Warship 2026: Scaling the Fleet - Delivering Added Mass with Affordable Minor Warships

Data-driven Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction for maritime machinery usually assumes its sensor suite is given; the designer of an affordable minor warship, committing to instrumentation years before the first failure, needs to know how few channels suffice. This study asks that question, channel by channel, at the Marine Engineering Laboratory (MEL), a lab-scale electric ship machinery plant comprising six coupled systems, using 68 run-to-failure records under three operational profiles that stand in for mission states. Sequential forward selection and backward elimination draw sensor sufficiency curves; permutation importance and SHAP values check whether channel rankings are identifiable; profile-disjoint folds measure robustness across mission states; and a holdout scored exactly once tests whether the curves reproduce. The holdout verifies a five-channel cooling set, 0.611 RMSE against a no-sensor baseline of 1.107; fuel and electrical each support a single channel; and every change of mission state costs prognostic accuracy.

Development in autonomous technologies has driven a decade of research into automation transparency, emphasising the communication of a system's actions, reasoning, and projected outcomes to its operator. Although much of this evidence comes from commercial maritime, aviation and automobile sectors, the underlying Human Factors challenges align closely with those of naval operations, where automation increasingly supports propulsion, platform management, and mission critical decisions. This paper reviews the experimental literature on automation transparency and distils ten design principles spanning information content, system integration, uncertainty communication, and evaluation of transparent systems. Three overarching insights emerge for naval human machine integration: (1) transparency is not a quantity to be maximised but a set of design decisions concerning what information is communicated, when it is communicated, and how it is prioritised; (2) the purpose of transparency is to calibrate trust rather than maximise it, including enabling operators to identify and reject incorrect automated recommendations; and (3) transparency must be sustained throughout the system lifecycle, encompassing design, training, operation, and post operational review. These findings provide an evidence based foundation for the design and evaluation of transparent automation in future naval systems.

The article is divided into several distinct dynamic interface study parts.  The objective of this analysis is to describe improved air and sea vehicle launch and recovery methodologies using top-level multi-disciplinary dynamic interface descriptions.  Dynamic Interface (DI) as an academic discipline is defined as the study of the combination of two or more free bodies in motion along with their associated systems. Prior to sea trials, simulation is normally conducted.  The simulation must simultaneously compute the encountered inertial loads on the air vehicle from the simulated ship motions.  These are coupled with direct wind force or disturbed airflow over the deck as air wake.  The key is to define constantly the ship’s attitude and movement as a function of the of the air vehicle virtual centre of gravity.  The same methodology may be applied to other motion sensitive systems like the launch and recovery of RHIBs, for example, and even piloted air vehicles.  The elegance of this methodology is in its simplicity and its capacity to incorporate other operational scenarios.  The test equipment at sea is analysed using a similar process as in the simulated cases.  All the motion parameters are measured.  Having defined the ship environment, including a short horizon forecasting motion tool, the focus is to improve on the forecasting advanced length giving the launch and recovery events more time to prepare.  On recovery, air vehicle stability at the instant of touch-down or whilst sitting on the deck, is tracked as a function of the encountered deck forces coupled with air wake.  To extend the deck behaviour forecasts, it is necessary measure the seaway at remote locations ahead of the ship.  The long horizon forecasting tool is called Quiescent Period Prediction or QPP.  In practice, the Radar kit maps the seaway which is computed from its emission backscatter.  The backscatter is reduced to wave lines composed of wave height, direction and speed of propagation.  The backscatter image along with the shadowed waves are reduced to a sea spectrum containing all the frequencies from the converted wave form.  Switching to the long horizon forecast of airflow, the Quiescent Period Prediction air wake portion operates by measurements made by a LiDAR system.  The system measures arriving wind systems at a remote location of the ship to identify the safest, quieter intervals of air parcels.  Whilst the air and sea dimensions are physically independent, quiescent water patches are often shadowed by a quieter parcel of air.  QPP LiDAR can monitor various airflow components over the deck, including chimney exhaust.  The exhaust plume can have a significant impact on the safe launch, recovery and securing of the air vehicle.  With the deck motions defined for the robot, many more opportunities to land are uncovered.

Navies around the world are moving towards multi-vehicle maritime autonomy with a few operators expected to supervise multiple assets. While technical capabilities can be advanced through thousands of simulated iterations, the human factor challenges of such supervision cannot be accelerated in the same way, as iterative experiments with human is essential for system evaluation and improvement. This paper reviews the human factors lessons accumulated over decades in the aviation and army domains to gain design insights for naval maritime autonomy. Through a semi-systematic review, situation awareness, cognitive workload and trust emerged as the most recurrent challenges. For each challenge, the paper introduces its underlying mechanisms, measurement approaches and emerging solutions, including explainable artificial intelligence, machine learning based workload estimation, cognitive agents and large language models. The review concludes that closing the remaining validation gap calls for close cooperation between navies and researchers.

The Royal Navy is moving rapidly towards a hybrid navy in which crewed ships, autonomous platforms, sensors and digital networks operate as a distributed but digitally connected force. This transition introduces challenges in terms of fleet mix design, platform and fleet level requirement setting and operational analysis. This paper presents a combined top-down and bottom-up approach to assessing hybrid navy configurations, using well-established principles to assess the survivability of capability.  

The existing bottom-up platform orientated capability of the Purple Fire vulnerability/lethality tool is developed to enable it to assess hybrid fleets using a top-down system-of-systems survivability assessment approach. The utility of this new analysis technique is demonstrated by linking it with the Synthetic Environment MACE for operational assessments, allowing a dynamic understanding of capability resilience in realistic operating scenarios.  

The need for this type of analysis in assessing fleet mixes and in adopting new systems efficiently is discussed alongside the presentation of a real-world example analysis.  

Accurate understanding of landing craft behaviour during beaching, offloading and retracting operations is essential for the safe and effective execution of amphibious missions. Although computational tools for predicting shallow water hydrodynamics and hull–seabed interaction continue to improve, real world data to validate these models which in turn guide operational decision making, remain limited. To address these gaps, an extensive scale model test campaign was conducted to analyse the performance of three generic landing craft designs across a range of representative littoral conditions. The model-testing results demonstrate clear differences in beaching dynamics across various landing craft types. Preliminary numerical simulations show good correlations with experimental data for seakeeping characteristics, while there remain noticeable differences in other areas, particularly ship motions and beaching dynamics. Future work will focus on refining the fidelity of the simulation tools and establishing their general predictive capabilities through bespoke full-scale experimental validation activities, establishing appropriate limiting criteria and developing tactical decision aids to support safe operating envelopes for amphibious operations.

Pressure to reduce warship complement is legitimate: fewer people can reduce accommodation, volume, power and 
through-life cost. Yet lean-crewing experience shows that satisfying a workload requirement does not necessarily 
establish that capability can be sustained over time. 

This paper proposes recovery margin: the reserve capacity within the sociotechnical system to absorb demand, recover 
and remain effective across repeated demands. Drawing on the logic of naval design margins, it treats human-system 
reserve as something that can be consumed, restored and protected over time. Recovery-margin assessment is proposed as 
a complement to existing task-based validation, making visible whether sufficient reserve remains as demands accumulate. 
Fatigue, work design and autonomy are considered as mechanisms that shape how that reserve is depleted, restored and 
distributed across the wider capability system. 

Affordable distributed lethality is a balancing act across the warship life cycle cost including shipyard infrastructure investment, a batch building contract model and modular mission systems that match changing threats to installed mission systems. Affordable distributed lethality lives at the centre of the Venn Diagram for Upkeep, via maintenance and repair, Update, via obsolescence management, and Upgrade, via constant mission system capability integration. Affordable distributed lethality facilitates scaling the fleet by delivering added mass into minor warships. 

This paper examines the Human Factors (HF) challenges associated with deploying midsized torpedo-style Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and their Launch and Recovery (LAR) systems within modular frameworks. Mission modularity, including the containerisation of capability, enables navies to adapt expensive platforms to evolving roles and emerging needs. It supports rapid deployment of systems, such as AUVs, either through purpose-built modular spaces on naval vessels or by utilising Vehicles of Opportunity (VOO). While modularity enhances flexibility and operational agility, it introduces complexities related to confined working environments, system integration, and maintaining safe and effective operations in variable conditions. The study highlights the importance of aligning Human Readiness Levels (HRL) with Technical Readiness Levels (TRL) to mitigate risks and improve effectiveness. Key HF considerations include designing for maintenance within containerised systems and supporting efficient operations on diverse platforms. Addressing these challenges is crucial ensuring sustained operational capability across the fleet. 

Modernising sustainment practices through digital solutions is critical to delivering affordable naval capability at scale in Australia. As Defence shifts toward continuous naval shipbuilding and sustainment, the performance of the complete lifecycle ecosystem becomes the key outcome. This will require sustaining and upgrading the in-service fleet while simultaneously recapitalising with new platforms. The needed result is a build and sustainment environment where workforce, shipyard capability, and configuration control are managed as an integrated system. 

The paper examines how shipbuilding-specific Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can provide Defence, shipyards, design agents, sustainment partners, and suppliers with an authoritative digital thread that connects engineering, procurement, construction, and in-service support. Rather than attempting to force every participant onto one authoring platform, the proposed approach separates CAD authoring from lifecycle information governance. A shipbuilding-specific PLM layer becomes a single harbour for controlled product structure, configuration state, asset condition, source lineage, change history, and downstream release. 

Many modern navies face a mismatch between the scale of their maritime responsibilities and the naval force they can afford to crew, sustain and deploy. This paper examines the question of a Minimum Viable Warship as a means of delivering affordable, credible maritime mass. Drawing on Australian autonomous-system developments and UK Hybrid Navy thinking, it argues that viability is not a fixed platform threshold. It is a strategic choice made across cost, crew, capability and cadence, and through nine connected trade spaces. The paper proposes a future programme based on force-level requirements, sovereign data and autonomy, distributed support, functional rather than platform-level autonomy, and progressive operational stepping stones. The research suggests that Australia should not simply look to buy a generic uncrewed vessel, it should develop a sovereign Hybrid Fleet architecture in which crewed, optionally crewed and uncrewed systems combine to deliver persistent effects across the Indo-Pacific. 

As demonstrated in the Russo-Ukrainian War, the combat effectiveness of large complex warships is seriously threatened by a plethora of modern weapons including uncrewed aerial and surface drone swarms. This drives navies to look at how alternative fleet arrangements can be constructed, what key functions and capabilities are required, and the challenges that arise from these arrangements. 

A modern frigate is the baseline, representing current expectations for endurance, range, survivability, and multi-role capability. Various sizes of uncrewed surface vessels (USV) provide a comparable set of capabilities when employed with logistic support. The study assesses the extent to which platform size affects ability to deliver key roles, examining factors such as launch and recovery, sustainment and ability to operate in oceanic sea conditions. 

The results aim to provide insight into how future naval forces might achieve global reach with fewer complex warships, while preserving operational flexibility and effectiveness. 

The Royal Navy is moving rapidly towards a hybrid navy in which crewed ships, autonomous platforms, sensors and digital networks operate as a distributed but digitally connected force. This transition introduces challenges in terms of fleet mix design, platform and fleet level requirement setting and operational analysis. This paper presents a combined top-down and bottom-up approach to assessing hybrid navy configurations, using well-established principles to assess the survivability of capability.  

The existing bottom-up platform orientated capability of the Purple Fire vulnerability/lethality tool is developed to enable it to assess hybrid fleets using a top-down system-of-systems survivability assessment approach. The utility of this new analysis technique is demonstrated by linking it with the Synthetic Environment MACE for operational assessments, allowing a dynamic understanding of capability resilience in realistic operating scenarios.  

The need for this type of analysis in assessing fleet mixes and in adopting new systems efficiently is discussed alongside the presentation of a real-world example analysis.  

A critical factor in the successful development, acquisition and operation of autonomous naval vessels is the availability of a fit-for-purpose regulatory framework that supports innovation while maintaining safety, accountability and operational effectiveness. This paper examines the new Defence Seaworthiness Program, launched on 1 January 2026, including the tailored authorisation and classification pathways available under the Australian Naval Seaworthiness Regulation (ANSR) and the Australian Naval Classification Rules (ANCR). Drawing on early implementation experience, the paper highlights practical regulatory challenges, including the categorisation and treatment of Remotely Operated Vessels (ROVs) and embarked vessels, and identifies emerging challenges and opportunities. The paper concludes by positioning the DSwP as a flexible, risk-informed approach for regulating autonomy at sea and enabling the successful integration of autonomous vessels into capability in support of Defence’s strategic objectives.  

Naval ship design routinely defers producibility to late stages, where the options to act on it are limited. With the safety of sailors and the defense of nations at risk, navies around the world rightfully make design choices to prioritize maximum capability when ships reach operational deployment. However, many naval acquisition programs are plagued by cost and schedule overruns, sometimes prompting the removal of systems, reductions in procurement quantities, or complete cancellation of programs. Rather than relying on static documentation and reactive problem-solving to address emergent production problems, we propose using a structured, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach to digitally map the dependencies between design intent and manufacturing reality. By capturing these connections, we contend such a framework can demonstrate the downstream impact of changes before steel is cut. This shift toward a systems-based understanding can inform programs as early as the Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) stage and mitigate programmatic risk. It matters most for the minor warships a high-low fleet must build in numbers and in parallel across several yards, where producibility governs whether the intended quantity arrives on schedule.

This session examines perception as the critical determinant of warfighting autonomy effectiveness. Legacy sensor modalities including radar and AIS, were designed on the assumption of a human operator reconciling multiple imperfect information sources, an assumption that does not hold for uncrewed and optionally crewed platforms operating in contested environments. Drawing on operational trial data, the session sets out the specific vulnerabilities of each legacy modality, argues for passive, edge-processed optical perception as a necessary complement in denied and emission-controlled conditions, and demonstrates that multi-sensor fusion for corroborating detections across modalities rather than relying on any single source is required to establish trustworthy situational awareness. The session concludes with implications for vessel design, crewing models and the near-term steps navies can take to operationalise this perception architecture ahead of fully autonomous deployment. 

This paper presents the outcomes of historical concept studies undertaken at the time that a common modular Hydrographic, Mine Countermeasure (MCM) and Patrol vessel was under consideration by Defence. The 2009 Defence White Paper identified the potential for significant operational efficiencies and savings from rationalising four existing classes of vessels into a future Offshore Combatant Vessel capability. The concept relied heavily upon modular autonomous systems for mine warfare and hydrographic operations. The studies examined the influence of commonality, modularity, vessel size, operating costs and survivability requirements on the overall capability solution. A dedicated Coastal Patrol Boat (CPB) concept was developed alongside a larger Offshore Combatant Vessel (OCV), and comparative life-cycle cost assessments were undertaken for a range of fleet structures. 

The studies demonstrated that embarked mission system requirements were the primary drivers of platform size and complexity, particularly for hydrographic and mine warfare operations. While a homogeneous fleet of OCVs maximised flexibility, mixed fleets of OCVs and CPBs produced significantly lower acquisition and sustainment costs. An accompanying survivability study estimated the cost impact of increasing the OCV from a predominantly commercial standard vessel to a militarised naval platform. Collectively, the studies highlighted the importance of developing realistic concepts of operation, survivability requirements and embarked mission system definitions before attempting to optimise fleet architecture. 

Since World War II, the service lives of naval vessels have steadily increased​ [1]​, creating a growing need to maintain capability, availability and regulatory compliance without a corresponding increase in maintenance burden. Building on work previously presented at IMC 2022​ [2]​ and Warship 2024​ [3]​, this paper examines how risk-based structural integrity management, engineering-led mitigation and advanced repair technologies can be used to optimise hull structures throughout their operational life. 

Drawing on practical case studies from the offshore and naval sectors, the paper demonstrates how engineering-led decision making can significantly reduce repair scope, improve maintenance efficiency and increase platform availability whilst maintaining structural assurance. It concludes that the engineering rigour traditionally applied during design should be extended throughout the in-service phase, supported by the wider adoption of proven techniques from allied industries and a broader range of repair options. The result is a practical pathway to maintaining ageing fleets for longer, with improved affordability, availability and regulatory confidence. 

Life of Type Extensions (LOTE) are critical for maintaining naval surface readiness amidst procurement delays for next-generation combatants. For legacy platforms operating beyond their original planned years of service, cumulative hull girder fatigue and increasing End-of-Life (EoL) displacement exceeding original design limits present significant structural risks. To evaluate these risks, this paper establishes a practical and conservative engineering framework for the global finite element analysis (FEA) and fatigue assessment of aging naval vessels. The methodology outlines a streamlined approach to global FEM development, incorporating practical modelling simplifications and force application methods. By combining maximum EoL weight distributions with rule-based dynamic wave loads, the framework generates conservative hogging and sagging stresses to predict cyclic fatigue damage. A rapid screening process is presented to identify initial areas of concern which can be taken into further detailed assessments following Class Society fatigue calculations. Ultimately, this workflow provides engineers with an efficient and practical methodology to predict fatigue life of the platform and enable maintenance strategy as part of the LOTE. 

Accurate understanding of landing craft behaviour during beaching, offloading and retracting operations is essential for the safe and effective execution of amphibious missions. Although computational tools for predicting shallow water hydrodynamics and hull–seabed interaction continue to improve, real world data to validate these models which in turn guide operational decision making, remain limited. To address these gaps, an extensive scale model test campaign was conducted to analyse the performance of three generic landing craft designs across a range of representative littoral conditions. The model-testing results demonstrate clear differences in beaching dynamics across various landing craft types. Preliminary numerical simulations show good correlations with experimental data for seakeeping characteristics, while there remain noticeable differences in other areas, particularly ship motions and beaching dynamics. Future work will focus on refining the fidelity of the simulation tools and establishing their general predictive capabilities through bespoke full-scale experimental validation activities, establishing appropriate limiting criteria and developing tactical decision aids to support safe operating envelopes for amphibious operations. 

Three operational-level anti-submarine warfare (ASW) wargames were conducted at the Operational Advantage Centre, HMS Collingwood, in March 2026 under NATO SMART Defence Initiative 1.1271, ASW Barrier. The campaign compared two force structures against a realistic Russian submarine threat in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap: a lightly augmented hybrid force representative of a 2027 capability baseline, and a maximally augmented uncrewed architecture representative of a 2032 baseline. The Fleet Command (FC) wargame system was used, extended with a bespoke sonar detection model derived from the sonar equations. The principal finding is that sensor mass and persistence, rather than individual platform performance, determine barrier effectiveness. A dense, multi-layer uncrewed vehicle architecture materially alters the operational balance; incremental augmentation of traditional forces does not. 

This paper introduces the Risk Based Approach to Margins Management, a scalable approach developed to enhance the management of naval vessel margins across the lifecycle of platforms within the Naval Enterprise. The approach integrates with existing risk management processes of Royal Australian Navy and employs a Red, Amber and Green rating system to classify margin status. To provide fleet-wide visibility, the approach adopts a margin roll-up system that aggregates individual margin statuses into vessel and class-level indicators using weighted criticality values. This enables strategic oversight and prioritisation of risk management efforts across the fleet. Worked examples illustrate the application to hypothetical scenarios, demonstrating its utility in balancing interdependent margins and informing engineering change decisions. 

The rapid evolution of unmanned surface vessel (USV) warfare—demonstrated in recent conflicts—has shifted naval priorities from platform sophistication to production scalability and industrial resilience. Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), in collaboration with Odense Maritime Technology (OMT), is developing a next‑generation production system to enable scalability by enabling rapid and flexible manufacturing of sea drones. The system can easily transition from low‑volume output to high‑volume surge capacity, overcoming today’s fragmented supply chains, labour limitations, and long lead times. 

The production system integrates large‑format additive manufacturing, modular assembly methodologies, and digitally enabled workflows to dramatically reduce fabrication time and minimize dependency on skilled labour bottlenecks. Hull structures are produced using industrial 3D printing technologies and assembled through a modular process. This approach of hull production enables a much faster production ramp-up time than traditional manufacturing methods for GRP hulls.  

This paper presents the conceptual architecture, enabling technologies, prototype results, and scaling model of the sea drone production system - illustrating how industrial agility can transform future naval warfare. 

Lean-crewed, minimally manned, and unmanned vessel programs prove harder to integrate, verify, and sustain than their size predicts, because reducing crew forces software to absorb functions once performed by people. This paper develops a vessel-specific definition of the software-defined vessel, shows why crew reduction produces integration complexity that outgrows equipment count across the manning continuum, defends an attritability boundary based on mission tolerance and replacement realism to separate the vessels this argument covers from those it does not, and redefines producibility to include lifecycle configuration control and verification. It then applies bounded plant-controller codesign to software-defined vessel architecture, treating selected physical and software-control variables as coupled early-design decisions rather than sequential handoffs. The argument applies to minor warships and larger non-attritable vessels, and points to a bounded, subsystem-scale codesign demonstration as the credible next step.