The UXV Combatant – The drone carrier that came too soon

In 2007, long before naval drones were in wide use, BVT Surface Fleet unveiled a concept that felt like it had leapt from the pages of science fiction: the UXV Combatant.

It was billed as a drone carrier for the Royal Navy, capable of operating UAVs, UUVs, and uncrewed surface vessels.

A mothership for robots across air, sea, and even land domains. In principle, it was a bold and prescient idea. In practice, it never stood a chance. The UXV Combatant was built around an assumption that drones required a fundamentally new type of vessel. That assumption has not held.

The UXV was designed to act as a permanent base and control hub for swarms of unmanned vehicles. Its shape and layout echoed aspects of the Type 45 destroyer, but it went far beyond existing naval thinking at the time. Two angled flight decks, arranged in a distinctive “V” formation, would support drones, V/STOL aircraft, and helicopters. It featured a moon pool to launch underwater drones, hangars for maintenance, and a vertical launching system for cruise missiles. It even had a 155mm naval gun, envisioned to fire rapid bursts in support of forces ashore.

The designers imagined it doubling as an amphibious assault platform, capable of embarking troops and their gear. It would have been part frigate, part light carrier, part robot command centre. The whole thing displaced just 8,000 tonnes, which is compact for something trying to do so much.

The ship was presented at DSEI 2007 with fanfare, along with mock-ups and artist renderings. But it never progressed beyond the concept stage. It quietly disappeared from the conversation in the years that followed.

This wasn’t because the idea was flawed. In fact, many of its predictions are now being proven correct. The real problem was that the UXV was too bespoke and arrived too early.

At the time, the Royal Navy was already committed to major projects like the Type 45 destroyers, Astute submarines, and the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. Budgets were tight. The technology to make the UXV work, particularly in terms of the very naval drones it would use, was not yet mature. And the idea of designing and building an entirely new class of ship just to operate a then-unproven capability was difficult to justify.

It also didn’t help that the UXV didn’t quite fit any existing mould. It was neither a full carrier nor a destroyer. Too lightly armed to be a capital ship, too large and complex to be a specialist platform. In trying to be everything… drone carrier, troop transporter, missile platform. It became difficult to place within the Royal Navy’s existing force structure.

But while the UXV died on the drawing board, its central idea, that future naval warfare would rely heavily on uncrewed systems, has become accepted doctrine. What has changed wasn’t really the end goal, but the route to getting there.

Instead of building a drone-optimised warship from scratch, navies are adapting what they already have. HMS Prince of Wales is the clearest example for the Royal Navy. Over the past two years, the Royal Navy has used the carrier to trial uncrewed aerial vehicles, including large fixed-wing drones like the Mojave, and rotary-wing platforms like the Malloy T-150. These are payload-capable, long-endurance systems being tested for real missions, from logistics to ISR to strike.

HMS Prince of Wales is becoming a drone carrier by evolution.

And it’s not just the carriers. Frigates like HMS Lancaster have trialled rotary UAVs like the Peregrine, a navalised Camcopter, expanding their sensor range without altering the ship’s design. Modular drone systems are being added to auxiliaries and mine countermeasure platforms. The Royal Navy’s Future Maritime Aviation Force is focused on exactly this kind of flexible integration, making drones part of the air wing rather than designing a separate ship just to carry them.

That’s the key lesson. The UXV Combatant’s greatest strength, its bespoke nature, was also its biggest weakness. It anticipated a future that has since arrived, but assumed that future would demand a purpose-built hull. In reality, navies have embraced adaptability. Rather than building a single high-tech mothership, they are spreading drone capabilities across multiple ship classes.

That may still change. The proposed Type 32 frigate has been suggested as a potential host for autonomous systems. And it is not inconceivable that one day the Royal Navy or another major force will commission a true drone carrier. But for now, the trend is clear. Drones are being integrated into the fleet gradually, ship by ship, role by role.

So the UXV Combatant was, in many ways, a brilliant idea. It just belonged to a timeline that didn’t exist yet. Today’s Royal Navy is realising much of what the UXV envisioned, not with a single warship, but with a distributed network of vessels, aircraft, and uncrewed systems working together. That might not make for as striking an artist’s rendering, but it is far more practical.

And perhaps that is the real legacy of the UXV. It showed what was possible, even if it wasn’t possible back then.