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"The U.S. Navy Is Seeking a UL-AUV"
www.strikepod.com/the-u-s-navy...

One of the likely drivers is the need for survivable VLS platforms. An uncrewed underwater missile barge/arsenal ship that can leverage existing architecture (the Virginia Payload Module) might hold an answer.

In a time when the Navy's extra-large (Orca) and large (Snakehead) AUV programs continue to suffer from cost overruns, technical issues, and programmatic uncertainty, and the U.S. shipbuilding and submarine workforce struggles to produce Virginia and Columbia hulls, what could be driving this?

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"PodIQ™ - An Undersea Force Model"

✅ Incorporate supplemental sensor platforms, such as seabed arrays, crewed vessels and aircraft, USVs, and encapsulated torpedoes, by specifying their quantity, passive acoustic sensor coverage area, availability rate, and unit cost.

The model enables you to:

✅ Explore tradeoffs across endurance, patrol architecture, recharge cycles, and integration with supplemental systems.
✅ Gain insight into the number of vehicles required to maximize persistent ASW coverage of a given area of waterspace.

and ...

We developed a simple conceptual model, PodIQ™, to analyze how key XL-AUV performance characteristics could drive the acquisition of a persistent, credible uncrewed undersea presence.

Cellula Robotics Ltd.
Anduril Industries
Kongsberg Maritime
MSubs Ltd

What this may or may not mean for the Orca program is unclear. But there are several companies that could provide a "commercially available, demonstration-ready uncrewed system ... offering a scalable and cost-effective solution for long-range, high-capacity payload deployment."