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.

Recent events in the Middle East have highlighted the growing importance of lightweight precision missiles in countering drone threats. The UK has already deployed Martlet systems on land in the eastern Mediterranean and Gulf regions as part of wider air-defence measures protecting British bases and infrastructure. Mounted on vehicle launchers and operated by British forces, the missile provides a relatively simple and precise way to intercept small unmanned aircraft without resorting to larger and more expensive air-defence systems.

The missile is also carried by the AgustaWestland AW159 Wildcat, where its compact size, precision guidance, and low cost make it useful against small maritime threats like drones and fast attack craft. These features suggest Martlet could play a broader role across the future fleet.

At a time when navies are increasingly confronted by large numbers of inexpensive unmanned systems, weapons designed for high-performance aircraft and missiles are not always the most practical response. Martlet sits in a useful space between naval guns and traditional air-defence missiles, offering a precise interceptor that can be carried in meaningful numbers.

The Missile Itself

Martlet is produced by Thales UK at its long-established missile facility in Belfast, drawing on technology lineage that includes systems such as Starstreak.

Typical characteristics include:

• Weight~13 kg

• Range~6–8 km

• Speed~Mach 1.5

• Guidance: laser beam-riding

• Warhead: blast-fragmentation

Instead of carrying its own radar or infrared seeker, Martlet follows a laser beam projected from the launch platform. The missile simply remains centred within that beam as it flies toward the target.

This guidance method has several advantages:

• resistance to electronic countermeasures

• Reduced missile complexity

• comparatively low cost.

The launcher platform maintains line of sight during the engagement, which is usually straightforward for short-range intercepts against drones or small surface targets.

Why Small Missiles Matter at Sea

Traditional naval air defence evolved around the need to defeat:

• high-speed aircraft

• supersonic anti-ship missiles

• large, high-value threats.

The resulting missile systems are highly capable but also expensive and carried in limited numbers.

Drone warfare changes the equation. Small unmanned systems can be produced cheaply and launched in large numbers. Defending against them, therefore, becomes a question of magazine depth and cost-effective interception.

Light missiles such as Martlet offer an intermediate option:

• engagement beyond gun range

• precision against small targets

• relatively compact launch systems.

In effect, they allow ships to manage dense threat environments without immediately resorting to their most sophisticated missiles.

Surface Launch on Warships

Although best known as a helicopter weapon, Martlet was designed from the outset to support multiple launch platforms.

A shipboard configuration would typically include:

• a compact multi-tube launcher

• a stabilised electro-optical director

• a laser designator integrated with the combat system.

The engagement sequence would follow a familiar pattern:

1. Ship sensors detect and classify a contact.

2. The electro-optical director tracks the target and projects a coded laser beam.

3. The missile rides the beam to the interception point.

Because the launcher is relatively small, it can be fitted to a wide variety of vessels without major structural changes.

A Practical Fit for Type 31

The Type 31 frigate provides a good example of how such a system could be integrated.

The ship already carries the TACTICOS, an open-architecture combat system designed to integrate new sensors and weapons relatively easily. Target tracking could be handled by the ship’s existing stabilised electro-optical director, such as the Mirador electro-optical fire control system, which already provides precision tracking capability for other weapons.

In practice, installing Martlet would largely involve adding a deck-mounted launcher and integrating it with the existing combat system interfaces. The optical director would designate the target with a coded laser beam, while TACTICOS manages engagement sequencing and situational awareness within the operations room.

Because the ship’s key sensors and command infrastructure are already in place, this integration could proceed without significant structural changes.

Extending the Defensive Perimeter

When used from helicopters, Martlet already allows ships to intercept targets several kilometres from the defended platform. Surface-launched missiles would add a further layer closer to the ship.

A notional defensive structure could look something like this:

• Outer: Helicopter-launched Martlet

• Middle: Ship-launched Martlet

• Inner: Programmable naval guns

• Terminal: Close-in weapon systems

Each layer addresses a different stage of the engagement while preserving high-end missiles for more demanding threats.

A Role for Autonomous Escorts

The missile may also find a natural place within future concepts for autonomous or optionally crewed escort vessels.

These platforms are often envisaged as distributed nodes within a task group, performing roles such as:

• sensor pickets

• magazine extensions

• forward threat interception.

A small missile system, such as the Martlet, could allow these vessels to investigate and engage drone contacts without committing larger warships.

Because the missile relies on relatively simple guidance, targeting information could come from the escort’s own sensors or be provided by other platforms within the network.

Trials With Autonomous Platforms

Recent trials also suggest that Martlet may prove adaptable beyond traditional launch platforms. In a Royal Air Force–sponsored experiment, a UK-developed drone, JACKAL, successfully fired a Martlet during a rapid development trial. The JACKAL platform, developed by Flyby Technology, was modified in cooperation with Thales UK to carry and launch the missile.

The engineering work was completed in approximately six weeks, demonstrating how quickly the system could be integrated onto an unmanned platform. In the test sequence, the vertical take-off aircraft launched the missile against a nearby target, illustrating the potential for lightweight guided weapons to be deployed from remotely operated systems. While still experimental, such demonstrations hint at a future in which missiles like Martlet are not limited to helicopters or ships, but could also be carried by unmanned aircraft operating as forward defensive nodes.

From a Future Navy perspective, the significance of this trial lies less in the individual drone and more in what it suggests about the missile itself. Because Martlet relies on relatively simple beam-riding guidance rather than complex onboard seekers, it can be integrated onto a wide variety of platforms with modest engineering effort. The JACKAL drone experiment, therefore, hints at a wider possibility: lightweight missiles deployed across a distributed network of crewed ships, helicopters and autonomous systems. In such a model, smaller unmanned platforms could act as forward pickets or intercept nodes within a task group, engaging drones or small surface threats before they reach the main force. The missile itself becomes less a single platform weapon and more a shared defensive tool within a distributed maritime architecture.

A Practical Evolution

Martlet does not represent a radical technological shift. Instead, it reflects a practical adjustment to the challenges posed by modern unmanned systems.

Its strengths are straightforward:

• compact launch systems

• flexible platform integration

• precision engagement against small targets.

These qualities enable the missile to operate from helicopters, land systems, and, potentially, additional naval platforms.

As the Royal Navy continues to think about how future fleets will operate in environments saturated with unmanned systems, weapons that can be distributed across ships, aircraft and autonomous escorts are likely to become increasingly relevant.

The current debate around the Royal Navy centres on a small surface fleet and growing commitments, raising questions about the sustainability of balancing ambition with available capacity.

The discussion has sharpened in recent months. Operations in the Middle East have placed sustained pressure on a limited number of destroyers and frigates. At the same time, the protection of undersea infrastructure in the North Atlantic and growing NATO commitments continue to demand a persistent maritime presence. Tom Sharpe, a retired Royal Navy commander who served for over 25 years in the Royal Navy, recently told the FT: “The navy is threadbare. This has been 30 years in the making and does not reflect the excellence of our current sailors. It is, nevertheless, true. Huge investment and a cultural clear-out are both required to reverse this decline. I’m not seeing signs of either.”

With around 19 destroyers and frigates in service, but not necessarily operational, the Royal Navy is being asked to operate across multiple theatres simultaneously. These concerns are real. Yet focusing only on ship numbers risks missing a deeper shift: the Royal Navy’s emphasis is moving toward integrating ships into a wider combat system, not just increasing hulls.

The Limits of Counting Ships

For centuries, naval power has been measured in hulls, tonnage and guns. Even today, defence debates often begin by comparing the number of destroyers, frigates or submarines different navies possess.

Yet modern naval warfare introduces a new constraint: magazine depth.

A modern warship carries extraordinary firepower, but in relatively limited quantities. Vertical launch systems allow missiles to be stored safely below deck and fired rapidly, yet each launch cell represents a finite engagement opportunity. Once those cells are empty, the ship remains afloat, but its combat value is dramatically reduced.

In high-intensity operations, missile and bullet expenditure can occur far faster than many people realise. Defensive engagements frequently require multiple interceptors against a single threat, and sustained combat can consume missile inventories in a matter of hours.

For those who have fought ships in combat, reality is straightforward: if a ship’s launch cells are empty, it remains afloat, but it has effectively left the battle.

This constraint means that naval power is increasingly shaped not just by the number of ships at sea, but by how efficiently those ships use the weapons they carry. Future Navy covered this in detail in this article:

The New Close-Range Battle at Sea

Recent events have also highlighted another emerging challenge: the rapid proliferation of drones in maritime conflict.

Uncrewed aerial systems now appear in large numbers across modern battlefields. Naval forces must increasingly defeat them at sea; these threats are often inexpensive, numerous, and capable of overwhelming traditional defensive systems if not addressed effectively.

The Royal Navy is already responding. Recent reports indicate that the service is seeking rapid counter-drone solutions for ships, as part of initiatives designed to accelerate the deployment of new defensive systems. The goal is clear: develop layered protection capable of defeating large numbers of low-cost aerial threats without exhausting high-value missile inventories.

This challenge illustrates the evolving nature of naval defence. While long-range missile systems remain essential, ships must increasingly rely on a layered combination of sensors, guns, electronic warfare and emerging directed-energy technologies to manage the growing drone threat.

In effect, the close-range battle around the ship is changing.

Sensors Everywhere

To address these pressures, navies are beginning to rethink how fleets generate combat power. Rather than relying solely on individual ships operating as self-contained fighting units, the emerging model distributes awareness across a much wider network.

The network may include aircraft, satellites, seabed sensors, and autonomous vessels. Operating across the maritime environment, these and other unmanned platforms together create a persistent picture of the battlespace—a picture that extends far beyond the horizon of any single ship.

Autonomous maritime systems are particularly suited to this role. They can operate for extended periods in areas where deploying crewed warships would be expensive or risky, providing surveillance and reconnaissance while feeding data back into command networks.

As a result, the sensing network may vastly outsize the fleet itself. Rather than stationing warships everywhere, the fleet maintains observation over all domains.

Concentrating the Shooters

If sensing becomes widely distributed, the logical next step is to concentrate the platforms that deliver the strike.

Missile-armed warships remain the decisive combat element of the fleet, but their effectiveness increases dramatically when they operate within a wider information network. Rather than relying only on their own sensors, these ships can receive targeting information from multiple sources across the battlespace.

In this model, a destroyer or frigate becomes less an isolated unit and more a node within a larger combat architecture. The ship still carries the missiles and the crew that operate them, but its awareness is extended by sensors distributed across the fleet and beyond it.

For a navy with limited hull numbers, this shift could prove crucial. Ships can be positioned where they are most effective rather than just where presence is needed for awareness.

The Hybrid Fleet

This evolving structure is sometimes described as a hybrid fleet: a combination of crewed warships, autonomous platforms and distributed sensing systems working together as a single operational network.

Crewed ships deliver command, decision-making, and weapons. Autonomous systems offer persistence, coverage, and distribute risk. Data networks link the two into a cohesive force.

Multiple sensors and weapon systems are already integrated into modern combat systems, creating shared digital infrastructures on board a ship. As these platforms evolve, it becomes increasingly feasible to integrate external sensors and autonomous platforms.

The challenge is no longer purely technological. It is doctrinal: learning how to fight as a network rather than as individual ships.

A Strategic Choice for Britain

For Britain, the debate about the Royal Navy ultimately comes down to a strategic choice.

One option is to build a much larger fleet. Another is to reduce global commitments to match available resources. Both approaches carry significant political and financial consequences. A third path is beginning to emerge: designing a distributed fleet architecture that allows a relatively small number of high-end warships to operate inside a much larger sensing and information network.

This approach does not eliminate the need for ships. Warships will continue to deliver effects at sea. However, maritime power may now depend more on how effectively those ships are connected to a wider network, rather than on how many are at sea.

The Royal Navy has faced moments like this before. Periods of strategic change often force navies to rethink how they fight, not just what they sail. Today’s debate over hull numbers may signal a broader shift: moving from fleets organised by individual ships to fleets structured as integrated systems.

If successful, the future Royal Navy may be defined not just by its ships, but by the power of the network connecting them.

Two signals, days apart.

The Fleet Commander, Vice Admiral Moorhouse, defends the prospect of no permanent Royal Navy warships in the Middle East, arguing that what the UK is offering is “a more modern offer” aligned with what allies want.

At the same time, a RUSI Journal paper argues that the 2025 Strategic Defence Review missed an opportunity to rethink the role of universities in military education and societal preparedness, treating them largely as STEM pipelines rather than engines of strategic literacy. On the surface, these are separate conversations.

They are not.

Taken together, they reveal a deeper shift: the Royal Navy is moving from visible global dispersion to concentrated alliance warfighting — and Britain’s intellectual infrastructure may not yet be aligned with that reality.

Link: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-journal/rethinking-military-education-uk-universities

The Gulf Is a Symptom

The article notes that the departure of HMS Lancaster and the likely withdrawal of the remaining Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel could leave the UK without a naval presence in the Gulf for the first time since 1980.

For four decades, that presence carried symbolic weight. It reassured partners. It signalled continuity. It reinforced Britain’s identity as a globally deployed maritime power. Now that posture is being reconsidered. The Fleet Commander’s phrase, “a more modern offer” is deliberate. It implies:

• Fewer permanent warships on station

• More training and integration

• More networked relevance

• A shift from geographic symbolism to capability partnership

This is not a retreat, it is reprioritisation. And reprioritisation always reveals what matters most.

Listen to Tanker Wars, behind the scenes of HMS Boxer’s deployment to the Gulf in 1988 and how it impacted Gulf operations:

NATO First Becomes Operational Reality

The Strategic Defence Review made NATO-first language explicit. But strategy only becomes real when trade-offs appear. You cannot simultaneously:

• Rebuild high-end ASW credibility.

• Harden the undersea infrastructure.

• Invest in hybrid fleets.

• Prepare for peer confrontation in the Euro-Atlantic.

• And maintain legacy patterns of global constabulary dispersion.

Something had to give.

The Atlantic Bastion concept illustrates the direction of travel: a layered network of crewed and uncrewed systems, integrated with sensors, to deny adversary submarines freedom of movement across the Norwegian Sea and the GIUK approaches.

That model rewards endurance, integration and alliance depth. It does not reward symbolic hull scattering.

The Gulf decision only makes strategic sense if Atlantic concentration is becoming structural rather than rhetorical.

The Future Fleet Is Hybrid by Necessity

If this trajectory holds, by 2040, the Royal Navy will no longer be defined by how many ships it can deploy globally.

It will be defined by whether it can integrate:

• Type 26 high-end ASW platforms

• Type 31 general-purpose frigates

• XLUUV and large USV layers

• Seabed sensor arrays

• Allied data networks

• Space-based ISR

• AI-assisted command support

The modern offer is no longer a frigate alongside. It is:

• A data node inside a coalition kill web

• A training and integration backbone

• A force multiplier within NATO

• A persistent undersea denial architecture

In a future North Atlantic crisis, deterrence will not hinge on a single visible hull. It will hinge on whether the UK can:

• Detect early

• Fuse allied intelligence in near real time.

• Protect undersea cables

• Sustain operations over months.

• Operate seamlessly inside NATO command structures.

That is hybrid warfighting — crewed and uncrewed, physical and digital, national and allied. And it cannot coexist with a fleet optimised for permanent global presence. Future Navy has discussed this in our Atlantic Bastian item:

The Political Risk

Concentration carries perception risk. Presence is legible. A ship in harbour reassures instantly.

• Architecture is invisible. Integration does not photograph well.

• A navy can become strategically stronger while appearing geographically thinner.

Without a clear explanation, the shift from presence to architecture risks being interpreted as decline rather than discipline. This is where the RUSI paper becomes strategically important.

The Missing Piece: Cognitive Mass

Dunn’s argument is straightforward: the SDR under-imagined the role of universities in military education and societal preparedness.

That omission becomes critical when the Navy itself is evolving. A hybrid Atlantic-focused fleet demands more than ships. It demands cognitive mass:

• Engineers who understand operational context

• Lawyers who understand maritime grey-zone escalation

• Policymakers fluent in deterrence dynamics

• Economists who grasp energy and cable vulnerability

• Journalists who understand sea control

• Citizens who recognise why the Atlantic matters

If Britain concentrates naval capability but fails to cultivate strategic literacy, every necessary trade-off will be misread. The fleet will modernise faster than the national conversation. That is not sustainable in a democracy.

From Global Display to Alliance Discipline

For decades, British naval identity was partly anchored in global visibility. But the 2030s will not reward nostalgia. They will reward:

• Alliance depth

• Endurance

• Network resilience

• Industrial capacity

• Undersea dominance

• AI-enabled integration

The Royal Navy appears to be accepting that it cannot be everywhere. Instead, it is choosing to become indispensable somewhere. That is maturity — if followed through coherently.

The Strategic Threshold

There are moments when posture shifts quietly. No grand speech. No doctrinal manifesto. Just a redistribution of risk. The Gulf signal suggests the Royal Navy is moving from:

• Geographic reassurance to Operational architecture

• Presence as influence to Integration as deterrence

• Solo display to Alliance discipline

This is not a dramatic revolution; it is a structural adaptation.

The 2030s Test

By the 2030s, the UK maritime environment will be shaped by:

• Undersea infrastructure coercion

• Arctic and High North competition

• AI-accelerated targeting cycles

• Alliance burden-sharing pressures

• Prolonged maritime competition below declared war

In that environment, dispersion offers diminishing returns. Concentration — if backed by industrial resilience and societal understanding — offers greater deterrent credibility.

The Fleet Commander’s “modern offer” and the RUSI warning about neglected military education are not disconnected developments. They are two halves of the same adjustment. The Royal Navy is redesigning itself for a harder era.

Britain now has to decide whether it will redesign its intellectual and political foundations alongside it, because the next maritime confrontation will not be won by the ship most visibly forward. It will be shaped by the network most deeply integrated — and the society most prepared to sustain it.

Intelligentized Warfare Is Already Afloat

China is no longer experimenting at the edges of naval autonomy. It is institutionalising it. Through its “intelligentization” doctrine, the PLA has set a 2027 goal to integrate AI across sensors, weapons, decision chains, and command networks. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) sees intelligent systems as force multipliers that compress kill chains, saturate defenders, and challenge Western C2 architecture. In Chinese terms, this isn’t merely about tech; it’s about forming the tempo and structure of future war.

Programs like the PLA’s Joint Operations Command System, autonomous navigation trials in the South China Sea, and ongoing AI integration in logistics and surveillance platforms reveal a coherent plan. China’s Academy of Military Sciences and the Chinese Electronics Technology Group are deeply embedded in this change, signalling a state-industrial fusion approach to warfighting AI.

The push toward intelligentization represents both operational ambition and strategic-level pressure. The PLA knows it cannot match allied experience at sea, but it can shift the game by fielding unmanned systems at scale. That’s not a hypothetical future. It’s a force design decision already in motion.

Carrier-Sized Swarms and Robotic Motherships

China’s New High-Tech Research Ship, the Zhu Hai Yun, is the most visible example of how China is approaching maritime autonomy, but it is far from an outlier. It sits within a wider set of capabilities that Beijing is testing and fielding at pace, each intended to expand strategic options rather than deliver direct combat power. These platforms are not optimised to fight in the conventional sense. Instead, they are intended to operate persistently, at scale, and below the threshold of armed conflict.

Zhu Hai Yun demonstrates a broader pattern in Chinese force development, where new platforms are introduced less for direct combat and more for the strategic options they enable. Operating below the threshold of armed conflict, such vessels support continuous presence and systems deployment in sensitive maritime regions, complicating attribution and response. This is capability development aimed as much at moulding the environment as at winning a fight.

The intent becomes clearer when the vessel is viewed as an autonomy platform rather than a conventional ship.

Zhu Hai Yun is best understood not as a ship, but as an autonomy management platform. Its value lies less in the hull itself and more in how the vessel is arranged to deploy, recover, and coordinate uncrewed systems at scale. The simplified profile schematic above highlights this architecture clearly: an extended, uninterrupted flight operations deck optimised for UAV handling; dedicated zones for uncrewed vehicle launch and recovery; a superstructure shaped around mission control and autonomy management rather than traditional bridge-centric command; and a communications mast prioritised for data exchange over line-of-sight navigation. This is not a combatant in the conventional sense, but a mobile node in a wider machine-led system, designed to generate mass, persistence, and decision speed without putting people forward. The strategic importance lies not in what Zhu Hai Yun carries, but in what it enables.

Alongside it, smaller systems like the JARI USV, the JARI-M multipurpose autonomous platform, and adaptive loitering munitions are entering service. These are not isolated prototypes: they are modular, scalable, and increasingly integrated into PLAN force structure. Paired with advances in datalinks, quantum navigation, and shore-based targeting support, these systems form a complex mesh for distributed lethality.

For comparison, Western equivalents such as the U.S. Navy’s Ghost Fleet Overlord and the Royal Navy’s XV Patrick Blackett have only recently begun sustained trials. The scale and pace of China’s fielding suggest a narrowing technology gap and a different appetite for operational risk. The difference is not conceptual ambition, but institutional tempo. Mass without decision speed is noise. Autonomy only becomes advantage when it compresses the threat evaluation and engagement cycle.

What Happens When the Opponent Skips the TEWA Loop?

In a battlespace shaped by machine-generated mass, the decisive variable becomes not platform count, but decision tempo. The question is no longer whether a force can detect or reach a target, but whether it can evaluate, assign, and act before the opponent closes the loop. autonomy is used to generate mass and persistence, the decisive advantage shifts to decision speed. In a battlespace defined by uncrewed systems operating at scale, the limiting factor is no longer detection or reach, but how quickly a force can evaluate threats, assign effects, and act with confidence.

Western navies prize assurance, layered TEWA logic, and human-in-the-loop design. NATO exercises like Formidable Shield have tested AI agents for threat evaluation, but always with human override. The PLAN signals a higher tolerance for machine-led tempo and operational risk with faster, more machine-driven decision frameworks.

AI-enabled systems are being created to identify, prioritise, and potentially engage targets without pause for centralised command. In a Taiwan or South China Sea scenario, this could mean AI-guided swarms overwhelming sensors before allied operators can respond.

Decision velocity is no longer a by-product of combat power. It is combat power. Can NATO ships operate at machine tempo without impairing assurance? Will Western command frameworks tolerate losses due to slower response cycles? The fight isn’t just about platforms anymore — it’s about competing risk thresholds and command cultures.

As TEWA accelerates toward machine speed, the problem shifts from calculation to control. The central question is no longer whether systems can recommend the right action, but whether command structures, assurance frameworks, and human operators can trust, understand, and govern those recommendations in time to matter.

Impacts on Allied Force Design and C2

If TEWA is where machine speed meets combat decision-making, then command and control is where that speed must be absorbed, governed, and directed. The challenge is no longer connecting sensors to shooters, but structuring authority, trust, and information flow so that human commanders remain decisive rather than overwhelmed.

China’s trajectory places stress on allied assumptions. Project Overmatch, AUWB-MN, and the Royal Navy’s Maritime Integrated C2 program become more than capability upgrades — they become essential to retaining initiative.

The U.S. Navy’s decision to equip multiple carrier strike groups with prototype overmatch nodes reflects urgency. NATO’s Federated Mission Networking and the Digital Ocean initiative are racing to build joint networks capable of handling dynamic, cross-domain tasking.

The UK’s own commitments, including T26’s open combat systems, shared infrastructure for multi-domain data fusion, and greater investment in AI integration, are consistent with the UK’s commitments. But the leeway for error is shrinking. The competition is not only in sensors and weapons, but in networks, latency, and the ability to trust machine outputs in real time.

As command and control absorbs more machine-generated judgment, the question of assurance becomes unavoidable. C2 systems are no longer neutral conduits of information, but proactive participants in how risk is surfaced, constrained, or passed through. If commanders are to remain accountable at machine speed, they must be able to view not just what the system recommends, but how, why, and with what confidence. Assurance is no longer a compliance function; it is a command requirement.

Assurance: Governing Trust at Machine Speed

In competition with an entity that is willing to trade assurance for speed, the role of assurance becomes decisive. It is the mechanism that allows commanders to operate at machine speed without surrendering responsibility. In an AI-enabled force, assurance defines what can be trusted, when it can be trusted, and under what conditions human assessment must intervene. Without it, faster decision cycles simply accelerate uncertainty rather than control it.

Traditionally, assurance in defence has been treated as a pre-deployment activity: validation, testing, certification, and compliance conducted long before systems encounter operational pressure. That model breaks down in environments where algorithms learn, data shifts, and autonomous behaviours adapt in real time. In contrast to China’s apparent comfort with machine-led tempo and risk absorption, Western navies remain accountable for decisions made at speed. That accountability cannot be deferred to process or policy.

For naval commanders, assurance must therefore be visible and actionable at the point of command. AI-enabled systems need to expose confidence levels, uncertainty intervals, and decision rationale in ways which match how operators think and act under pressure. A recommendation that is delivered quickly but without context is not an advantage; it is a liability. Trust at machine speed depends on legibility, not just performance.

This places new demands on both system design and command culture. Assurance frameworks have to be embedded into combat management systems and C2 architectures, not bolted on as audit tools. Operators must be trained not only to use AI outputs, but to question them, override them, and understand their failure modes. Commanders, in turn, must retain clear authority over when machine judgment is accepted and when human decision prevails.

The implication for navies facing China’s autonomy model is practical rather than philosophical. Speed alone is not enough. Advantage will belong to forces that can combine autonomy with control, machine recommendation with assured command, and invention with accountability. That is not a technology problem. It is a force design and leadership problem.

Keeping Ahead: The RN’s Next Moves

For the Royal Navy, maintaining an edge in an autonomy-driven competition will depend less on matching China platform for platform, and more on how quickly autonomy, TEWA, command, and assurance are fused into a coherent operational system. The challenge is no longer proving that AI and uncrewed systems work, but combining them in ways that preserve command authority, accelerate decision-making, and remain credible under active operational pressure.

But keeping ahead demands more than experimentation. It requires red teaming the red edge. Understanding how the PLAN fights with autonomy, how it views risk, and how it deploys mass without people is now essential.

The Royal Navy’s task is therefore not to chase autonomy for its own sake, but to shape how it is used. Success will depend on accelerating experimentation, embedding assurance into command systems, and training commanders to operate confidently alongside machine judgment. In a competition defined by speed and scale, the RN’s advantage will come from integration, restraint, and the ability to turn autonomy into a controllable source of operational leverage.

Closing Thought

No single platform defines China’s approach to naval autonomy. Still, it is defined by the speed, scale, and confidence with which it is willing to integrate machines into the fabric of command. Vessels like Zhu Hai Yun are signals, not anomalies, pointing to a future in which decision tempo, persistence, and system-level coordination matter more than individual hulls or weapons.

For Western navies, the response cannot be to uncritically mirror that model. The competitive advantage lies elsewhere. It lies in the ability to combine autonomy with control, speed with judgment, and inventiveness with accountability.

In an AI-enabled battlespace, credibility is not judged by how fast machines can act, but by how confidently humans can command them.

The future fight will not be decided by who fields the most autonomous systems, but by who governs them best.

Standfirst

The Royal Navy enters the second half of the 2020s at a moment of profound strain and transition. A new First Sea Lord inherits a Service grappling simultaneously with material exhaustion, personnel pressure and a rapidly shifting strategic environment. These are not abstract challenges but immediate, compounding ones that shape every discussion about the future of the fleet.

The surface force is under acute stress. The Type 23 frigates are operating well beyond their original design life, and difficult decisions loom over how many hulls can safely remain at sea. The regeneration of the Type 45 destroyers continues. While these ships have now been operationally proven, they are entering early middle age, carrying an ever greater share of the fleet’s air defence burden. Against this backdrop, Type 26 and Type 31 cannot arrive quickly enough. Their delayed entry into service has left capability gaps that are being filled only through increasing risk acceptance and ingenuity at the deckplate level.

The Submarine Service, central to the Royal Navy’s identity and deterrent posture, faces its own pressures. While regeneration is underway after a difficult period, extended six-month or longer patrols place an unsustainable strain on crews. Continuous At-Sea Deterrence remains unbroken after nearly six decades. Still, without urgent action to stabilise personnel tempo and retention, there is a real risk that the human foundations of CASD will erode, even if the platforms themselves endure.

There is also a morale and identity challenge. The Royal Marines, long a defining component of British maritime power, have at times felt marginalised during years when amphibious shipping was drawn down, and the Corps was employed primarily as light infantry ashore. That perception may be unfair, but it reflects a period in which amphibious ambition was sacrificed to preserve other headline capabilities. What is now required is a credible and properly funded vision that places the Corps at the heart of the future Navy. The Future Commando Force offers that vision: a highly skilled maritime raiding force, able to conduct specialist operations, operate in the High North and integrate with allies. Delivering it, however, demands ships, insertion craft and sustained investment, including the proposed Multi Role Strike Ship.

It is against this backdrop of ageing platforms, stretched people and unresolved strategic trade-offs that the UK’s carrier force and wider fleet architecture must be reassessed. The question is not whether the Royal Navy should remain ambitious, but how it can align ambition with sustainability. With a new First Sea Lord facing the Strategic Defence Review, likely fiscal constraint and decisions on the next generation of platforms, including Type 83 and MRSS, the choices made in the coming years will shape the Service for decades.

The carrier bet and the world it assumed

For much of the past 20 years, the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers and the F-35B have been framed as the centrepiece of British maritime power. They signalled global reach, alliance credibility, and continued relevance at the top table of Western defence. In strategic terms, they embodied a bet made in the early 2000s: that the UK would continue to operate primarily as an expeditionary power, projecting air power at distance in permissive or semi-permissive environments, anchored within a stable US-led security architecture. This strategic gamble involved significant investments, with the construction costs for the two carriers alone exceeding £6 billion. Each carrier requires an escort fleet consisting of at least two destroyers, two frigates, and a submarine, depending on mission requirements. Additionally, operational costs have been substantial, with annual expenses running into hundreds of millions to maintain these impressive vessels and support systems. These figures underscore the high stakes involved in the UK’s commitment to this carrier-centric approach.

The strategic weather has changed. The contemporary maritime environment is now shaped by significant technological advancements, most notably the development of long-range precision-strike capabilities, the proliferation of autonomous drones, and the growing importance of undersea infrastructure. These technologies have disrupted traditional power dynamics, reducing the reliance on uncontested deck cycles and increasing the complexity of logistics in contested environments. Carrier aviation remains influential, but these shifts mean it no longer holds the centre of gravity in maritime competition. This is not an argument against carriers. It is an argument against designing the fleet around them.

Carrier air power in a software-defined war

Modern carrier aviation is now as much about code as it is about steel and jet fuel. Fifth-generation aircraft rely on mission data files, software updates, sensor fusion, and networked kill chains. The aircraft itself is a node within a wider digital ecosystem that spans sensors, satellites, networks, and decision-support systems. Imagine a scenario where, during a critical mission, a vital mission-data file is suddenly corrupted. As the aircraft approaches its target, it loses access to real-time sensor updates and accurate threat assessments. The pilot faces a choice between blindly executing the mission or aborting, with no decision-support system to guide action in hostile airspace. This vignette illustrates how the reliability of software profoundly impacts mission success, embedding technical risk in human terms.

This creates three structural tensions for medium naval powers. First, the sovereignty of function becomes blurred. Operational effectiveness increasingly depends on access to software pipelines and data libraries beyond national control. Second, sustainability and mass are constrained. Exquisite platforms concentrate combat power, but in an era of drone swarms and missile salvos, concentration also creates fragility. A meaningful metric for quantifying this fragility is the ‘missiles-per-sortie’ ratio for carriers compared to the endurance and distribution capabilities of autonomous drone systems. This highlights how the concentration of power can lead to vulnerability. Third, people and logistics dominate outcomes. Carrier strike groups are manpower-intensive and escort-hungry, absorbing scarce skills and sustainment capacity in navies already under pressure.

None of this renders carrier aviation obsolete. It does, however, challenge the assumption that carrier strike should remain the organising logic of maritime power.

The strategic mismatch: where the UK is most exposed

The Queen Elizabeth class was conceived in a world shaped by expeditionary operations and coalition air dominance. The emerging reality is one of persistent grey-zone pressure in the North Atlantic and High North, renewed undersea competition, and the re-militarisation of logistics and reinforcement routes. In this environment, the UK’s most consequential maritime vulnerabilities sit closer to home than the Indo-Pacific.

To understand the strategic realignment, one must consider the hierarchy of the UK’s maritime interests. At the top is the defence of the homeland, ensuring the UK’s security and economic stability. Closely following are alliance commitments, particularly within NATO, which underscore the importance of the North Atlantic as a buffer zone and critical reinforcement route. Global presence and engagement, while vital for broader diplomatic and economic interests, have become secondary to these more immediate concerns. This prioritisation explains why the North Atlantic now tops the list of maritime priorities, underscoring the need for an agile and capable force structure to address regional vulnerabilities effectively.

Toward an Atlantic Bastion fleet

If the organising principle of the fleet shifts from expeditionary prestige to regional maritime resilience, its structure changes accordingly. To guide this transformation, a strategic litmus test could be posed for every fleet decision: “Does this platform increase North Atlantic persistence?” This question ensures that each procurement decision aligns with the overarching aim of enhancing the regional resilience and operational sustainability of the fleet.

A home-first, Atlantic Bastion fleet would be built around a dense ASW spine centred on the Royal Navy’s Type 26 frigates, operating alongside maritime patrol aircraft and embarked helicopters, and integrated with allied forces in the High North. This includes the developing UK–Norway ASW partnership, in which Type 26-class ships form a core element of a joint undersea deterrence posture in the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea. A key aspect of this partnership is the establishment of coordinated patrol patterns, allowing for seamless shifts between UK and Norwegian assets to ensure continuous surveillance and rapid response capabilities. Shared data pipelines are utilised for real-time threat assessments, demonstrating the operational benefits of integrated intelligence efforts. This ASW layer is complemented by the attack submarine force, which provides the decisive subsurface element of deterrence, persistent intelligence collection and the ability to hold adversary undersea forces at risk.

Protecting this manoeuvre space requires a credible air and missile defence shield, anchored today by the Type 45 destroyers and, over time, by their successor class. In an Atlantic Bastion construct, air defence ships are no longer defined primarily as carrier escorts. They become guardians of logistics, reinforcement routes, seabed warfare units and critical maritime nodes in the UK approaches and wider North Atlantic, reflecting the growing importance of defending sustainment networks against missiles and drones.

Alongside ASW and air defence, there is a standing requirement for dedicated forces for seabed warfare and infrastructure protection. Undersea cables, pipelines and offshore energy assets are strategic targets in their own right. Persistent monitoring, inspection, repair support and counter-sabotage capability therefore become core maritime missions, supported by unmanned underwater systems and specialist platforms operating under the protective umbrella of the wider Bastion force.

Sustaining this posture elevates the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) from a background enabler to a central component of maritime deterrence. Fuel, ammunition, spares and forward repair capacity become contested assets in their own right. In an Atlantic Bastion construct, RFA vessels are treated as protected high-value units, integrated into air and missile defence planning and escorted as part of the deterrence architecture. By conceptualising RFA ships as ‘moving nodes’ within the Bastion’s kill chain, their deterrent value is augmented. Visualising these auxiliaries not merely as support but as vital targets that require defence fundamentally reframes their role. Without resilient logistics, the Bastion concept collapses into rhetoric.

Differentiated surface combatants and a realistic transition

Within this architecture, surface combatants are no longer treated as interchangeable “general purpose” hulls. They are differentiated by role into a broader system of systems.

The first tranche of Type 31 frigates provides a bridge into this model. In the near term, Batch 1 Type 31s are well suited to overseas presence and maritime security tasks, sustaining UK commitments in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Guinea, and the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, higher-end escorts tend to operate closer to home. As the fleet evolves, these hulls need not be discarded. They can be re-roled into Atlantic Bastion enabler functions, with the transition expected to commence in 2030. This timeline aligns with strategic reprioritisation efforts.

Future Navy proposes introducing new Batch 2 Type 31s by 2030, redesigned around lean crewing, high automation, and modular mission payloads, drawing on the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force’s Mogami-class approach. This batch will provide a more sustainable answer, optimised for endurance, aviation operations, boat handling, disaster response, and partnership missions. It will effectively replace OPVs for overseas presence while consuming far less high-end workforce than a traditional frigate.

In this role, Type 31 Batch 1 acts as a mothership for unmanned systems, extending ISR coverage through embarked UAVs and USVs, providing communications relay, supporting seabed warfare and mine countermeasures units, and responding to grey-zone activity in the North Atlantic and UK approaches. This exploits their mission bay, aviation facilities and growth margin without attempting to turn them into surrogate ASW or air defence specialists.

Crucially, the overseas presence burden should not remain permanently tied to these hulls. A reworked Type 31 Batch 2, redesigned around lean crewing, high automation and modular mission payloads, drawing on the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force’s Mogami-class approach, would provide a more sustainable answer. Optimised for endurance, aviation operations, boat handling, disaster response and partnership missions, this Batch 2 variant would effectively replace OPVs for overseas presence while consuming far less high-end workforce than a traditional frigate.

People, skills and the digital backbone

This fleet architecture is only viable if matched by parallel investment in crews, skills and digital infrastructure. Crewing and specialist skill gaps already constrain surface fleet availability. Autonomous systems, seabed warfare and networked air and missile defence are software-intensive capabilities that demand digital fluency as much as traditional seamanship.

Here, digital twins and AI-enabled decision support, including the emerging concept of an “AI shipmate”, become enabling infrastructure rather than optional innovation. Digital twins can support predictive maintenance, remote diagnostics and training at scale, reducing the operational burden on crews and increasing platform availability. AI-assisted advisory tools can augment watchkeepers and command teams under cognitive load, improving decision quality while preserving human authority.

In a leaner-manned future fleet, these tools are about enabling fewer people to operate more complex systems safely and sustainably, not replacing them. However, before deploying an “AI shipmate”, commanders must critically consider the ethical implications of AI decisions. A key question is: how can command structures ensure accountability for actions taken by AI systems within the chain of command?

Addressing such governance challenges now is crucial to pre-empt future resistance and uphold operational integrity.

Closing thought: from prestige to persistence

Ultimately, this is a question of prioritisation, not aspiration. The fleet architecture outlined here is not cost-neutral, but it is more strategically coherent with the threats the UK now faces. Moving to a single operational carrier, with the second hull held in extended readiness for training, trials and contingency, would free substantial resources across crews, escorts, sustainment, munitions and refit budgets. Those resources could be reinvested into the unglamorous but decisive enablers of maritime power: ASW mass, air and missile defence capacity, seabed warfare and infrastructure protection forces, autonomous mine countermeasures, resilient logistics through the RFA, and the digital backbone needed to make a leaner fleet viable.

Over the past two decades, smartphones have evolved from simple communications devices into software-defined platforms that now shape how business, media and everyday life function. Warships, by contrast, have remained structurally similar floating airfields and escorts, even as the battlespace around them has been transformed by autonomy, software and contested networks. The strategic choice for the UK is not whether it can still project power episodically at a distance, but whether it can adapt its maritime force design to the same pace of change. In an era of contested home waters, undersea vulnerability and logistics warfare, the scarcest commodity is not prestige, but persistence.

Imagine a typical day at sea in 2030 under the ‘persistence over prestige’ paradigm. The Royal Navy’s ships move silently through the North Atlantic, their sleek hulls equipped with advanced autonomous systems that scan the depths for undersea threats and potential hazards. A Type 26 frigate, leading a coordinated patrol mission, works seamlessly with the UK–Norway ASW partnership, sharing real-time data through a secure digital backbone.

Overhead, drones patrol the skies, communicating with a Type 31 frigate acting as a mothership to enhance surveillance and logistical support. Meanwhile, the crew aboard monitors massive data streams, supported by AI-enabled advisory systems, ensuring optimal decision-making. Across the fleet, every ship functions as a critical node in a vast, responsive security network, painting a vivid picture of a maritime force focused on resilience and adaptability.

That is a Future Navy at work!

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The idea of the battleship never quite disappears.

When strategic confidence weakens and uncertainty grows, large visible platforms regain their appeal. They are legible expressions of power. They suggest endurance, resolve, and mass in ways that distributed systems and software-defined forces struggle to communicate.

So take the idea seriously.

Assume a modern US battleship is built. Not a nostalgic replica, but a contemporary capital ship. Large displacement. Deep missile magazines. Extensive command facilities. Significant electrical margin. Designed to be the most formidable surface combatant afloat.

The interesting question is not whether it would be powerful. The question is how it would actually be used once physics, geography, and adversary behaviour are allowed to speak.

The governing constraint: ASW, noise, and detectability

Every discussion of large surface combatants eventually arrives here.

Big ships are noisy in multiple dimensions. Acoustically, they displace and disturb vast volumes of water. Electromagnetically, they radiate to support sensor, network, and command functions. Logistically, they generate predictable replenishment patterns. Operationally, they demand escorts that themselves create detectable movement.

In modern naval warfare, particularly in the North Atlantic and Western Pacific, anti-submarine warfare and persistent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance shape the battlespace before any missile is fired. Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) is the network of sensors, platforms, and analysis that allows a force to see, track, and understand an adversary continuously, often long before any weapon is used.

This imposes an immediate and unavoidable consequence.

A battleship cannot operate as a forward, leading platform in contested waters without becoming the dominant acoustic and targeting feature of the operating area.

That single fact forces a doctrinal shift. The ship must operate behind an outer ASW and ISR screen, with quieter, more expendable, and more numerous platforms forward. Its role becomes dependent rather than leading.

This is not a critique. It is the starting condition for everything that follows.

What the ship becomes in practice

Once pushed back by ASW and detectability realities, the battleship settles into a narrower but coherent role set.

A rear-area missile magazine

Deep magazines matter most when sustained fires are required over time. The ship becomes a source of volume, not immediacy. It delivers the weight of fire based on the targeting provided by others.

A command and integration node

Large hulls buy space, power, and people. In complex operations, this matters. The ship can host joint, coalition, and multi-domain coordination without displacing other mission sets.

A political and strategic signal

Visibility is not incidental. The ship is a powerful ship. That signalling value reassures allies and deters adversaries, but it also raises the political cost of loss or damage.

• Each of these roles is valid.

• Each also increases reliance on the surrounding force.

Scenario 1: Caribbean and Venezuela-style pressure operations

In a sanctions-enforcement or regional-coercion scenario, the battleship operates in its most forgiving environment.

Threat levels are limited. Sea space is manageable. The mission is endurance, coordination, and presence rather than high-end combat.

Here, the ship functions as:

• A joint and interagency command platform

• A visible anchor for sustained US presence.

• A defensive air and ISR coordination hub

Escort requirements remain modest:

• One air-defence destroyer for redundancy and layered coverage

• One multi-role frigate for surface and limited subsurface awareness

• Subsurface assets are available but not permanently attached.

• Heavy reliance on aviation and Coast Guard integration

In this environment, the ship appears effective. Nothing fundamentally challenges its survivability. Nothing forces difficult trade-offs.

This matters because success in permissive environments often disguises fragility in contested ones.

Scenario 2: North Atlantic deterrence and reinforcement

Move the same ship into the North Atlantic, and the logic tightens sharply. This is a battlespace dominated by submarines, long-range strike systems, weather, and distance. The ship’s size no longer reassures itself. It attracts attention.

ASW reality becomes the governing factor.

To avoid becoming the dominant acoustic contact, the ship must remain behind a layered screen. That screen is not optional. To operate credibly, the battleship now requires:

• Two submarines in support, one forward on the threat axis and one manoeuvring

• At least two dedicated air-defence escorts to manage long-range strike risk

• Continuous ASW frigate coverage with towed arrays

• Secure and survivable replenishment at sea

At this point, the ship’s contribution is real. It adds missile depth, command capacity, and endurance.

It also consumes a disproportionate share of escort capacity.

The trade-off is structural. Every escort committed to protecting the battleship is an escort not available for distributed ASW, convoy protection, or independent tasking.

Scenario 3: Taiwan and sustained grey-zone pressure

This is the most demanding environment and the clearest stress test. A Taiwan harassment campaign is not about a decisive battle. It is about shaping behaviour through pressure, ambiguity, and persistence. The opposing system, led by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, integrates space, cyber, air, surface, subsurface, and information effects.

In this environment, being continuously tracked is more damaging than being attacked.

A battleship’s size, emissions, and escort footprint make concealment impossible. Its movements would be catalogued. Its logistics are mapped. Its presence normalised. Operationally, it could only operate well east of Taiwan, outside the first island chain, as a rear-area command and missile node.

Even there, survivability demands escalate:

• Three or more dedicated air-defence destroyers

• Multiple submarines operating forward and on the flanks

• Dense unmanned decoy and ISR layers

• Continuous logistics protection

China would not need to strike the ship. Demonstrating that it can be tracked, shadowed, and pressured would be sufficient to constrain its use.

In a grey-zone campaign, a platform that cannot be risked forward becomes a tool of reassurance rather than leverage.

Sustainment, tempo, and the hidden cost of mass

Beyond combat survivability lies a quieter constraint: sustainment. Large ships burn readiness quickly. They demand maintenance windows, crew depth, and industrial support. Their escorts do the same. High-tempo deployment of a capital ship, therefore, pulls disproportionately on fleet readiness.

This matters because modern competition is about time on station and persistence, not short surges of power.

A force that looks formidable on day one but cannot be sustained at scale becomes predictable and therefore manageable by an adversary.

The force-structure question

Across all scenarios, a consistent pattern emerges.

The battleship is never just a ship.

It is a system anchor that pulls escorts, submarines, logistics, ISR, and political attention towards itself. Where the threat is low, this looks acceptable. Where the threat is intelligent and persistent, it becomes constraining.

None of this invalidates the concept. But it does mean the ship’s value cannot be judged solely by its capabilities. It must be judged by what the wider force can afford to provide around it, repeatedly, under pressure, and without distorting everything else.

A final observation

Large platforms do not fail because they are weak. They fail when the system around them cannot support them without becoming brittle.

• If such a ship were built, it would be powerful.

• It would also be demanding.

What that trade-off is worth is left deliberately unanswered.

Two Royal Navy stories, published within days of each other, tell us far more about the future of naval warfare than any single technology announcement ever could.

In the first, the Royal Navy demonstrated a helicopter taking control of multiple uncrewed aircraft in flight. A crewed platform acting as the airborne command node for drones, extending reach, persistence, and awareness well beyond what one aircraft could achieve alone.

In the second, a naval aviator was recognised for cat-like reactions that saved a £2.5 million uncrewed helicopter from destruction.

Read together, these are not competing narratives. They are a single, coherent story about where naval autonomy is actually heading, and why the human role is becoming more important, not less.

We have been here before. This is what AI Shipmate was always about.

Across Future Navy, and particularly in the AI Shipmate work, the argument has never been that artificial intelligence or autonomy replaces sailors.

The argument has been that it changes where human judgment sits.

• AI Shipmate was framed as a staff officer, not a captain.

• A system that filters, prioritises, and proposes.

• Never one that commands.

What we are now seeing at sea is that philosophy made real.

In the helicopter drone trial, autonomy handled extension. As the drones fanned out across the horizon, the crew could see on their displays a mosaic of feeds, each depicting a different angle of the expansive battlespace. It widened the sensor net, stayed airborne longer, and absorbed risk. But intent, authority, and judgment stayed with the crew.

In the recovery of the uncrewed helicopter, AI was irrelevant. The decisive moment was human perception, experience, and instinct under pressure.

That is human–machine teaming done properly.

Assurance is not a paperwork exercise. It is lived on the flight deck.

Much of the debate around autonomy and AI assurance quickly becomes abstract. Frameworks, governance models, and ethical checklists. Those matter, but assurance ultimately lives at the sharp end.

A system is trusted because:

• Operators understand what it can and cannot do.

• They know when it will hand back control.

• They believe they can intervene decisively when things go wrong.

The second story is, in many ways, an assurance success story. For instance, the operator reacted within approximately 5 seconds, saving the aircraft from descending by a critical 200 feet. This quick response time illustrates how preparedness can directly translate into saved assets.

A sailor trusted the system enough to operate it. They also trusted themselves enough to override it.
And the organisation recognised that intervention was a skill, not failure.

That is precisely the balance AI Shipmate argued for. Machines operate at machine speed. Humans retain responsibility. When autonomy falters, the human is not surprised, sidelined, or locked out. They are ready.

This is how trust is built in real fleets, not just in policy documents.

The myth that autonomy is about fewer people

There remains a persistent belief, often outside the naval profession, that autonomy is primarily a tool for workforce reduction. But we must ask: What price do we pay when no sailor is on hand to intervene? It’s an attractive idea for spreadsheets, promising savings and efficiency. Yet it is a dangerous one in operations.

Autonomy compresses time and expands space. It allows a single platform to sense, influence, and persist across a much wider battlespace. But that amplification raises the cost of error. When systems become more interconnected, the consequences of a bad decision escalate faster.

This does not diminish the need for people. In fact, it increases the need for better-prepared individuals. The sailor who saved the uncrewed helicopter did not just save an asset. They preserved confidence in the wider autonomous system. That confidence is fragile. Lose it, and autonomy stops being used, no matter how advanced it is.

Command is a scarce skill in an autonomous fleet. One of the quiet but profound aspects of the helicopter trial is what it says about command. The crewed aircraft was not just another sensor. It was the authority node, deciding how the drones were employed, when they mattered, and when risk was acceptable. This contrasts sharply with commercial applications like package delivery drones, which can simply reroute orders when necessary. In military scenarios, a command decision might mean adjusting rules of engagement, carrying significant consequences for missions and lives. This reinforces a theme that runs through your Future Navy work.

In future fleets:

• Sensors will be plentiful.

• Autonomous effects will be cheap.

• Data will be abundant.

What will remain scarce is what we can call ‘interpretive command judgment.’ This ability to interpret intent, balance mission against risk, and take responsibility when machines act at speed will define professional mastery. That skill cannot be automated away.

If anything, autonomy concentrates responsibility upward and inward. Fewer hands on controls, more weight on each decision.

Why this matters for the future fleet

The Royal Navy of the next decade, by 2032, will be leaner in hulls and aircraft, but broader in reach.

It will rely on:

• Crewed platforms as command hubs

• Uncrewed systems for mass and persistence

• AI to manage tempo and complexity.

But none of that works if assurance is treated as an afterthought or autonomy is sold as a replacement. To truly convince a sceptical admiral that assurance is “baked in” rather than bolted on, one might ask: What single indicator would demonstrate this level of integration? This reflection invites us all to consider how to make assurance an inherent part of the process.

These two stories show a healthier path.

• Autonomy as augmentation.

• AI as staff work.

Humans as accountable decision-makers. “Standing on the flight deck, I know that every decision I make could change the outcome,” says a flight-deck sailor, underscoring the personal responsibility and emotional investment present in every mission.

That is not resistance to change. It is how change succeeds.

The real lesson

The future of naval warfare is not human versus machine. It is human plus machine, with responsibility staying firmly where it belongs. Autonomy did not save that drone, a sailor did.

And the more autonomous the fleet becomes, the more decisive that sailor will need to be. That is not a problem to solve. It is the point.

Future Navy usually focuses on AI, digital command systems, and the emerging technologies reshaping maritime operations. But the world is changing faster than the platforms we build. No amount of future technology will matter if we do not have the sovereign industrial base, political will, and strategic freedom to build, crew, and sustain a fighting fleet. At sea, autonomy begins not with algorithms, but with steel, supply chains, and national choices.

That reality has been sharpened recently by a sobering intervention from the Royal United Services Institute. In a newly released Global Security Briefing, former Deputy Prime Minister Sir David Lidington made clear that the risk facing Europe is no longer hypothetical. The United States is shifting its centre of gravity toward the Indo‑Pacific, and European security is no longer guaranteed to sit at the top of Washington’s priority list. This is not just about Donald Trump or one electoral cycle. It is about a structural change in how the United States views its global obligations.

The Greenland episode is emblematic rather than exceptional. When access, leverage, and sovereignty become bargaining tools within an alliance, dependence stops being a convenience and becomes a liability. As senior figures now acknowledge openly, Europe and the UK may need a decade to replace capabilities that the United States currently provides as a matter of course. The uncomfortable truth is that we have not started that clock seriously enough.

Against that backdrop, this piece is a deliberate step away from the usual Future Navy focus on AI‑enabled command, autonomous systems, and digital transformation. Those things matter. But they rest on foundations that are far weaker than we like to admit. The question is no longer whether advanced technology can transform naval warfare. It is whether Britain retains the freedom to deploy and sustain power at sea without permission.

1. A Nuclear Deterrent Tied to Washington

We can repeat the phrase “independent nuclear deterrent” as often as we like, but operational reality tells a different story. Britain’s Trident missiles are leased from a United States stockpile. They are maintained, refurbished, and stored at Kings Bay in Georgia. Our warheads are designed to fit U.S. missile bodies and rely on shared technical standards. Guidance, targeting data, and satellite dependencies are inseparable from American infrastructure.

The system only works because Washington allows it to work. That is not independence. It is a political dependency that we have chosen to normalise. In most scenarios, it is stable. In a world of transactional alliances, it is also a strategic vulnerability. No other core element of British defence is so exposed to the policy choices of another state, yet it remains largely undiscussed in public.

2. Warships Powered by Foreign Code

Modern Royal Navy warships are digital platforms as much as steel hulls. Combat systems, navigation, engineering control, and logistics increasingly sit on commercial software stacks. In practice, that means Microsoft operating systems, VMware virtualised environments, and U.S.-controlled licensing and update regimes.

This is not a theoretical cyber debate. Imagine a carrier or amphibious group operating under heightened tension in the North Atlantic or Baltic, while access to U.S.-controlled GPS correction services, software updates, or secure cloud‑linked services is degraded or delayed. Navigation accuracy drops. Weapon alignment becomes less precise. Secure data exchange slows or fragments. The platform still floats, but its effectiveness erodes quickly.

These systems were adopted for speed and cost efficiency, not strategic resilience. Yet we have built no serious sovereign alternative, and little contingency planning for a future in which access is constrained by politics rather than adversaries.

3. A Shrinking, Ageing Fleet

The Royal Navy now operates with fewer than twenty escorts, and that headline number hides how many are actually available at any given moment. Type 23 frigates are beyond their intended service lives, kept going by skill and determination rather than margin. Type 45 destroyers have spent years in remediation for fundamental power and propulsion flaws.

New ships are coming, but far too slowly. The first Type 26 began construction in 2017 and will not be operational until the late 2020s. Type 31 is faster, but still does not close the gap created by retirements. In the meantime, commitments are met by stretching deployments, accepting risk, and quietly gapping tasks. This is not a strategy. It is a managed decline.

Why geography now matters again
This is not an abstract force‑planning issue. Last year, Future Navy examined the re‑emergence of the North Atlantic as a contested front line, stretching from the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap into the wider Atlantic. That analysis argued that Europe would increasingly be required to hold this space itself: monitor undersea cables, track submarine movements, and sustain deterrence long before U.S. reinforcements could arrive.

What has changed since then is not the geography, but the politics. The Atlantic Bastion concept assumed that allied solidarity would hold under pressure. Recent events suggest that the assumption now needs stress‑testing. If access, support, or reinforcement becomes conditional, the burden of early action falls squarely on European navies, including the Royal Navy, which is already stretched thin and structurally dependent.

4. An Industrial Base on Life Support

Strategic autonomy cannot exist without industrial resilience. In 2025, construction of vital Royal Fleet Auxiliary solid support ships nearly stalled because the yard could not afford steel. That should have triggered an alarm across the government. Instead, it was treated as an awkward procurement problem.

British shipbuilding today depends on a narrow set of yards, fragile supply chains, and intermittent political attention. Foreign ownership and emergency financing have become substitutes for long‑term planning. A serious maritime power does not discover its production limits in the middle of a crisis. We are discovering them in peacetime.

5. Patchwork Fixes Are Not a Strategy

The Royal Navy innovates: autonomy, modularity, digital experimentation. Yet these sit atop major structural weaknesses. Dependencies in deterrence, software, build rates, and industry can’t be solved by innovation alone.

The reality is, a single political shock—whether in Washington, the global economy, or a critical supplier—could cascade rapidly through these dependencies. That is not resilience. It is exposure.

6. What Needs to Change

• End strategic complacency. Defence planning must assume constrained U.S. support as a credible scenario, not an awkward hypothetical.

• Rebuild sovereign supply chains. Steel, propulsion, energetics, and critical components cannot be left to fragile commercial arrangements.

• Reduce software dependency. Sovereign or allied alternatives to U.S.‑controlled operating environments must become a funded priority, not an aspiration.

• Accelerate fleet renewal. Build rates must reflect strategic demand, not Treasury convenience.

• Be honest with the public. Sovereignty costs money. The illusion of independence is cheaper, but far more dangerous.

Final Word

This is not an argument against alliances or technology, but one for realism: if Europe and the United States continue to diverge strategically over the next decade, Britain’s current structure will limit its freedom of action at sea.

As a veteran, I served in a Navy that acknowledged limits and planned for them. Today, rhetoric about global influence masks dependence on what we do not control. Hulls, supply chains, and sovereignty are still vital.

Until we address this honestly, we risk a future navy that appears advanced but operates under someone else’s shadow.

Further reading

• Atlantic Bastion: Europe’s New Front Line — Future Navy analysis of the North Atlantic as a contested battlespace

• The Digital Ocean: Securing the Invisible Fleet — on undersea infrastructure, cables, and maritime resilience

• The Chain of Command Meets the Autonomous Ship — why AI and autonomy depend on trusted command and sovereign systems

• Can Europe build a credible nuclear deterrent without the US? — UK Defence Journal

Keywords: Royal Navy, strategic autonomy, defence resilience, Trident, shipbuilding, Atlantic Bastion, naval sovereignty, UK defence industry

A recent online article by a Royal Navy officer (link in further reading below) presents a well-argued and timely case for expanding synthetic training and wargaming across the Service. The article is well-sourced and clearly written, reflecting the standards of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre. In an earlier Future Navy post on Threat Evaluation and Weapon Assignment (TEWA), I looked at how machines help commanders decide what matters most in combat. This wargame item asks the harder question of what happens when those decisions are tested under pressure.

Much of the diagnosis is correct. The intent is right. The direction of travel aligns with what allied navies are already doing, and with what the First Sea Lord Gwyn Jenkins has been signalling publicly about preparedness, realism, and meeting the demands placed on today’s sailors.

This article deserves serious consideration. But it also stops short of saying the one thing that truly matters. The Royal Navy does not have a training problem. It has a credibility and risk-ownership problem.

Wargaming is important not only for skill development but also for revealing uncomfortable truths. This challenge has hindered its integration.

Where the original article is right

The original article gets three big things right.

• First, platform scarcity now shapes training opportunity rather than the other way around. That is an unavoidable reality.

• Second, the complexity of modern warfare has outpaced what can reliably be recreated at sea. Synthetic environments are no longer optional; they are essential.

• Third, wargaming and low-friction simulation develop judgment, intuition, and systems thinking in ways that lectures, checklists, and scripted exercises never will.

The recommendation to expand training beyond advanced simulators to include tabletop, paper, and commercially available wargames is particularly significant. This is where meaningful cultural change starts.

On these points, there should be broad agreement.

The quiet truth cannot quite state

The article does not fully address why wargaming is difficult to institutionalise. Wargaming challenges organisations not because of cost or complexity, but because it exposes underlying assumptions.

Effective wargames do more than train personnel. They reveal:

• Where force structure breaks

• Where mass is insufficient

• Where deterrence relies on availability that does not exist

• Where plans are sustained by hope rather than capability

This is why wargaming cultures often fail due to institutional resistance rather than lack of enthusiasm.

When career advancement relies on positive readiness reports and reassuring briefings, repeated honest wargaming is viewed as a risk rather than a benefit.

Project SPARTAN and the illusion of a solution

Project SPARTAN is described as a necessary, though delayed, solution. This assessment is accurate but incomplete.

Large, integrated synthetic environments tend to produce:

• Limited access

• Specialist ownership

• Event-based use

• Carefully curated outputs

They rarely drive daily cognitive change across the fleet.

• Wargaming culture is not created by platforms.

• It is established through permission.

Without explicit senior support for uncomfortable findings, SPARTAN risks being impressive rather than transformative.

The real blockers we need to name

If the Royal Navy is committed to progress, it must be honest about the true barriers.

Classification is often used as a safeguard. Most effective wargaming does not require highly sensitive intelligence, but rather plausible constraints, red teaming, and intellectual honesty.

Risk continues to be managed at lower levels. Junior officers are encouraged to innovate in theory, but they still face career risk. Behaviour will not change until senior leaders actively protect against failure in synthetic environments.

Participation is often mistaken for impact. Conducting a wargame is not equivalent to implementing its findings. Many uncomfortable insights are set aside because they have implications for force design.

Most importantly, wargaming is still viewed as an educational tool rather than a design process. Its true value lies in determining what should not be expected of personnel, not just improving current capabilities.

This discussion is largely avoided.

The real test is not just fighting.

There is a deeper test that wargaming must confront, and it goes beyond tactics, formations, or who wins the engagement.

It is whether our models of war still assume a linear, sequential fight.

In much Royal Navy training culture, including historically within Fleet Operational Sea Training, combat has often been framed as a progression. You fight. You take hits. You then transition to damage control. Weapons teams become damage control parties. The battle moves on.

While this logic appears straightforward in planning, it is inaccurate. In actual conflict, phases do not occur sequentially. My own experience, and that of many others who have been under fire, is that ships do not get the courtesy of finishing one problem before the next arrives. On HMS Ardent in the Falklands Conflict of 1982, there was no clean handover from fighting the enemy to fighting the ship. The crew had to do both at the same time, with shrinking manpower, failing systems, broken communications, and wounded people.

This distinction is critical when discussing wargaming. If a wargame assumes that a ship can:

• Absorb a hit

• Pause the fight

• Reassign weapons teams to damage control.

• Then re-enter the battle.

In this case, the wargame is not testing reality but maintaining a reassuring narrative.

Logistics, missiles, and the myth of endurance

The same problem applies to logistics and weapons. Too many games still assume:

• Missile stocks that are effectively infinite

• Replenishment that is timely and uncontested

• Platforms that remain fully mission-capable until decisively removed

Modern warfare does not operate in this manner.

A serious wargame must ask:

• What happens after the first wave of missile expenditure?

• How long can a task group fight once vertical launch cells are empty?

• What does deterrence look like when reloads are measured in weeks, not hours?

• What happens when logistics vessels are threatened or unavailable?

• How do degraded ships continue to fight while simultaneously keeping themselves afloat?

These are not rear-area logistics questions. They are warfighting questions at the point of contact, this is discussed in detail in this Future Navy post:

A Navy that does not accurately model missile depletion, spares exhaustion, crew fatigue, and damage control under fire is not preparing for war. It is conducting a theoretical exercise.

Why this matters for wargaming culture

At this point, wargaming becomes genuinely challenging. A properly constructed, junior-led, repeatable wargame should be allowed to conclude that:

• A ship still in the fight cannot spare people for damage control.

• A task group must disengage because it is out of missiles, not courage.

• A platform survives the hit but loses relevance because its sensors, power, or crew are degraded.

• Logistics failure ends the operation more decisively than enemy fire.

These outcomes are not failures; they are the purpose of the wargame. They are dismissed as unrealistic; the organisation is not protecting realism. It is protecting identity.

The credibility question

The Royal Navy’s credibility does not rest on whether it can win the opening exchange. It rests on whether it can:

• Sustain combat under attrition.

• Fight while damaged, not after damage

• Make hard choices about when ships withdraw.

• Admit where mass, logistics, and people are insufficient.

Wargaming is one of the few tools that can prompt these discussions early, cost-effectively, and transparently. However, this is only possible if logistics, missile stocks, and damage control are treated as decisive variables rather than background assumptions.

Saying the quiet part out loud

The original article is right to argue that wargaming and synthetic training matter. It is also, by necessity, right to frame them as enabling tools. However, what must now be stated clearly is this.

• Wargaming is not primarily about readiness, it is about honesty.

• It is about aligning ambition with resources, commitments with capacity, and rhetoric with reality.

• The Royal Navy does not need better synthetic environments to tell itself reassuring stories.

It requires repeatable, rigorous tools that compel honest assessment of what can and cannot be credibly deterred, defended, and sustained. Wargaming can do that.

However, this will only occur if we acknowledge that wargaming is not risk-free.

Further Reading

The Broadside

From virtual reality to victory

Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you wish for peace, prepare for war – has long been the motto of the Royal Navy, symbolising the power of force and deterrence in maintaining peace. This motto also implies that the members of the service should be trained and equipped for the struggles and dangers of conflict, …

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5 months ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · SLt Isaac Robinson RN

In 2026, the Royal Navy faces a period of strategic compression. Persistent challenges related to personnel, submarine availability, and surface escort numbers have shifted from abstract trends to immediate operational constraints. Simultaneously, the North Atlantic has transitioned from a stable rear area to an active strategic environment, influenced by Russian naval resurgence, vulnerabilities in undersea infrastructure, and increased volatility within the alliance.

The distinctiveness of the current moment arises not solely from Russian actions but from the erosion of foundational assumptions that have guided British and NATO maritime planning for decades. Recent United States rhetoric and policy signaling regarding Greenland and the Arctic have introduced significant strategic uncertainty within the alliance. This uncertainty now directly affects British maritime capabilities.

This analysis argues that the Royal Navy is facing a convergence of crises rather than a single challenge. Internal overstretch, limited submarine availability, and alliance volatility now interact in ways that reduce decision time and eliminate operational margins for error. The North Atlantic has shifted from a managed environment to a comprehensive stress test. The manner in which Britain responds in the next two to three years will determine its maritime relevance for decades.

The human constraint

In 2026, the primary constraint on British maritime power is not the quantity of vessels, but the availability of adequately trained personnel to operate them.

Recruitment levels remain structurally low. Recent data indicate that the Royal Navy is significantly underperforming its intake targets, with delays between application and basic training approaching 10 months. In a labor market that prioritizes speed and flexibility, such delays often prompt technically skilled candidates to leave the service for the private sector before they join.

While retention rates have shown modest improvement, supported by targeted financial incentives, these gains obscure underlying challenges. Specializations such as marine engineering, cyber, digital, and medical fields continue to experience significant strain as they compete with civilian industries that offer higher compensation, greater stability, and more predictable family life. Retention bonuses and pay supplements have provided temporary relief but have not addressed the root causes.

Consequently, the Royal Navy remains capable of deployment, but only by placing increasing demands on a diminishing pool of specialists. This situation is unsustainable. While ships and maintenance cycles can be extended, personnel cannot be stretched indefinitely.

In 2026, the central challenge for the Royal Navy is not the number of ships in its inventory, but the limited number of reliable crews it can generate.

The submarine competency cliff

This issue is most pronounced within the submarine service.

Maintaining continuous at-sea deterrence with an aging ballistic missile submarine fleet has enabled record-length patrols. While extended deployments have maintained deterrence, they have introduced high costs. Mental strain, family separation, and exhaustion have become structural features of the operational model rather than incidental side effects.

A further, more serious consequence is that extended maintenance periods and platform unavailability reduce operational time at sea for the broader submarine workforce. As a result, junior officers and engineers accumulate fewer operational hours, thereby eroding tacit knowledge. The instinctive judgment developed through repeated exposure becomes increasingly difficult to transmit.

An effective deterrent force relies not only on platforms but also on depth of experience. As this depth diminishes, the risk associated with succession increases. The primary danger is not immediate failure, but the gradual development of fragility—a force that appears operationally intact while its underlying resilience quietly erodes.

Simultaneously, attack submarine availability has declined to critically low levels. Although the existing submarines are highly capable, capability without availability does not constitute effective deterrence. With only a limited number of deployable submarines at any time, operational priorities such as protecting the deterrent, monitoring Russian activity, and securing undersea infrastructure increasingly compete rather than complement each other.

While the future deterrent is under development, the current deterrent is maintained primarily through endurance and professionalism. However, this approach does not equate to genuine resilience.

Surface fleet reality and the frigate gap

In 2026, the surface escort force is undergoing a period of fragile transition.

With older frigates retiring more rapidly than replacements are commissioned, fleet numbers have fallen below levels necessary to comfortably meet standing commitments. Maintenance cycles are extended, and availability has become unpredictable. Although official fleet totals remain unchanged, the actual deployable force is significantly reduced.

These developments have already altered British deployment patterns. Carrier strike groups continue to operate, but increasingly rely on multinational escort screens. While allied support is a core strength of NATO, dependence becomes a vulnerability when it transitions from reinforcement to substitution.

The central concern is not one of embarrassment or prestige, but rather the sovereignty of action. A navy unable to reliably protect its most valuable assets without external support must accept limitations on the timing, location, and manner of their deployment.

Britain retains the capacity for global operations, but increasingly faces challenges in doing so independently.

Type 31 and the limits of mass

The Type 31 frigate plays a central role in restoring the mass of the surface fleet. Its accelerated construction schedule will enable it to enter service more quickly than previous classes, a significant development.

However, the Type 31 is not a direct replacement for its predecessors. Its initial configuration emphasizes presence, partnership, and flexibility rather than high-end warfare. This design choice is legitimate, provided its limitations are clearly understood.

The Type 31 provides strategic value primarily when integrated into a broader network of sensors, allied forces, and decision-making systems. It enables more capable assets to focus on demanding tasks, reassures partners, and maintains presence. However, it does not serve as a substitute for anti-submarine warfare dominance.

The primary risk is not that the Type 31 is under-armed, but that its role may be misunderstood. Mischaracterizing such platforms as comprehensive war-fighting solutions can foster false confidence and lead to fragile operational plans.

Greenland and the alliance fracture

In 2026, the most destabilizing factor in the North Atlantic arises not from Moscow, but from alliance politics.

The United States’ emphasis on Greenland as a strategic asset reflects genuine concerns, including missile defense geometry, space surveillance, Arctic access, and undersea infrastructure. However, rhetoric and signaling are as consequential as intent. Publicly questioning sovereignty establishes significant precedents.

For NATO, these developments have profound implications. The alliance is predicated on the assumption that threats originate externally. When internal pressures arise, the foundational logic of collective defense is challenged.

For the United Kingdom, this dilemma is particularly acute. The UK is deeply integrated with American nuclear, naval, and technological systems, while also bound by treaty obligations and trust to European allies, including Denmark. A dispute over Greenland is not a hypothetical issue; it is situated directly across the GIUK gap, the principal maritime corridor of the North Atlantic.

For the first time since NATO’s establishment, British defense planners must consider partial strategic divergence within the alliance as a credible planning assumption rather than an improbable anomaly.

This situation does not necessarily indicate an alliance rupture, but it does introduce significant uncertainty. Such uncertainty fundamentally alters risk management requirements.

The GIUK gap and the undersea domain

The Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap has regained strategic relevance, not as a Cold War relic, but as a contemporary challenge involving sensors, infrastructure, and decision-making processes.

Russian submarines persistently test NATO’s capacity to detect, track, and respond. The presence of undersea data cables further increases the stakes. Disruptions below the threshold of armed conflict can impose substantial economic and political costs without provoking an immediate military response.

Detection, in isolation, does not constitute deterrence. A sensor barrier without the capacity for follow-on action only enhances situational awareness, not adversary behavior. Effective deterrence requires operational depth, persistence, and the demonstrated ability to impose costs when necessary.

Consequently, the North Atlantic should be viewed not as a single chokepoint, but as a layered battlespace. Surveillance, decision-making advantage, allied integration, and resilience have become more critical than the capabilities of any individual platform.

Northern integration as strategic adaptation

In response to limited force mass and increasing uncertainty, the Royal Navy has pursued deeper integration, and its partnership with Norway exemplifies this approach. Shared platforms, coordinated training, personnel exchanges, and common logistics generate operational depth unattainable by either navy independently. Interchangeability functions as a genuine force multiplier. It is a force multiplier.

A similar approach is evident in the air domain, where maritime patrol aircraft networks now function as collective systems rather than isolated national assets. This integration accelerates information flow, extends coverage, and reduces operational gaps.

This strategy does not replace sovereign capability, but compensates for its limitations. In an era of constrained resources and volatile alliances, achieving operational depth through integration is essential for survival.

Money, mass, and relative power

Although Britain’s defense spending is increasing in absolute terms, it is being surpassed in relative terms by other states.

Frontline NATO states are increasing their defense expenditures more rapidly, driven by geographic proximity and heightened threat perceptions. This dynamic has shifted the balance of relative influence. While Britain remains a leading contributor, it no longer sets the pace within the alliance.

Relative power is significant, as influence within alliances derives from tangible contributions as well as strategic intent. A navy that diminishes in comparison to its peers risks becoming a specialist adjunct rather than a central actor.

Ambition that is not matched by sufficient force mass ultimately results in rhetorical gaps, which have now become apparent.

Conclusion: a narrowing margin

In 2026, the Royal Navy remains professional, adaptable, and globally engaged. Personnel continue to perform under significant strain, future platforms are in development, and alliances remain robust.

However, the operational margin has significantly narrowed.

Personnel fragility, submarine overstretch, surface fleet transition, and alliance uncertainty are no longer isolated issues. They reinforce each other. Together, they compress time and remove slack from the system.

Professionalism cannot serve as a long-term substitute for adequate capacity. Endurance is not a replacement for resilience, and alliance cohesion can no longer be taken for granted.

The security of the North Atlantic can no longer be assumed; it is currently undergoing significant testing.

How Britain chooses to manage people, integrate allies, and confront uncomfortable assumptions in the next few years will determine whether the Royal Navy remains a central guarantor of Atlantic security, or a highly professional force operating permanently at the edge of its limits.

Moscow’s Perspective: The Bastion as a Planning Constraint Rather Than a Barrier

The Atlantic Bastion is one of the most consequential maritime ideas to emerge from the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review. In British and NATO discourse, it is framed as a layered anti-submarine warfare construct: a network of sensors, uncrewed systems, aircraft, surface combatants, and submarines designed to restore undersea awareness across the North Atlantic, protect the UK’s deterrent, and secure critical seabed infrastructure.

While this framing is accurate, it remains incomplete.

From the Russian perspective, the Atlantic Bastion is neither an impenetrable barrier nor a significant deterrent. Instead, it is viewed as a planning constraint—a system that complicates operational timelines, exposes strategic intent, and necessitates early decision-making, but does not yet restrict freedom of action. Recognising this distinction is important, as maritime deterrence has historically focused on shaping adversary behaviour under pressure rather than achieving complete impermeability.

How Russia Thinks About the Atlantic

Russian naval strategy does not treat the Atlantic as a symmetrical battlespace. It divides the maritime domain into functional zones: coastal defence, near seas, far seas, and the global ocean. The North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea sit firmly in the far seas category, where Russia does not expect to achieve sea control. Instead, its objective is temporary sea denial and disruption.

In Russian doctrine, the navy does not need to win decisively. It needs to not lose quickly. Time, distraction, and escalation leverage are success metrics.

This logic informs Moscow’s assessment of the Atlantic Bastion. Rather than viewing it as a permanent barrier, Russian strategists interpret it as an effort to restore Western undersea transparency in a region Russia considers inherently contested.

Detection Is Assumed, Not Feared

A core Western assumption is that persistent detection contributes directly to deterrence. Russian planners do not fully share that belief.

Detection in the Norwegian Sea is already anticipated. During the Cold War, Soviet submariners expected detection at maritime choke points and planned their operations accordingly. This mindset endures. From Moscow’s perspective, early detection is tolerable if it compels NATO to deploy limited high-end anti-submarine warfare (ASW) assets prematurely, diverts US and UK submarines away from other operational theatres, and increases ambiguity regarding which contacts constitute genuine threats.

In this context, the Atlantic Bastion generates as much operational noise as it does clarity. The proliferation of sensors results in more tracks, increased data volume, and a greater burden on command structures. Detection by itself does not deter; rather, it diverts attention and resources.

Surge Beats Persistence

Russian operational planning emphasises surge operations over sustained endurance. The primary objective is not indefinite stealth, but rather to exploit the initial phase of a crisis, when political hesitation, legal uncertainty, and escalation management limit Western responses.

This rationale underpins three probable Russian approaches: conducting a pre-hostility surge of Yasen-class SSGNs and SSNs into the Atlantic, employing speed and depth to evade continuous tracking, and disrupting NATO ASW forces by presenting multiple simultaneous operational dilemmas.

Consequently, the Atlantic Bastion is regarded as a temporary obstacle rather than a permanent barrier.

Arctic and Under-Ice Bypass

A prominent Russian countermeasure to a GIUK-focused Bastion is to circumvent it entirely.

Russia has made significant investments in Arctic under-ice operations. Recent Northern Fleet exercises have demonstrated long-range submerged transits beneath the ice cap, including strategic ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) movements from the Barents Sea to the Pacific. The Arctic is not considered a sanctuary, but rather a manoeuvring space.

If the Bastion remains geographically constrained, Russia can utilise the polar front as acoustic cover, thereby bypassing the Norwegian Sea sensor grid. For this reason, Russian planners consider a Norwegian Sea-centric Bastion predictable. In their assessment, operational depth is more significant than sensor density.

Bastion as Intelligence

An important and often overlooked consideration emerges. From Moscow’s perspective, the Atlantic Bastion is valuable not only for its operational effects but also for the intelligence it provides. It reveals areas where NATO’s presence is limited, identifies genuinely high-value assets, and highlights the West’s continued reliance on a small number of advanced platforms.

In effect, the Bastion functions as a diagnostic tool. It demonstrates how NATO operates under pressure, allocates resources, and transitions from detection to decision-making.

Where Russia Sees Weakness

Russian analysts acknowledge the significance of the Atlantic Bastion, yet they also recognise its limitations.

First, deterrence by denial alone is insufficient. Russian doctrine presumes that sea control is always temporary and contested. Deterrence by denial, if not accompanied by a credible threat of punishment, is considered incomplete. Second, the Bastion’s capacity for conventional punishment is limited. A system that detects but cannot impose costs is regarded as an early warning mechanism rather than a true deterrent. Russia anticipates Western reluctance to escalate from detection to destruction, especially below the threshold of open conflict.

Third, geographic compression presents a vulnerability. A Bastion concentrated on the Norwegian Sea is perceived as bypassable, predictable, and susceptible to saturation.

Grey-Zone Pressure and Seabed Warfare

The Atlantic Bastion encompasses more than just submarine operations.

Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research operates a fleet of specialist vessels and submersibles designed for seabed reconnaissance, cable tapping, and infrastructure sabotage. Recent activity around undersea pipelines and communications cables in the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea highlights this capability.

From Moscow’s perspective, seabed infrastructure represents a strategic pressure point. In a crisis, disruption need not be permanent; temporary cable outages, unexplained faults, or ambiguous damage can have significant political and economic effects without crossing explicit escalation thresholds.

Any Bastion that fails to incorporate seabed security into its core operational framework will remain incomplete.

What Actually Worries Moscow

The Atlantic Bastion poses a genuine destabilising threat to Russia only if three specific conditions are met.

• First, it gains depth. Extension eastward into the Barents Sea and westward into the deep Atlantic threatens surge logic rather than simply monitoring transit routes.

• Second, it integrates punishment. Russia’s deterrence calculus is shaped by fear of conventional precision strike, not sensors. Maritime strike platforms, loitering undersea effects, and naval mining held in reserve change the equation.

• Third, it survives escalation. Russia assumes Western systems will withdraw under legal, political, or commercial pressure during a crisis. A Bastion that remains active through the grey-to-war transition undermines that assumption.

At that stage, the Bastion transitions from a sensor network to an escalation management challenge for Russia.

What the UK and NATO Are Already Doing

This assessment should not be interpreted as an argument for inaction. The Atlantic Bastion did not develop in isolation and is not intended to function independently. It reflects a broader, coordinated shift in UK and NATO approaches to undersea control, escalation management, and resilience in the North Atlantic.

At the UK level, the Bastion sits alongside three important developments:

• First, the Royal Navy is reestablishing undersea awareness as a continuous peacetime activity rather than relying solely on surge responses. Persistent ASW patrols, P-8 operations from Lossiemouth, renewed SSN focus on the North Atlantic, and the early integration of uncrewed systems collectively indicate a posture intended to shape adversary behaviour well before the onset of crisis.

• Second, protecting seabed infrastructure has become an explicit military responsibility. UK–Norway agreements on pipeline and cable security, enhanced monitoring of suspicious vessels, and a more direct connection between ASW, maritime security, and economic resilience all reflect an understanding that undersea warfare now encompasses a broader range of activities beyond traditional torpedo engagements.

• Third, the Royal Navy is integrating sensing capabilities with command functions. The transition to shared digital infrastructure, the creation of a unified maritime operational picture, and the acceleration of decision support processes are intended not only to improve efficiency but also to ensure that detection leads to timely action at the political level, not merely at the tactical level.

At the NATO level, the picture is broader still.
The Alliance has decisively reclassified the Atlantic as a contested theatre rather than a secure rear area. Initiatives such as the Digital Ocean project, renewed NATO ASW barrier efforts, and the rapid integration of national sensor networks into a unified operational picture all support this shift. Exercises like Baltic Sentry and Atlantic-focused ASW serials are intentionally visible, serving both as demonstrations of capability and as strategic signals.

Importantly, NATO is revisiting the concept of deterrence by punishment at sea. Maritime strike capabilities, long-range fires, and the integration of non-US assets into Atlantic planning are now openly discussed. These elements are essential to maintaining credibility in an environment where Russian escalation logic differs fundamentally from NATO's.

While these measures do not guarantee success, they indicate that the Atlantic Bastion should be regarded as an initial step rather than a completed defensive architecture.

A Shifting Atlantic Context

The Atlantic Bastion is emerging at a moment of wider strategic flux. Recent US actions beyond the European theatre, and renewed attention on Greenland’s strategic position, underline that the Atlantic is no longer governed solely by alliance routine or predictable escalation norms. From Moscow’s perspective, these signals matter less for their specifics than for what they suggest about Western cohesion, restraint, and political bandwidth.

This does not weaken the case for the Bastion. It strengthens it. In a world where great power behaviour is increasingly transactional and geographically assertive, undersea deterrence becomes one of the few domains where stability can be quietly maintained without constant political theatre. The more visible and volatile surface politics become, the more important it is that the Atlantic beneath remains governed by clarity, persistence, and credible consequence.

Russian Naval Growth: How Moscow Intends to Counter NATO in the 2026–2035 Window

A common Western assumption is that Russia’s navy is a declining force, constrained by sanctions, shipyard bottlenecks, and the demands of a prolonged land war. That assessment is only partially correct, and dangerously incomplete when applied to the undersea domain.

Russia does not need a large navy to counter NATO. It needs a focused one.

A Submarine-Centric Growth Model
Russian naval investment over the next decade is overwhelmingly biased toward submarines, seabed systems, and long-range strike rather than surface fleet parity. This is not a temporary expedient. It is a deliberate structural choice.

• Key trends are already visible:

• Continued Yasen-class production

Despite delays, Russia remains committed to fielding additional Yasen-M SSGNs through the early 2030s. These boats are central to Russia’s Atlantic strategy because they combine stealth, endurance, and conventional and nuclear strike in a single platform. Even small increases in Yasen numbers disproportionately increase NATO’s ASW burden.

Sustainment of the SSBN force
Borei-class SSBNs remain protected assets, but their presence shapes Russian risk tolerance elsewhere. As long as the SSBN bastion is credible, Russia can accept greater risk with attack submarines operating forward.

Investment in specialised undersea platforms
Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research continues to receive priority funding. This includes seabed mapping ships, mini-submarines, and deep-diving platforms designed not for combat, but for infrastructure interference, sensor exploitation, and ambiguity creation.

Russia’s growth model is therefore not linear fleet expansion. It is selective amplification of the systems that stress NATO the most.

Quantity Is Less Important Than Disruption
From Moscow’s perspective, NATO’s vulnerability lies not in platform numbers, but in coordination, endurance, and political cohesion.

Russian naval planning assumes that:

• NATO ASW forces are finite and high value

• Western publics are sensitive to economic disruption

• Escalation thresholds at sea remain politically ambiguous

Even a modest increase in Russian submarine availability can force NATO into difficult trade-offs: escorting transatlantic shipping, protecting undersea infrastructure, tracking SSNs, and maintaining SSBN protection simultaneously.

This is why Russian planners focus on dilemma creation, not sea control.

Arctic Enablement as Force Multiplier
One of the least appreciated aspects of Russian naval growth is how Arctic capability acts as a multiplier rather than a separate theatre. Under-ice navigation, Arctic basing, and polar logistics allow Russia to:

• Mask submarine deployment patterns

• Bypass predictable sensor belts

• Force NATO to defend depth rather than lines

This is not about dominating the Arctic. It is about using it to unbalance Atlantic defence planning. If the Atlantic Bastion remains geographically shallow, Russian naval growth does not need to be large to be effective.

The Strike Problem
Russian naval growth is inseparable from its emphasis on strike. Submarines are not viewed primarily as hunters. They are viewed as mobile launch platforms.

The continued deployment of long-range cruise missiles, including dual-capable systems, means that Russian submarines threaten not only shipping and military targets, but also political decision-making timelines. The mere possibility of conventional or nuclear strike from the Atlantic shapes escalation dynamics long before weapons are fired.

This is why Russia judges deterrence less by sensor density and more by whether NATO can impose reciprocal cost.

What This Means for the Atlantic Bastion
The uncomfortable implication is this:

The Atlantic Bastion will face increasing pressure over time, not decreasing. Russian naval growth does not aim to overwhelm the Bastion.

It aims to:

• Stretch it

• Saturate it

• Outlast it politically

If NATO treats Bastion as a static defensive architecture, Russian adaptation will steadily erode its deterrent value.

If, however, Bastion evolves alongside this threat, expanding geographically, integrating punishment, and remaining active through escalation, Russian naval growth becomes a liability rather than an advantage.

That is the strategic contest now unfolding under the Atlantic.

The Russian Bottom Line and Why It Matters

From Moscow’s current perspective, the Atlantic Bastion is considered credible but not decisive. It complicates Russian planning processes without eliminating operational options. The Bastion serves more as a signal of intent than as an enforcer of outcomes. Russia’s objective is not to defeat the Bastion, but to withstand its effects long enough to generate strategic dilemmas in other areas.

This dynamic reflects the inherent challenges of maritime deterrence.

The effectiveness of the Atlantic Bastion should not be measured solely by its ability to prevent submarine incursions; such a metric is insufficient.

Its primary purpose is to compel Russian decision-making earlier, more rapidly, and under less favourable conditions. The Bastion aims to compress operational timelines, limit escalation options, and increase the risks associated with pre-conflict manoeuvring, rather than rendering such actions impossible.

This issue extends beyond anti-submarine warfare considerations.

It is a command. The Atlantic should no longer be viewed as a defensive moat, but rather as a domain for strategic messaging, fought below the surface but decided above it. The Atlantic is no longer a moat. It is a message space. The credibility of the Bastion depends on mutual understanding of its strategic message by both parties.

Further Reading and Context

Core analysis and doctrine

• Royal United Services Institute
  The Atlantic Bastion (Kaushal & Black, 2025)
  The foundational analytical paper underpins much of the public Bastion debate. Particularly strong on deterrence by denial versus punishment and Russian surge logic.

• Centre for Naval Analyses
  Russian Strategy for Escalation Management
  Essential reading for understanding how Moscow thinks about signalling, nuclear thresholds, and maritime escalation control.

• UK Ministry of Defence
  Strategic Defence Review 2025
  The political and strategic context for Atlantic Bastion includes an explicit linkage to seabed security and deterrence posture.

Russian naval thinking and capabilities

• Michael Kofman et al.
  Russian Military Strategy: Core Tenets and Operational Concepts
  A sober examination of how the Russian armed forces think about war termination, time, and attrition rather than decisive victory.

• Barents Observer
  Coverage of Northern Fleet exercises and under-ice submarine operations
  Particularly useful for tracking real-world behaviour rather than stated intent.

• U.S. Naval Institute
  Analysis of Yasen-class SSGNs and Russian undersea strike doctrine
  Helpful for understanding why conventional precision strike matters so much to Russian deterrence calculus.

Undersea infrastructure and grey-zone activity

• Atlantic Council
  Reports on subsea cable vulnerability and hybrid maritime threats
  Strong on the economic and political implications of undersea disruption.

• NATO
  Digital Ocean initiative and maritime situational awareness updates
  Signals how NATO is quietly rebuilding Atlantic-wide undersea coherence.

• European Union
  Subsea cable security and maritime resilience initiatives
  Useful context for the civilian–military convergence now shaping seabed protection.

Related Future Navy work

Readers interested in the themes explored here may also want to look at:

• The Digital Ocean: Securing the Invisible Fleet

• AI Shipmate: Command at Machine Speed

• The Atlantic Is No Longer a Moat

• Seabed Warfare and the Economics of Deterrence

Key topics covered in this episode include:

• The “Pre-War” Reality: How 2025 became the year decision-makers accepted that deterrence is no longer guaranteed and that the UK is operating in a pre-war environment.

• Hybrid Fleets: The move away from “platform purism” toward integrating autonomous systems and the Type 31 Frigate as a “system host” rather than just a budget warship.

• Whole-of-Society Deterrence: Why the Chief of the Defence Staff argues that protecting undersea cables, data flows, and national infrastructure is now just as critical as traditional frontline combat.

• The 2026 Tests: The five concrete benchmarks—from credible hybrid task groups to AI integration—that will determine if the Navy’s transformation is real or merely rhetorical.

Join us as we break down how the Royal Navy is attempting to condense decades of ambition into a single, urgent planning horizon.

Introduction: The Year Time Ran Out

2025 will be remembered not for the Royal Navy defining its future, but for acknowledging the end of its strategic latitude.

Throughout the year, decisions previously scheduled for the 2030s were accelerated by geopolitical pressures, industrial constraints, and an increasing awareness that deterrence is no longer guaranteed. By December, this understanding became explicit: senior defence leaders now describe the UK as operating in a pre-war era.

This shift represented substantive and structural change, not merely rhetorical adjustment.

Throughout 2025, Future Navy documented this transition, highlighting the vulnerability of undersea cables and the Atlantic Bastion, the operational necessity of autonomy and artificial intelligence, and the requirement that a carrier represents true capability only when deployed with a credible supporting group.

By year’s end, the trajectory was clear and irreversible.

A New First Sea Lord — And a Change of Tempo

Prior to the strategic focus expanding to encompass society, industry, and national resilience, the most immediate shift in 2025 originated within the Royal Navy.

In May 2025, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins KCB OBE ADC RM became the First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff — the first Royal Marine ever to hold the role.

Sir Gwyn commissioned into the Royal Marines in 1990, serving early in the Commando Logistics Regiment and on operations in Northern Ireland with 42 Commando. His formative years were spent not in large platform commands but in expeditionary, resource-constrained environments where adaptability, tempo, and logistics determined success or failure.

His operational background is reflected in his leadership approach.

From his initial public statements as First Sea Lord, his language has been operationally focused, prioritising time, readiness, and the realities of warfighting over abstraction or caution. In contrast to previous naval leadership, which often discussed transformation programmes and future pathways, Sir Gwyn emphasised concrete deadlines.

His most notable intervention was a direct assessment that the Royal Navy has four years to achieve operational readiness for conflict.

This framing is substantive, condensing decades of ambition into a single planning horizon and indicating a leadership style focused on tangible outcomes rather than process. It also reflects a willingness to confront difficult realities, including shortfalls in escorts, fragile availability, and the gap between conceptual capability and deployable force at scale.

Equally significant is his approach to change. Sir Gwyn demonstrates little tolerance for platform purism or traditional prestige. Instead, he consistently emphasises mass, persistence, and adaptability, recognising that in a missile-dense, data-rich battlespace, survivability depends as much on numbers and networks as on individual platforms.

His openness to autonomous escorts, hybrid fleets, and rapid expansion of uncrewed systems reflects a Royal Marine perspective shaped by operational experience rather than acquisition cycles. In this context, autonomy is regarded as a means to restore tempo, resilience, and operational depth, rather than as a technological experiment.

As Chairman of the Navy Board, Sir Gwyn is responsible for the fighting effectiveness, efficiency, and morale of the Naval Service. In practice, his first year in the role has established a clear direction: transformation is now a matter of urgency rather than a distant aspiration.

Subsequently, the Chief of the Defence Staff broadened the focus to include whole-of-society deterrence. NATO formalised the Digital Ocean initiative, and the industry advanced new autonomy partnerships. However, the initial momentum and urgency originated within the Royal Navy.

Although the Royal Navy has increased recruitment, this influx has not yet reversed the decline in overall trained strength. New recruits remain in training for extended periods before becoming operationally deployable, so they do not immediately offset the loss of experienced personnel. As a result, the service continues to experience a net deficit in skilled manpower, with qualified personnel leaving faster than they can be replaced. In 2025, the Royal Navy shifted from viewing transformation as a future concept to treating it as an immediate operational deadline.

From Assumption to Urgency: The Strategic Mood of 2025

The defining feature of 2025 was not a particular platform, announcement, or programme, but a fundamental change in strategic tone.

Operationally, the Royal Navy shifted from incremental modernisation to explicit warfighting readiness. Nationally, the conversation moved from abstract risk to tangible vulnerability, focusing on energy systems, data flows, ports, and seabed infrastructure.

This convergence was significant, reframing naval power from a focus on ships and submarines to its role within a broader system supporting national security and daily life.

This reframing was articulated most clearly in December at RUSI. In his annual address, the Chief of the Defence Staff set the clearest strategic context of the year. He described the current environment as more dangerous than at any point in his career and argued that while deterrence has so far held, the trend line is worsening and the cost of failure rising.

He emphasised that deterrence is not solely a military function, but a whole-of-society responsibility. While the armed forces remain the first line of defence, future conflicts are equally likely to target infrastructure, the economy, and public resilience as to occur on distant battlefields.

This was not a theoretical abstraction. The Chief of the Defence Staff explicitly referenced cyber attacks, undersea infrastructure, industrial capacity, and skills as decisive factors in contemporary deterrence. The implication is clear: security cannot be delegated solely to the military.

In doing so, the Chief of the Defence Staff provided national validation for themes that had emerged in Royal Navy discourse throughout the year, particularly the centrality of the Atlantic, the seabed, and the systems sustaining the UK’s economy and alliances.

If 2025 marked the year the underwater battlespace became central to NATO planning, it also marked the transition of the Atlantic Bastion from a naval discussion point to a matter of national concern.

NATO’s decision to establish a common Allied Underwater Battlespace Mission Network marked a decisive shift, recognising that future maritime competition will be determined by networks, data, and interoperability rather than hull numbers. The UK’s leadership in this effort positions the Royal Navy at the centre of the emerging Digital Ocean architecture.

The Chief of the Defence Staff’s December remarks reinforced this perspective, warning that attacks on infrastructure and the economy are central elements of contemporary conflict, not secondary risks.

In this context, protecting undersea cables, seabed sensors, ports, and maritime data flows is now a core component of national deterrence, rather than solely an anti-submarine warfare task.

Hybrid Fleets and the End of Platform Purism

Operationally, 2025 marked a decisive shift away from platform-centric thinking.

The First Sea Lord’s guidance was explicit: future warfighting will depend on hybrid fleets integrating crewed platforms with autonomous surface, subsurface, and airborne systems. The objective is mass, persistence, and survivability, not novelty.

The Chief of the Defence Staff reinforced this logic in December, describing transformation as a high–low mix delivered rapidly, blending advanced capabilities with affordable, scalable systems that can be quickly adapted.

This framing is significant, signalling institutional recognition that the era of highly specialised, scarce platforms operating independently has ended. The future fleet will be evaluated by its integration of personnel, data, autonomy, and industrial scale.

Shared Infrastructure and the Quiet Enabler of Change

One of the most consequential yet least visible developments in 2025 was the maturation of the Royal Navy’s Shared Infrastructure approach.

By consolidating numerous combat systems into a unified digital environment, Shared Infrastructure has become the foundation for future ambitions, including AI-assisted decision-making, rapid software updates, leaner manning, and integration of uncrewed systems as the backbone. The hybrid fleet remains aspirational, but with Shared Infrastructure, autonomy, and AI, it becomes operationally plausible.

This development marks the point at which the Navy’s transformation becomes credible rather than conceptual.

Type 31: From Budget Frigate to System Host

Few debates in 2025 evolved as significantly as the discussion regarding the Type 31 Frigate.

By year’s end, the central question shifted from whether the Type 31 was ‘good enough’ to whether the Royal Navy could afford not to leverage the only surface combatant explicitly designed for modularity, open systems, and autonomy integration.

The Chief of the Defence Staff’s emphasis on scale, affordability, and adaptation speed implicitly strengthens the case for the Type 31. Although not named directly, the platform fits the described role: a system host capable of carrying uncrewed mass, evolving digitally, and operating as part of a wider networked force.

In a fleet constrained by the number of available escorts, this consideration is especially significant.

AI, Command, and the Human Factor

Throughout 2025, artificial intelligence shifted from a subject of speculative discussion to an operational necessity, accompanied by greater realism regarding its limitations.

Both the Chief of the Defence Staff’s address and subsequent discussions emphasised that artificial intelligence must be integrated into combat systems without undermining command responsibility or trust. The primary challenge is to streamline staff work, accelerate decision-making, and reduce cognitive burden, rather than to replace commanders.

The Chief of the Defence Staff directly linked technological transformation to personnel and organisational culture, emphasising that retention, leadership, skills, and training remain decisive. Artificial intelligence without trust is fragile, and autonomy without assurance poses significant risks.

This balanced perspective aligns with the Royal Navy’s current direction and the findings of comprehensive analytical work across Defence.

A recurring reality in 2025 was that a carrier does not constitute true capability unless deployed with a credible supporting group.

Escort availability, maintenance cycles, and sustainability have become immediate operational constraints rather than abstract planning concerns. The year saw renewed public debate over fleet size, readiness, and the risk of diminished capability from overcommitment.

The Chief of the Defence Staff addressed this reality, arguing that readiness includes stockpiles, training, personnel, and the capacity to engage in conflict immediately, rather than at an unspecified future date.

In 2026, this tension will either intensify or begin to resolve.

2026: From Direction to Proof

By December 2025, the strategic picture had become clear.

• The First Sea Lord had set a four-year warfighting clock.

• The CDS had framed deterrence as national, not merely military.

• The Atlantic and underwater domains had become central theatres.

Consequently, 2026 will test these ambitions.

The focus will shift from new strategies or rhetoric to demonstrable outcomes.

Five tests will matter most:

1. Can the Royal Navy deploy a credible hybrid task group, not an experiment?

2. Do uncrewed systems move from trials to routine tasking?

3. Is the Atlantic Bastion defended as a system rather than just patrolled?

4. Does Type 31 begin to absorb autonomy at scale?

5. Is AI visible in operations rooms without breaking command culture?

These objectives are not abstract ambitions; they represent concrete tests of delivery.

Conclusion: A Navy Re-Entering History

2025 marked the year the Royal Navy shifted from analysis to action.

By year’s end, both naval and national leadership were aligned on a fundamental principle: deterrence now relies on readiness, resilience, and the capacity to adapt more rapidly than adversaries. While ships remain important, networks, personnel, data, and industrial capacity are equally critical.

The future fleet has moved beyond the conceptual stage and is now being assembled under significant pressure, in public view, and within a constrained timeframe.

The outcomes of 2026 will determine whether that ambition is realised.

When the Chief of the Defence Staff calls for a “whole-of-society effort” to deter Russia, he is not issuing a warning about the future. He is describing the present.

The UK’s national power now rests on infrastructure that lies largely unseen: undersea data cables, energy interconnectors, pipelines, and seabed systems that enable economic life, military command, and alliance cohesion. These systems are already being surveilled, mapped, and interfered with below the threshold of war.

This is not an abstract risk. It is an active contest — and it is happening now, not in the mid-2030s.

For the next two to three years, the Royal Navy must secure the undersea domain without operational mass from Type 26 or Type 31. That gap is real, measurable, and unavoidable. The question for leadership is not whether this is uncomfortable. It is whether we act decisively to manage it. That gap cannot be wished away — but it can be managed.

This article sets out a Future Navy proposal to do exactly that.

The reality we must plan against — not the one we prefer

Between now and the late-2020s, the UK’s ASW posture rests on a narrow base:

• Type 23 carries almost the entire frontline ASW burden, increasingly stretched and ageing.

• Type 45 can escort, protect and command — but it is not an ASW hunter.

• P-8 Poseidon and Merlin HM2 are world-class, but scarce and in constant demand.

• Type 26 and Type 31 will not arrive in sufficient numbers to close the gap.

This is not a failure of ambition. It is a consequence of time.

What would be a failure of leadership is pretending this gap does not exist.

The answer is not to dilute high-end ASW forces further. It is to build mass, persistence and visibility alongside them — now.

A Future Navy proposition: the Rapid ASW Fleet

The Rapid ASW Fleet is a deliberate, time-bound response to this gap.

• It does not attempt to replace Type 26.

• It does not pretend commercial hulls are frigates.

• It does not chase technological perfection.

Instead, it focuses on four things that matter immediately:

1. Persistent presence
Continuous occupation of key seabed routes, landing zones and choke points.

2. Undersea visibility
Using towed passive arrays, seabed sensors and autonomous systems to make covert activity observable.

3. Rapid cueing of high-end assets
Enabling Type 23, P-8 Poseidon, Merlin HM2 and allied forces to act decisively.

4. Deterrence through attribution and mass
Making interference visible, attributable and politically costly.

This is not a warfighting fleet. It is a persistent, commercially enabled undersea tripwire force that detects, attributes, and cues — buying time and space until the future fleet arrives.

This is not theoretical — the UK is already doing it.

Crucially, this proposal does not start from a blank sheet. The Royal Navy and UK industry have already demonstrated the model:

• RFA Proteus — a converted offshore support vessel, acquired and operational within a year, now conducting seabed surveillance and undersea monitoring.

• HMS Stirling Castle — a commercial hull rapidly converted into a mothership for autonomous systems, now a commissioned warship.

• Project CABOT and NATO Digital Ocean initiatives — linking uncrewed sensors, crewed platforms and shore-based analysis.

• UK SME-led USV trials — proving that small manned ships and unmanned systems can be integrated at speed.

This proposal connects these strands into a coherent, executable force concept.

The platforms: commercial hulls, adapted fast

The backbone of the Rapid ASW Fleet is converted commercial offshore vessels:

• Offshore support vessels

• Survey ships

• Large patrol hulls

These ships already offer:

• North Atlantic sea-keeping

• Endurance measured in weeks.

• Deck space for sensors, USVs and containers

• A mature UK industrial base for conversion and sustainment

They are not acoustically pristine — and that is acknowledged. But operating within defined speed and machinery envelopes, they can deploy towed passive arrays, seabed sensors and autonomous vehicles effectively enough to act as persistent acoustic pickets.

The aim is coverage, not stealth.

Thin ships, thick shore — where the real advantage lies

The decisive advantage of this fleet sits ashore. Rather than placing scarce acoustic analysts on every hull, the Rapid ASW Fleet is built around:

• Edge processing at sea

• Secure, prioritised data transmission

• Centralised shore-based fusion centres

This aligns with NATO’s emerging underwater mission networks and reflects reality: expertise is finite, sensors are not. This is how scarce skills are scaled up to operational levels.This model enables:

• Pattern-of-life analysis

• Long-term anomaly detection

• Evidence building for attribution

• Rapid cueing of P-8, Merlin, Type 23 and allied assets

Grey-zone competition is not won by perfect detections — it is won by persistent observation and decision advantage.

Protection without pretending — the Royal Marines’ role

These ships are not designed to fight peer navies — but they must be protected.

Here, history matters.

In 1982, the UK rapidly adapted merchant shipping to sustain operations in contested waters. Protection was pragmatic, layered and proportional.

The same logic applies now.

Embedded Royal Marine detachments provide:

• Close-range ship protection

• Deterrence against harassment and interference

• Confidence to operate forward

Equipped with:

• Man-portable air defence (e.g. Starstreak / Martlet)

• Lightweight remote weapon stations

• Small-boat defence and counter-drone capability

This is not escalation. It is a credible presence.

What this force does — and what it does not

Clarity is essential. The Rapid ASW Fleet does:

• Maintain continuous undersea awareness.

• Monitor cables and seabed infrastructure.

• Detect and classify anomalous activity.

• Cue high-end ASW forces

• Free scarce escorts for tasks only they can perform.

• Support attribution and political decision-making

It does not:

• Replace Type 26

• Conduct an independent submarine prosecution.

• Operate unprotected in high-intensity conflict.

Protection is layered. Escort is available if required. Visibility itself is a deterrent. Honesty here is what gives the concept credibility.

This is what “whole-of-society” actually looks like

This fleet is not just naval; it deliberately mobilises:

• UK offshore industry — hulls, yards, crews, sustainment

• UK SMEs — sensors, autonomy, data fusion

• Reserves and RFA — expanding the meaning of service

• Telecoms, finance and energy sectors — defining priority routes and resilience thresholds

• Insurers and regulators — making interference economically visible

This is deterrence built into national function — not confined to the fleet.

Leadership means acting before the fleet arrives.

The UK faces a two-to-three-year gap in credible, persistent undersea security before Type 26 and Type 31 enter service in meaningful numbers. During that period, the foundations of national power, data, energy, deterrence and alliance credibility, remain exposed to persistent grey-zone activity.

This risk cannot be mitigated solely by existing high-end assets.

A Rapid ASW Fleet, built around converted commercial hulls, autonomous sensors, shore-based analysis and embedded force protection, can be fielded at speed using UK industry and existing technology. It would deliver immediate persistence, detection and attribution, while freeing scarce escorts for tasks only they can perform.

This is not a substitute for the future fleet. It is a bridge to it.

The decision is whether to act now to manage this risk — or accept the strategic consequences of delay.

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.