Description
Just as the war in Ukraine has seen exponential growth in the employment of remotely-piloted and (increasingly) autonomous airborne weapons – often shorthanded as ‘drones’ – so too the maritime domain is currently seeing a proliferation of uncrewed systems. In addition to Ukraine’s own successful employment of relatively simple and low-cost naval drones to cripple major Russian warships, most advanced navies are now switching to autonomous models of mine-hunting, China’s PLAN is progressing with the world’s largest and most diverse fleet of uncrewed submarines, and the Royal Navy’s own ‘Atlantic Bastion’ concept relies heavily on autonomous surface and sub-surface vessels to try to control vital UK sea lines of communication while suffering a paucity of crewed ships. Yet do such advances herald a genuine revolution in naval warfare, finally upending an inescapable truth of all previous maritime history: that those who seek to control the sea must be ready to deploy their people on, in, or above it? This paper will argue – via four related lines of reasoning – that the promise of such autonomous naval systems, while real, currently falls far short of such a revolutionary punchline.
