This is a video presentation of current thoughts about Future Navy challenges produced in conjunction with Google Notebook LM based on the work and analysis of Richard Gough.
What does it really take to build a navy prepared for the wars of tomorrow? The mood in 2025 is tense: Ukraine’s war continues, Houthi attacks disrupt the Red Sea, Russian shadow ships threaten critical cables, and China’s naval growth is staggering.
This presentation explores the Royal Navy’s Vision 2040 — autonomy for mass, AI for speed, and humans for resilience. It highlights the transformative systems on the horizon, from XLUUVs and drones to directed energy weapons and the Future Air Dominance System.
But the analysis also lays bare the risks: missile disparities, lean manning under fire, the end of submarine stealth through quantum sensing, and the brutal vulnerability of rearming at sea.
The findings point to five crucial steps to bridge ambition and reality — scalable crews, resilient logistics, standardised combat systems, cyber by design, and allied acceleration of AI.
The message is clear: the technology is impressive, the ambition is high, but the sea remains unforgiving. Without fixing the fragile foundations of people, supply chains, and digital resilience, even the most advanced navy risks being unprepared when it matters most.
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