NATO’s effort to build a common underwater mission network is moving beyond a technical architecture and into something much broader, with speakers at UDT 2026 making clear that the challenge now is as much about operations, culture and multinational alignment as it is about engineering.
Speaking on a panel titled Innovation and Transformation in the North Atlantic, Adrian Fryer, AUKUS and Naval Director at Saab UK, said the discussion around innovation is too often reduced to hardware alone, even as the real difficulty lies in how different nations, operators and companies work together.
“Technology on its own doesn’t really alter the game,” he said. “What we need is transformation and innovation in how we work and how we bring that technology together.”
Fryer said the programme had started life as a technical problem, but had quickly become something larger. “Initially we looked at it, it was purely a technology, technical challenge. But the more we look at it now, we spend more time understanding how we’re going to operate it collectively, not just across industry, but across different nations, but also strategically across NATO as well.”
That is an important shift as it means the network is now being treated as the basis for a shared operating model across allied navies and industries. Fryer was explicit that the technical solution alone would not be enough, saying: “We could provide the best technical solution in the world, but unless we have that knowledge, that understanding and buy in and interoperability across different countries and across NATO, then it’s not worth the paper it’s written [on].”
Part of what makes the concept significant is the level of ambition behind it, something Fryer described simply as “the underwater Internet of Things”. He went on: “Once you’ve got the access code and you’ve proved you can log on, then you can log in and log out whenever you want, and it should appear completely seamless as well.” It is a simplified comparison, but it captures the intent clearly enough, namely plug-and-play interoperability, shared data environments and the ability for allied systems to connect into a common framework rather than operate as isolated national assets.
He pushed that further with a practical example, arguing that the aim is to reach a point where a UK-operated uncrewed system crossing the North Atlantic could, if necessary, be picked up and operated by another ally. “How can you know on the surface, like a sub-surface, like a USV that is owned and operated by the UK transit the North Atlantic, and then [be] picked up by the Norwegians and operated by the Norwegian aid, for an example, as well.” The wording was rough in delivery, but the meaning was clear enough. The ambition is not simply interoperability in principle, but genuine operational handover across national lines.
Rear Admiral Paul Flos, Programme Director International Naval Materiel Cooperation at the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and Chairman of the NATO Naval Armaments Group, made clear that the programme sits inside a broader alliance effort to close maritime capability gaps. He noted that this work had grown out of NATO structures already in motion and said the organisation could not afford to wait for full consensus before making progress. “You can wait until all these 32 countries agree on something which will never happen,” he said. “So it’s more called the coalition of the willing… just put some people together and do stuff. And NATO is happy.”
Fryer said the Mangrove consortium was formed last summer and brings together ten companies from across NATO countries, with a 12-month phase one ending in September this year. The aim of that first stage, he explained, is not to produce a complete finished network, but to establish a reference architecture and common design standard that can then be taken to participating nations. “When we read out at phase one, we have a reference architecture, sort of design standard that we can move forward to,” he said.
He was also candid about the politics around that process as not every company or country involved in the wider space will automatically support the effort, and some will inevitably drag their heels. Fryer said part of the challenge now is to convince participants that the network is not intended to produce a single industrial winner but to create a technical architecture others can plug into. “This is not a solution that’s going to be closed and there’s going to be one winner,” he said. “This is a technical architecture solution… everybody can plug into it and gain some level [of] advantage.”
Captain James Lovell RN, Head of Underwater Battlespace Capability at Navy Develop, linked the network directly to the Royal Navy’s own Atlantic Bastion work, saying national initiatives would have to feed into the wider NATO model rather than sit apart from it. “Anything we do in Atlantic Bastion has to be connected with and inform the mission network as well,” he said. He added that northern European states all have a direct stake in this because “we are going to be operating up there together” and because the need “to play together as we move forward at a pace of relevance with novel and new systems” demands that they connect their efforts properly.
Captain Christopher Hill RN MBE, Bastion ASW Programme Director at Navy Develop, went further still, arguing that the architecture emerging from Mangrove should become the foundation for the UK’s own national framework. “The architecture and the reference architecture that comes out of Mangrove should be the basis for the start sovereign glue,” he said. In his view, the value lies not just in the wires and standards, but in the decisions that sit around them. “It’s decisions that need to make quickly around those standards, those policies, the rules of the game for joining the network.”
That combination of operational, political and industrial issues is why the panel spent so much time talking about culture. Fryer argued that a great deal of effort now has to go into building support early, both across NATO and inside industry, so that the architecture is accepted as a common foundation rather than resisted as somebody else’s scheme.
“There’s a big push to get a more of a strategic sort of influence plan behind it as well. So people buy in at the early stages.”
