Speaking at the Defence Leaders Combined Naval Event (CNE) 2024 conference in Farnborough, UK, on 21 May, Second Sea Lord Vice Admiral Martin Connell CBE said industry at all levels had a vital role to play in ensuring that the navy stayed ahead of the technological curve. But he insisted that change was necessary to develop “a maritime technological ecosystem fit for the 21st century”, warning: “We simply must adapt now, or we will lose later.”
The development of a new strategy for 2040 reflects the realities of a more contested and riskier world, but also highlights the RN’s concerns that it risks being left behind unless it can radically change the way it delivers, exploits and sustains technology on the frontline.
According to Vice Admiral Connell, the focus is on developing a navy that can adapt faster, and adopt a bolder mindset that is more willing to accept increased risk. “The navy of 2040 will be one of increased effective mass from an accelerated programme of shipbuilding, combined and augmented by uncrewed underwater, surface and air vehicles,” he said. “It will be one of greater lethality across our fleet, and we we will now prioritise offensive strike capability over all else.
“We will need to create a resilient architecture that rapidly integrates autonomous systems and which is capable of operating in the most demanding electronic warfare and cyber environments, and one that is capable of transferring petabytes of data around the maritime battlespace in the future.”
Industry is seen as central to the navy’s future vision. While the major primes will remain important, the service is increasingly looking to embrace disruptive thinking and technological innovation from small/medium enterprises and hyperscalers “to achieve the pace, integration and connectivity it requires,” said Vice Admiral Connell. “It is obvious that we need a plurality of business to work with.”
He also emphasised the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) to the future navy, but expressed frustration about the pace at which it was being exploited in the service compared to its adoption in the commercial and consumer sectors. “If applied correctly, [AI] has the potential to create dynamic new benchmarks for accuracy, efficiency and lethality. But when I ask some of our industry partners how they’re incorporating data and AI into their own product design, development and learning today [then] if I’m honest this still feels a little underwhelming.
“I recognise that there is so much more that should and can be done in this area. I want to hear less about future potential, and more about direct action. We need to be quicker to adapt, and perhaps draw the lessons from other sectors such as pharma and banking.”
Latencies associated with current processes were acknowledged, but Vice Admiral Connell said that recent operations had shown how activity could be speeded up to meet an urgent operational need. “When HMS Diamond encountered its first engagement in the southern Red Sea, it sent its data back to the United Kingdom for analysis,” he told the CNE audience. “It took far far too long to turn that around.
“I’m pleased to say that our people have responded to that change to do better. To assess, to analyse, to question, to support better and faster, to provide software patches to our sensors and weapons, to develop different capability solutions at pace, [and] to adapt our techniques and procedures. Because every day counts.”
Second Sea Lord added that the navy would continue to pursue exploitation of off-the-shelf systems where they were “good enough for what we require,” citing the example of the seabed warfare vessel RFA Proteus, which was rapidly acquired to support protection of critical national maritime infrastructure. There would also be an increased emphasis on spiral development and rapid scaling for the front line, he said, “in order to get them into the hands of our sailors and marines much quicker”.
The big risk, said Second Sea Lord, was that the pace of technological change could render many of the service’s pre-existing platforms and obsolete without action. “[There] is an imperative for all of us to become more innovative, more ambitions and to make better use of the resources we already have”.
“We are not afraid to innovate at the edge, to adapt, to learn fast, to trial, to experiment and to then scale.”
