In early April, the UK Royal Navy (RN) lifted the veil on a bold initiative intended to 'mainstream' the introduction of autonomous technologies into the front-line fleet. Given the name NavyX, this joint military/industry technology accelerator has been funded through the Ministry of Defence's (MoD's) Transformation Fund to engineer a generational leap in the ways and means by which the RN procures, integrates, proves, and scales autonomous systems. This desire to think and act differently has been driven by multiple factors. First, there is a changing and fast-evolving threat across multiple dimensions: the hybrid warfare 'grey zone' in which adversaries exploit economic, political, cyber, media, and social environments to seek advantage; the development of new weapon technologies, ranging from low-cost, improvised unmanned explosive devices and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) 'swarms' to hypersonic missiles and directed-energy weapons; and the re-emergence of peer and near-peer adversaries, which demands the ability to readily scale up to high-end warfare.
展开▼
