Navy wargamed hybrid fleet and still needs crewed warships

The Royal Navy has run a series of service-wide war games to test its planned hybrid fleet, and the answer has come back consistently that crewed warships remain necessary alongside the uncrewed systems, the First Sea Lord has said, in an interview for the Council on Geostrategy’s Defence Talks podcast.

General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, the first Royal Marine to lead the service, was asked whether the ease with which a surface ship can now be found and attacked calls into question the purpose of having one at all.

He said the transition does not make crewed warships irrelevant, but changes how they are used. “It just changes the way that you’re going to operate them, and it changes the way you achieve mass. It changes what their role is, in particular the command and control and coordination of the uncrewed systems that we’re going to need to field.”

On the testing itself, he said: “That’s why we have been running a series of navy-wide war games to test the hybrid fleet and rigorously test it in each environment as to how we’re going to operate and how this would work, where the challenges and the weaknesses are in the model at the moment. Time and again, the tests come back with you still need conventional warships in this mix. They’re just further back and have a slightly different role to the way that we would have fielded them in the past.”

That is a more reassuring answer than much of the surrounding debate has assumed, and it is being reached through structured testing rather than asserted. The Navy is examining where its own model breaks before committing to it, which is a considerably better position than discovering the weaknesses later.

General Jenkins also pushed back on reading the Black Sea across to British waters wholesale. “We do have to be careful applying the geography and the specific physical environment of the Black Sea or the Straits of Hormuz to some of our Atlantic space, and the big Atlantic is a very different proposition to some of those quite constrained and even reasonably benign waters.” He immediately added that this implies no complacency.

What Ukraine has achieved he described as a wake-up call for every Western navy, noting that a navy in name but not in being had neutralised one of the most advanced fleets in the world.

He set the change alongside earlier turning points in naval history, from sail to steam and wood to iron, through the dreadnought, the aircraft carrier and the submarine, observing that each had its detractors at the time, and that those arguing steam would never replace sail or that carriers were irrelevant were eventually answered by events.

Listen to the full interview

The conversation runs a good deal wider than the extracts covered here. Over the course of the episode the First Sea Lord also discusses reforming officer selection and training, how the Navy intends to unleash innovation at the front line, the three strands of the Atlantic programme in Bastion, Strike and Shield, the relationship with industry that the hybrid fleet depends on, and his own reading of how the strategic picture has changed since he joined the military at the end of the Cold War. Interviews with a serving First Sea Lord at this length are rare, and anyone with an interest in where the Royal Navy is heading over the next decade will get considerably more from listening to it in full than from any write-up.

General Sir Gwyn Jenkins was interviewed by Viktorija Starych-Samueliene and Paul Mason. The episode is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Defence Talks is produced by the Council on Geostrategy, a London-based think tank founded in 2021 which focuses on British foreign, defence and trade policy, the Indo-Pacific and the geopolitics of technology, and which publishes the journal Britain’s World alongside its research output. The series is delivered in partnership with ADS Group, the trade association representing the British aerospace, defence, security and space industries, and is sponsored by BAE Systems.