Naval capabilities
The Bayraktar TB2, an unmanned aerial vehicle currently being used by Ukrainian forces, on show at an aviation and technology festival in Turkey.
Marines – to be replaced, in part, through increased investment in autonomous technologies. “My very, very personal view has always been that you can drive down the number of personnel at risk by driving up the levels of autonomy and the level of automation. And we should be doing that more rapidly than we are,” says Hine.
There are two main aspects that would factor into increased automation of Royal Navy operations, according to Hine. The first is the high number of people employed in back-office functions, while the second is the rotation of people at sea in order to conduct operations. With increased automations of Royal Navy ships, fewer personnel will be required to man these vessels. Similarly, many back-office functions could be replaced with autonomous systems, empowering people to go to sea rather than working in an office.
“If something can be autonomously delivered, why wouldn’t you do it? We’ve seen autonomy is ready. We’ve seen you can do it at scale. We know that it’s efficient.”
$750m
Cost of the Russian Moskva, sunk by two low-tech Neptune missiles off the coast of Ukraine on
14 April 2022. Forbes
36
This would likely result in lower numbers of personnel serving on each platform, which would enable the navy to create multiple crews per platform, driving up their availability while retaining the same number of people. “All of that seems to me to be entirely possible,” says Hine. “But it’s very difficult to achieve because it requires changing culture.” And there’s the rub. In Hine’s opinion, the biggest obstacle hindering the Royal Navy’s ability to achieve its goals is the culture and long-held traditions that are currently in place, and require a considerable shift. “This isn’t a criticism because you need culture. But you need the right culture – the culture of challenge, pace, urgency, prioritisation, all of which we could do
more of,” says Hine. “We are at a place where best endeavours are not good enough. […] Trying is not as good as achieving.”
Winning time
Of course, when discussing what the Royal Navy needs to achieve its goals, it is worth examining what those goals are. According to Hine, at its most fundamental level, the Royal Navy “needs to be an organisation that can fight and win”. Of course, that raises questions of its own – who will fight, and how, and on what timescale? From there, deciding what ‘winning’ looks like, determines a whole host of other factors. “It’s very easy to say ‘stay within budget’,” Hine notes. “Well, that immediately implies that the budget is right.” Of course, no military force in history has ever been satisfied with its funding, but in terms of immediately increasing the efficiency of the Royal Navy, Hine would want more availability from its platforms. “The best way to do that is to put multiple crews on the platform. But that will cost you more money as you’d need more people currently – because the platforms are not optimised for autonomy.” While there are some situations in which you would not necessarily want to involve autonomous systems – the delivery of a nuclear warhead, for instance – there are many others where autonomy would work perfectly well. With the benefits of autonomous systems now being demonstrated on the global stage, the question, then, is whether or not the Royal Navy has the appetite for it in the timescale necessary to be at the front of any queue. “If something can be autonomously delivered, why wouldn’t you do it? We’ve seen autonomy is ready. We’ve seen you can do it at scale. We know that it’s efficient,” says Hine, underlying his position on the subject. For him, the answer is clear: “We should be autonomous where possible, crewed when necessary.” ●
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
fotopanorama360/
Shutterstock.com
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