. The repairs take weeks. And the systems we build to monitor the seabed in the first place . . . those return data in months, from systems that can take years to procure.
That latency is the real vulnerability, and it's one we can no longer engineer our way out of using the traditional defense-acquisition model.
The System Knows It Is Broken
You don't have to take an industry executive's word for it. In passing the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, the House Armed Services Committee wrote that the defense acquisition system is "broken and too slow, rigid and bureaucratic to meet evolving threats." The entire legislative package was built on the SPEED and FoRGED Acts and signed into law last December.
The intent is right. But intent has been right before. As one recent analysis of Pentagon spending from 2012 through 2025 found, despite years of "commercial-first" rhetoric, little meaningful progress has been made in actually buying commercial solutions, and major programs still stretch well over a decade. Commercial-first has been official policy for a generation.
Nowhere is the delta between reform and reality more expensive than beneath the surface of the ocean. The U.S. Navy, to its credit, has stood up program after program for unmanned undersea vehicles over the past decade. But that takes time in a capital-acquisition model. Meanwhile the seabed keeps getting more contested.
The Alternative
Here's the encouraging part: the operating model that closes the gap is already at sea.
For years, the fastest way to put persistent maritime domain awareness in front of a fleet commander has been contractor-owned platforms. Wind and solar-powered surface drones delivered situational awareness to the Fifth and Fourth Fleets, and most recently to counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean, all without the Navy first buying, crewing, and sustaining the hardware itself.
Operators didn't purchase a boat. They purchased a picture.
That distinction is critical. And what has been proven on the surface is now available below it.
Buying Answers, Not Assets
Call it Capability-as-a-Service, or Ocean-Intelligence-as-a-service. The premise is simple: a contractor-owned fleet delivers a firm, fixed-price outcome. That outcome can be persistent subsurface awareness, anomaly detection, or decision-ready intelligence piped straight into the operational picture. Capability doesn’t come with the baggage of capital assets: no acquisition bottlenecks, no integration headaches, and zero maintenance across a multi-year lifecycle.
Structured this way, the model resolves the tensions that stall traditional procurement:
No capital-acquisition cycle: The customer contracts for the intelligence, not the vehicles. Refresh happens on the provider's balance sheet, not through a new milestone review.
Firm, fixed-price outcomes: Budget certainty replaces the cost-growth risk that plague programs of record.
Field ready and compliant today: The technology is NDAA-compliant and already in the water.
Genuinely expeditionary: When the entire fleet ships in a handful of standard containers, "ready now" stops being a slogan and becomes a reality.
This is precisely the “on-ramp” the latest reforms Bedrock is built to deliver. The tools exist. What's missing is the willingness to treat undersea awareness as a capability procured as a service rather than a fleet to be owned.
The Need For Speed
Sovereign capability still matters, and always will, but not every mission requires the government to own every sensor. Insisting that it does just costs precious time.
The adversary dragging an anchor across a cable is not waiting for a milestone decision. The seabed is contested now. The capability to see it clearly has become an imperative. The only question left is whether we're willing to stop procuring assets and start buying intelligence that can be delivered on day one.
