Firing a missile from an autonomous boat is impressive. But keeping four of them running through a Falklands winter, while working with a patrol ship, aircraft, shore headquarters, and military logistics, would teach us much more.

STARK’s new 12-metre Vanta 12 is another interesting addition to the fast-growing field of maritime autonomy. With its long endurance, high speed, surveillance sensors, and ability to carry weapons like Sea Venom, it raises questions about its place in the Royal Navy’s Hybrid Navy.

It’s tempting to look for a ship to carry the Vanta 12. There are already proposals for frigates to act as command vessels for autonomous groups, and the Type 31 has many features that could make it fit for that job. But the Vanta 12 points to another option. Maybe the first question isn’t which ship should carry it, but where the Royal Navy could run a few of these vessels long enough to see if the whole system works.

The Falkland Islands could be a very useful place to find out.

An operational environment, not a demonstration range.

One reason the Falklands are appealing is that much of the force structure is already in place.

British Forces South Atlantic Islands is headquartered at Mount Pleasant and provides the joint command structure for British military activity across the region. East Cove Military Port, a short distance away, is the primary maritime logistics node for British forces in the South Atlantic and the operational base for the Falkland Islands patrol vessel.

HMS Medway assumed the permanent Royal Navy role from HMS Forth in January 2026. During almost six years in the South Atlantic, Forth sailed 155,000 nautical miles, working with the RAF and Army while conducting fisheries protection, maritime security and wider patrol duties around the islands and South Georgia. That record demonstrates the value of the OPV, but it also illustrates the size of the task being placed on a single ship.

The wider force at Mount Pleasant already provides air defence, aviation, land forces, logistics and command infrastructure. This is therefore not an empty stretch of ocean into which an autonomous experiment would have to be inserted. It is a functioning joint operational environment carrying out a real mission every day.

That’s exactly why it’s such a good place to test this idea.

Right now, there’s a gap between what the surveillance system can spot and when it makes sense to send a crewed ship to check it out. An autonomous surface force could help fill that gap.

Adding an autonomous layer.

Picture four Vanta 12s based at East Cove Military Port (Mare Harbour). This isn’t a suggested force size, just a practical number to test the idea. Four is enough to keep operations going, rotate vessels for maintenance, and see if managing several autonomous platforms adds value or just creates more work.

I wouldn’t start by using them as missile boats.

Their main job at first should be surveillance and investigation. They could patrol certain areas, check out contacts, provide radar and camera information, and stay in places where it wouldn’t make sense to keep Medway all the time.

This wouldn’t mean four replacements for an OPV. HMS Medway can board ships, help out, use judgement at sea, and provide the visible presence that’s still important for maritime security. An autonomous craft can’t just copy those roles. But it could give another set of eyes, sometimes tens or even hundreds of miles from the patrol ship.

This would change how the ship is used. Instead of heading toward every contact, Medway could stay focused on its main job while an autonomous vessel checks things out. If something needs attention, the patrol ship can still respond. If not, it saves time and effort.

This is where the Hybrid Navy offers more than just putting drones on ships.

The force, not the ship, should control the autonomy.

How the command is set up is just as important as the vessels themselves. I wouldn’t have HMS Medway always control the Vanta force. Instead, a small team ashore could be part of the BFSAI command, plan missions, check on the platforms, and bring their information into the bigger operational picture.

Medway would have access to the same information and could take control of individual vessels when needed. This difference is important because it challenges the old idea that an autonomous vessel always needs to be tied to a parent ship.

A Vanta could work for shore headquarters on one mission, help Medway on another, or even be assigned to a visiting warship during an exercise. It becomes a shared asset, not just equipment tied to one ship.

This could be one of the biggest changes autonomy brings. Sensors and weapons don’t have to be on the same platform as the person in charge. The ship becomes part of the network, not always its centre.

Then it’s time to push the limits and see what breaks.

The Falklands would let the Navy go beyond the usual conditions of a technology demo. The Royal Navy is already experimenting with mesh networks linking ships, drones and uncrewed systems. During Trident Sprint, data has been exchanged directly between nodes rather than relying on a single hub or continuous satellite connection. The Navy has also deliberately worked in disrupted, degraded, intermittent and low-bandwidth environments as it develops the digital foundations of the Hybrid Navy.

These ideas need to work outside of exercise conditions.

A deployment in the Falklands should make things tough on purpose. Sometimes GNSS should be unavailable, satellite links should be cut, bandwidth should be limited, and control should switch between Mount Pleasant and Medway. Sometimes, vessels should be taken off the network without warning.

The key question isn’t just if communications can be restored, but what the autonomous force does while they’re down.

Does a Vanta keep patrolling as ordered? Does it go to a set communications point? Does it return to East Cove? Can operators on shore predict what it will do before the link is lost?

These answers are important because a Hybrid Navy that always needs a network has a big weakness. If losing the network stops it from working, an enemy doesn’t have to sink the vessel—just cut it off. So the system needs to keep working, even when the perfect digital connection is gone.

The South Atlantic will test more than just software and networks.

There’s another reason the Falklands are a good test site: the environment will challenge the physical systems as much as the networks. Endurance claims can look impressive on paper. A vessel that can travel over a thousand miles and spend weeks at sea offers options a regular ship’s boat can’t.

But endurance isn’t the same as being ready for action.

The real questions are less glamorous. How often do sensors require cleaning or calibration? How much maintenance does an uncrewed vessel actually need? Which components suffer from saltwater exposure? How quickly do seals, bearings and machinery begin to cause problems? What spares have to be held at East Cove? What happens when a software update introduces a fault? How much engineering support is required for every day the vessel spends at sea?

The South Atlantic often exposes overly optimistic assumptions. Medway’s 2026 midwinter deployment to Tristan da Cunha covered more than 5,000 miles in conditions that included heavy South Atlantic seas. That is a rather different environment from a carefully controlled demonstration area.

That’s why one of the most valuable things to measure in a Falklands test is simple: out of every thirty days, how many days can a four-vessel autonomous force actually operate usefully?

That number would reflect reliability, weather, maintenance, communications, manpower, and logistics. It could tell us much more about the Hybrid Navy’s future than another successful missile test.

People need to be measured just as carefully as the technology.

Autonomy also brings a manpower puzzle that needs to be tested.

If four supposedly autonomous vessels require four sailors permanently sitting at consoles steering them, supported by engineers, mission commanders, sensor operators and communications specialists, we may simply have moved the crew ashore.

There might still be benefits in risk and endurance, but the Navy’s people problem may not be solved. The objective should be for a small team to oversee several autonomous systems, stepping in only when human judgement is needed, not controlling every move. It’s a practical opportunity to discover what that means in practice, and whether the Navy can do so in a way that is truly useful. If it can, the Hybrid Navy will have a stronger foundation than another demonstration could provide.

Can one operator genuinely supervise several vessels during routine operations? How much attention does each platform demand? What happens when two autonomous vessels encounter unexpected situations at the same time? How many engineers does the detachment really need, and how much specialist knowledge has to remain in the UK?

Most importantly, does adding autonomy lighten the workload for the current force, or just create another group for BFSAI to support? These are exactly the tough questions an operational trial should answer.

Weapons should come later.

I would only focus on weapons after navigation, communications, maintenance, manpower, and command arrangements are well understood.

The attraction of Sea Venom is obvious. MBDA already describes the weapon as suitable for integration with uncrewed surface vehicles, and its secure two-way datalink allows operator-in-the-loop supervision, including target changes, aim-point refinement and mission abort.

This gives a real way to keep a human decision-maker involved in the engagement process. But just putting Sea Venom launchers on Vanta doesn’t automatically make it a useful weapon system.

The more important test is whether the whole process can work together.

One sensor might detect a contact, a Vanta might investigate it, and the system could correlate it with information from elsewhere in the force. Once its identity and behaviour were established, the commander could decide what response was appropriate. If an armed response were authorised under the applicable rules of engagement, the commander could then assign the most suitable platform as the effector.

That could be a Vanta, or it could be something else. The key point is that the sensor, the commander, and the weapon don’t all have to be on the same platform anymore. That’s a much bigger change than just building an unmanned missile boat.

Why the Falklands?

None of this means we have to act as if another conflict in the South Atlantic is bound to happen. The UK government’s stated position remains that its military presence is defensive and that it reviews and maintains force levels at what it considers appropriate for the defence of the islands.

So, the main reason for using the Falklands isn’t just to add another weapon to the defence. setup. It’s really about the unique features of the Falklands.

The UK already controls the military command structure, airfield and maritime support arrangements. East Cove provides an established logistics base. HMS Medway provides a permanent crewed maritime presence. The wider force continues to perform its normal operational responsibilities, whether an experiment is underway or not.

At the same time, the geography, distance from the UK, weather, and communication challenges make the Falklands tough enough to reveal weaknesses that might stay hidden in shorter tests closer to home.

Civilian shipping, environmental responsibilities, and standard rules governing safe maritime operations also apply. East Cove sits alongside environmentally sensitive areas, ensuring autonomous vessels would operate within real regulatory and safety constraints rather than inside an artificial military bubble.

It’s hard to recreate that mix on a training range. The Falklands are controlled enough for structured tests, but remote and operational enough to make the results matter.

The real goal isn’t just the South Atlantic.

The aim isn’t to set up a permanent drone flotilla in the Falklands just for its own sake. The real value is in what the Royal Navy can learn.

If a small group of autonomous vessels could be sustained from East Cove, commanded from ashore, handed across to HMS Medway when required and kept useful through South Atlantic weather and disrupted communications, almost every part of that experience could be applied elsewhere.

The Baltic presents different threats, but many of the same questions about distributed surveillance and command. The Gulf adds congestion and a more demanding threat environment. The GIUK gap and North Atlantic make communications, endurance and weather even more important. Eventually the same lessons would shape how autonomous systems operate alongside Type 31, Type 26 and whatever form the Common Command Vessel ultimately takes.

Failures would be just as important as successes.

If a supposedly persistent autonomous vessel spends half its time alongside waiting for maintenance, we need to know that. If six vessels require a large specialist team to operate them, we need to know that too. If the system stops being useful whenever satellite bandwidth disappears, it is better to discover that at East Cove than during a future confrontation.

That’s why I believe the Falklands could play a role in the Hybrid Navy that goes far beyond just defending the islands.

Find the weaknesses before combat does.

The Hybrid Navy is advancing fast. Autonomous vessels are getting better, networks are improving, and weapons are starting to move away from traditional crewed ships. But there’s a risk of confusing technical progress with being truly ready for operations.

The Royal Navy needs to do more than show that autonomous systems can navigate, sense, and shoot. It must also know what happens when they’re cold, wet, disconnected, low on spare parts, and run by tired people working alongside a force that still has its regular duties.

The Falklands offer exactly that kind of environment.

This reminds me of history. In 1982, the South Atlantic exposed weaknesses in equipment, logistics, communications, and assumptions—with harsh results. It showed that technology must survive not just enemy contact, but also distance, weather, exhaustion, and failure.

Over forty-four years later, we can use the same environment on purpose to find the Hybrid Navy’s weaknesses before someone else finds them in combat. So the real question isn’t just whether Vanta 12 could help defend the Falklands. It’s whether the Falklands can help us learn how to build a Hybrid Navy that really works.

Further Reading

1. Steve Prest, “Hybrid Navy: Building the Maritime Operating System”, RUSI, 24 August 2026
   https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/hybrid-navy-building-maritime-operating-system

2. Commander Edward Black, “Prototype Warfare within the Hybrid Navy Adventure”, RUSI, 19 March 2026
   https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-newsbrief/prototype-warfare-within-hybrid-navy-adventure

3. Royal Navy, “Technology demonstration boosts Royal Navy’s information warfare abilities”, 17 October 2025
   https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news/2025/october/17/20251017-trident-sprint

4. NATO CMRE, “Maritime Unmanned Systems Enablers”
   https://www.cmre.nato.int/ar25/maritime-unmanned-systems-enablers/

5. Royal Navy, “RFA Lyme Bay deploys with autonomous minehunting systems”, 25 May 2026
   https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news/2026/may/25/20260525-lyme-bay-sails

Argentina is rearming. Oil is moving from prospect to production in the waters around the Falkland Islands. President Javier Milei has hardened Argentina’s sovereignty campaign. And in Washington, the second Trump administration is asserting a much more muscular view of American primacy in the Western Hemisphere. Put those developments together, and it is easy to construct an alarming headline:

Could Argentina take the Falklands again?

That is the wrong question.

Argentina is not currently rebuilding the force that invaded the islands in 1982. Britain has not abandoned their defence. No evidence suggests another invasion is imminent. But something important is changing in the South Atlantic.

The assumptions that have underpinned Falklands deterrence for more than four decades are becoming less comfortable. Argentina is slowly recovering military capabilities it had lost. Offshore oil is creating new economic interests and new vulnerabilities. American policy towards the hemisphere is becoming less predictable. At the same time, Britain’s armed forces are being asked to maintain commitments across Europe, the North Atlantic, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East with limited resources.

None of these developments individually constitutes a Falklands crisis. Together, they deserve attention. And the lesson for Britain should not be to prepare to fight the Falklands War again.

It should be to ensure that there is never a reason to do so.

What has actually changed?

It is worth separating the facts from some of the more excitable commentary. Five developments have materially changed the context around the Falklands since 2025.

Argentina has begun rebuilding credible fast-jet capability.
The first six of 24 former Danish F-16A/B aircraft arrived in December 2025. Further deliveries are expected through 2028, supported by training, modern air-to-air weapons and precision-guided munitions.

Argentina’s wider military recapitalisation is gathering pace.
Buenos Aires has agreed a programme covering up to 235 Stryker armoured vehicles and continues to explore options for rebuilding its submarine force. These programmes are significant, but much of the capability remains prospective rather than operational.

Sea Lion has moved from prospect to project.
Final Investment Decision was taken in late 2025. Drilling is expected to begin in 2027, with first oil targeted for the first quarter of 2028. That turns hydrocarbons around the islands into a real strategic and economic issue rather than a distant possibility.

Milei has hardened Argentina’s political approach.
Buenos Aires has threatened tougher measures against companies involved in Falklands oil development and is placing greater emphasis on the South Atlantic within its broader defence and sovereignty policy.

Washington has introduced new uncertainty.
The Trump administration has embraced a more assertive interpretation of American primacy in the Western Hemisphere, sometimes described within the administration itself as the “Donroe Doctrine”. President Trump has also said the US position on the Falklands is under review.

None of those facts means war is coming. But taken together, they mean the strategic environment is no longer static.

The danger of looking back to 1982.

Inevitably, this is personal for me.

On 21 May 1982, I was aboard HMS Ardent in Falkland Sound when she came under sustained Argentine air attack. Twenty-two of my shipmates were killed. The Falklands War has therefore never been an abstract military campaign to me. But that is precisely why I am wary of using 1982 as the template for viewing every new development in Argentina.

The Argentine armed forces of 1982 were formidable by regional standards. Argentina possessed a sizeable combat air force, an aircraft carrier, submarines, modern surface combatants, amphibious shipping and the ability to put troops ashore. Britain, meanwhile, had no permanent fighter force on the islands and nothing resembling today’s military infrastructure at Mount Pleasant.

The strategic problem today is fundamentally different.

Argentina has spent decades suffering from declining defence investment and lost capabilities. Its submarine force is currently non-operational. Its navy cannot reproduce the amphibious operation of April 1982. Much of its equipment requires modernisation.

That matters when assessing the headlines surrounding Argentina’s current rearmament. It is a recovery from a very low base. But recovery is nevertheless taking place.

Argentina gets its fast jets back.

The most visible symbol is the F-16.

Argentina has purchased 24 former Danish F-16A/B fighters. The first six arrived in December 2025, with further deliveries expected through 2028. The significance goes beyond simply acquiring another aircraft type. For years Argentina effectively lacked a credible modern supersonic fighter capability. The F-16 programme begins to reverse that.

The associated American package includes training, support, and modern air-to-air weapons, including AIM-120 AMRAAM, plus precision-guided munitions. As aircraft, pilots, weapons, and support infrastructure mature, Argentina will regain a capability British planners cannot simply ignore.

But perspective matters. Twenty-four F-16s do not equal another Falklands War.

Generating combat power over the South Atlantic requires much more than owning fighters. It requires trained crews, serviceability, weapons stocks, intelligence, surveillance, command and control, tanker support, maritime forces, logistics and the ability to sustain operations over considerable distances.

Argentina also does not currently possess the naval force required to seize and sustain the islands. Plans to restore its submarine capability are worth watching. France’s Scorpène has been under consideration, although financing and competing options remain unresolved. Argentina has also embarked on wider army modernisation, including an agreement covering up to 235 Stryker armoured vehicles.

These programmes tell us something important about the direction of travel. They do not tell us that Argentina is preparing an invasion.

Military modernisation and military intent are very different. We should be careful not to confuse the two.

The oil changes the calculation.

The most consequential development in the South Atlantic is not an F-16 at all.

It is Sea Lion.

After years in which Falklands hydrocarbons seemed perpetually in the future, the Sea Lion oil development has passed Final Investment Decision. Development activity is now under way, drilling is expected to begin in 2027, and first oil is targeted for the first quarter of 2028.

That changes the sovereignty dispute. Oil gives the islands the prospect of significant long-term economic activity. It also creates fixed infrastructure, international investment, shipping movements, supply chains and commercial relationships that Argentina can seek to challenge.

Buenos Aires already regards hydrocarbon development around the Falklands as illegal. Milei has now threatened tougher sanctions against companies involved. This is where the discussion becomes more interesting than another invasion scenario.

Argentina does not have to land troops at Stanley to create difficulties for Britain.

It can challenge companies legally. It can sanction directors and investors. It can place pressure on regional ports and suppliers. It can contest maritime activity diplomatically. It can attempt to increase the insurance and commercial costs of operating around the islands.

In a more confrontational future environment, offshore infrastructure itself becomes something Britain must monitor and protect. Sea Lion therefore changes more than the Falklands’ economics.

It potentially expands the area Britain must deter others from interfering with.

Enter the “Donroe Doctrine”

Another variable would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago.

Washington.

The Trump administration has increasingly framed the Western Hemisphere through an assertive reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The phrase “Donroe Doctrine”, originally journalistic shorthand, has subsequently been used within the administration itself.

Behind the label is a serious idea. The United States intends to reassert primacy in the Americas and resist strategic influence from powers such as China and Russia.

For Britain, the key question is where that leaves a European state administering territory in the South Atlantic that Argentina claims. Here, historical accuracy matters.

The United States has not traditionally recognised British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. Its longstanding position has essentially recognised British administration while remaining neutral over the competing sovereignty claims.

That distinction mattered in 1982.

Washington attempted to mediate between Britain and Argentina before ultimately providing Britain with substantial practical assistance once diplomacy failed. The new uncertainty, therefore, is not that America might suddenly stop recognising British sovereignty. It never formally did.

The question is whether Washington would continue to distinguish between neutrality over sovereignty and opposition to Argentine coercion. That question became more significant when President Trump said recently that the American position on the islands was under review.

It would be wrong to leap from that statement to the conclusion that Washington is preparing to support Argentina’s claim. There is no evidence for that. But uncertainty now exists where Britain would prefer certainty.

President Milei has cultivated a close political relationship with Trump and has spoken of changing circumstances surrounding Argentina’s claim. Again, none of this means America is about to abandon Britain over the Falklands. But deterrence depends partly upon what potential adversaries believe.

Ambiguity therefore matters.

Britain’s position is stronger than some headlines suggest.

The other side of the argument also needs perspective. There is a growing tendency to take every current difficulty facing Britain’s armed forces and conclude that the Falklands are therefore undefended. That is too simplistic.

The fundamental difference between 1982 and today is that Britain does not plan to arrive after an invasion. It is already there. RAF Mount Pleasant transformed the strategic equation after the war.

Typhoon fighters provide permanent air defence. The islands maintain ground forces, air defence, surveillance, and supporting infrastructure. Britain retains a maritime presence in the South Atlantic and has robust plans for reinforcement.

The Ministry of Defence has repeatedly stated during 2026 that the defensive posture is kept under review, including against developments in drones and long-range weapons, and remains appropriately scaled.

Dismissing that assessment would be unwise. Equally, it would be unwise not to test the assumptions behind it.

Britain’s wider armed forces are stretched.

The Royal Navy has well-documented availability and personnel pressures. Traditional amphibious capability is being transformed. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary faces its own challenges. Competing demands exist in the North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Gulf and Indo-Pacific.

A Falklands reinforcement operation would also span approximately 8,000 miles of ocean. So the relevant question is not whether Britain possesses enough ships on a particular Monday morning to recreate the 1982 Task Force. It is:

Can Britain keep Mount Pleasant operational, supplied, connected and sufficiently well defended that no opponent can create a realistic opportunity to challenge the islands?

That is a very different test.

Mount Pleasant is the centre of gravity.

The Falklands defence problem is therefore increasingly one of resilience.

• Aircraft need fuel.

• Weapons need storage.

• Runways need to remain usable.

• Sensors need power.

• Communications need to survive disruption.

• Ships and aircraft need maintenance.

• Personnel need food, accommodation and medical support.

And all of it sits at the end of one of Britain’s longest military supply chains. This is familiar territory for Future Navy.

We have discussed autonomous vessels, software-defined warships and artificial intelligence extensively. But none of those technologies eliminates logistics.

The last mile still matters.

Indeed, the further Britain moves towards distributed and autonomous forces, the more important the infrastructure connecting them becomes. The Falklands provide an almost perfect example.

• A handful of additional autonomous systems around the islands could significantly increase surveillance without requiring hundreds of additional personnel.

• Long-endurance uncrewed aircraft could extend the surveillance picture.

• Uncrewed surface vessels could patrol maritime approaches and offshore infrastructure.

• Underwater vehicles and distributed sensors could help monitor submarine activity.

• Space-based surveillance could provide persistent awareness of Argentine military movements.

• AI-supported systems could fuse those feeds into a much richer operating picture.

None of these needs to carry weapons to be valuable. Their first purpose would be to make surprise increasingly difficult.

The next Falklands crisis may begin in the grey zone.

This is where concentrating on another Argentine invasion becomes most misleading. Imagine a future crisis in which nobody initially fires a shot.

• An unidentified drone appears repeatedly near offshore oil infrastructure.

• GPS interference affects maritime operations.

• Cyber attacks disrupt communications or logistics.

• An Argentine survey vessel operates close to disputed waters.

• Commercial companies face escalating legal action.

• Regional ports come under political pressure not to support Falklands-bound vessels.

• Military aircraft conduct increasingly assertive patrols.

• Social media fills with competing claims about an incident at sea.

• A future Argentine submarine leaves an Argentine naval base and disappears beneath the South Atlantic.

None of these actions necessarily constitutes war. Together they could create a significant British military problem. The requirement would be to understand what was happening, attribute it correctly and respond proportionately without creating the escalation an opponent might be seeking.

That requires more than having a frigate available. It requires persistent situational awareness.

And that is precisely what the emerging Hybrid Navy should offer.

A Hybrid Falklands defence.

The First Sea Lord’s vision of a Hybrid Navy is usually discussed in the context of high-end warfighting: crewed warships operating alongside autonomous systems, increasing mass without proportionately increasing personnel. The Falklands suggest another use.

Persistent deterrence.

Imagine a South Atlantic surveillance architecture built around Mount Pleasant rather than simply a collection of individual platforms.

• Typhoon remains the high-end combat element.

• A Royal Navy vessel provides presence and maritime command.

• But a much larger network surrounds them.

• Long-endurance UAVs maintain surveillance beyond the islands.

• USVs monitor shipping and offshore infrastructure.

• UUVs periodically survey important approaches and seabed infrastructure.

• Commercial satellite data supplements military ISR.

• Passive sensors provide additional warning.

All of that information is fused into a common operating picture shared between the Falklands, Northwood and deployed forces.

In a crisis, additional autonomous systems can be flown or shipped south much faster than traditional warships can be generated and deployed. This does not replace people. Nor does it remove the need for ships, aircraft or weapons.

It makes the relatively small force already in the South Atlantic much harder to surprise. That is exactly the sort of task at which autonomy should excel.

But sensors do not solve the logistics problem.

There is a danger here too. A Falklands version of the Hybrid Navy cannot become another technology demonstration. The difficult questions remain decidedly physical.

• How much aviation fuel is stored on the islands?

• How long can air operations continue if resupply is disrupted?

• How quickly can a damaged runway be repaired?

• How much ammunition is pre-positioned?

• Are there sufficient spares for sustained Typhoon operations?

• How resilient are satellite and undersea communications?

• Can autonomous systems be maintained locally?

• How much dependence remains upon civilian contractors and commercial supply chains?

• How quickly could Britain reinforce the islands if warning time collapsed from weeks to days?

The answers to many of those questions are understandably not public. They nevertheless matter more than simply counting Argentine F-16s against British Typhoons.

Deterrence is ultimately a calculation made in somebody else’s capital. The objective is to ensure that calculation always produces the same answer:

It won’t work.

Ascension still matters.

There is another dot on the South Atlantic map that should not be overlooked: Ascension Island.

Its importance in 1982 is well understood, but its relevance has not disappeared. Any sustained reinforcement of the Falklands still depends upon infrastructure, staging, airlift, tanker support and access across enormous distances.

In a future crisis, Ascension could again become critical to moving people, aircraft, stores and potentially autonomous systems south. That makes resilience there part of Falklands deterrence too.

The defence of the islands should therefore not be considered simply as a ring drawn around East Falkland. It is a network extending north through Ascension and ultimately back to Britain. Break enough links in that network, and the forces at Mount Pleasant become progressively less useful. Protect those links and the strategic problem facing Argentina becomes much harder.

What Argentina sees matters.

It is also worth looking at this from Buenos Aires. Argentina maintains a sovereignty claim which enjoys broad political support across its domestic political spectrum. Milei has not invented the dispute, even if his approach and his relationship with Washington have changed how it is presented.

From an Argentine perspective, Britain’s military presence and exploitation of natural resources around the islands reinforce a situation it regards as illegitimate. That does not make the Argentine claim correct. Nor does it override the Falkland Islanders’ clearly expressed wish to remain British. But understanding the other side’s perspective is part of deterrence.

Argentina may reasonably conclude that its relative military position will improve over the next decade as F-16 capability matures and other modernisation programmes progress. It may also believe that Britain’s global commitments will continue to stretch its armed forces. And it may see an American administration increasingly focused on hemispheric politics as creating diplomatic opportunities that did not previously exist.

Britain should not panic about those calculations. It should ensure they never add up to an attractive opportunity.

Deterrence before the Task Force.

Britain has an understandable tendency to measure Falklands security against the extraordinary achievement of 1982.

• Could we still send a Task Force?

• How many escorts could we generate?

• Could the carriers operate that far south?

• Where are the amphibious ships?

Those are legitimate questions in the extreme case where deterrence has already failed. But they are not where I would start.

The purpose of Britain’s post-1982 Falklands strategy was precisely to avoid having to conduct another Operation CORPORATE.

That remains the objective.

The Falklands of the 2030s should therefore be defended through persistent awareness, resilient infrastructure, credible air power, sufficient stocks, protected logistics and the ability to reinforce early.

Autonomous systems can contribute substantially to that architecture. So can AI, but neither replaces the fundamentals.

• Fuel still has to reach Mount Pleasant.

• Aircraft still have to fly.

• Weapons still have to work.

• Runways still have to be repaired.

• Ships still have to be sustained.

And ultimately people still have to make decisions in circumstances where the distinction between provocation, coercion and armed attack may be deliberately unclear.

Not 1982.

I have no desire to see another Falklands War. Those of us who were there understand better than most what the phrase “military option” ultimately means. That is also why I think some of the current commentary risks missing the point.

• Argentina’s F-16s matter.

• Milei’s rhetoric matters.

• Sea Lion matters.

• The changing politics of Washington matter.

• Britain’s stretched military resources matter.

But none of them, individually or collectively, demonstrate that another Argentine invasion is imminent. What they demonstrate is that the strategic environment around the Falklands is changing. Britain has time to respond. The right response is neither alarmism nor complacency.

It is deterrence.

And in the South Atlantic of the 2030s, deterrence may increasingly depend on something we have discussed throughout the Future Navy series: the ability to connect ships, aircraft, autonomous systems, sensors, infrastructure, logistics, and people into a force more capable than the sum of its individual platforms.

In 1982, Britain had to retake the Falkland Islands. The measure of success for the Future Navy is much simpler.

Make sure we never have to do it again.

The Type 45 fleet is receiving the Power Improvement Project (PIP), an additional 24 Sea Ceptor (CAMM) missile cells and the Sea Viper Evolution (SVE) ballistic missile defence upgrade. These improvements are not expected to reach Full Operating Capability across all six ships until autumn 2032. With the class’s retirement generally expected to begin in the mid-2030s, extending at least some ships into the 2040s could allow the Navy to extract considerably more value from that investment.

On the surface, this is familiar: warships are expensive, defence replacement programmes generally take longer than expected, and existing ships are upgraded and given extensions to their operational lives to bridge the gap. The Royal Navy has been in this situation before; the extended operational life of the Type 23 frigates is a good example.

But this time, something more interesting could be happening. Recently, when discussing the matter with the Council on Geostrategy, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins may have given his clearest explanation to date of how the Royal Navy intends to replace the Type 45. The solution won’t be another destroyer.

Jenkins gave an unusually direct account of the earlier course of the Type 83 programme, saying the proposed successor would be ten metres longer, a couple of thousand tonnes heavier, would need another hundred people, and would cost several billion pounds more. It was the traditional naval procurement cycle taken to its logical end: replacing an increasingly complex warship with an even larger and more complex one.

Jenkins aims to break that cycle. According to him, the future maritime air-defence capability will be based on a smaller and less complicated crewed warship working with uncrewed escorts. These vessels would provide extra magazine capacity, increase sensor range, and carry electronic warfare or decoy equipment. Each air-defence capability would thus become, as Jenkins puts it, a “mini task force in its own right”.

The way in which we should consider extending the Type 45 is therefore different. The destroyers may not merely have to survive until their replacement comes. Maybe they need to survive long enough to help in creating it.

The Replacement for a Destroyer Is No Longer Necessarily a Destroyer

For over a century the majority of naval capability has been concentrated on individual platforms. A destroyer incorporates within one hull sensors, weapons, communication systems, command facilities, propulsion, personnel and protection. Whenever the capability is improved, there is a tendency to upgrade the ship: better radar requires more electrical power and more cooling, a greater number of weapons calls for more space, more equipment increases displacement, and greater complexity may call for more people as a result of which the costs go up, fewer ships can be afforded, and ever greater capability becomes concentrated in each hull.

The Hybrid Navy potentially breaks that relationship. Instead of asking how everything needed to replace a Type 45 can be fitted aboard a Type 83, the question becomes which capabilities actually need to be aboard the crewed ship at all. The future crewed combatant might retain command and control, human decision-making and core combat capability, while an uncrewed missile vessel provides additional magazine depth. Another autonomous vessel could carry sensors further forward, while others might provide electronic warfare, decoys, communications or additional surveillance.

The individual ship becomes less important as the unit of capability; increasingly, the networked force itself becomes the capability.

The key point underlying the new ideas for the Type 91 missile vessel and the Type 94 sensor vessel is also why Jenkins’s remarks matter for the final design of the Type 83 replacement. The Royal Navy is considering separating the functions usually housed within the destroyer.

Doing so offers considerable advantages. Missile capacity can increase without making the crewed ship larger, sensors can be positioned further from the command platform, and high-risk tasks can be pushed towards uncrewed systems. An enemy may also have to find, classify and attack multiple targets rather than concentrate its effort on one exquisite warship. But distributing capability also distributes vulnerability.

Pulling Apart the Kill Chain

A Type 45 contains much of its air-defence kill chain within one ship. It detects a threat, its combat system develops the tactical picture, people make decisions, and weapons are selected and launched. Modern naval warfare already involves extensive information sharing between ships, aircraft, and other sensors, but the Hybrid Navy takes that principle considerably further.

Imagine that the sensor detecting an incoming missile is aboard an autonomous Type 94, the commander making the engagement decision is aboard the crewed warship tens of miles away, and the missile required to destroy the target is aboard an uncrewed Type 91 somewhere else again. The air-defence system now spans three vessels, and communications between them become as important as the platforms themselves.

The distributed model therefore creates difficult questions about how the force fights when that network is degraded. A sensor vessel may detect and track a target but lose its connection to the command ship, while the weapon needed to engage that target may be aboard a third platform. The challenge becomes more acute under satellite disruption, jamming, GNSS denial or emissions control. Decisions will be needed about how much authority individual nodes retain, how engagement-quality data is shared and how the overall system degrades gracefully rather than simply ceasing to function.

This is not a matter of minor communication problems. The network no longer supports the weapon system; it is now integral to it. Distribution may remove the single point of failure represented by the exquisite warship, but it risks replacing it with another critical vulnerability: the force’s ability to exchange trusted information quickly enough to fight.

This is where the Hybrid Navy becomes much harder than simply buying autonomous ships. Jenkins himself makes an important distinction. Large uncrewed vessels already operate worldwide, and he does not regard building the vessels themselves as the principal technological challenge. The harder problems include autonomous navigation that meets regulations, resilient data networks that can operate in difficult environments, and mission systems reliable enough to function at sea without sailors constantly available to repair them.

These are precisely the problems which must be solved before the Royal Navy can safely get rid of the existing model of maritime air defence; it is also in this area that the Type 45 becomes of particular interest.

Type 45 as the Bridge

The transition does not have to happen overnight. Rather than operating Type 45 until the day a completely new distributed air-defence system replaces it, the Royal Navy could progressively build that future system around the existing destroyer. Autonomous sensors could be introduced first, followed by electronic warfare and decoy vessels connected through increasingly resilient networks. An uncrewed missile magazine could then add distributed firepower, allowing the Navy to progressively experiment with cooperative engagement, weapons control, and command of a dispersed force.

Crucially, this would allow sailors to discover how the system behaves when things go wrong. Exercises could deliberately degrade communications. Autonomous vessels could be forced to operate without GNSS or beyond normal communications range. Crews could learn how much information they actually need to maintain command of a distributed force, and where additional autonomy becomes useful rather than merely impressive.

The progression might therefore look less like a simple transition from Type 45 to Type 83 and more like an evolution from Type 45, through Type 45 operating with autonomous systems, into a genuinely distributed Type 45 task group, before the eventual future crewed combatant takes its place at the centre of a mature autonomous escort family. This would not necessarily mean experimenting around a declining combat system. Sea Viper Evolution and the addition of Sea Ceptor should leave the Type 45 with a substantially modernised air-defence capability, potentially making it a more useful reference platform against which distributed alternatives can be tested.

It would mean the Type 45 became more than a legacy capability being maintained while the Navy waits for a new system, and could instead act as the operational link into the Hybrid Navy.

Prototype Warfare at Fleet Scale

Another key element in the developing picture is what is known as prototype warfare. A recent RUSI study outlined the concept of “prototype warfare” and stated that armed forces should become active participants in developing immature capabilities rather than merely acting as customers who wait for industry to deliver fully finished equipment.

Under this model, operators use prototypes, discover their weaknesses, generate operational data and feed that experience back into development. Systems that work are improved and eventually scaled, while those that fail are changed or discarded. The objective is not to eliminate failure, but to fail early enough that failure remains affordable and useful lessons can still influence the final capability.

Jenkins’s description of the Navy’s changing relationship with industry closely reflects this approach. He outlines a different kind of relationship with the industry in which the Royal Navy states the operational effect it wants rather than drawing up a detailed technical specification that exactly defines how the industry must meet that requirement. Atlantic Net is an early example, with the industry investing its own funds to develop possible solutions to the Navy’s need for persistent autonomous surveillance in the North Atlantic.

Jenkins goes further, suggesting that companies could provide early uncrewed escorts to the Navy so that they can be trialled and experimented with alongside existing warships. Applied to maritime air defence, Type 45 could therefore become something more important than an ageing destroyer. It could become the laboratory where the Royal Navy learns how to fight the Hybrid Navy at sea, rather than in simulation or on a PowerPoint slide.

The Human Bridge

The transition also has a human dimension. Removing sailors from individual vessels does not remove people from the system. Someone still has to plan missions, maintain autonomous craft, load weapons, interpret ambiguous tracks, manage degraded networks, repair failures and decide when lethal force should be used.

The skills needed could also change a great deal. A future air-defence officer might not merely fight a ship; he or she could command a distributed combat system spread across crewed and uncrewed platforms, with some functions running autonomously while others require human approval. The problem then becomes understanding the behaviour and limitations of the whole network rather than becoming an expert in the systems installed on a single ship.

Trust and experience will therefore be important. A commander has to understand not only what an autonomous system is supposed to do, but also how it behaves when the environment is confusing, communications are intermittent, and the enemy is deliberately trying to deceive it. Experience cannot be simply included in doctrine before the systems arrive; it must be gained through repeated operational use.

According to Jenkins, the Navy is currently altering how it selects, trains, and educates its leaders for the age of the Hybrid Navy and autonomy. Hence, extending the Type 45 could act as a link not only for platforms but also for people, enabling the sailors who will one day operate the future air-defence system to start learning how to fight with it well before the new crewed warship enters service.

Life Extension Must Not Become Life Support

There is still a risk in giving too much weight to this argument, since keeping old ships in service because their replacements are not yet ready is by no means an innovative way to acquire vessels, and the Type 45s have already suffered from well-known propulsion and availability problems. The cost of maintaining old hulls, machinery, and combat systems increases steadily, obsolescence grows, and the number of skilled personnel and engineering resources remains limited. Eventually, extending the service life of the ships will no longer be worth it.

A shrewd narrative concerning experimentation should not conceal the fact that the capability programme is merely behind schedule. The argument for extending the Type 45 becomes convincing only if those extra years are intentionally used to speed up the transition. Each additional year for the Type 45 should advance the Hybrid Navy’s learning. There is also an opportunity cost. Money and engineering effort spent sustaining Type 45 into the 2040s cannot be spent twice. A life-extension programme that begins consuming the resources required to develop its replacement would eventually defeat its own purpose.

If the ships continue with present-day practices while everyone waits for their eventual replacements, then hardly anything will have changed. But if they gradually use the sensors, autonomous escorts, distributed weapons, and command systems meant to replace some of their own capabilities, those extra years will be far more valuable. The Royal Navy can find out what works while it still has its proven backup option.

Don’t Wait for the New Ship

The most important consequence is that the Royal Navy need not wait for the eventual Type 45 successor to begin fielding its next generation of maritime air defence. That represents another break with the traditional model, where a major new capability often arrived with the ship built to carry it. Design, construction, combat system and weapons were bound together into a programme that could take well over a decade.

A distributed architecture can evolve in different ways. The autonomous sensor need not wait for the new crewed ship, nor does the decoy vessel, the electronic warfare node or the distributed missile magazine. Progressive development of resilient communications, cooperative engagement, autonomous navigation, and new command-and-control arrangements is possible, with each element tested, improved, and then incorporated into the existing force.

When the future crewed combatant arrives, much of the surrounding system could thus already be in place. More significantly, the Royal Navy could already have the necessary knowledge to operate, maintain, and fight the system. The new ship would be added to an evolving combat system rather than mark the moment that system suddenly comes into being.

That might, in the end, become one of the Hybrid Navy’s biggest advantages, since capability needn’t wait until the commissioning pennant is hoisted.

Keep It Longer to Replace It

The First Sea Lord compares the present transformation to some of the major technological changes in naval history. He may be right, but those earlier changes were generally not straightforward. Steam did not immediately replace sail, aircraft did not cause the battleship to vanish overnight, and new technologies always coexisted with the old ones. Moreover, navies ran experiments, gained experience, sometimes made serious mistakes, and eventually developed new methods of fighting.

The shift to autonomous and distributed naval warfare is unlikely to be any different. The Royal Navy cannot afford to get into the 2030s and find that its distributed air-defence system functions perfectly well in simulation but fails in the North Atlantic when subjected to jamming, adverse weather, equipment failures and the attention of a smart enemy.

Type 45 offers an opportunity to discover those problems earlier, at sea, with sailors, autonomous systems and operational warships, while there is still time to fix them. For most of naval history, keeping an old class in service longer has been evidence that its replacement is late. This time there is an opportunity to make it something more.

The safest route to replacing the conventional air-defence destroyer may therefore be paradoxical: keep it longer, and use it to build what comes next.

Future Reading

• Navy Lookout: Royal Navy to study extending Type 45 destroyer service life

• Council on Geostrategy, “First Sea Lord: Driving the Naval Transformation”.

• RUSI, Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain
  

• From Future Navy:

  
  

At the core of modern warship design is a simple question: how many sailors does a ship actually need? For years, the trend has been obvious. Automation has cut down crew sizes. Machines now handle tasks that once needed watch keepers. Sensors check equipment that used to be inspected by hand. More advanced software has taken over jobs that teams of sailors used to do.

The Royal Navy’s new Hybrid Navy pushes this idea even further. The goal isn’t just to run crewed warships more efficiently, but to mix them with remote-controlled and autonomous systems, spreading sensors, weapons, and other roles across a bigger fleet.

This approach makes sense. The Royal Navy needs more ships without needing a lot more people. Uncrewed systems can stay on task longer, cover more area with sensors, carry equipment, and handle jobs that would otherwise tie up valuable crewed ships.

But this question might miss something important. We often ask how many sailors it takes to run a warship. In wartime, though, the real question is different.

How many sailors does a warship need when things go wrong?

The Falklands Test

The Falklands conflict of 1982 was one of the first major tests of modern maritime warfare.

Anti-ship missiles, computer-assisted command systems, jet aircraft, nuclear submarines, electronic warfare and increasingly sophisticated sensors all played significant roles. The Royal Navy went south with ships and weapons designed primarily for a different Cold War battle in the North Atlantic and discovered, under fire, what worked and what did not.

But the campaign demonstrated something else. Modern naval warfare remained extraordinarily dependent upon people. Operation Corporate stretched approximately 8,000 miles from Britain to the South Atlantic. Ascension Island became the critical forward node. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary provided the replenishment lifeline, while merchant shipping was rapidly requisitioned and converted to carry troops, aircraft, fuel and stores.

Merchant ships transported thousands of personnel and enormous quantities of freight south. The fuel chain moved hundreds of thousands of tons. The RFA conducted more than a thousand replenishments during the campaign. It was an extraordinary demonstration of logistics and improvisation, and people made it happen.

Engineers modified ships. Dockyard workers prepared vessels at extraordinary speed. Merchant seafarers sailed into a war zone. RFA crews maintained the supply chain. Sailors moved ammunition and stores. Maintainers kept equipment running thousands of miles from normal support facilities.

At Ascension, a logistics organisation that barely existed at the beginning of the operation expanded rapidly to support a fleet heading into combat. The system succeeded not because everything went as planned, but because people adapted when things didn’t.

When the Plan Meets the Enemy

The loss of Atlantic Conveyor provides one of the clearest examples. She carried helicopters, stores and equipment essential to the land campaign. When Exocet missiles struck her on 25 May, three of the four Chinook heavy-lift helicopters being transported south were lost. Plans that had assumed significant helicopter mobility suddenly had to change.

Waterborne logistics, landing craft, smaller helicopters and human endurance filled some of the gap. The campaign continued. But Atlantic Conveyor revealed another important distinction. A merchant ship could be adapted remarkably quickly to carry military capability, but that did not automatically make it a warship. Her commercial construction complicated damage control. Her commercial construction offered less subdivision and damage-control resilience than a purpose-built warship, which made responding to the fire harder.

The lesson was not simply that warships should be better protected. It showed that survivability depends on design, equipment, training, and people working together. If one part is missing or weak, the others have to make up for it.

A Lesson From HMS Ardent

I experienced another part of that equation personally. By the time HMS Ardent reached the Falklands, we were running defence watches: six hours on, six hours off. As the air threat increased, the strain did too.

Long stretches of warfare aren’t exciting all the time. Often, they’re repetitive, uncomfortable, and exhausting.

• You watch. You listen. You wait.

• And tired people make mistakes.

Before the landings, I accidentally fired an anti-missile chaff rocket during routine system checks. No enemy aircraft were attacking us at the time. There was no equipment failure. I was simply tired.

The response aboard Ardent was revealing. I was not disciplined. The problem was recognised for what it was, and the procedure changed so that someone else oversaw my routine checks as well as all other operators. A small incident, but an important lesson.

How long people can keep going shapes how long the combat system can last.

Days later, on 21 May 1982, Ardent was subjected to repeated air attacks in Falkland Sound. Once a warship starts taking serious damage, the neat distinction between the people who operate the ship and those who save it begins to disappear.

Fire, flooding, smoke, injuries, and broken systems create challenges that no peacetime plan can fully predict. In these moments, people become the redundancy.

Forty-Four Years Later

That lesson has renewed relevance.

The recent experience of the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, after more than eight months deployed and more than 200 consecutive days without a port call, has again raised questions about human endurance at sea. Reports of problems with living conditions, supply, morale and sailor wellbeing have been disputed in part by the US administration.

The precise circumstances aboard one carrier are less important here than the underlying issue. Ships have technical endurance. They have logistical endurance. They also have human endurance. Those three things are not necessarily the same.

So, we should be careful about judging all ships based on one deployment. Still, the bigger issue is hard to ignore.

A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier demonstrates the distinction particularly well. Its propulsion endurance can be measured in years. Fuel, food, ammunition and aviation stores can be replenished at sea.

The people cannot. Eventually sailors need rest and recovery. Sustained operational tempo builds fatigue, no matter how capable the surrounding platform may be. This is important for today’s Royal Navy. Just as demands on the fleet are rising, we’re also trying to send fewer people to sea.

The Lean-Manning Paradox

Automation unquestionably allows smaller crews. But smaller crews create a paradox. During normal operations, automation replaces people. But when things go wrong, the people left on board might suddenly have to do the jobs the machines usually handle.

Experience with small-crewed ships shows how tough this can be. Sensors and automated systems can cut down on routine checks and watchkeeping, but sensors can break, wiring can get damaged, and signals can become unreliable.

At that point somebody has to investigate. And fewer people are around to do it. This matters particularly in damage control because much of it remains intensely physical.

• Fire.

• Flooding.

• Structural damage.

• Smoke and toxic gases.

• Loss of electrical power.

• Damaged communications.

These aren’t just numbers on a screen. Someone still has to find the problem, shut down machines, set up barriers, move gear, fight fires, or stop flooding.

The problem is increasingly recognised in work on lean-manned and autonomous naval platforms. Work on lean-manned and autonomous platforms increasingly recognises that damage control cannot simply be treated as another function from which people can be progressively removed.

A ship built with just enough people for normal operations might not have enough hands when things go wrong and more help is needed. That is the lean-manning paradox.

The more a ship relies on fewer people, the more important each person becomes if the automation stops working.

The Hybrid Navy Changes the Equation

None of this argues against autonomy. Quite the opposite. A genuinely uncrewed vessel offers an entirely different approach to survivability. If no sailors are on board, there’s no need to keep living spaces safe or make sure there are escape routes through machinery areas. Engineering systems can be built in modules and kept separate. If one part is damaged, it can just shut down. In some cases, the whole platform can be left behind.

The mistake would be to assume that an autonomous vessel should be a conventionally crewed warship with the accommodation removed. It can be designed around entirely different assumptions. That difference is important. The dangerous middle ground may actually be the lean-crewed warship.

• It retains people and therefore has to protect them.

• It retains complex combat systems.

• It must recover from battle damage.

• It must maintain watches.

• It must operate for weeks or months.

• But it has fewer people on board when things don’t go as planned.

• And in war, things often don’t go as planned.

The People Who Aren’t Aboard

The Hybrid Navy also challenges what we mean by a ship’s company.

In August 2026, a routine cyber vulnerability assessment of the Royal Navy’s new K3 Scout uncrewed surface vessels detected that one of their cameras was making heartbeat communications to a Chinese IP address.

According to the Ministry of Defence, subsequent investigation found no evidence that MoD data or systems had been accessed, compromised or transmitted externally. The camera was provided through a third-party supplier, despite the prime contractor receiving security assurances.

In one sense, the incident demonstrates that assurance worked. Testing detected the unexpected behaviour. But it also illustrates how different the workforce problem becomes with an autonomous fleet.

A K3 does not require a sailor standing beside its camera. It still requires people who can understand what that camera is doing. Modern autonomous vessels contain layers of hardware, firmware, software, communications and data dependencies assembled through complex supply chains. A component several levels below the prime contractor can introduce behaviour that neither the customer nor perhaps the prime originally anticipated.

You can check the vessel and still not know exactly what it’s doing. Taking sailors off the ship doesn’t remove the need for people—it just shifts it somewhere else.

• Someone must assure the hardware.

• Someone must test the software.

• Someone must monitor network behaviour.

Someone must validate updates, manage configuration, maintain the autonomy stack and ultimately decide whether the system can still be trusted. So the Hybrid Navy might need fewer people at sea, but it will depend increasingly on specialists elsewhere.

Procurement Becomes Part of the Fighting System

The K3 incident also exposes another challenge. Autonomous systems derive part of their military value from their ability to evolve quickly. Sensors can change. Payloads can be replaced. Software can be updated. Commercially derived technology can potentially be introduced far faster than equipment aboard traditional warships.

That is a feature, not a problem.

RUSI’s work on “prototype warfare” argues that the Royal Navy needs precisely this ability to field immature capabilities, learn through operational use and rapidly improve those that demonstrate value. It describes operators not simply as consumers of finished equipment, but as “prosumers”, participating in the development of capability through use, feedback and data.

But speed cannot mean abandoning assurance. The K3 experience suggests almost the opposite. If the Hybrid Navy is to incorporate technology faster, assurance itself must become faster and continuous.

The answer cannot be to subject every camera, processor or software update to the procurement cycle of a conventional warship. Nor can it be to trust the supplier and hope for the best. The Royal Navy will need to learn how to procure quickly, test continuously and distrust intelligently.

That creates another demand for people. The sailor of the Hybrid Navy may be an operator, maintainer and damage controller. But the wider Navy will increasingly depend upon software engineers, cyber specialists, data scientists, AI assurance teams, remote operators, commercial maintainers and industry partners. People are still a key part of naval power.

That role has just grown beyond the ship itself.

People as Reserve Capacity

An interesting historical parallel emerges here. The fighting strength of the Falklands Task Force was never simply the sum of the complements aboard Royal Navy warships. Merchant seafarers, RFA crews, dockyard workers, engineers, logisticians and industry formed an extended human system that allowed the fleet to operate and adapt 8,000 miles from home.

The technology has changed profoundly. The principle has not.

Far more people keep a fleet running than just those on board.

And those people offer something that’s hard to show on a staffing chart. They provide reserve capacity. A sailor is not simply a unit of workforce assigned to a task. A sailor whose normal job is operating a weapon may become part of a firefighting team. An engineer may help recover a damaged electrical system.

Someone off watch becomes another pair of hands moving equipment, carrying casualties or establishing a damage-control boundary. And the same principle applies beyond the ship.

• Engineers modify equipment.

• Software specialists diagnose unexpected behaviour.

• Maintainers improvise repairs.

• Logisticians reroute supplies.

• Industry finds another way to manufacture something that is suddenly required.

• People find ways to adapt.

The Falklands Task Force did this constantly. Today, we’d probably call this resilience.

Back in 1982, it was just what people did.

Designing for the Bad Day

The Hybrid Navy offers an opportunity to use scarce sailors much better.

Uncrewed systems can undertake persistent surveillance. Autonomous vessels can extend the sensor network. Remote weapons platforms may add magazine depth. Artificial intelligence can reduce the burden of analysing ever-growing volumes of information.

This is needed if the Royal Navy wants to get more out of the people and resources it has. But we need to be clear about what we mean by efficiency. The objective should not simply be to minimise the number of sailors aboard every future warship.

Maybe the better goal is to cut down on the routine tasks sailors have to do, so they’re only needed when it really matters. That’s a small but important difference. Automation should create human reserve capacity rather than simply provide an opportunity to cut posts.

• It means watching for crew fatigue just as carefully as we check the health of the machines.

• It means planning damage control based on the number of people actually available at 3 a.m. after days at action stations, not just the number listed on paper.

• It means building truly uncrewed platforms from the start, not just reducing the crew on a regular ship until no one is left.

And it means realising that some of the people a warship relies on might be hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

The Question We Should Be Asking

Forty-four years ago, the Falklands Task Force demonstrated that sophisticated technology and enormous logistical complexity could be held together by trained people capable of adapting when the plan failed.

Today’s Royal Navy is attempting something equally ambitious. It wants to distribute combat power across crewed and uncrewed platforms, use artificial intelligence to accelerate decisions and generate greater maritime mass without requiring a proportionately larger Navy.

That’s the right approach. But there is a danger in treating sailors purely as a cost to be engineered out. The crew on a ship is also a source of resilience. And the people who support that ship, whether aboard an RFA, in a dockyard, inside a remote operations centre, writing software or examining a suspicious packet of network traffic, are increasingly part of that resilience too.

Technology might mean you need fewer people when everything is running smoothly. But warship design also needs to consider how many people are needed when things go wrong.

Perhaps that is the enduring lesson connecting the South Atlantic in 1982 with the Hybrid Navy of the 2030s. The future fleet should not be designed simply around the minimum number of sailors required to operate it. It should be designed around the number of people and the amount of automation required to survive its worst day.

And some of those people may never go to sea.

Further Reading

1. Royal Navy / Naval Damage Control, “Damage Control on Lean-Manned and Autonomous Platforms”
   Navy Leaders Site

2. RUSI, “Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain”
   Link

3. US Naval Institute, “The Logistics Miracle”, Peter Hore, 2022
   Peter Hore’s account of Ascension and Falklands logistics provides the historical background to the Task Force’s wider human system, extending far beyond the complements of its warships.
   The Logistics Miracle

4. US Naval Institute, “Lessons for a Wartime Navy from STUFT Vessels in the Falklands War”, 2024
   Lessons for a Wartime Navy from STUFT Vessels in the Falklands War

5. R. Adm. James Parkin, “Delivering the Hybrid Navy: Challenges and Opportunities”,
   Council on Geostrategy / Britain’s World, 2026
   

Walk around a modern frigate or destroyer and the obvious things catch your eye. The radar mast. The missile silos. The main gun. The flight deck. These are the visible symbols of naval power and, for more than a century, they have defined how we judge a warship’s capability.

Yet increasingly, none of them works alone.

Hidden beneath the steel is another ship. One made not of bulkheads, pipework and machinery, but of shared computing, secure networks, data and software. It is largely invisible to visitors, yet it may prove to be one of the most important parts of the ship.

The next revolution in naval warfare may not be a new missile or a more powerful radar. It may be the digital architecture that allows every system onboard to work together, adapt and continue fighting when parts of the ship have been damaged or disconnected.

The hardware increasingly provides the platform, the software delivers the capability.

Every generation has its revolution

Naval history can be viewed as a succession of technological revolutions.

• Steam replaced sail.

• Steel replaced wood.

• Electricity replaced many hydraulic and mechanical control systems.

• Missiles displaced guns as the principal long-range weapon.

Today we are experiencing another transition, but this one is different. A single piece of equipment does not define it. It concerns the way the entire ship is designed and how its combat power is generated.

Traditionally, every major capability onboard brought its own dedicated hardware. Navigation, communications, electro-optics, weapons control, electronic warfare and combat management required separate computers, networks and support equipment.

As new capabilities were added during a ship’s life, more cabinets, cables and proprietary processors followed. Each system came with its own supply chain, training requirements and upgrade cycle.

The result was often a collection of highly capable systems that worked alongside each other rather than as one integrated whole.

That model is beginning to change.

From equipment to infrastructure

The Royal Navy’s Shared Infrastructure programme represents a fundamental shift in naval engineering. Rather than every capability requiring its own dedicated computing hardware, multiple applications can be hosted on a common, secure digital backbone.

At its simplest, this brings together shared computing, resilient networks, data storage and common operator consoles. Applications remain separated where security and safety require it, but they no longer necessarily need a unique cabinet and processor of their own.

Shared Infrastructure is already used across several Royal Navy ship classes, from Offshore Patrol Vessels to the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers. It is being installed aboard the first Type 26 frigates, HMS Glasgow and HMS Cardiff. BAE Systems describes its origins as extending back to initial deployments in 2015.

The commercial comparison is tempting.

We no longer buy separate devices for music, photography, satellite navigation and communications. A smartphone delivers all of these through software running on shared hardware.

A warship is obviously more complex. Weapons safety, security classifications, real-time processing and the need to survive combat prevent any direct comparison with a consumer device. But the underlying direction is similar.

The hardware increasingly becomes a common platform upon which different capabilities are delivered.

That matters because it changes more than the equipment fit. It changes the relationship between the warship and time.

Combat at the speed of software

For much of the twentieth century, improving a warship meant altering the ship itself. Installing a new radar, weapon or command system could require new cabinets, fresh wiring, additional cooling and a lengthy dockyard period. Capability development moved at the pace of naval procurement, shipbuilding and major refit cycles.

Shared infrastructure begins to loosen that relationship.

Some improvements will still require new sensors, processors or weapons. A software update cannot create electrical power, generate cooling capacity or place another missile in the magazine.

But an increasing proportion of combat capability can evolve through software:

• Sensor fusion.

• Threat recognition.

• Electronic-warfare libraries.

• Communications.

• Decision support.

• Management of uncrewed systems.

• Artificial intelligence.

This does not mean that untested code can be sent directly to a deployed warship. Naval software must be assured, integrated and certified, particularly when connected to weapons or navigation. It does mean that capability can potentially be improved far more rapidly than through a traditional refit.

The United States Navy is moving in the same direction. In 2024, USS Winston S. Churchill became the first ship using a fully virtualised Aegis combat system to intercept an air target with a missile. The US Navy described this as part of its effort to move from multiple segregated systems towards a single integrated combat system, supported by a common hardware and software development pipeline. US Naval Sea Systems Command

The significance is not simply technical.

Threats, tactics and algorithms can now change much faster than ships can be built. If a navy needs years to incorporate each improvement, it risks deploying vessels whose digital capabilities are already falling behind.

A software-defined warship does not eliminate the need for shipbuilding. It allows the ship to continue evolving after it has left the shipyard.

Fighting through degradation

The true test of shared infrastructure will not come during a demonstration. It will come after systems begin to fail.

Naval combat has always involved degradation. Sensors may be damaged. Communications disrupted. Power lost. Networks attacked. Compartments may become inaccessible.

The question is not whether every system survives. It is whether the ship retains enough capability to continue fighting. A well-designed shared architecture could allow applications to be moved between surviving computing resources, while alternative sensors and offboard sources continue contributing to the tactical picture.

If a radar is lost, electro-optical sensors, electronic-support measures, passive sonar, another ship, an aircraft or an uncrewed system may still provide useful information. Shared infrastructure can help bring those sources together and present them coherently to the command team.

But this resilience is not automatic.

Moving several capabilities onto common infrastructure can also create common points of failure. The loss of a network backbone, power supply, cooling system or critical software layer could affect several functions at once.

Physical separation still matters. Redundancy still matters. Damage control still matters. So do degraded operating modes that allow essential systems to function when the wider architecture is unavailable.

The ship will only fight through degradation if that requirement has been designed and tested into the architecture from the beginning.

Resilience must become a property of the whole ship, not merely a promise attached to individual systems.

AI joins the crew

Artificial intelligence fits naturally into this model.

One misconception surrounding military AI is that it will arrive as a separate black box, installed beside the existing combat system. In practice, AI is more likely to appear as a collection of services operating across the ship’s digital infrastructure.

One application might help classify sensor contacts. Another could monitor machinery data for signs of failure. Others might support route planning, intelligence analysis, logistics or the management of un-crewed systems.

Each application could draw upon different data while supporting different members of the crew. This reinforces an argument I have made before. The AI fleet is not one brain, and AI does not need to become the captain of the ship.

It can instead become part of the operations-room team, helping people process information, identify patterns and manage complexity without displacing human command. Shared infrastructure makes that possible. It allows AI to become pervasive without necessarily becoming dominant.

It could also provide controlled environments in which new applications are evaluated against representative data before being trusted with operational functions. The difficult work remains assurance: proving what the software can do, understanding how it can fail and deciding which decisions must remain firmly with people.

The hidden vulnerability

Every technological revolution creates new strengths and new dependencies.

As more capability moves onto shared digital infrastructure, protecting that infrastructure becomes a war-fighting task in its own right.

• Cyber resilience can no longer be treated as an IT problem.

• Power and cooling become combat functions.

• Software assurance becomes as important as weapons assurance.

• Configuration management affects operational readiness.

A warship could carry an excellent radar and a capable missile, yet fail to exploit either if its software configuration is wrong, its data is corrupted, or the architecture connecting them has been compromised.

Adversaries will understand this. They may not need to attack every sensor individually if they can disrupt the infrastructure that connects them.

There is also an industrial question.

If shared infrastructure depends upon proprietary interfaces controlled by a small number of suppliers, a navy may gain technical flexibility while losing commercial freedom. Software-defined capability can still become locked into long contracts, closed architectures and slow approval processes.

Open standards and modular designs can help, but “open” does not mean unrestricted. Safety-critical naval systems still require firm design authority, controlled interfaces and rigorous assurance.

The challenge is to create an architecture open enough to evolve, but controlled enough to trust in combat. That balance may prove just as important as the technology itself.

Designing the software-defined warship

For generations, naval architects have designed hulls around machinery spaces, magazines, sensors and accommodation.

Future designs will increasingly need to treat data architecture as another fundamental part of the ship.

That changes the design process.

Naval architects, marine engineers, combat-system specialists, cyber professionals and software developers can no longer work as a succession of separate disciplines. Decisions about power, cooling, compartmentation, network routes, redundancy and computing capacity will directly influence the ship’s ability to evolve and survive.

It also changes procurement.

There is little value in building a software-defined warship if every software change must pass through a process designed for replacing physical equipment. Continuous technological development requires continuous assurance, integration, training and operational feedback.

The Royal Navy has already begun using the phrase “at the speed of software” when describing its experimentation with scalable infrastructure and common architectures. The challenge will be turning that ambition into an enduring way of delivering frontline capability. Royal Navy, Trident Sprint

Shared Infrastructure is therefore not the destination. It is the foundation upon which the software-defined warship will be built.

The ship beneath the ship

The most powerful fleet of the future may not be the one carrying the greatest number of missiles or the most sophisticated radar.

It may be the fleet best able to connect its sensors and weapons, absorb new technology and continue operating when parts of that digital architecture are attacked or destroyed.

History remembers HMS Dreadnought because she reshaped battleship design. The defining innovation of the next generation may be much harder to photograph. It will lie beneath the steel, connecting sensors, weapons, people and autonomous systems into a fighting whole.

The next generation of warships will still be built from steel. Their weapons will remain physical, and their survival will still depend upon sound naval engineering and trained people. But increasingly, they will adapt, fight and recover through software.

The ship beneath the ship may ultimately prove to be the one that decides the battle.

Further reading

• BAE Systems: Shared Infrastructure
  A useful introduction to the Royal Navy’s shipborne hosting environment and how common computing supports multiple combat and mission systems.

• US Naval Sea Systems Command: Virtualized Combat System Completes Critical Navy First
  Describes the successful missile engagement by USS Winston S. Churchill using a fully virtualised Aegis combat system.

• Royal Navy: Technology Demonstration Boosts Royal Navy’s Hybrid Transformation
  Shows how the Royal Navy is experimenting with common architectures, scalable infrastructure and delivering capability “at the speed of software”.

• RUSI: Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain
  Sidharth Kaushal and John Louth examine how modular, software-defined systems could support faster experimentation, operational feedback and selective scaling.

The Hybrid Navy is steadily moving from concept to reality.

Across the world’s leading navies, autonomous surface vessels, un-crewed underwater systems and AI-enabled command and control are growing essential to future force design. Much of the discussion quite rightly focuses on what these systems can do: extending surveillance, raising operational mass, reducing risk to sailors and providing commanders with new options across the battle-space.

Yet one question receives remarkably little attention.

What happens when the mission ends?

Autonomy does not eliminate support. It redistributes it. The future effectiveness of the Hybrid Navy will depend not only on capable autonomous platforms but also on the engineering, logistics, digital infrastructure, and people that sustain them.

The last mile of autonomy is not at sea. It begins when the autonomous system reconnects with the wider naval enterprise.

Beyond the Myth of the Crewless Ship

There is a persistent assumption that removing the crew removes much of the complexity.

• Fewer sailors.

• Lower costs.

• Simpler operations.

• Reality is rather different.

• Removing sailors from the vessel does not remove sailors from the Navy.

• Someone still plans the mission.

• Someone remains accountable for command decisions.

Someone certifies software updates, validates sensor performance, repairs battle damage, analyses mission data, and authorises the next deployment. Autonomy changes where people add value; it does not eliminate their need.

The Mother Ship Remains Central

Much public discussion imagines autonomous vessels roaming independently across the world’s oceans. Current naval thinking points towards something more practical.

The Hybrid Navy is likely to centre on crewed warships acting as command nodes, deploying autonomous systems to extend reach rather than replace the parent platform. The mother ship becomes the first line of sustainment.

Whether a frigate, support ship or future autonomous mothership, it provides capabilities that autonomous craft cannot easily provide for themselves:

• command and control

• mission planning

• secure communications

• launch and recovery

• payload exchange

• first-line maintenance

• engineering support

• human judgement when autonomy reaches its limits

Rather than making crewed warships less relevant, autonomy arguably makes them more important. The centre of gravity shifts from individual platforms to connected systems.

The Real Last Mile

Eventually every autonomous vessel returns. Perhaps not to Portsmouth after every patrol but certainly back into its support ecosystem. This is where the invisible work begins. Unlike conventional patrol craft, much of the engineering effort goes beyond mechanical systems.

Between missions, the vessel may require:

• software assurance

• AI model validation

• cyber integrity checks

• battery replacement or charging

• payload reconfiguration

• sensor recalibration

• predictive maintenance

• communications testing

• mission data exploitation

• hull inspection

Operational preparedness depends less on repairing failures and more on preventing them. The support organisation becomes as important as the platform itself.

Ports Become Digital Operations Centres

Ports have traditionally been viewed as places where ships refuel, rearm and undergo maintenance. The Hybrid Navy changes that role, future naval bases become digital operations centres.

Long before an autonomous vessel reaches harbour, its engineering health may already be known.

• Telemetry has identified emerging faults.

• Replacement parts have been allocated.

• Software patches prepared.

• Payloads configured.

• Engineers assigned.

The physical turnaround is the final stage of a process that started while the vessel was still hundreds of miles away. Ports evolve from maintenance facilities into highly connected engineering hubs where physical infrastructure and digital infrastructure become inseparable.

Lessons from Formula One

Perhaps an unexpected comparison can be found in Formula One.

Championships are no longer won solely by the fastest driver or most powerful engine. Success depends on how effectively teams exploit data. Thousands of telemetry points stream continuously from each car.

• Engineers track performance in real time.

• Remote operations centres support the race team from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

• Different specialists receive different views of exactly the same information, enabling decisions that improve performance while reducing risk.

The Hybrid Navy faces a remarkably similar challenge.

Autonomous vessels will generate enormous quantities of engineering, navigational and operational data. The challenge is not collecting it. Modern sensors make that relatively straightforward.

The challenge involves ensuring that the right information gets to the right people, in the right format, at the right moment.

• The commanding officer requires mission readiness.

• Engineers require equipment health.

• Cyber specialists require security status.

• Logisticians require forecasts of future demand.

• Dockyards require maintenance schedules.

The value is not in the volume of data, but in changing that data into operational decisions.

A Different Kind of Workforce

Much of the argument surrounding autonomy focuses on reducing manpower. A more interesting question is how manpower changes.

Tomorrow’s naval support organisation may increasingly rely on robotics engineers, software specialists, AI assurance teams, cyber professionals, and data analysts working alongside experienced sailors.

The engineering branch itself evolves. Instead of waiting for equipment to fail, engineers increasingly monitor condition, predict degradation and intervene before faults become operational failures. Technology changes the nature of expertise; it does not replace expertise.

A Personal Reflection

One reason this subject specifically interests me is that I have seen a similar transformation outside defence.

As a Chief Technology Officer, I was responsible for the health and security of large-scale digital infrastructure. Like a modern Formula One team, we relied on continuous telemetry from thousands of endpoints, predictive monitoring, and real-time security analytics. AI wasn’t making operational decisions but was spotting anomalies, predicting failures, and delivering the right information to the right specialist at the right time.

Over time, I trusted AI to monitor complex systems more consistently than manual processes. The human role didn’t disappear; it evolved. Engineers spent less time watching dashboards and more time interpreting information, making decisions, and solving problems requiring experience and judgement.

I believe the Hybrid Navy faces a comparable transition. Autonomous vessels will generate vast quantities of engineering and operational data. Success will depend not on collecting that data, but on turning it into timely decisions across the mother ship, the dockyard and the wider support enterprise.

The lesson is not that navies should become Formula One teams or enterprise IT departments. Rather, both demonstrate that competitive advantage increasingly comes from connecting people, platforms and data into a single operational system. The vessel may be autonomous, but the support network behind it remains truly human.

Conclusion

It is easy to be fascinated by autonomous technology. It is harder—but ultimately more important—to think about what happens after the mission.

Every autonomous vessel still depends upon people. Not necessarily onboard, but throughout a network of operators, engineers, logisticians, software specialists and commanders who keep the system functioning. The Hybrid Navy will not succeed simply by acquiring autonomous vessels. It will succeed because it learns how to sustain them.

That entails investing not only in ships, but in mother ships. Not only in sensors, but in digital infrastructure. Not only in artificial intelligence, but in the engineers and sailors who know when to trust it, when to question it and ultimately how to turn information into operational advantage.

The future may indeed belong to autonomous systems. But the last mile of autonomy will always remain intrinsically human.

Further Future Navy Reading

• Hybrid Navy – First Sea Lord 2029

• The AI Fleet Is Not One Brain

• Hybrid Navy: Autonomous VLS Engineering

  External Links

  • The UK Defence Investment Plan (for the Hybrid Navy context)

  • The UK National Security Strategy

  • Royal Navy Disruptive Capabilities and Technologies Office

  • The Alan Turing Institute: Assurance of third-party AI systems for UK national security

Future Navy Technical Briefing

Deepdive briefing from Future Navy Research with NotebookLM Audio

The Royal Navy’s future fleet is no longer being designed solely around ships. It is being designed around a central question: how do networks sustain combat power?

The Strategic Defence Review and the Defence Investment Plan describe a future Hybrid Navy in which crewed warships operate alongside autonomous surface vessels, uncrewed underwater vehicles and AI-enabled decision support. Concepts such as Atlantic Bastion depend on distributed sensing, autonomous platforms and software-defined integration to deliver greater mass, persistence and operational reach.

Much of the discussion surrounding this transformation has focused on artificial intelligence, autonomous vessels and digital command systems.

Yet one engineering challenge has received remarkably little attention.

Every discussion about autonomous missile ships assumes one thing: that the missiles will still fire when required. That assumption may prove to be one of the hardest engineering challenges facing the Royal Navy.

At a Glance

The Hybrid Navy depends on more than autonomous navigation. It depends on trusted combat systems. This engineering challenge matters because:

• Firepower depends on reliability. An autonomous missile ship only adds combat power if commanders are confident every launcher will function when required.

• Today’s launch systems assume engineers are onboard. Future autonomous vessels remove that assumption, requiring a fundamentally different engineering philosophy.

• Software alone cannot solve the problem. Artificial intelligence can monitor system health, but it cannot repair a deteriorating seal, replace a failed component or restore trust in a weapon system that may no longer perform.

• This challenge extends across the entire Hybrid Navy. The same principles apply to sensors, propulsion, communications and power systems. Vertical Launch Systems simply provide the clearest example.

Engineering confidence is now a strategic capability. Future combat power will depend not only on autonomous platforms, but on designing systems that remain trusted after weeks of independent operation.

The Assumption Nobody Questioned

When I joined HMS Norfolk in 1989 to help introduce the Royal Navy’s first Vertical Launch Sea Wolf missile system into service, one assumption underpinned every design decision.

There would always be engineers onboard.

If hydraulic pressures drifted, environmental seals deteriorated, electrical connectors suffered corrosion or launcher mechanisms required adjustment, experienced maintainers would detect the problem long before operational capability was affected.

That was simply how warships worked. Maintenance was never viewed as an exceptional activity. It was continuous. Every watch, every day and every deployment.

During my career, much of it spent training sailors in damage control and system resilience, one lesson became obvious. Complex systems rarely fail through a single catastrophic event. They fail quietly, through the gradual accumulation of small defects that experienced engineers identify and correct long before they threaten the mission. The Hybrid Navy quietly removes that assumption.

For the first time in modern naval history, engineers are being asked to design combat systems on the assumption that no engineer will ever touch them during deployment.

• That represents far more than a technological challenge.

• It requires a fundamental change in naval engineering philosophy.

The Magazine Challenge

The Royal Navy increasingly speaks about a distributed fleet. Whether described as autonomous missile ships, adjunct magazines or uncrewed escorts, the principle is the same. Smaller autonomous vessels carrying significant numbers of Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells could increase the fleet’s magazine depth while allowing high-value crewed warships to concentrate on command, sensing and anti-submarine warfare.

• Operationally, the concept is compelling.

• Technically, it raises an uncomfortable question.

Who maintains the launcher?

Unlike navigation, communications or autonomous collision avoidance, a missile launcher has one purpose.

• It either launches when commanded.

Or it does not.

• There is very little middle ground.

That cannot be solved simply through better software. It is fundamentally an engineering problem.

More Than A Missile Tube

From the outside, a Vertical Launch System appears deceptively simple. A collection of launch cells built into the deck. In reality, it is a tightly integrated combination of mechanical engineering, environmental protection, electrical distribution, diagnostics, safety systems and complex software.

Every launch cell must remain fully operational despite weeks of vibration, shock loading, salt contamination, changing temperatures and heavy seas.

• For decades, naval engineers balanced reliability against maintainability.

• Small defects were expected.

Routine maintenance prevented those defects becoming operational failures. The system worked because skilled people were always available.

Autonomous vessels fundamentally change that relationship.

Engineering Without Engineers

The challenge facing future missile ships is not simply corrosion. Nor is it mechanical reliability.

It is trust.

Current Vertical Launch Systems assume routine preventative maintenance throughout deployment. Engineers inspect, lubricate, calibrate, test and replace components before failures occur. An autonomous vessel operating independently for weeks cannot do any of those things.

• A deteriorating environmental seal may go unnoticed.

• A loose electrical connection may slowly worsen.

• A sensor fault may progressively reduce confidence in launcher status.

• None of these faults is individually catastrophic.

• Together they create something far more dangerous.

Uncertainty.

A commander may possess a fully armed vessel yet no longer have complete confidence that every launcher will perform when called upon.

For an autonomous missile ship, uncertainty is operationally unacceptable.

Engineering for Human Absence

This demands a fundamental shift in naval engineering. Historically, systems were designed to be maintained at sea. Tomorrow’s systems must increasingly be designed not to require maintenance at sea.

That may sound like a subtle distinction.

It is anything but.

Emerging research increasingly points towards launcher architectures based upon:

• Hermetically sealed modules

• Embedded condition monitoring

• Predictive diagnostics

• Simplified mechanical systems

• Modular replacement rather than onboard repair

• Continuous engineering oversight from shore

Maintenance does not disappear, it moves. Instead of engineers finding faults onboard, software identifies degrading performance long before the vessel returns to harbour. The launcher becomes another intelligent system, continuously reporting its own health.

The Digital Backbone

This is where the Royal Navy’s Shared Infrastructure programme becomes strategically significant. Shared Infrastructure is often described as a common computing environment capable of hosting multiple combat systems while presenting operators with integrated information through common consoles. It already supports major combat functions across the Queen Elizabeth class, Type 23 and future Type 26 and Type 45 programmes. Its importance may prove much greater.

Future autonomous vessels will continuously generate engineering data alongside tactical information.

• Launcher temperatures.

• Electrical loads.

• Environmental conditions.

• Power consumption.

• Component health.

Artificial intelligence may identify subtle trends invisible to human operators. The combat system no longer monitors only the tactical environment.

It monitors itself.

Shared Infrastructure therefore becomes more than a computing architecture. It becomes the mechanism through which autonomous warships continuously assess their own fighting capability.

Software becomes part of the weapon system rather than simply controlling it.

Beyond Vertical Launch Systems

Vertical Launch Systems simply expose the wider challenge. Exactly the same engineering philosophy now applies to every critical capability within the Hybrid Navy.

• Radar.

• Electro-optics.

• Communications.

• Navigation.

• Power generation.

• Propulsion.

• Mission systems.

Every component must increasingly be capable of prolonged operation without routine human intervention. This represents one of the largest shifts in naval engineering philosophy for generations. The challenge is no longer designing equipment that works.

It is designing equipment that remains trusted when nobody is there to touch it.

Engineering Confidence

Technology can demonstrate autonomy, only engineering creates confidence. An autonomous missile ship may successfully navigate thousands of miles without human intervention. That achievement alone does not make it a trusted combat system. Trust is earned when commanders believe every launcher, every sensor and every mission system will continue to function after weeks of independent operation.

That confidence cannot simply be programmed into software, it must be engineered into the ship.

Engineering the Hybrid Navy

Recent defence thinking increasingly recognises that future combat capability will evolve through continuous software development as much as hardware acquisition.

Prototype warfare advocates iterative development, operational experimentation and continuous learning rather than waiting decades for fully mature capability. Atlantic Bastion similarly depends upon integrating autonomous systems, distributed sensing and crewed platforms into a single operational architecture.

Shared Infrastructure provides the digital environment that allows these concepts to converge. Yet software alone cannot solve the challenge, the physical engineering must evolve with it.

Perhaps that is the real lesson.

The Hybrid Navy is not simply replacing sailors with software. It is replacing decades of engineering assumptions that quietly depended upon those sailors being there.

Final Thoughts

The Defence Investment Plan presents an ambitious vision for a digitally connected Royal Navy capable of operating across an increasingly distributed battle space. Autonomous platforms promise greater mass, persistence and flexibility while allowing crewed warships to concentrate on the most demanding operational tasks.

That vision is achievable:

• But only if the engineering evolves as rapidly as the operational concepts.

• Removing sailors from a ship is comparatively straightforward.

• Removing every engineering assumption built around those sailors is considerably harder.

The future Hybrid Navy will not be judged simply by whether autonomous vessels can cross oceans without crews. It will be judged by whether commanders trust them enough to fight alongside the fleet.

That confidence will not be earned through artificial intelligence alone.

It will be earned through thousands of engineering decisions, many of them invisible, ensuring every launcher, every sensor and every mission system continues to perform exactly as intended after weeks alone in one of the harshest operating environments on Earth.

The future Hybrid Navy will not be defined by autonomy. It will be defined by confidence. Confidence that every critical system will still fight after weeks without a human hand touching it.

Coming Soon

Future Navy Technical Briefing: Shared Infrastructure: Building the Royal Navy’s Digital Backbone

Further Reading

Readers interested in the wider themes discussed in this briefing may also find the following useful:

• Strategic Defence Review 2025. The review introduces the Hybrid Navy concept, Atlantic Bastion and the transition towards a more distributed, software-enabled force.

• Emma Salisbury, Atlantic Bastion: The Future of Anti-Submarine Warfare. An excellent overview of the operational concept behind Atlantic Bastion and the technological challenges of persistent undersea surveillance.

• The U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions. Admiral Daryl Caudle’s emphasis on the relationship between Sailors, the Foundry, the Fleet and the Fight provides an interesting comparison with the Royal Navy’s evolving digital transformation.

• Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain. A useful discussion of iterative capability development and software-defined acquisition, themes that underpin engineering for autonomous operations.

  Future Navy Posts

  • The AI Fleet Is Not One Brain

  • Software-Defined Warship

  • UK Defence Investment Plan: The Royal Navy’s Digital Future

  • Atlantic Bastion: Europe’s New Front Line

When Future Navy launched, I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to understand the direction of travel. The 2026 Defence Investment Plan doesn’t answer every question, but it does suggest that many of the themes explored over the past year are now moving from debate into policy.

Over the past twelve months, I have covered topics including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, Atlantic Bastion, digital infrastructure, software-defined combat systems, and the enduring importance of sailors in an increasingly automated fleet. Some articles explored new technologies, while others challenged assumptions. All were connected by a single question:

What kind of Royal Navy are we actually building?

The 2026 publication of the Defence Investment Plan provides the clearest answer yet: the Navy we have discussed has arrived. This is not due to a revolutionary new vision, but because it confirms a direction that has been quietly emerging for several years. A different Royal Navy is now taking shape.

• It is not a bigger Royal Navy.

• It is a different Royal Navy.

From Platforms to Networks

For generations, naval power has largely been measured by the number of ships in the fleet.

• Frigates.

• Destroyers.

• Submarines.

• Aircraft carriers.

These platforms remain essential, but they are increasingly becoming nodes within a larger combat system. The Defence Investment Plan reinforces this shift toward shared digital infrastructure, persistent sensing, AI-enabled decision support, and distributed operations.

Programmes such as Atlantic Bastion are not simply capability projects; they demonstrate how combat power is now being generated differently. The platform still matters. The network increasingly determines its effectiveness.

AI Has Become Infrastructure

One of the most significant shifts is that artificial intelligence is no longer viewed as experimental technology. It is becoming infrastructure, and that distinction matters. Nobody asks whether a modern warship should have radar or satellite communications; they are simply part of the ship.

The same appears increasingly true for AI.

Across planning, sensing, data fusion, logistics, and decision support, AI is becoming another layer within the naval operating system. This reflects a recurring theme in Future Navy: the AI shipmate is not replacing sailors, but extending their capabilities.

The Human Edge Has Not Disappeared

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the Defence Investment Plan is what it does not say: it does not envision empty ships replacing experienced sailors. Instead, the emphasis remains on human command, supported by increasingly capable autonomous systems.

For someone who spent seventeen years in the Royal Navy as a Warfare Leader, including combat operations during the Falklands War and extensive work in the Gulf region during the 1980s conflicts, this distinction is critical.

• Technology changes.

• Combat does not.

• People still carry responsibility.

• People still exercise judgment.

• People still fight the ship.

The future fleet may become more autonomous, but it will remain fundamentally human.

A Different Kind of Mass

For decades, naval debates have often centred on one question:

“How many ships do we have?”

That remains important, but the Defence Investment Plan suggests another question is becoming equally relevant.

“How much combat effect can we generate?”

A future task group may consist of crewed warships, autonomous surface vessels, underwater vehicles, persistent sensors, maritime patrol aircraft and AI-enabled command systems working as a single integrated force. Mass is no longer measured solely by hulls, but by connected capability.

The Underwater Battlespace Has Become Strategic Terrain

Perhaps nowhere is this transition clearer than beneath the surface, where Atlantic Bastion represents far more than an anti-submarine warfare programme. It signals recognition that the underwater domain has become strategic terrain in its own right.

• Protecting critical infrastructure.

• Persistent surveillance.

• Distributed sensing.

• International collaboration.

• Artificial intelligence.

• Autonomous systems.

Together, these elements describe a new operating model for maritime security, built on integration, persistence, and distributed effect.

The Defence Investment Plan provides direction, but the hard work begins now. It does not guarantee delivery; the difficult questions now begin.

• Can industry deliver software at operational speed rather than procurement speed, and sustain that pace in service?

• Can autonomous systems survive in the North Atlantic through winter as well as in demonstration trials, and do so reliably once delivered?

• Can NATO integrate data quickly enough to exploit these new capabilities once they are delivered?

• Can recruitment, training and leadership evolve alongside rapidly changing technology and support delivery at pace?

• Most importantly, can culture adapt as quickly as capability?

  
  History suggests that technology rarely determines success on its own; people do!

Final Thoughts

Looking back over the first year of Future Navy, one conclusion stands out.

Artificial intelligence, autonomy, Atlantic Bastion, digital infrastructure and shared combat systems were never isolated topics. They were all part of a much larger transition in how the Royal Navy intends to generate maritime power.

The Defence Investment Plan does not complete that transition, nor does it answer every question. It does, however, confirm that many of these ideas have moved beyond discussion and into policy, the conversation now changes.

The next challenge is no longer to speculate about what the future fleet might look like. It is to examine how that vision is translated into funded programmes, industrial contracts, operational concepts and, ultimately, front-line capability.

• Some ideas will mature.

• Others will evolve.

• Some will undoubtedly fail.

• That process will be every bit as important as the vision itself.

Future Navy will continue to follow that journey, not by celebrating announcements or criticising them for their own sake, but by examining how today’s ambitions become tomorrow’s operational reality. Because the Navy we have been talking about has arrived.

Now we get to watch it being built.

Richard Gough served for seventeen years in the Royal Navy, including as a Weapons Director during the Falklands War. He is the founder of Future Navy, exploring how technology, people and strategy are reshaping maritime power.

Further Reading

If this is your first visit to Future Navy, these earlier articles provide the context behind many of the themes explored here.

The AI Shipmate (Parts 1-3)
How artificial intelligence could evolve from a software tool into a trusted member of the ship’s company, while preserving human command and accountability.

The Human Edge of the AI Fleet
Why leadership, judgement and teamwork become more, not less, important as naval technology advances.

The AI Fleet Is Not One Brain
Why future fleets will operate as distributed networks of people, platforms and intelligent systems rather than a single centrally controlled force.

Atlantic Bastion: Securing the North Atlantic
An exploration of the Royal Navy’s emerging concept for persistent undersea surveillance, distributed sensing and NATO integration.

Watching the Wires
How protecting critical undersea infrastructure has become a strategic naval mission in an era of hybrid warfare.

Carrier Strike Group Comes Home
Lessons from recent Royal Navy operations and what they reveal about the transition towards a digitally enabled, networked fleet.

Taken together, these articles explore the evolution of the Royal Navy from a platform-centric force to a digitally integrated, AI-assisted, network-enabled fleet.

I have served on two first-of-class Royal Navy warships. HMS Boxer introduced the Computer Assisted Action Information System to the fleet. Later, HMS Norfolk became the first Type 23 frigate and the first Royal Navy ship to fire the vertical-launch Sea Wolf missile system. Both represented major steps forward for the Royal Navy.

Neither became fully operational overnight.

Trials took years. Defects were discovered and corrected. Systems evolved. Crews learned what worked and what did not. Tactics were refined. Confidence was earned. The journey from launch to operational capability took years, not months. That experience has been on my mind recently as I watch the debate surrounding the Royal Navy’s future.

We hear a great deal about Atlantic Bastion, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, distributed sensing and the Hybrid Navy. We hear about Type 26, Type 31 and a future fleet that will combine crewed warships with large numbers of uncrewed systems.

Indeed, it may be the only realistic vision available to a country that cannot simply rebuild its Cold War fleet numbers. The question is not whether the vision is compelling. The question is whether the Royal Navy can successfully navigate the transition period required to get there.

The Difference Between Transformation and Recovery

Recent weeks have not been kind to the Royal Navy’s public narrative. Reports of further issues affecting HMS Prince of Wales. Ongoing uncertainty over defence spending. Delays to major shipbuilding programmes. All of the Royal Navy’s five operational Astute-class nuclear attack submarines are currently docked for repairs or maintenance, leaving the UK with no available "hunter-killer" submarines at sea. Questions over manpower, retention and readiness. Taken individually, none of these developments represents a crisis. Taken together, however, they reveal an important truth.

The Royal Navy is attempting to transform itself while simultaneously recovering from decades of contraction. Those are not the same thing. Transformation is about introducing new technologies, concepts, and ways of operating.

Recovery is about generating deployable ships, trained crews, available weapons and sustainable readiness. Both are essential. The challenge is that the Navy must now achieve both simultaneously.

The Type 23 Problem

The future escort fleet is often discussed as though it is already arriving. In reality, the burden still rests firmly on the shoulders of the Type 23 frigate force.

That should not be viewed as a criticism.

The remaining Type 23s are still highly capable warships. Their combat systems have been modernised. Sea Ceptor has given them a credible and effective air defence capability. Sonar 2087 remains one of the most respected anti-submarine systems in NATO service. Combined with Merlin and Wildcat helicopters, they continue to provide a formidable contribution to North Atlantic operations. The issue is not capability.

The issue is time.

Each additional year of service increases maintenance demands. Spare parts become harder to source. Refit periods grow more complex. Unexpected defects become more likely. The steel may endure; availability becomes the challenge.

And despite the understandable excitement surrounding Type 26 and Type 31, history suggests caution.

• Operators understand something often lost in public discussion.

• A ship launched is not a ship deployed.

• A commissioned ship is not an available ship.

• The concept demonstrated is not a capability that has been fielded.

The first Type 26 and Type 31 frigates will represent significant advances. However, anyone who has experienced the introduction of a first-of-class warship knows that operational maturity takes time. Lessons from the first ship influence the second. The second influences the third.

• This process cannot be rushed.

• The result is an uncomfortable reality.

The Royal Navy remains dependent upon the successful sustainment of today’s fleet while waiting for tomorrow’s fleet to arrive.

The Human Challenge

Yet I increasingly believe that the greatest challenge is not technical. It is human. Much of the discussion surrounding future naval power focuses on ships, drones, artificial intelligence, and sensors. Navies, however, are built from people.

Throughout my career, I learned that warships are not defined by their combat systems alone. They are defined by the teams that operate them.

• A ship can survive defects.

• A ship can survive bad weather.

• A ship can survive lengthy deployments.

• Sustaining performance becomes harder when uncertainty is constant.

• Will the deployment be extended?

• Will there be enough people?

• Will promised improvements arrive?

• Will the future ever seem closer than the next maintenance period?

These are not technology questions. They are questions of confidence. And confidence is every bit as important as capability. The current generation of sailors carries a significant burden. They maintain an ageing fleet while preparing to operate a fundamentally different one. They must sustain today’s commitments while embracing tomorrow’s concepts.

That is no small task.

Holding the Line

I support the Royal Navy’s direction of travel. I believe autonomous systems will play an increasing role in maritime operations. Artificial intelligence will become an important enabler of command and decision-making. Atlantic Bastion addresses a genuine strategic challenge. Type 26 and Type 31 will ultimately become highly capable warships.

The danger is not that the vision is wrong.

The danger lies in assuming that announcing a future capability is the same as possessing one. The next five years may prove more difficult than the decade that follows.

The Royal Navy must maintain credible global operations, sustain ageing but capable ships, introduce new warship classes, integrate autonomous systems, adapt its training model, and retain enough experienced sailors to bridge the gap between today’s fleet and tomorrow’s. That is a formidable undertaking for any navy.

Success is possible. But before the Royal Navy can fight the future fleet, it must sustain the current one. That means keeping the Type 23 force operationally credible. It means delivering Type 26 and Type 31 into meaningful service. It means retaining experienced sailors and developing the next generation. Above all, it means recognising that transformation and recovery are not the same thing.

History may judge that achievement more difficult than any individual technology programme.

Further Reading

The Strategic Defence Review 2025
The foundation document for Atlantic Bastion, the Hybrid Navy and the Royal Navy’s future operating model.

Emma Salisbury, Atlantic Bastion: The Future of Anti-Submarine Warfare
An excellent exploration of the concept that sits at the centre of the Royal Navy’s future North Atlantic strategy. It highlights both the opportunities and the unanswered questions surrounding persistent undersea surveillance.

Sidharth Kaushal and John Louth, Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain
A thought-provoking RUSI paper examining how navies can adapt more rapidly through experimentation and iterative development rather than waiting for perfect solutions.

U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions (2026)
Admiral Daryl Caudle’s framework places Sailors, Fleet and Readiness at the centre of naval transformation. A useful reminder that future capability depends upon people as much as technology.

The Human Edge of the AI Fleet (Future Navy)
My earlier exploration of how leadership, trust and professional judgement remain critical as AI systems become increasingly embedded in naval operations.

Artificial intelligence in defence is still being discussed as if it will converge into a single system. One that sees everything, understands everything, and supports command at speed. It is an appealing idea.

It will not.

What is emerging instead is more complex and distinctively naval in its character. Rather than a single intelligence, the reality is a distributed system of specialised capabilities. Each solves part of the problem, but none solves it all. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the operational reality of naval AI.

The Myth of the Single AI

The conversation around artificial intelligence in defence often relies on the idea that a unified system could one day see, decide, and act faster than any human command team. While this forms the basis for much of the current debate, it overlooks how naval AI actually develops and operates: through multiple specialised, interacting components rather than a single entity.

This vision will not become reality.

Instead, what is emerging reflects the practical needs of naval operations—a complex, distributed system of specialised capabilities. Each element addresses a specific challenge, but none provides a total solution. Recognising this shift is crucial for understanding the true trajectory of naval AI.

Recent work from the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security reinforces this shift. Progress is unlikely to come from a single breakthrough but from combinations of approaches working together.

This distributed approach matters at sea. Integration—not unification—of capabilities shapes operational outcomes. Thus, how naval technologies work together ultimately determines their effectiveness in action.

From AI Shipmate to System AI

Much of the early discussion has framed AI as a digital officer. A “shipmate” sitting alongside the command team, processing data and offering advice. That metaphor still holds value, but it is incomplete.

The future fleet will operate with an AI stack, linking multiple capabilities into a unified system: perception systems that detect and classify the environment; fusion engines that combine sensor inputs across domains; decision-support tools that shape options under time pressure; and sustainment systems that optimise endurance and availability. Each element plays a distinct but interconnected role.

According to Naval News, the Royal Navy’s move toward a hybrid force will involve integrating new technologies in stages, meaning each component will develop differently and may experience its own unique challenges. As a result, the future fleet is expected to operate with a diverse mix of systems rather than having a single unified approach. It will be decided through many.”

This is not a single entity; it is closer to an operations room, distributed across machines.

The Constraint That Changes the Game

Advanced AI systems are expensive to build and run; rising compute, data, and energy costs limit who can reach the edge. For the UK, that means unlikely dominance in AI model development, but the advantage shifts from building the biggest models to integrating and using them effectively.

Several practical steps can help realise this integration advantage. First, modular interfaces enable both legacy and cutting-edge AI tools to communicate seamlessly across ships and shore facilities. Second, using common data standards enables rapid fusion of sensor inputs from both crewed and uncrewed systems. Third, cross-domain training teams ensure operators can evolve doctrine and tactics as AI behaviours change. Finally, iterative deployment—introducing AI in stages, learning from real use, and refining integration—anchors improvement. Taken together, these steps help the Royal Navy get the most from available technologies, even if they do not have the most advanced individual model.

In this environment, the advantage will not belong to the navy with the best AI, but to the one that integrates it fastest, reinforcing that integration—not technical supremacy—is decisive.

In naval terms, this is familiar ground. According to a UK government report, the Royal Navy’s successes have typically relied on integration, doctrine, and operational understanding rather than sheer numbers, and the introduction of artificial intelligence at sea does not fundamentally alter this approach. It reinforces it.

Systems, Not Ships

We still talk about “AI-enabled ships” as if capability resides in the hull, but it no longer does.

The centre of gravity now shifts away from individual platforms to the systems they operate within. This changes how naval capability is perceived and measured. For example, concepts such as the Atlantic Bastion illustrate the importance of layered networks comprising sensors, autonomous systems, and crewed platforms to achieve persistent awareness.

You see it in hybrid fleets, where crewed warships host and coordinate uncrewed systems, and in prototype warfare, where capability evolves through use. AI accelerates this shift because it thrives in systems.

The Problem of Trust

There is, however, a harder edge to this story. AI systems do not fail cleanly. They fail unpredictably, particularly when pushed beyond the conditions in which they were trained. In a commercial setting, that is merely an inconvenience. In a naval context, it is a risk to command. Risk mitigation, therefore, must be central. Naval doctrine increasingly addresses these AI-related risks by emphasising robust training, layered assurance measures, and rigorous validation of systems against real-world scenarios. Redundancy—whether in overlapping sensors, alternative data links, or maintaining a human-in-the-loop—serves as a buffer against unexpected failures. Routine drills to rehearse system breakdowns, continuous monitoring for anomalous behaviour, and predetermined fallback procedures all help ensure that AI remains an asset, not a liability, even when uncertainty is highest.

• Can a system be relied upon in a cluttered littoral environment?

• Can it distinguish between threat and ambiguity at speed?

• Can a commander understand why it is recommending a course of action?

These are not just technological questions—they also concern doctrine, training, and assurance. To prepare for fragmented AI, doctrine must become more modular and adaptable. Training should emphasise scenario-based exercises simulating system failures. Officers must learn to interpret and manage diverse AI outputs. In this context, “AI will not command the ship. It will shape the space in which command happens.” These organisational adaptations will determine how AI contributes to combat—a fragmented advantage. As AI development fragments, so will its operational edge, with each nation seeking different outcomes:

• Speed of decision

• Resilience under disruption

• Scale through autonomy

• Precision through integration

The result, therefore, is not a single technological race but a set of diverging approaches, as nations optimise for distinct operational outcomes. This divergence creates opportunities for competitive advantage, but also introduces the risk of instability, as differing priorities and capabilities may collide during crises.

Command in the Age of Systems

For the Royal Navy, the future fleet won’t be defined by one breakthrough, but by orchestrating many technologies. Command practices will align with this orchestration.

• It will be less about controlling individual platforms.

• More about directing systems of systems.

The analogy is not a captain with a perfect chart. It is a command team managing a complex operations room, where information flows continuously, decisions are shaped collaboratively, and uncertainty never disappears.

• AI does not remove humans from the process.

• It makes the human role even more important.

The Shape of the AI Fleet

The idea of a single, all-seeing AI is comforting, but the reality demands more.

The AI fleet will be:

• Distributed rather than centralised

• Specialised rather than generalised

• Iterative rather than complete

It will remain human-led, machine-supported, never the reverse. This technological shift is matched by changes in the human layer.

The Royal Navy is modernising training to develop leaders for complex, information-rich environments where decision-making is shaped as much by systems as by people. This is not just about better training pipelines. It acknowledges that command itself is changing.

In this environment, leadership means more than overseeing technology. Officers must guide the integration of AI into operational practice, interpret outputs critically, and make judgment calls when ambiguity persists. It will require setting clear intent, building trust between human teams and machine systems, and ensuring accountability for every decision.

The essence of command will be to balance human insight with AI-driven possibilities, keeping responsibility and initiative at the centre.

Further Reading

• CETaS, The Next Frontier: Security Implications of Future AI Paradigms
  Link: https://cetas.turing.ac.uk/publications/future-AI-paradigms

• RUSI, The Atlantic Bastion

• RUSI, Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain

For years, warships in the Gulf have faced constant surveillance and political uncertainty. They have also endured quick-moving threats and the risk of escalation. During the Tanker Wars, Royal Navy crews realised that being present was not enough. They needed situational awareness, endurance, and good judgment. Firepower alone was not sufficient.

Yet, despite this progress, many of these same challenges persist today.

What sets the current era apart is the introduction of new technology into the region.

Recent news reports that the Royal Navy plans to send uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) to the Gulf. At first, this might seem like just another technology update. But something more significant could be happening. The Royal Navy is moving from simply testing maritime autonomy. It is making it a regular part of fleet deployment; as a result, this marks a major change for naval operations.

The Gulf is not a controlled test area. Hormuz is still one of the world’s toughest places for maritime operations:

• dense commercial traffic,

• heavy electronic surveillance,

• persistent drone activity,

• contested narratives,

• and the constant possibility of rapid escalation.

If autonomous systems can operate effectively there, it demonstrates their suitability for wider deployment.

These systems are not simply for replacing sailors or saving money. Their main aim is to help navies monitor busy, contested seas without overtaxing limited crewed ships.

A Type 45 destroyer or Type 23 frigate is highly capable. But these ships are rare and expensive. Autonomous systems offer something different: distributed sensing, persistent surveillance, lower-risk forward presence, and continuous monitoring across wider operational areas.

In practice, these systems could act as extra eyes and ears for the fleet. However, incorporating autonomous systems into real operations is more complex than headlines suggest.

Autonomy at sea is more than adding drones. Every new uncrewed system brings challenges: secure communications,

• cyber resilience,

• sensor fusion,

• operator trust,

• rules of engagement,

• and command authority.

An autonomous vessel in the Strait of Hormuz might spot and report something faster than a person could. Still, commanders need to trust the system’s reports and its data handling. They must also decide if the information holds up under stress.

This becomes especially vital in busy, politically sensitive waters, where mistakes or escalation could have serious consequences.

The complexity involved extends beyond just technical challenges.

Crucially, it is also cultural.

For more than a hundred years, naval command depended on people watching and understanding the environment themselves. The hybrid fleet changes that. Now, commanders might get information from machine-assisted systems. These systems can work together at high speed. Making this change work will require both trust and new technology. There is also a bigger strategic picture shaping these Gulf deployments.

The Royal Navy’s developing “Hybrid Navy” concept is emphasised by the First Sea Lord and the Strategic Defence Review. It points to a fleet built around crewed warships, autonomous systems, distributed sensors, and AI-assisted command networks.

Seen in this broader context, Hormuz is more than just a local deployment.

Instead, it becomes a real-world testing ground.

Lessons from there will likely influence how the Royal Navy plans for the future. These lessons may include:

• Atlantic Bastion,

• North Atlantic surveillance,

• undersea infrastructure protection,

• persistent ASW barriers,

• and distributed maritime operations in the GIUK gap.

The Royal Navy is not the only one making this shift. Across NATO and in commercial shipping, autonomous systems are moving from trials to real operations. The Gulf could be the first place the Royal Navy sees if these systems work in real situations. It is not just a test.

Understanding this shift in operational practice is crucial.

Modern naval capability now grows through repeated use and improvement. Perfect planning alone is no longer enough. Systems are put into action, tested, changed, and improved in real situations. This process now looks more like software development than old-style procurement.

In essence, this is prototype warfare unfolding at sea.

Autonomous systems in the Gulf will not replace frigates, destroyers, or submarines. Skilled sailors and commanders will still be needed. But these systems could start to change how navies handle presence, surveillance, and command in challenging areas.

A few weeks ago, I thought back to my own experiences crossing the Strait of Hormuz during the last years of the Cold War. At that time, situational awareness relied on radar screens, visual lookouts, intelligence updates, and the instincts of tired watch keepers. They all worked under pressure.

The geography has not changed. Similarly, the pressure remains relentless. Now, though, the fleet entering these waters is starting to look very different.

The Royal Navy is about to find out if the Hybrid Fleet can deliver real results in one of the world’s toughest operational environments. This will test theory against reality.

Further Reading

• Royal Navy USVs to be deployed for potential operational debut in Strait of Hormuz – Navy Lookout

• Britain sending a drone fleet to Hormuz – UK Defence Journal

• Royal United Services Institute research paper: The Atlantic Bastion explores the Royal Navy’s emerging layered autonomous ASW and surveillance architecture for the North Atlantic.

• Royal United Services Institute research paper: Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain examines how naval capabilities are increasingly evolving through operational experimentation and rapid iteration rather than traditional procurement cycles.

• Foreign Policy Research Institute analysis: Atlantic Bastion: The Future of Anti-Submarine Warfare explores the wider strategic and technological implications of distributed autonomous maritime surveillance.

• Royal Navy concept paper: Maritime Operating Concept outlines the Royal Navy’s shift toward integrated, networked and distributed maritime operations.

• Centre for Emerging Technology and Security report: The Next Frontier: Security Implications of Future AI Paradigms examines how AI-enabled systems, agentic architectures and distributed autonomy may reshape future operational environments.

Future Navy attended the inaugural Lord Fisher Lecture on Sea Power & Naval Transformation given by the First Sea Lord. There are moments when a speech is more than a speech. It becomes a signal.

General Gwyn Jenkins KCB OBE ADC RM, set out a vision for the Royal Navy that is both familiar and deeply uncomfortable. Familiar because it echoes the long arc of naval transformation, yet uncomfortable due to the unprecedented pace, risk, and scale of change now being demanded, which connects past reform to today’s urgent challenges.

This is not incremental reform. It is an attempt to reset how the Royal Navy fights, marking a clear departure from previous incremental reforms and setting the stage for a more dramatic transformation.

A Fisher Moment—But With Less Time

The invocation of John Fisher was deliberate.

Fisher understood that naval power was not just about ships. It was about industrial capacity, technology, and the willingness to discard what no longer worked. He forced change through the system, often brutally.

The First Sea Lord is signalling something similar:

• Ruthless prioritisation

• Acceptance of risk

• A willingness to move faster than the system is comfortable with

But there is one critical difference between now and Fisher’s time that shapes the scale of the task today. Fisher had time.

The Royal Navy does not.

The Hybrid Navy: Not Replacement, But Reinvention

At the heart of the speech sits the idea of a Hybrid Navy, a concept that builds on the themes of change and urgency established earlier.

This is not about replacing warships with drones.
It is about changing how combat power is generated:

• Crewed platforms remain the backbone.

• Uncrewed systems provide mass, persistence, and reach

• AI-enabled systems compress decision timelines.

This aligns closely with what we are now seeing in Ukraine and the Middle East:

• Low-cost systems are shifting the balance.

• High-end platforms are increasingly exposed.

• Scale is becoming as important as sophistication.

The direction is sound. But executing this vision—which is grounded in both historical reflection and current realities—will be immensely challenging.

Atlantic Bastion: The Real Centre of Gravity

Beneath the broader narrative, one element stands out.

The North Atlantic.

The speech reinforces what has been building for over a year: Atlantic Bastion is becoming the organising concept for Royal Navy warfighting.

A layered system of:

• Crewed ASW platforms

• Uncrewed surface and subsurface systems

• Persistent sensor networks

• Integrated data and targeting

The aim is simple:

Detect, track, and constrain Russian submarine activity before it matters.

This reflects the reality that undersea warfare remains the most consequential domain of conflict.

It also reflects a hard truth:

• The UK cannot match mass with traditional platforms.

• It must build persistent awareness instead.

As RUSI analysis has highlighted, Bastion is fundamentally about integrating low-cost autonomous systems with high-end assets like the Type 26 to create a scalable ASW network. The concept is credible. But it is not yet complete.

Speed as Strategy

Perhaps the most striking part of the lecture was not the technology, but the language of time.

“We measure technological advancement in days, weeks and months, not years.”

This is a rejection of traditional defence procurement culture.

It reflects a shift toward:

• Rapid iteration

• Prototype deployment

• Learning through use

This is consistent with the emerging concept of “prototype warfare”, where capability is developed through continuous operational feedback rather than long acquisition cycles.

It is also where the real friction will occur. Because speed is not just a technical challenge. It is an institutional one.

The 2029 Problem

The First Sea Lord has set a clear ambition:

A warfighting-ready hybrid fleet by 2029.

This includes:

• Uncrewed escort vessels within two years

• Carrier-launched drones in the near term

• Integrated hybrid operations across the fleet

It is an ambitious timeline.

Possibly too ambitious.

Not because the technology cannot be delivered. But because integration, training, and doctrine take longer than platforms.

The risk is not failure. The risk is partial success:

• Systems delivered

• Concepts unproven

• Operators unconvinced

There is a real risk the Royal Navy fields systems faster than it learns how to fight them. And in war, that gap matters.

Command in the Age of Machines

One line in the speech deserves more attention than it will likely receive: “Modern warfare does not account for the chain of command.” This point bridges the rapid technological and operational changes to their inevitable impact on decision-making structures.

This is the real transformation.

• Not drones.

• Not autonomy.

• But decision-making under compression.

If systems operate at machine speed:

• Authority must be delegated.

• Trust must be redefined.

• Human judgment must shift from control to oversight.

This is where the Hybrid Navy becomes more than a force structure change.

It becomes a command culture change.

And this is the hardest transformation of all.

Allies, Integration, and Reality

The proposal for a Northern European maritime force, building on frameworks like JEF, is strategically sound.

Interoperability, shared logistics, and common systems offer:

• Greater mass

• Faster response

• Stronger deterrence

But this is not simply a technical problem.

It is political.

• Sovereignty concerns

• Differing threat perceptions

• National command constraints

Integration at this level is difficult in peacetime.

It becomes harder under pressure.

Where This Leaves the Royal Navy

This speech does not answer every question.

But it does clarify intent and highlights what the Royal Navy must achieve to remain effective: prioritising the North Atlantic, fully integrating new technologies, and adapting its command culture at speed.

The Royal Navy is:

• Prioritising the North Atlantic

• Embracing uncrewed and autonomous systems

• Attempting to move at a speed it has historically resisted.

It is also accepting something more fundamental:

The current model of naval power is no longer sufficient.

Final Thought

The Royal Navy is not trying to build a slightly better fleet. It is trying to build a different one, fast enough to matter.

Whether it succeeds will depend less on the technology it acquires, and far more on the Royal Navy’s ability to change how it thinks, trains, and fights—directly linking its future effectiveness to the cultural transformations discussed throughout the speech. Because in the end, the challenge is not building the hybrid fleet.

It is learning how to command it.

Further Reading

• RUSI – The Atlantic Bastion: Deterrent Design and ASW Futures

• RUSI – Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain

• Future Navy – The Digital Ocean: Securing the Invisible Fleet

• Future Navy – TEWA in the AI Age

  
  

The Royal Navy’s Atlantic Bastion is emerging as a key idea in modern maritime defence. It is a layered network of sensors, autonomous systems, and crewed platforms designed to detect and constrain Russian submarines before they reach the wider Atlantic.

It is a serious answer to a serious problem. Yet as we strengthen this undersea defence, we must consider a different kind of fleet already manoeuvring above.

The Bastion as Designed

The concept is clear enough. A distributed system of surveillance and anti-submarine warfare capabilities, combining uncrewed platforms, acoustic sensing, and high-end assets like the Royal Navy Type 26 frigates. Its purpose is deterrence by denial: to make it difficult, risky, and unattractive for adversary submarines to operate unseen in the North Atlantic.

Recent analysis notes the Bastion is intended to form a persistent detection network, combining autonomous systems with traditional ASW forces to constrain Russian freedom of manoeuvre in critical waters. Necessary, but not sufficient.

However, as we examine its limits, it becomes clear that more is needed.

The Fleet We Don’t See

Alongside Russia’s submarine force sits another, less visible system of maritime power.

A “shadow fleet” of commercial vessels operates through opaque ownership structures, flags of convenience, and complicated legal arrangements. Tankers, cargo ships, and support vessels move through global trade routes with limited transparency and ambiguous accountability.

These ships are not warships. But they offer something equally valuable: presence without attribution.

They can loiter, observe, and operate near critical infrastructure without triggering thresholds that normally justify a military response. This subtle but profound shift requires attention.

The Gap in the Bastion

The Atlantic Bastion is designed to detect submarines. But the most difficult challenge in the maritime domain today is not detection. The challenge is interpretation.

A submarine detected in the GIUK gap is a military problem. A commercial vessel operating slowly over a subsea cable route is something else entirely.

• It may be conducting legitimate activity.

• It may be mapping.

• It may be signalling.

• Or it may be doing nothing.

The difficulty is not seeing it but proving intent. The Bastion, as currently framed, encounters its limits. While advanced, it remains bound by political realities, pointing to necessary evolution.

From ASW Barrier to Maritime Ecosystem

These points indicate a wider shift in how we think about naval defence. The Cold War was a platform-versus-platform model. Submarine against frigate. Detection against evasion. The emerging model is different. Now, the paradigm shifts: the system-versus-ecosystem framework becomes the framework for maritime security.

The Atlantic Bastion already hints at this by combining sensors, autonomy, and crewed platforms into a single operational construct. To be fully effective, it must go beyond the purely military layer.

It must incorporate:

• Commercial shipping data

• Ownership and registry analysis

• Pattern-of-life monitoring

• Persistent surveillance above and below the surface

Therefore, the Bastion must evolve beyond an anti-submarine barrier to become a dynamic maritime intelligence system.

The Role of Data and AI

This evolution marks the true transformation in maritime defence. A shadow fleet cannot be countered by more ships alone. It requires:

• Correlation across thousands of vessel movements

• Detection of anomalous behaviour over time

• Integration of civilian and military data sources

The technology exists to do this. Current naval architectures increasingly fuse large volumes of battlespace information into a single operational picture. The challenge is not technical. Therefore, the biggest hurdles are not in technology but in organisation.

Who owns the data?
Who interprets it?

Decisions become especially complex when the signal remains ambiguous, demanding cohesive action.

Deterrence in the Grey Zone

The Atlantic Bastion is built around deterrence by denial. Meanwhile, the grey fleet navigates a space where denial is elusive, and attribution is deliberately murky.

This suggests the need to complement denial with something else:

• Regulatory systems that define unacceptable behaviour

• Alliances that enable shared surveillance and reaction

• And, where necessary, the credible ability to impose cost

Not every action justifies a military response. Yet ignoring ambiguous behaviours could invite greater risks in the long run.

A Wider Battlespace

It becomes clear that the maritime domain is expanding. It is no longer determined exclusively by:

• Warships

• Submarines

• And naval engagements

It now includes:

• Data flows

• Infrastructure

• Commercial actors

• And ambiguous behaviours below the threshold of conflict

The Atlantic Bastion sits at the centre of this change. To remain effective at this centre, the Bastion itself must adapt to the changing environment.

Conclusion

The Royal Navy is right to focus on the undersea fight. Submarines remain one of the most dangerous and strategically significant threats in the North Atlantic. But the next challenge may not come from below the surface.

It may arrive quietly, under a commercial flag, operating within the rules, and just beyond the point where those rules can be easily enforced.

If the Atlantic Bastion is to succeed, it must be transformed into an active defence that anticipates threats above and below the surface. The time to act is now—adapt, innovate, and lead to secure the maritime domain. The Bastion must not just observe but actively interpret, decide, and respond to threats. Proactive action—not just awareness—must be the standard.

In today’s maritime battlespace, recognising threats is insufficient. We must act on what we understand. Understanding alone is not enough—action must follow. Seize this moment to adapt, drive innovation, and take a leadership role in shaping maritime defence.

Further Reading

• Royal United Services Institute – The Atlantic Bastion
  The most detailed open-source assessment of the concept. Highlights both its strengths and the risk of defining the problem too narrowly around submarine detection alone.

• Foreign Policy Research Institute – Atlantic Bastion: The Future of Anti-Submarine Warfare
  Explores the layered sensor network, AI-enabled detection, and the scale of the Russian undersea challenge that Bastion is designed to address.

• Royal Navy – Strategic Defence Review 2025
  Sets the direction for a hybrid fleet and North Atlantic focus, but leaves open questions around grey-zone activity and infrastructure protection.

• North Atlantic Treaty Organization – Maritime security and critical undersea infrastructure initiatives
  Increasingly central to alliance thinking as seabed warfare and cable protection move into the foreground.

• International Maritime Organization – Maritime regulation and governance
  Provides the legal context that makes grey-zone activity at sea difficult to challenge, even when behaviour appears suspicious.

• Maritime autonomy and sensing developments
  A snapshot of how AI, machine vision, and uncrewed systems are expanding maritime awareness beyond traditional radar and AIS.

Missiles fly over the Middle East, drones test defences, and warships arrive late, stretched thin and facing public criticism. These familiar headlines bring equally familiar questions about readiness, fleet size, and whether the UK has a navy fit for today. Some criticism is fair, but much of it is just noise or misses the real issues.

While most people are still focused on the Gulf, the Royal Navy has already shifted its main focus to the north. This is not a choice, but a necessary strategic change.

The Optics of Strain

Recent Gulf tensions have exposed an uncomfortable reality.

When a crisis happens, the UK chooses where to send its forces and manages risk carefully, rather than sending overwhelming naval power. To many observers, this approach often looks fragile.

Discussions often focus on a single advanced air defence destroyer, but the real picture is broader. Margins are thinner, there are fewer ships, more commitments, and adversaries are more flexible and less bound by old rules.

The real issue is that the Royal Navy is no longer built to dominate several regions at once. Instead, it has to choose its priorities.

The Quiet Planned Shift

This shift toward prioritising is not something in the future; it is already happening.

The North Atlantic, High North, and Baltic are now at the heart of UK naval strategy. Protecting undersea infrastructure is a key task. Securing reinforcement routes and making sure the continuous at-sea deterrent survives are also central to the mission.

This thinking is behind the Atlantic Bastion concept. It uses a layered network of sensors, uncrewed systems, and crewed ships. The goal is to keep watch at all times and limit what enemy submarines can do.

This same logic shapes the Hybrid Navy. This force unites traditional warships with autonomous systems and achieves scale through systems, not just hull numbers. These principles are now leading to bigger changes, such as the creation of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF).

Why JEF Matters Now

JEF is often described politely. A UK-led grouping of northern European nations. High readiness. NATO-aligned. Yet this view ignores JEF’s core significance. JEF is becoming the operational answer to a structural problem.

The Royal Navy cannot build up enough strength on its own. It cannot keep up operations in the North Atlantic, Baltic, and High North while also meeting global commitments. More ships would help, but they take decades to build.

Therefore, the solution moves in a different direction. Treat allied navies as part of a single operational system. A Hybrid JEF Navy is not a fleet in the traditional sense. It is a network.

• UK, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch and Baltic forces operating as a continuous layer

• Autonomous systems extending reach and persistence

• Shared data building a common operational picture

• Civilian and commercial infrastructure folded into the defensive architecture

This is fundamentally different from coalition warfare, which only comes together during a crisis.

It is designed to exist before the crisis.

In simple terms, it is the Atlantic Bastion made multinational.

Sweden and the Expansion of the Northern System

The recent visit by the Royal Navy’s First Sea Lord, Sir Gwyn Jenkins, to Sweden underlines how serious this change has become. This was not a routine engagement. It was about alignment.

Now that Sweden is a NATO member, the geography of the challenge has changed. Sweden is already closely involved in JEF, making the Baltic no longer a secondary area. It is now part of the same operational system as the North Atlantic and the High North.

That has real consequences.

• Swedish undersea warfare capability feeds directly into the wider detection network.

• Baltic choke points link to Atlantic reinforcement routes

• Northern European navies move from partners to components of a shared battlespace.

What is emerging is not simply cooperation, but integration. A maritime system stretching from the Baltic to the GIUK gap, designed to operate as one. The First Sea Lord’s recent presence in Sweden is a signal of intent. The UK is not just participating in that system. It is trying to shape it.

From Presence to Persistence

This change is reshaping what naval power means. For years, just being present was enough, a ship on station, visible and sending a message. Now, what matters is staying power. episodic deployment, but continuous sensing. Not national awareness, but joint understanding.

This reflects the threat.

Russian submarine activity, seabed warfare, and grey-zone attacks on infrastructure are ongoing problems. These cannot be handled off and on. They require constant attention over wide areas.

But keeping this level of awareness is expensive. That is why the approach is changing. Autonomous systems help extend reach, allies add strength, and networks bring everything together.

The Reality Beneath the Concept

The direction is clear and the concept makes sense. Still, there are real challenges when it comes to putting it into practice.

1. Command and Control at Speed

A multinational, hybrid force depends on data.

It’s not just about collecting data. SNot just collecting it, but sharing it, trusting it, and acting on it quickly matter too.

This is not simply a technical challenge. It is operational and political.

• Who owns the data?

• Who makes the decision?

• How fast can that decision be made across nations?

The ambition is a common operational picture.

The risk is a fragmented one.

And in a fight defined by speed, fragmentation is failure.

2. Detection Is Not Deterrence

The Atlantic Bastion concept relies heavily on persistent surveillance.

It assumes that knowing where the enemy is and limiting their movement helps deter them.

That is true.

But it is not enough.

Just spotting the enemy does not guarantee deterrence. An adversary might accept being seen if they can still reach their goal or cause problems elsewhere.

A network that sees everything but cannot respond decisively risks becoming passive.

For JEF, this raises a hard question.

Where does the consequence sit?

3. Industry and Speed

The Hybrid Navy depends on swift adaptation.

Software-defined capability. Autonomous systems. Iteration in contact.

Prototype warfare means fielding early, learningThis is consistent with the idea of prototype warfare. Field early, learn fast, and refine through use. Do not waitAvoid waiting for perfection.

But this requires a different mindset.

Less certainty. More speed. Greater tolerance of risk.

Without that shift, the concept will outpace the system designed to deliver it.

Back to the Gulf

ThisWhich brings us back to the start. Criticism of UKwhere we started. The criticism of UK military capability in the Gulf is not entirely misplaced. It reflects real constraints and trade-offs, but alsoreal trade-offs. But it also reflects an outdated expectation.

The Royal Navy is no longer built to be everywhere in force at all times. Instead, it is changing into something different.

• A force that concentrates on a primary theatre.

• That integrates allies into its core structure.

• That uses autonomy to extend reach.

• That builds deterrence through networks rather than platforms alone.

The Gulf still matters. It always will. But it is no longer the organising principle.

The Strategic Bet

The UK has made a bet.

By focusing on the North Atlantic and working closely with JEF, the UK aims to build enough strength, awareness, and deterrence to succeed where it matters most. Using a hybrid model helps make up for having fewer ships. Acting early should help shape the situation before any conflict starts.

It is a logical choice, but also a risky one. If integration fails, technology falls behind, or the enemy finds ways around the network, there will be little room to recover.

The Hard Truth

The criticism sparked by events in the Gulf points to a bigger change in naval strategy. It is not just about one deployment, but about a larger shift that is already happening. From ships to systems. From national force to integrated network. From presence to persistence.

The direction is clear.
The debate now is not about strategy.
It’s about whether the system can deliver it fast enough.

Further Reading

• RUSI – The Atlantic Bastion (2025)
  A foundational paper on the UK’s emerging northern strategy. Explains the layered sensor network, deterrence logic, and the limits of detection-only approaches.

• RUSI – Prototype Warfare in the Maritime Domain (2026)
  Essential reading on how navies must adapt faster, fielding early capability and iterating in use. Directly relevant to the Hybrid Navy concept.

• Ministry of Defence – Strategic Defence Review 2025
  Sets the “NATO First” direction and frames the shift toward the North Atlantic and integrated deterrence.

• NATO – JEF and Northern Flank Integration Briefings
  Useful for understanding how JEF complements NATO force structure, particularly in the Baltic and High North.

• Navy Lookout – Analysis on Project CABOT and North Atlantic ASW
  Clear, accessible breakdown of how the Royal Navy is approaching persistent ASW and seabed defence.

• UK Defence Journal – Coverage of Royal Navy readiness and deployments
  Helpful for tracking the public narrative and criticism around fleet availability and operational strain.

• Maritime Journal – Autonomy at Sea Special Report (2026)
  A useful industry view of how autonomy is evolving in practice, particularly around perception, machine vision, and human-machine teaming.

It doesn’t happen with an announcement.

There’s no signal, no doctrine update, no moment where someone declares that the rules have changed. Instead, it creeps in through operations. A strike here that stretches the definition of a military target. A system there that compresses decision time just enough to bypass reflection. A justification written after the fact, rather than before the action.

As these operational shifts accumulate, the framework that once shaped warfare begins to loosen, leading to broader implications for command and control. Recent operations have already shown how quickly decision timelines can collapse under combined drone, missile, and electronic pressure.

Across Ukraine, the Middle East, and beyond, something is shifting—not the laws of armed conflict themselves, but their role. These laws are still written, taught, and referenced, yet in practice, they are increasingly interpreted quickly, often under pressure and after outcomes are already underway.

This is not lawlessness. It is something more subtle and more dangerous.

It is the transition from rules-constrained warfare to outcome-driven warfare, where legality becomes part of the narrative rather than the decision.

The compression of the decision

Modern conflict is no longer paced for deliberation.

Drones, autonomous systems, and distributed sensors have created a battlespace where detection, classification, and engagement can occur in seconds. The time available to think, question, and challenge assumptions is shrinking.

This is not theoretical. It is visible in how operations are now conducted:

• Targets identified through fused data rather than single-source confirmation

• Effects delivered at range, often without direct human presence

• Civilian infrastructure is increasingly drawn into the operational calculus.

Each of these actions, while individually justifiable, together form a system in which operational decision time exceeds the legal decision process.

When operational tempo overtakes the legal process, the law does not disappear—it lags behind, adapting post hoc to actions already taken.

From constraint to justification

For decades, the laws of armed conflict acted, at least in principle, as a constraint. Commanders operated within them, trained against them, and understood their limits before taking action.

What we are now seeing is a shift.

The question is no longer always:

“Can we do this?”

But increasingly:

“Can we justify this?”

That is a subtle but critical change. The key takeaway: warfare decisions are now often justified after action occurs, not constrained beforehand.

This shift moves the centre of gravity from disciplined decision-making to post-action narrative. In contested, urgent, and fragmented contexts, such narratives often suffice to rationalise outcomes.

The machine-speed problem

This is where AI enters the frame.

Not as the decision-maker, but as the accelerator.

AI-enabled systems are already:

• Grading intelligence

• Prioritising threats

• Recommending courses of action

They are not “fighting the ship” but are shaping its conditions of battle.

And critically, they are doing so at a speed that compresses human oversight.

The result is a growing gap:

• Human responsibility remains

• Machine-tempo decision-making expands

Closing this gap between expanding machine-tempo decisions and enduring human responsibility has become central to effective, accountable command in modern warfare.

Because legal frameworks were built for a world where:

• Information was incomplete

• Decisions took time

• Commanders could pause

Yet that world—one that allows such pauses—is fast disappearing under pressure from new technologies and operational tempos.

As the Alan Turing Institute puts it, “Responsibility cannot be delegated to AI.” The technology can accelerate insight, but it does not remove accountability. Human judgement remains central, even as systems compress time and increase complexity. The risk is not that machines take control, but that humans are asked to exercise control in conditions they were never designed for.

Command in the grey zone

The risk is not that commanders lose control.

It is that control becomes harder to exercise than it was designed.

A Principal Warfare Officer, an Operations Room, and a Commanding Officer all still sit at the centre of the decision. But the environment around them has changed:

• More data than can be fully interrogated

• Faster timelines than can be comfortably challenged

• Systems that present recommendations with increasing confidence

Within this environment, the responsibilities of command necessarily evolve alongside the systems they govern.

Not from decision-maker to observer, but from actor to arbiter of machine-informed judgement.

And that is where the pressure lies.

Because responsibility does not scale with speed.

The illusion of control

There is a comforting assumption that humans remain “in the loop.”

Technically, they do.

But being in the loop is not the same as being in control.

If the system presents:

• A prioritised threat

• A recommended action

• A narrowing time window

Then the human role becomes one of validation rather than exploration.

And validation under pressure differs from judgment. This means for the future fleet.

None of this suggests that the rules of war are gone.

They still matter. They shape alliances, legitimacy, and long-term outcomes, and define what states claim to stand for.

In the moment of action, these rules are no longer the foremost constraint; technology and tempo now lead.

That role is being overtaken by:

• System design

• Data confidence

• Decision speed

Which leads to a harder, more uncomfortable truth:

In future warfare, ethics will depend less on law and more on whether system design supports, slows, or challenges human decision-making. The key is how these systems influence the decisions humans make in conflict.

The real question

We are not yet at the point where machines make sovereign decisions.

We may not have surrendered decision-making to machines, but we already allow them to define the timelines and contexts in which critical choices are made.

So the question is not:

Will AI follow the rules?

It is:

Will we still have the time and the space to apply them?

Further reading

• NATO Allied Underwater Battlespace Mission Network (AUWB-MN)

• UK MOD AI Assurance and Human-Machine Teaming

• ICRC – Humanitarian Outlook 2026

• AI Won’t Replace the General: Algorithms, Decision-making and Battlefield Command

In modern war, the decisive question is no longer who can strike first, but who can keep fighting when the magazines run dry.

At the start, it looks like every modern naval engagement we have trained for. Clean tracks on the screen. Confident engagements. Interceptors leaving the rails on cue. But this fight does not end after the first exchange. It keeps coming. Wave after wave. Day after day. And slowly, the balance shifts. Not because the system fails, but because the weapons run out.

Sixteen days into the Iran conflict, the numbers told their own story. Over 11,000 advanced munitions expended during Operation Epic Fury. Not in a prolonged campaign, but in the opening phase. At that scale, warfare stops being about manoeuvre or precision alone. It becomes something more fundamental. A question of endurance, measured not in hours or intent, but in inventory.

All this leads to a fundamental rethink.

The Illusion of the First Fight

Western naval thinking still carries an implicit assumption. If the force is well-trained, networked, and technologically superior, it will prevail in the opening exchanges and shape the battle from there. That assumption is increasingly fragile.

The modern threat environment does not present a single, manageable engagement. It presents persistent, layered pressure. Drones, missiles, decoys, cyber effects, and ambiguity all arrive together, often at lower cost and in greater volume than the defender can comfortably absorb.

This creates a dynamic where success in the opening engagement becomes almost irrelevant if it cannot be sustained.

A ship may win the first fight. But if its vertical launch cells are depleted, if its interceptors are gone, if its resupply is weeks away, then it is no longer a combatant in any meaningful sense. It becomes a liability, or at best, a sensor node waiting for protection from others.

The question is no longer simply whether a ship can fight. It is whether it can remain in the fight.

Magazine Depth as a Warfighting Constraint

For much of the missile age, magazine depth has been treated as a design compromise. Hull size, cost, and role definition have all influenced the number of weapons a ship carries. Resupply has been assumed, but is rarely central to operational design.

That is no longer tenable.

High-end munitions are expensive, complex, and slow to produce. In a sustained conflict, they are consumed far faster than they can be replaced. This creates a structural imbalance between operational tempo and industrial capacity.

A modern destroyer may carry dozens of interceptors. It may expend them in hours.

Replenishment at sea for vertical launch systems remains limited. Rearming often requires port access, specialised infrastructure, and time measured in days or weeks. In a contested environment, those assumptions become fragile.

This is what the RUSI analysis captures so clearly. The decisive factor is not simply who has the better weapon system. It is the one who has command of the reload.

We have seen this before. In 1944, volume broke elegant defensive theories. Cheap, one-way attacks forced the U.S. Navy to fight repeatedly, at close range, with depth. That pressure is returning. But this time the magazine is finite. Modern air defence is built around vertical launch cells that cannot be replenished at sea. The constraint is no longer detection or decision. It is how quickly those cells empty, and what happens when they do.

The Industrial Base Enters the Battlespace

There is a deeper implication here. The defence industrial base is no longer a supporting function. It is part of the operational system.

Production rates, supply chains, and manufacturing resilience now directly shape combat endurance. A nation that cannot replace its munitions at the rate they are consumed will see its combat power decay, regardless of how advanced its platforms may be.

This is not a new idea in land warfare. But at sea, where we have long relied on high-end platforms and relatively small numbers, it represents a significant shift.

It also exposes a Western vulnerability.

Western forces have optimised for precision, integration, and efficiency. Potential adversaries are increasingly optimising for volume, affordability, and persistence. In a short engagement, precision dominates. In a prolonged one, volume begins to tell.

Where AI Actually Matters

Much of the current discussion around AI in warfare focuses on acceleration. Faster detection, faster classification, faster decision-making. All of that is valuable, but it is incomplete.

• AI must now engage with a different question.

• Not simply: what is the best weapon to use?

• But can we afford to use it now?

This is a shift from tactical optimisation to endurance-aware command.

An AI-enabled combat system should track real-time and projected magazine levels across platforms, monitor threat activity, evaluate supply chain constraints, and simulate the impact of various tactical choices on long-term combat endurance. This provides commanders with clear data to make informed decisions, prioritising not only immediate response but also sustained operational capability.

It should do more than recommend tactics for winning an immediate battle; it should assist commanders in coordinating weapon usage, timing resupply, and allocating resources to maximise lasting combat effectiveness.

In effect, TEWA evolves. From allocating the best available weapon against a threat to managing the entire inventory of combat power over time.

This is not about removing human decision-making. It is about giving command teams visibility of something that is currently opaque and fragmented. The human still decides. The AI system ensures that decisions are informed by considerations of endurance, not just immediacy, by processing data and presenting insights to support operational choices.

The Distributed Answer

If magazine depth cannot be managed on one platform, it must be addressed across the system. This points toward a more distributed model of naval combat.

Large platforms matter for sensing, command, and high-end effect, but cannot carry the whole burden of defence. They need support from a broader ecosystem of assets contributing to magazine depth.

This could include smaller platforms carrying lower-cost interceptors, autonomous systems providing additional layers of defence, distributed sensors enabling earlier and more selective engagement, and alternative effectors such as directed energy where viable.

The aim is not simply to increase the number of weapons. It is to create a system where no single platform’s depletion ends the fight.

A Royal Navy Challenge

For the Royal Navy, this raises uncomfortable but necessary questions.

Current force design remains heavily influenced by platform-centric thinking. Magazine depth is finite, reload is constrained, and industrial capacity is limited. At the same time, the threat environment is moving toward persistence and scale.

The result is a growing gap between how we plan to fight and how a fight is likely to unfold. Closing that gap requires more than new missiles or new ships. It requires a shift in how we think about combat power itself.

Endurance is no longer a logistical detail—it is a command responsibility.

The Real Shift

The most important takeaway from the recent conflict is not the number of munitions used. It is what that number represents.

• War has become a contest of sustained output.

• Sensors, networks, and AI will still shape how we fight. But they will not determine whether we can continue to fight once the initial exchanges are over.

That will be governed by something far less discussed and far less glamorous.

• Magazine depth.

• Reload.
  

And the ability to command both.

Further reading

• RUSI – Over 11,000 munitions in 16 days: Command of the reload governs endurance

• UK Strategic Defence Review 2025

• Future Navy – TEWA in the AI Age

• Future Navy – The Digital Ocean: Securing the Invisible Fleet

We keep returning to an old solution for a modern problem: send a warship, provide an escort, reassure the market. It is visible and decisive, in line with the traditional view of maritime security. But escorts do not truly secure trade. They never really did.

In constrained waters, presence matters. It always has. A well-run escort can deter, disrupt, and respond, thereby reducing risk for those moving through contested space. But it cannot remove that risk. Even at their best, escort operations rely on timing, detection, and a degree of luck. The geometry is unforgiving. The threat only needs to be right once, while the defender must be right every time. That was true decades ago, and it is even more true now.

What has changed is the nature of the threat itself. It is no longer singular or easily defined. Instead, it is layered, distributed, and often ambiguous. Uncrewed systems operate at the edge of detection, small and low-signature, blending into the background of an already crowded maritime environment. Surface vessels can appear indistinguishable from civilian traffic until the moment they are not. Mines remain as relevant as ever, cheap to deploy and disproportionately effective. Much of the targeting data that enables these threats does not even originate in the immediate battlespace. It is gathered, processed, and passed along from elsewhere, compressing decision-making into ever-shorter time windows and reducing clarity precisely when it is most needed.

Against this, we continue to default to the idea of escort. Yet there is a harder truth that sits beneath this instinct. A handful of warships cannot scale to protect a global trading system. Thousands of vessels move through multiple choke points every day, carrying energy, goods, and raw materials that underpin the global economy. This is not a series of discrete events but a continuous flow. Navies underpin that system. They deter, reassure, and, when required, fight. But they do not, and cannot, provide persistent protection to every ship in every place at all times. That has never been their role, even if our language sometimes suggests otherwise.

What we are defending is also broader than we tend to acknowledge. Maritime security often centres on ships, cargo, and oil. Yet, the same seabed carries cables that make up the global economy’s nervous system. Financial transactions, cloud services, AI workloads, and daily communications all depend on infrastructure beneath shipping routes. These cables pass through the same choke points and face many of the same risks.

The current environment has begun to expose a weakness we have long assumed away. The problem goes beyond mere cable damage. If we constrain access for repair, cables may remain degraded for extended periods.

There is also a more uncomfortable development emerging. Multiple critical corridors are now under pressure simultaneously, not just for transit but also for maintenance and repair. The issue is no longer simply whether cables can be cut. It is whether they can be fixed in a timely manner at all. Much of the technology sector’s resilience has been built on logical redundancy. This assumes that physical access to infrastructure would remain available. That assumption is now under strain. When recovery depends on the same contested geography as the disruption, redundancy becomes far less effective than it appears on paper.

If those routes degrade or become inaccessible, recovery timelines can stretch from hours to weeks, possibly longer. Most have not yet fully absorbed this part of the problem. We do not secure individual ships as they move through contested waters. We secure a tightly coupled system of trade, data, and infrastructure that shares the same geography and, increasingly, the same vulnerabilities. When that system comes under pressure, it does not fail cleanly or predictably. It degrades in ways that challenge our ability to manage and recover.

Seen through that lens, the limits of a platform-centric approach become clearer. This is not an argument against naval power. Instead, it argues for broader thinking. We need a maritime security ecosystem that sees security as distributed, shared, and persistent—not concentrated in a few high-value assets.

In such a system, commercial vessels are not just passive participants. They become active nodes, contributing to awareness through behaviour and reporting. Persistent surveillance—including uncrewed systems above, on, and below the surface—extends presence beyond what crewed ships alone can achieve. Data fusion becomes central, with the operational picture shared across networks rather than held within a single operations room. Industry also has a role, as insurance frameworks, routing, and risk management shape behaviour in ways that naval presence alone cannot.

Within this ecosystem, naval forces remain essential, but their role continues to evolve. They now act as intervention nodes: concentrated, informed, and ready to deliver decisive effect when needed. A wider system supports them, providing context, awareness, and reach.

We are still, in many ways, organised around a model built for a different era. Then, threats were clearer, fewer, and easier to attribute. Presence could imply control. That model is now under strain. The scale, complexity, and interdependence of the modern system have outgrown it.

We do not secure a trillion-pound trading system with a handful of grey hulls. We secure it with a network. And at present, we have only partially formed that network.

The instinct to send ships is not wrong. It is a necessary part of the answer, but no longer sufficient on its own. The real question is whether we are prepared to build a system in which escorting is just one part of a broader maritime security approach.

Further Reading

• RUSI – Atlantic Bastion and undersea infrastructure analysis
  A strong foundation for understanding the strategic importance of subsea cables and the North Atlantic as contested space.

• NATO – Allied Underwater Battlespace Mission Network (AUWB-MN)
  Emerging work on integrating crewed and uncrewed systems into a shared underwater operational network, highlighting the shift toward system-level thinking.

• U.S. Navy – CNO Fighting Instructions
  A useful articulation of how modern naval power depends on people, infrastructure, and systems, not just platforms.

• International Cable Protection Committee – Submarine cable protection and resilience reports
  Essential reading on the physical vulnerability and repair challenges of global cable infrastructure.

• Lloyd’s of London – Maritime risk and global trade reports
  Provides the commercial perspective on how risk, insurance, and behaviour shape maritime security outcomes.

• Helsing – AI-enabled maritime sensing and autonomy
  Insight into how distributed sensing and AI are reshaping awareness across the maritime domain.

A French naval officer reportedly revealed the location of an aircraft carrier. Not through espionage. Not through a cyber attack. Through a fitness app, the officer leaked the location of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle via Strava, after he logged a 35-minute run on the app while exercising on the aircraft carrier’s deck on 13 March 2026. At the same time, reports have emerged of operational coordination taking place on commercial messaging platforms such as WhatsApp during recent US military activity.

Individually, these incidents could be seen as minor lapses. Together, they reveal a fundamental shift: the boundaries of operational risk are moving beyond what traditional models can capture.

This shift is significant because security often centres on firewalls, air gaps, classified networks, and systems designed to keep adversaries out. Yet, these incidents fall outside that traditional model, highlighting a broader risk landscape.

Today, the primary risk is no longer just unauthorised access. It lies in what individuals voluntarily, often unconsciously, reveal through everyday digital habits.

What’s shared often goes unnoticed, becoming automatic, ambient, or simply convenient—and thus, far more dangerous.

Building on these points, consider the maritime domain itself. In an earlier piece, Cyber at Sea, I argued that the maritime domain has quietly become a persistent digital environment rather than just a physical one. Warships now operate inside a continuous flow of data, connectivity, and system dependency that extends well beyond the hull.

That digital environment extends beyond networks and systems to include another critical factor: the human layer.

It includes the human layer.

Fitness apps, smartphones, and wearables continuously generate location and movement data. Messaging platforms offer something different:

• speed

• accessibility

• low friction

And in operational contexts, friction matters. When formal systems are constrained or slow, people will route around them. They always have.

The difference today is visibility. A message sent on a commercial platform may sit:

• outside military networks

• outside audit structures

• outside formal control

But it does not sit outside the collection. Similarly, a run logged on a fitness app is not intended as operational data. But intention is irrelevant. What matters is aggregation. At sea, uncertainty is protection.

Carrier groups survive not just through layered defence, but through ambiguity. Their location, intent, and movement patterns are deliberately obscured.

That principle is unchanged.

But it is worth remembering that even in an earlier, far less connected era, managing information was never straightforward.

During the Falklands War, HMS Sheffield lost what little warning margin she had at a critical moment. A satellite transmission interfered with her electronic support measures, reducing her ability to detect the incoming threat. Elsewhere in the task group, contacts had been detected earlier but were assessed as unreliable, shaped by the noise and false reports of previous days. In other words, the problem was not simply technology. It was interpretation, timing, and human judgment under pressure.

The challenge was never just seeing the picture.
It was knowing which picture to trust.

What has changed is not just how information is accessed, but how quickly personal actions can compromise operational security.

Where information was once limited and contested, it is now continuous and self-generated.

And the pathways through which it can influence operations have multiplied.

• One data point might mean nothing.

• A pattern becomes intelligence.

• A conversation adds context.

And context is what turns data into targeting.

This brings us to the convergence of both cases. The Strava incident demonstrates how easily pattern-of-life data can be exposed without intent. The use of commercial messaging platforms shows how operational behaviour adapts to convenience, even when it sits outside designed systems.

• Neither is surprising.

• Both are entirely human.

Reflecting on both cases, it’s clear that modern warships are no longer isolated platforms. Instead, they operate within a wider digital ecosystem of shared infrastructure, software-defined capability, and distributed decision-making—connections that frame both the vulnerabilities and new operating realities discussed earlier.

This brings a clear advantage:

• faster integration of sensors and weapons

• more agile command structures

• Reduced onboard hardware and crewing

But this also creates a new dependency—one that goes beyond systems themselves. Not just on systems. On behaviour.

In Cyber at Sea, the focus was on protecting networks and ensuring resilience against intrusion.

That work is still foundational. Yet, these incidents highlight a growing, adjacent challenge: behavioural risk. Unlike technical perimeter breaches, behaviour cannot be easily contained or firewalled.

But these incidents highlight something adjacent and arguably more difficult: behavioural risk resists containment—there is no perimeter for behaviour. For navies moving toward leaner crews, greater connectivity, and AI-enabled decision support, this matters. Because the risk is no longer confined to:

• compromised systems

• degraded networks

• hostile cyber activity

It now sits at the intersection of:

• people

• platforms

• and everyday digital tools

Taken together, these examples do not suggest banning technology or retreating from connectivity. Rather, they highlight the need to understand and adapt to the real and evolving operational environment.

It is an argument for recognising the operating environment as it actually exists.

An environment where:

• data is continuously generated.

• behaviour is continuously recorded.

• informal systems can carry operational weight.

We have spent decades hardening systems against intrusion.

The next challenge is more subtle.

The central challenge in a connected world is to ensure our own everyday behaviours don’t unintentionally expose critical information. Recognising and managing this risk is now essential for operational security.

Further reading

• Cyber at Sea (Future Navy)

• Human behaviour and digital dependency in modern fleets

• Pattern-of-life intelligence and grey-zone operations

When HMS Dragon was rapidly deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean in March 2026 after drone strikes near RAF Akrotiri, debate focused on Royal Navy readiness. Yet, this event illustrates a fundamental shift in what readiness means for a modern navy.

Why did it take several days for a frontline destroyer to sail?

Commentators cited causes from dockyard contracts to industrial decline. However, these miss the deeper point: HMS Dragon is a highly integrated combat system. Preparing her is not just about mechanics, but increasingly about digital reconfiguration.

The episode illustrates a broader reality that defence planners are still coming to terms with: modern warships are increasingly software-defined platforms.

This evolution sets the stage for understanding changes in how navies prepare and deploy their ships.

A Ship Being Re-Rolled for War

Public reporting suggested that the work carried out on Dragon compressed weeks of preparation into a matter of days. Crews reportedly worked extended shifts while dockyard teams carried out welding, certification checks, ammunitioning and system preparation.

From the outside, this looked like a delay.

Inside the naval system, it looked more like re-rolling a destroyer for a different fight.

A Type 45 deployed on routine NATO duties is configured differently from one sent into a high-threat air defence environment in the Eastern Mediterranean. Mission profiles drive everything from weapons state and sensor configuration to operational certification and command-and-control integration.

That work still includes traditional tasks: refloating, ammunition loading, structural work and safety certification.

But it increasingly includes something else.

Digital reconfiguration.

Modern combat systems depend on software updates, sensor configurations, and integration. Adapting to evolving threats now requires both physical and digital readiness—especially the time to update and assure complex combat software.

From the Type 42 to the Type 45

The contrast between the Royal Navy’s old Type 42 destroyers and the Type 45 class illustrates how profound this shift has been.

The Type 42 belonged to a largely mechanical era of naval combat systems. Its Action Data Automation Weapons System (ADAWS) integrated sensors and weapons through a centralised architecture built around the Sea Dart missile system. Engagement capacity was constrained by physical factors, including radar trackers and missile illumination requirements.

In other words, the ship’s limits were largely mechanical and architectural.

The Type 45 represents a different philosophy entirely.

At the heart of the ship sits the Sea Viper air defence system, built around the Sampson active electronically scanned radar and the Aster missile family. Instead of a handful of simultaneous engagements, the system can track and engage dozens of targets across a wide battlespace.

Equally important is the digital backbone that supports it.

The combat system runs through the Royal Navy’s Shared Infrastructure architecture, which consolidates numerous combat and platform functions across common consoles and computing environments. This architecture allows spiral software development and capability upgrades without wholesale hardware replacement.

In effect, the Type 45 is not just a ship carrying weapons.

It is a floating, combat-computing environment.

Powering the Digital Destroyer

The Power Improvement Project (PIP) completed across the class illustrates another important aspect of the software-defined warship.

The original Type 45 power system struggled to deliver reliable electrical power to the ship’s demanding sensors and combat systems. The PIP upgrade introduced additional high-capacity generators to ensure the destroyers could sustain their electrical load without risking system shutdowns.

This was not simply an engineering upgrade.

This reflects how modern warships rely on digital infrastructure and electrical power as crucially as they do on traditional propulsion and weapons. These elements define operational capability and readiness.

Without stable power, the combat system itself cannot function.

The Allied Comparison

The British response drew comparisons with France.

France surged a significant portion of its surface fleet—sending the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and several frigates to sea—while the Royal Navy prepared HMS Dragon.

France has taken an aggressive posture toward emerging threats such as unmanned aerial vehicles. One example is the rapid deployment of new electro-optical systems such as the Paseo XLR across major French warships to improve the detection of small aerial and surface threats.

Both navies operate sophisticated systems and face similar pressures, so this contrast is not due to a technological gap.

But it does highlight something important.

Naval readiness today hinges on industrial and digital agility as much as—and sometimes more than—fleet size.

The Drone Problem

The wider strategic environment also explains why the rapid deployment of ships like HMS Dragon matters.

Modern naval air defence now faces a brutal economic equation.

Adversaries can deploy large numbers of low-cost one-way attack drones and cruise missiles. Defending forces often rely on high-end interceptors costing orders of magnitude more.

Even the most advanced missile defence system cannot ignore the mathematics of magazine depth.

A navy that can intercept every threat may still struggle to sustain that defence if attacks are frequent and inexpensive.

This reality is already pushing navies toward new defensive approaches, including electronic warfare, directed-energy weapons, and layered air defence systems designed to reduce reliance on expensive interceptors.

The Real Lesson

The debate around HMS Dragon should not be framed as evidence of a broken navy or a failed ship design.

The Type 45 remains one of the most capable air defence destroyers in the world.

Instead, this episode illustrates evolving naval readiness—defined by the speed and efficiency of digital and operational reconfiguration.

In the twentieth century, readiness was primarily about hulls, engines and crews.

In the twenty-first century, it increasingly includes:

• combat-system software

• sensor integration

• digital threat libraries

• weapons certification

• dockyard surge capacity

The warship has become a software-defined combat platform.

And readiness now depends on how quickly navies can configure, update and deploy those systems in response to emerging threats.

Conclusion

The rushed preparation of HMS Dragon revealed an uncomfortable truth. Naval strength is no longer measured solely by the number of ships in the fleet. It also depends on the speed at which those ships can be reconfigured for new missions. Dockyard agility, industrial support and digital combat-system flexibility are now central components of maritime power.

In the era of drone warfare and rapid technological change, a navy’s true readiness may depend less on the tonnage of its hulls than on the responsiveness of the systems that sit inside them.

Why this article

With tensions again rising around the Strait of Hormuz and global oil flows under scrutiny, it is worth remembering that the region has faced similar crises before. I served on three Royal Navy deployments to the Gulf between 1977 and the Tanker War of 1988, and those experiences still offer useful perspective on today’s debate.

The Strait of Hormuz is once again at the centre of global energy politics. Much of the current debate treats the region as if its strategic dynamics are new. They are not.

Between 1977 and 1988, I served on three Royal Navy deployments to the Gulf that spanned the collapse of one regional security system and the emergence of another.

Those experiences highlight lessons about maritime risk in the Strait that remain relevant today.

A deployment built on an assumption

In November 1977, a Royal Navy task group crossed the Gulf from Dubai to Bandar Abbas to take part in a multinational naval exercise. I was serving aboard the frigate HMS Mohawk, part of a the Group 6 deployment led by the cruiser HMS Tiger.

The exercise, called MIDLINK, brought together ships from Britain, the United States, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. It was conducted under the umbrella of the Central Treaty Organisation, better known as CENTO. The Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), originally known as the Baghdad Pact, was a Cold War-era military alliance formed in 1955. It was modeled after NATO and intended to prevent Soviet expansion into the Middle East. The original members included Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, with the United States providing support as an observer and through bilateral agreements.

At the time, the strategic logic seemed straightforward. Iran, under the Shah, was expected to anchor Western security in the Gulf. Allied navies trained together so that the sea lanes through the Strait of Hormuz would remain open. For the sailors involved, it felt like routine Cold War naval cooperation.

Within two years, that entire system had disappeared.

The world CENTO expected

CENTO had its origins in the 1950s Cold War effort to contain Soviet influence across the Middle East.

The alliance linked Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, with strong American support. By the 1970s, its practical focus had shifted toward protecting the stability of the Gulf and the flow of oil that underpinned Western economies.

Iran was central to that vision.

Under the Shah, Iran was building one of the most modern naval forces in the region. British-built warships, American aircraft and expanding naval bases were part of a strategy that assumed Iran would become the regional guardian of Gulf sea lanes. Exercises such as MIDLINK were designed to test that system.

History intervened before the system could mature.

A system that vanished overnight

In 1979, the Iranian Revolution swept away the Shah’s government and the strategic framework that had been built around it. Iran withdrew from CENTO, and the alliance itself quickly collapsed. The Western assumption that Iran would anchor Gulf security proved completely wrong.

Within a year, the region was engulfed in the Iran–Iraq War, and Western navies began returning to the Gulf in a very different role.

Returning under very different circumstances

I returned to the Gulf in 1983 aboard the frigate HMS Avenger as part of the Armilla Patrol. The Armilla patrol was a permanent Royal Navy deployment in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s and 1990s, established to protect British shipping interests, particularly during the Iran-Iraq War. It served as a precursor to modern Gulf patrols and was often reinforced during high-tension periods.

By then, the strategic landscape had already shifted dramatically. The war between Iran and Iraq was threatening merchant shipping across the region, and Western navies were maintaining a presence to reassure commercial traffic and regional partners.

Five years later, I returned again, this time aboard the frigate HMS Boxer during the height of the Tanker War. Tankers were burning. Mines were appearing in shipping lanes. Missiles were striking merchant vessels. Insurance markets in London were watching events in the Strait almost in real time.

Yet even during the most intense phases of that conflict, one thing never happened.

The Strait of Hormuz never truly closed.

Geography always wins

The Strait of Hormuz looks wide on a map. In reality, the navigable shipping lanes are narrow and highly structured. Tankers transit through a traffic separation scheme that provides only limited manoeuvring room.

Ships carrying millions of barrels of oil navigate this narrow, structured corridor, one of the world’s most critical routes. Roughly a fifth of global oil trade still passes through it. The geography remains as it was in the 1970s.

That geography sets clear limits on the power of military force in the Strait.

Disruption, not closure

Political commentary often speaks about “closing” the Strait of Hormuz as though it were a simple military switch that could be flipped. History suggests something more complicated.

During the Tanker War, hundreds of ships were attacked using mines, missiles and fast attack craft. Merchant vessels were damaged, insurance premiums surged, and transit risks increased dramatically.

But oil exports continued.

The strategic effect was not the permanent closure of the Strait but the creation of uncertainty and economic pressure through disruption.

Today, disruption—rather than closure—is still the most potent tool for regional leverage.

HMS Boxer and the intelligence war at sea

By the late stages of the Tanker War, something else had quietly changed in the way naval operations were conducted in the Gulf. Ships were beginning to fight with intelligence.

When I returned to the region aboard HMS Boxer in 1988, the ship carried an unusual capability for a Royal Navy escort at the time. Boxer carried an American OUTBOARD signals intelligence system, allowing the ship to intercept and analyse regional radio communications in real time.

Alongside the equipment were specialist communications technicians, including Arabic speakers who could interpret intercepted traffic in real time. This meant the operations room could often hear activity developing before it appeared on radar. Fast attack craft coordinating with shore stations. Patrol boats exchanging instructions. Coastal command centres directing movements across the Gulf.

Boxer’s intelligence advantage signalled how information had become decisive in naval strategy—an enduring lesson for modern operations. Looking back now, that capability feels strikingly familiar. Modern naval doctrine talks about networked sensors, information dominance and data-driven operations, but the basic principle was already visible in the Gulf in 1988: the ship that understands the battlespace first holds the advantage.

A narrow strait and a long memory

When I first passed through the Strait of Hormuz in 1977, the assumption was that Iran would anchor the region’s security. Two years later, that system had vanished.

Four decades on, the Strait remains strategically vital. Its geography, shipping patterns, and even many of the tactics used to disrupt traffic remain unchanged.

The Thailand-flagged cargo ship Mayuree Naree engulfed in black smoke in the Strait of Hormuz, 11 March 2026. - Reuters

What has changed is the tendency to discuss the Strait as though its history began yesterday. Those of us who stood watch there know better. The Strait has a long memory, even when the debate does not.