Speaking at the Navy Leaders’ Combined Naval Event 2024 (CNE 24) on 21 May, Rear Admiral Cédric Chetaille – the French Navy’s deputy chief for operations, and director of seabed capability development – said that the navy’s development path has been laid out by France’s seabed warfare strategy, that the service is moving towards IOC, and that it is testing and using capability on exercises and operations.
These developments are set against a backdrop of increasingly pressing requirements to deliver seabed operational capability, Rear Adm Chetaille explained.
Such requirements are demonstrated in the Russo-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts spilling over into other regions, including at sea. In September 2022, the Nordstream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea were struck by unexplained explosions. In March 2024, several internet cables transiting the Red Sea/Bab-el-Mandeb/Gulf of Aden corridor were damaged, reportedly by a commercial ship that was sinking after being attacked by Houthi rebels targeting commercial and naval ships.
“The geopolitical situation is now urgent. The good thing is the way ahead for us is quite clear, the procurement roadmap is underway, and we are expecting IOC of our first capabilities in 2026 with remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).”
Rear Admiral Cédric Chetaille, the French Navy’s Deputy Chief for Operations
In February 2022, France released its national seabed security strategy, addressing the country’s approach to protecting its seabed interests and infrastructure alongside naval capacity to conduct freedom of action. The procurement roadmap that followed set out France’s requirement to develop various platforms and capabilities to provide versatility in conducting seabed operations. “This is the right way to multiply effects in naval warfare, and to better co-ordinate with anti-submarine warfare (ASW) to ensure success in multi-domain and joint operations, recognising the specific nature of seabed warfare domain assets and command and control,” said Rear Adm Chetaille.
“France’s seabed warfare model is an end-to-end operational function, from the analysis and the anticipation of the threats to offensive or defensive actions,” he added.
As France continues developing its seabed operational capabilities and expertise, the navy is focused on three areas, Rear Adm Chetaille explained: building its overall capacity for operating maritime uncrewed systems; improving capability to use complex underwater acoustics; and improving capability to process underwater data. Capabilities it is developing for seabed operations also relate to other underwater tasks, including ASW and mine-countermeasures (MCM). For example, while – like many navies – much of France’s initial uncrewed capability developments relate to MCM, it is now assessing large displacement uncrewed underwater vehicles (LDUUVs) that could offer capability for seabed and ASW operations. One example is the UCUV demonstrator by Naval Group. In addition, Naval News understands a military variant of Exail’s Ulyx deepwater AUV is under development.
As regards bilateral activities, in mid-May 2024 the French Navy auxiliary ship FS Loire and the Italian Navy (ITN) minehunting vessel ITS Gaeta – co-operating on a seabed control serial, during the ITN’s ‘Mare Aperto’ exercise in the Mediterranean Sea – successfully countered what the French Navy referred to (in a social media post) as “malicious action on underwater infrastructure”. For the exercise, France operated an A18-D AUV and a Diomede ROV.
This was the first time a seabed serial had been conducted in ‘Mare Aperto’, said Rear Adm Chetaille.
As regards national activities, “We are right now experimenting with our first seabed warfare operation, called ‘Calliope’, that is delivering its first operational effects,” said Rear Adm Chetaille.
France has conducted eight ‘Calliope’ deployments to date: two in 2022, four in 2023, and two so far in 2024. Operations take place in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
Although limited ‘Calliope’ operational details are available, Rear Adm Chetaille underlined the activity’s importance.
“‘Calliope’ operations involve experimentation with different deep-sea assets – that the navy is mainly leasing through the private sector – to evaluate what we can do with what kind of systems, and what is better fitted for our mission,” he explained. “Also, ‘Calliope’ is a way to operate in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic on very specific targets that were identified a long time ago, but to date we have not been able to address.”
In these contexts, Rear Adm Chetaille continued, ‘Calliope’ combines exercising and operations to help the navy keep pace with seabed domain technology change. “We are trying to catch up with the urgency of the topic, and trying to develop our knowhow and courses of action in terms of more offensive operations on the seabed,” he said. “We want to be ready as quickly as we can, and ‘Calliope’ operations are made for that.”
Speaking at the UK Royal Navy’s ‘First Sea Lord’s Sea Power Conference 2024’ in London on 14 May, Admiral Nicolas Vaujour – the French Navy’s Chief of Naval Staff – underlined the importance of ‘Calliope’.
“What we are doing in ‘Calliope’ is operationalising our strategy,” said Adm Vaujour. “This means we test and test and test again new systems coming from different industry, in order to find a good answer to the question we put on the table – being able to monitor from the [surface] down to 6,000 m in order to see what we can achieve with what kind of assets, and then decide where we would like to monitor, where to be able to intervene, and where to be present.” “[We are] testing, then devising the doctrine, and then operationalising, to have the assets to confirm the concept of our seabed warfare strategy,” Adm Vaujour continued.
“We do not know the seabed very well, […] So, we have to explore, we have to monitor, we have to see what our competitors are able to do, and we have to be able to detect any [issues] and to intervene.”
Admiral Nicolas Vaujour – Chief of Staff of the French Navy
Plans are in place for ‘Calliope’ operations to continue for at least two more years, Rear Adm Chetaille told the CNE 24 conference.
Naval News comments
The French Navy’s capability development with ‘Calliope’ is interesting for three reasons:
- The navy is conducting the operation regularly.
- It is operating at different depths down to 6,000 m: testing at deeper depths is important, because it demonstrates the capability to operate in all areas across the North Atlantic.
- France is testing new equipment that it is using to deliver operational outputs at the same time.
