The Royal Navy’s shrinking fleet has become an easy target for critics looking to make an easy argument. There are fewer ships than in previous decades – obviously, therefore the navy must be underfunded or in decline: nope. Neat narratives miss the complexity of the situation, and don’t reflect reality.
The United Kingdom remains one of the largest defence spenders in the world, ranking at No 6 with a spend of $81.8bn, behind the USA, China, Russia, Germany and India. In terms of GDP however the UK ranks 30th with only 2.3% of GDP dedicated to the military burden. Unsurprisingly the top ten in terms of GDP are dominated by economically smaller countries engaged in active conflict. If the Royal Navy is not short of money, why the perceived decline?
Naval procurement alone absorbs enormous resources. The problem is within the machinery of defence spending itself. Modern procurement is layered with processes designed to eliminate waste, risk and error. That is sensible, in principle, but in practice it creates a system of blind process and conflicting tunnel visions where the cost of preventing small losses far exceeds the losses themselves. Vast sums are spent on internal assurance structures and audit mechanisms with questionable economic logic. When the cost of preventing a minor inefficiency becomes larger than the inefficiency itself, the system begins to work against its own purpose. The procurement system ends up protecting and subsidising an almost untenable culture of ‘how it’s always been done’ that no one asked for or wants and spends significant energy trying to navigate and manage.
Often, equipment that could be procured commercially is pushed through demanding specification regimes. While there are cases where this is clearly necessary, these processes test products to extremes ensuring they comply with very high-level standards, despite the fact that often, the extreme specifications may never be relevant to their actual operational use. Due to modern commercial-build standards, the equipment itself frequently remains unchanged; while the testing simply proves it can survive harsher conditions and generates certification to say so. The outcome is a vast multiplication of cost for increasingly exquisite platforms and equipment in much smaller numbers than originally intended. This approach has shaped naval doctrine.
“Vast sums are spent on internal assurance structures and audit mechanisms with questionable economic logic. When the cost of preventing a minor inefficiency becomes larger than the inefficiency itself, the system begins to work against its own purpose.”
Fantasy fleet designs detail quantities of highly specialised ships designed to operate together in task groups. Each vessel type performing a specific primary function; air defence destroyers protect the group from aircraft and missiles; anti-submarine frigates hunt submarines; aircraft carriers project air power and command capability; minehunters clear sea lanes but rely on others for protection. This system works because each ship compensates for the vulnerabilities of the others. The difficulty emerges when that structure breaks apart due to small hull numbers and unavailability. With fewer ships available, vessels designed to operate in large groups operate with gaps in their defensive formation, or even alone.
At the same time, the character of warfare has changed. Decades of defence spending in preparing to defeat very small numbers of sophisticated adversaries armed with advanced missiles, submarines and aircraft has now become secondary. Our highly capable, phenomenally complex and vastly expensive warships face rather more rudimentary threats – and in astonishing numbers.
This exposes an uncomfortable weakness. Highly sophisticated systems can still be challenged by sheer quantity. Large numbers of cheap drones, improvised maritime weapons and relatively rudimentary attack systems augmented with high quality, commercially available, cheap technology can overwhelm the most advanced defences just by being different and plentiful. A destroyer designed to defeat cutting-edge supersonic missiles that attack from a low-earth orbit struggles when confronted with dozens of low and slow threats arriving in vast waves. Despite their being secondary and tertiary point defences able to operate within the attack vectors of the new drone threat and defeat it in small numbers, there is no such thing as infinite ammunition. As defensible as the new threats are, it’s becoming less likely that a modern warship will get through an engagement with a clean sheet.
“Large numbers of cheap drones, improvised maritime weapons and relatively rudimentary attack systems augmented with high quality, commercially available, cheap technology can overwhelm the most advanced defences”
Naval warfare is therefore adapting again to meet the hybrid of old, new and new-old technology. The ongoing debate around mine warfare in the Gulf illustrates this well. Traditionalists often point to the declining number of dedicated minehunters and lament their disappearance. Yet minesweepers effectively disappeared decades ago; by the late 1990s they had largely all been replaced by minehunters, vessels designed to locate and neutralise individual mines rather than sweep entire areas indiscriminately. However, the traditionalist argument neglects to mention that minehunters now reaching the end of their heavily extended service lives, many over thirty or forty years old operating on 1960s era technology, were built in a very different era, before the word ‘drone’ was even coined. Despite still being in service in some cases, their defensive capability is minimal. Ships of this calibre were never designed to operate in drone denied coastal environments, under threat from modern precision weapons, while simultaneously clearing mines. The littoral environment has changed dramatically, so much so that the threats encountered today did not even exist as recently as 2021.
Coastal missile systems have been around for decades, exquisite loitering munitions for a short time, but very cheap drones that can be arguably categorised as loitering munitions, available in huge numbers, mean that sending manned ships into narrow waterways within the range of an almost endless supply of land-based weapons is astoundingly risky, bordering suicidal, unless succeeding a brutal bombing campaign to neutralise launch sites and industrial bases. In such a scenario, escorting a minehunter with a destroyer or frigate does not solve the problem. It just means more allied ships are placed in harm’s way at a staggering human cost.
Minehunters were never designed to operate in drone denied coastal environments, under threat from modern precision weapons, while simultaneously clearing mines.
A new approach is needed and uncrewed systems begin to make sense in this context. Uncrewed surface vessels and underwater vehicles are still relatively immature technologies and often criticised for their limitations. They rely on vast infrastructure and reliable communications links despite the claims of autonomy and AI doing the lifting. They almost all require remote operators. Uncrewed vehicles (UxV) are technologically immature compared with traditional platforms and can easily be disrupted or destroyed despite the mitigation that there is a far smaller risk to life.
Hybrid Navy
Hybrid Navy is not about replacing crewed for uncrewed. It is about developing a diverse tool kit to allow the best asset for the job to be available for any task. That asset might not look like a ship anymore.
Uncrewed systems exist to facilitate operations in environments too dangerous for manned ships to operate comfortably within. This is the naval equivalent of using drones instead of vulnerable aircraft. Originally the argument was made that uncrewed systems removed the man from the minefield. That argument was admirable and leaves open the retort that if something is not broken, why fix it: the ships of yesteryear allowed men to clear minefields in relative safety. However, this simple argument fails to account for the small complication that due to the new drone threat the minefield has become largely inaccessible. Therefore, in order to gain access to the minefield in the first place, an uncrewed system must be employed.
If a small, comparably cheap uncrewed vehicle is lost while clearing a minefield, the mission continues; another system replaces it and no one goes home with a flag draped over their coffin. The loss of equipment is inconvenient; the loss of a crewed warship is strategically and politically catastrophic. Using uncrewed systems is therefore an evolution to enable operations in much harsher operating environments which are themselves dominated by uncrewed systems.
Much of the debate around uncrewed systems is influenced by how they are being visualised. Public narrative is shaped by promotional imagery and concept art that unintentionally reinforces outdated assumptions. Many of the 3D images used to depict future autonomous naval systems show vessels that look almost identical to traditional warships. They have the familiar silhouette of frigates or destroyers, complete with bridge windows, deck fittings, ropes and flags. The invisible difference is that there is supposedly no crew on board – to operate the very human ergonomic design. This imagery is deeply misleading. It suggests that the future fleet will simply consist of traditional ships with the people removed. That is not the case.
“The loss of equipment is inconvenient; the loss of a crewed warship is strategically and politically catastrophic. Using uncrewed systems is therefore an evolution to enable operations in much harsher operating environments which are themselves dominated by uncrewed systems.”
Autonomous systems do not need to resemble ships; the point is to evolve individual capabilities, not replace entire hulls with more of the same, sans staff. Sensors and effectors do not have to be packaged into hulls that look like frigates or destroyers. In many cases the most effective solution will not resemble a ship in any conventional sense. Situational awareness, for example, is achieved through the processing, visualisation and mapping of sensor data to create an image of the battlespace. A 1980s design of RADARs and SONARs to achieve this relied on mounting sensors on frigates then deploying them sometimes exclusively for data gathering. Increasingly this task is better suited to much smaller distributed networks of privately operated sensors rather than individual platforms. A private company might operate a constellation of uncrewed systems or sensor equipment that feeds a streaming service of data directly into command systems – like GPS. The military may not own or operate the hardware producing the information; just purchase a subscription to the stream of received data as another input into the operational picture. In such a model, naval operators care less about the platform generating the information and more about the accuracy of the data itself. The sensor and enabling contract to its owner is the capability, not the vessel carrying it.
This same principle applies across the entire maritime battlespace. Rather than imagining a frigate-sized uncrewed radar ship patrolling the oceans, painted grey, it is more realistic to understand that unseen spatial data collection of vast areas will be procured by a contracted distributed web of sensors in many forms and be piped to a small number of combat systems with human operators in need of situational awareness. The navy does not need to be directly involved in collecting that data. It simply needs reliable access to it. Exactly the same logic extends beneath the surface. Underwater sensing and monitoring may increasingly rely on networks of autonomous vehicles, seabed sensors and remotely operated systems rather than dedicated frigates conducting patrols with towed sonars.
This does not mean that crewed warships are disappearing. Quite the opposite. Frigates, destroyers and carriers remain essential because complex tasks require large crews and robust defensive capabilities. Combat operations, damage control, sustained deployments and high-end warfare all demand the presence of people at sea. When it is still impossible to leave a printer unattended for too long, it’s a huge ask to expect a complex warship will run for months without human involvement. But secondary functions, including gathering sensor data, monitoring maritime activity, or clearing mines under heavy air threat do not require sailors to be placed in harm’s way. They can oversee from afar.
‘Naval operators care less about the platform generating the information and more about the accuracy of the data itself. The sensor and enabling contract to its owner is the capability, not the vessel carrying it.”
This is the broader logic behind the idea of the “hybrid navy”, a concept increasingly discussed by the First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. A hybrid navy does not abandon traditional warships: destroyers, frigates and carriers remain essential for command, protection and heavy strike capability. What changes is how maritime capability is generated. Instead of relying exclusively on a small number of highly capable crewed platforms, future fleets combine those ships with networks of uncrewed vessels and autonomous sensors via digital targeting data architectures; extending the reach and awareness of traditional platforms while mitigating the new risks associated with operating in contested environments.
Individually, many of these new technologies appear fragile or imperfect. But when partnered with traditional capabilities they form a distributed system in which the weakness of one element is offset by the resilience of the whole. In this model, naval power cannot be measured by counting hulls or tonnage. Maritime effect is produced through dozens of interconnected nodes, some traditionally crewed and many not. That is the essence of the hybrid navy. It reflects a recognition that the future of maritime warfare lies not in building ever more exquisite ships alone, but in the integration of ships, autonomous systems and a vast digital network into a single ecosystem.
