When the Network Goes Dark
Why Resilience, Not Technology, Will Decide the Future Navy
In 2018, I wrote a piece about AI and blockchain in the military. At the time, it felt forward-leaning. Distributed systems. Shared trust. Smarter machines. The language of emerging technology — and the assumption that the problem to be solved was innovation.
Seven years on, after Ukraine, the Red Sea, and a hard return to great-power friction, I think I misunderstood my own argument. The article wasn’t really about AI. It wasn’t about blockchain.
It was about what happens when the system starts to fail.
The Moment Things Stop Working
Every navy plans for the fight it hopes to have.
Clean command chains.
Reliable comms.
Satellites overhead.
A single operational picture that everyone trusts.
But modern conflict doesn’t start by destroying ships.
It starts by eroding confidence.
The cable goes down — not all of them, just enough.
The data still flows — but no one is quite sure it’s clean.
The AI still produces an answer — but the inputs feel thin.
Headquarters is still there — but slower, noisier, contested.
Nothing is completely broken. And that’s the point. This is the environment navies now have to operate in: one where systems work, but never perfectly, and never for long.
The Old Assumption: Perfection as a Design Goal
For decades, Western forces — including the Royal Navy — have designed capability around an unspoken assumption:
If we protect the network, everything else follows.
So we centralised data.
We optimised command structures.
We built exquisite platforms tied together by exquisite connectivity.
It worked — until adversaries stopped trying to beat us head-on. Now they aim somewhere else. They don’t need to sink the carrier. They just need to make the picture unclear enough that no one wants to be responsible for the next decision.
That’s not a technology failure. That’s a doctrinal one.
A Realisation That Took Too Long
Back in 2018, blockchain caught my attention because it challenged a sacred military instinct: central control. It asked an awkward question:
What if trust didn’t depend on one system, one authority, or one version of the truth?
At the time, it felt theoretical.
Today, that question sits at the heart of real operations — coalition warfare, contested logistics, shared ISR, and autonomous systems operating beyond constant supervision.
Not because blockchain is the answer — it isn’t — but because the principle was right. Distributed trust survives disruption better than centralised perfection.
Resilience Is What’s Left When You’ve Been Hit
Resilience isn’t about preventing failure. It’s about continuing to function after failure has begun.
A resilient navy assumes:
Comms will degrade
Data will be incomplete.
AI will operate with uncertainty.
Authority will need to move closer to the edge.
People will have to decide without full confidence.
That changes everything.
It changes how we think about AI — not as an oracle but as an assistant that must explain its doubts.
It changes how we think about autonomy — not as independence, but as endurance.
It changes how we think about command — not as control, but as intent.
Resilience isn’t something you bolt on. It’s something you design from the start.
Atlantic Bastion: A Doctrine Disguised as Geography
This is why the renewed focus on the North Atlantic matters. Atlantic Bastion isn’t about reviving Cold War habits. It’s about protecting continuity — economic, informational, strategic.
Undersea cables.
Seabed surveillance.
Autonomous patrols.
Allied integration.
These aren’t niche capabilities. They are the scaffolding that keeps the system functioning under pressure. This is infrastructure warfare, not fleet action — and it demands a resilience mindset first, platforms second.
AI: Acceleration Without Resilience Is Fragility
There’s a risk here.
AI is introduced as speed—faster decisions, faster cycles, faster effects.
But speed in a degraded system doesn’t create an advantage.
It creates brittleness.
A resilience-led navy asks harder questions:
What happens when the data is wrong?
How does the system signal uncertainty?
When does the human step back in?
How does failure degrade safety?
These aren’t ethics debates. They’re survival questions.
The Quiet Shift We Need to Make
We argue endlessly about hull numbers, platforms, and budgets. Those debates matter — but they’re downstream. The upstream choice is simpler, and harder:
Do we design a navy that works when everything goes right —
Or one that keeps going when things start to fail?
Resilience isn’t a capability. It’s a doctrine.
And doctrine is what decides whether a fleet adapts under pressure — or freezes at the moment it’s needed most. That’s the lesson I was circling in 2018. It just took the last few years to make it impossible to ignore.