Navy would ‘probably lose’ without autonomous shift

The Royal Navy would probably lose a war against an opponent that had made the transition to autonomous warfare while Britain had not, 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, told Viktorija Starych-Samueliene and Paul Mason: “If we were to find ourselves fighting an opponent who had transitioned to autonomous warfare, and we had not, we will probably lose. And my job is not to lose. My job is to win.”

He said that made the shift a necessity rather than a gamble. “I don’t see it as a risk in embracing this transition. I see it as an absolute necessity. You must do, and we have to do it.”

The lesson he draws is explicitly from recent fighting. “I think the lesson to draw from the Black Sea and now the Straits of Hormuz is if we were to find ourselves fighting an opponent who had transitioned to autonomous warfare, and we had not, we will probably lose.”

He described the change facing navies as fundamental rather than incremental. “I kind of describe this as, it’s an overused phrase, but this is a paradigm shift. It is a fundamental reframing of what maritime power is and how we will wield it.”

Asked directly about the purpose of a surface platform in an age when it can be found and destroyed by asymmetric means, he said the answer is not that warships become irrelevant. “I don’t think it makes the manned warships irrelevant. I think it just changes the way that you’re going to operate them, and it changes the way you achieve mass.”

On the detractors, he said: “Much like any good historian will tell you, there were plenty of detractors back at those transition times. Plenty who argued that steam would never replace sail. Plenty who argued that aircraft carriers were irrelevant. Plenty that said that submarines were ungentlemanly and shouldn’t be pursued. There are plenty now questioning this transition as well, but my perspective as running the navy is we have no choice here.”

‘Not a research agency’

The First Sea Lord was blunt about the Russian organisation conducting what Moscow describes as deep sea research, saying its purpose is destruction rather than science.

He said: “Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not a research agency. It is an independently funded arm of the Russian state, whose sole purpose is to pursue the destruction of critical underwater infrastructure, in particular in the event of a transition towards war, or just as an economic leverage for the Russian state.”

He was equally direct about how well the alliance is coping with the wider undersea threat. “We are, if we’re really honest, as allies, we are struggling to contain very capable submarines,” he said, describing a real growth in Russian undersea capability alongside the so-called research programme aimed at British cables and pipelines.

Britain depends on the sea for its data, virtually all of its trade and virtually all of its energy, he said.

The Black Sea lesson

General Jenkins pointed to what Ukraine has achieved against a far larger opponent, describing it as a warning to every Western navy.

He said: “We only have to look at the war in Ukraine and what the Ukrainian Navy, a navy in name but not in being in the way that we would recognise it, and what it’s managed to do to the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, completely neutralise one of the most advanced fleets in the world. That is a wake-up call to all of us.”

He cautioned against applying those lessons wholesale, noting that the Atlantic is a very different proposition from the constrained waters of the Black Sea or the Strait of Hormuz, while adding that this implies no complacency.

He framed the change as comparable to the great transitions in naval history, from sail to steam, wood to iron, the arrival of the dreadnought, the aircraft carrier and the submarine, observing that each had its detractors at the time.

Crewed warships are not going away, in his account, but their role changes. He said the Navy has been running service-wide war games to test the hybrid fleet, and that “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.”

Interchangeability

On allies, General Jenkins set out an ambition beyond the familiar language of interoperability.

Interchangeability, he said, means it is agnostic which nation is in a given place conducting a task, with each navy acting for the others’ collective requirements and able to exchange capabilities.

The Norwegian Type 26 agreement is the vehicle for that. Norway will build identical ships, and he said Norwegian sailors are already working alongside British crews on HMS Glasgow in Scotland before she has been launched.

Other Joint Expeditionary Force navies have noticed. Chiefs of navy signed a statement of intent in London a couple of months ago for what he called the enhanced JEF Navy or Northern Navies concept, covering training, doctrine, capability and equipment, with formal ratification aimed for November in Norway.

He described the JEF as complementary to NATO rather than a substitute, valuable because it does not require consensus among all thirty-two allies and can therefore move earlier in a crisis. He said the NATO commanders he speaks with welcome it for exactly that reason.

Asked what concerns him most, the First Sea Lord returned to uncertainty, saying alliances feel fragile and pointing to “the rise of state on state contestation, not just competition, and a number of possible scenarios in the future that could lead to even catastrophic events with no certainty that we can avoid them.”

The interview was not, on the whole, a pessimistic one. He described the Royal Navy as still a reference navy that others wish to emulate and follow, said allied navies recognise Britain is leading the world on the hybrid concepts and want to join that journey, and pointed to Atlantic Net as a world leading proposition arriving on a timetable that has the first sensors in the water this year. The Norwegian Type 26 partnership, with identical ships and Norwegian sailors already working aboard HMS Glasgow before she has launched, he presented as the platform on which interchangeability between allied navies gets built.

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.