British drone warships could boost shipbuilding industry

The Defence Investment Plan swaps a planned generation of crewed destroyers and frigates for six Common Combat Vessels and a fleet of uncrewed platforms it says will grow through the 2030s. On an optimistic reading, the sheer number of simpler hulls, spread across more yards, could do more for British shipbuilding than the warships they replace, but will they?

The Royal Navy’s shift to a hybrid fleet leaves one figure wide open, the number of ships it will actually build, because the Defence Investment Plan commits to at least six Common Combat Vessels and a new family of uncrewed platforms, the Type 91, 92, 93 and 94, a mix of missile carriers, submarine hunters and sensor ships, without ever putting a firm number on the uncrewed fleet.

The plan drops two crewed programmes the Navy had been counting on, the Type 83 destroyer meant to replace the six Type 45s from the late 2030s and the never-numbered Type 32 frigate planned on top of the eight Type 26 and five Type 31 already under construction. In their place come six Common Combat Vessels acting as crewed command hubs for the uncrewed platforms, plus however many of those platforms the Navy can eventually fund, so that on paper a generation of perhaps eleven large and complex warships gives way to six command ships and a far larger number of small ones.

Fewer warships, but many more hulls

For British shipyards, that trade looks very different depending on how it is counted, since eleven frigates and destroyers would have meant a great deal of steel and thousands of skilled jobs concentrated at the big yards on the Clyde and at Rosyth, whereas the uncrewed vessels are smaller, cheaper and far simpler, each carrying only a fraction of the tonnage and labour of a frigate. Measured by tonnage and man-hours, six command ships and a swarm of drones would likely not match the programme they replace, though the sum looks different once the measure is hull count and the number of yards able to take part.

Simplicity is what makes that plausible, because when industry was competing to shape the cancelled destroyer requirement, one British shipbuilder’s concept, shown publicly in 2025, paired a large air-warfare command ship with smaller, lean-crewed or autonomous sensor and effector vessels it argued could be built at a wide range of yards, well beyond the two that build the Navy’s frigates today.

If that holds, a fleet of uncrewed platforms could spread work to the commercial and second-tier yards that rarely see a warship order, sustaining a broader industrial base and a steadier drumbeat of construction than a handful of complex hulls ever could.

How many drone ships would it take?

As for how many that might be, the plan gives no total, yet the Navy has offered a template, because the First Sea Lord has described the hybrid model as a Type 26 frigate operating in company with two uncrewed escorts while a submarine drone hunts beneath, and has said he wants the first uncrewed escort ships sailing alongside Royal Navy warships “within the next two years”.

Taking that flotilla as the unit, the Navy will have nineteen crewed surface combatants once the command vessels arrive, the eight Type 26, the five Type 31 and the six Common Combat Vessels, and on the usual planning assumption that only about one hull in three is at sea at any moment, roughly six of them would be on deployment at once. Screen each with the two escorts the First Sea Lord describes and that is a dozen uncrewed vessels at sea, or eighteen at the higher figure of three apiece, and applying the same one-in-three rule to the escorts themselves points to a standing force of something like around thirty to sixty surface hulls.

That one-in-three assumption is doing most of the work here, and it could move either way, because uncrewed vessels are meant to stay at sea longer than crewed ones, which would pull the total down, while unproven early designs may spend more time under repair, which would push it back up.

The template only carries the count so far, though, because the four uncrewed types are not one interchangeable escort. Three of them are surface ships, the Type 91 carrying missiles as a dispersed magazine, the Type 94 carrying a radar to watch the skies, and the Type 92, listed in the plan as an underwater sensing platform but in practice a surface sloop that hunts submarines with towed sonar arrays in support of the frigates, and it is these three that the flotilla screen above is really counting.

Only the fourth, the Type 93, works beneath the surface, an extra-large uncrewed submarine drawn from the Excalibur programme that ranges alongside the crewed attack boats, and it scales not with the number of frigates put to sea but with the length of the North Atlantic barrier the Navy wants to hold, so it sits on top of the surface figure rather than inside it. Once it and the sensor gliders already entering the water are added, a total comfortably into the sixties is easy to reach.

The government says as much itself, listing the Type 91 to 94 and committing that “in the 2030s, we will expand the numbers of the above platforms and bring at least six Common Combat Vessels into service as the brain of a networked Maritime Air Defence system.” The upper end of the ambition is larger still, because the minister responsible has spoken of a Royal Navy numbered in the hundreds, most of it uncrewed, a figure that drew open scepticism given the service’s struggle to order even a modest number of autonomous minehunters.

There is evidence behind the direction, too, because a Navy-wide wargame late last year was reported to show the hybrid force roughly trebling the missile capacity of a task group, and even the lower, flotilla-driven figure, were it built in the UK, would be one of the larger runs of naval hulls this country has ordered in a generation.

Where the hulls get built

The optimism rests on conditions that are not yet in place in my view, the most important being where the hulls are to be built, because one of the competing industrial concepts would base its uncrewed vessels on designs from an overseas shipbuilder, sending much of the metalwork abroad and leaving the British share in the systems and the integration, while much of the value in these platforms may lie in the combat systems and the autonomy in any case, where the yards that weld the hulls would capture only part of it.

There is a question, too, of how simple these hulls really are, since the larger surface types are assessed as potentially eighty to a hundred metres and a couple of thousand tonnes, closer to a small warship than to the cheap drone the word suggests, even if the sonar sloops prove smaller. Only one of the four, the Type 93 underwater vehicle, would flow not to commercial yards at all but to the specialist submarine supply base, so three of the four types are surface hulls that more yards could in principle take on, which is the part of the case that most helps British shipbuilding, provided the orders come and the metal is cut here. All of it depends, too, on orders that do not yet exist, since the plan describes its figures as indicative, commits only to at least six command ships, and leaves the uncrewed numbers to future budgets, against a recent record of ambitions announced and then quietly trimmed.

None of that cancels the opportunity, and if the Navy builds the flotillas it is describing, and builds them in Britain, the hybrid fleet could put more hulls into more yards than the crewed ships it has given up, even if each one is smaller and cheaper than the warships now being set aside. Whether the Navy takes that opportunity will show in the order book over the coming years, as the numbers the plan leaves open are either turned into contracts with British yards or allowed to slip.