FADS
This conceptual thinking is centred around the future air dominance system (FADS). The RN’s focus on FADS is far broader than looking at a future platform to replace the in-service Type 45 Daring-class air-defence destroyers, Rear Admiral James Parkin – the RN’s Director Develop – told Naval News, in an interview on 24 August.
“There’ll be a ship that you would recognise as a complex warship,” said Rear Adm Parkin. This ship concept is currently referred to as the Type 83.
The 2021 iteration of the UK Ministry of Defence’s (MoD’s) Defence Command Paper (the MoD’s capability development plan for delivering on the strategic-level defence and security requirements defined in the accompanying Integrated Review process) referred to Type 83 as a “concept replacement warship for Type 45”.
Reflecting wider and ongoing evolution in the MoD’s approach to defence acquisition – a framework within which, Rear Adm Parkin argued, the RN has already begun changing how it thinks about procurement – the navy is broadening its thinking on how to replace Type 45 and deliver the required future capabilities.
“What we hope to do with FADS is something that is significantly different in our approach to how we consider the overall system. “
Rear Adm James Parkin, the RN’s Director Develop
At DSEI, and particularly in some of the conversations that the First Sea Lord [Admiral Sir Ben Key] will be having in his keynote address, we will be able to unpack what we mean by FADS – which is, in big terms, air defence against the hardest possible threats, but also long-range precision strike against the hardest possible targets.”
This ambition is part of the RN’s continuing development of a ‘system of systems’ approach to capability development, Rear Adm Parkin continued. In his view, the navy’s evolving thinking within concepts like FADS is prompting UK defence leaders to see “[an] opportunity for the RN to be a world leader in how we think about dealing with threats … into the 2050s and 2060s, not just in 2023 against the threats we see today.”
To inform its thinking about how best to build new approaches to capability development in concepts like FADS, the RN will use DSEI to engage industry and other partners, Rear Adm Parkin explained. “What you’ll see at the navy stand in particular is that we’ve themed our outward messaging around FADS …. It’s not so much a launch, but an understanding and a sharing of some of our early ideas,” he said. DSEI will be the first opportunity for the RN to discuss these ideas with other armed forces, allies and partners, and companies with established or emerging relations with the navy, the admiral added.
Current capability development onboard the RN’s Type 45s, in-service Type 23 frigates, and incoming Type 26 and Type 31 frigates will feed into the capability development process for FADS, Rear Adm Parkin explained. Procurement history has shown that trying to introduce state-of-the-art technologies en masse into a new complex warship may deliver an exquisite, expensive platform affordable only in small numbers. “What we’re going to do with FADS is not just introduce everything to be brand new at once,” he said: instead, the RN is seeking “to introduce something that will still be the best in the world but won’t end up being an ‘impossible-to-deliver’ portfolio of programmes that will make up FADS.” Here, Rear Adm Parkin continued, recent RN decisions to upgrade the Type 45’s Sampson and Long-Range radars and Sea Viper local area anti-air and missile defence capability, for example, are part of the process that will inform capability thinking and development for FADS.
