The UK MoD has invited interested companies to an Industry Day scheduled for 5 March at Portsmouth for Project CABOT, an ambitious initiative aimed at delivering a remotely operated and autonomous ASW “barrier” in the North Atlantic.

CABOT is the successor (and a step up in ambition) from experimental and conceptual activities carried on so far under the national Project CHARYBDIS (itself part of the ASW Spearhead portfolio of sonar enhancements and sensors development) and through the NATO ASW Barrier smart defence initiative, which has the UK as lead nation. Under CABOT, the Royal Navy hopes to develop a first deployed, low-manned / remotely operated “ASW as a service” system which would be delivered under a Contractor Owned, Contractor Operated, Naval Oversight (COCONO) model.

This first phase is known as ATLANTIC NET and would see contract-owned low-manned or uncrewed assets gather acoustic data, triage it with AI/ML algorithms, and supply it to a secure Remote Operations Centre (ROC) for analysis by Royal Navy staff. This would deliver increased mass and persistence at sea quickly and “releasing RN platforms for other tasking”. Subsequently, BASTION ATLANTIC would see a transition to Royal Navy-owned and operated Uncrewed Surface Vehicles, which the tender identifies as “Type 92 SLOOPS”, and Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles identified as Type 93 CHARIOTS (a nod to the world war two British “human torpedo” with the same name), alongside a host of other sesnors.

ATLANTIC BASTION would also “consider the use of UK developed Underwater Battlespace Area Denial (UBAD) capabilities” which strongly suggests a reborn interest in the UK for maritime mines. In the invitation, the Royal Navy includes a tentative timeline in which “in-water” operations of ATLANTIC NET begin already by the end of 2025, with the “transition” to BASTION around the end of 2028.

While at this stage the makeup of the system and timelines are still all to be defined, particularly as UK Defence braces for the impact of the Strategic Defence Review and funding decisions to be made in the spring, we can only take note of known activities and trends: the experimental ship XV PATRICK BLACKETT is working towards demonstration of Degree 4 autonomy in the future (4 is “full” autonomy, whereas 3 is remote control) and Requests for Information have already been let that specifically asked industry inputs for containerized sensor solutions that would fit a “40 meters” USV, the size of PATRICK BLACKETT.

The XV vessel is a Damen-built Crew Transfer Vessel and the Netherlands have already announced the intent to purchase 2 similar, slightly larger vessels for use as “low-manned” adjuncts supporting warships with a containerized load of loitering munitions and BARAK surface to air missiles. This provides more than a clue to the potential shape of the “Type 92”.

PATRICK BLACKETT has repeatedly taken part in NATO REPMUS events in Portugal centered on the ASW barrier project, as has Thales’s HALCYON USV, the prototype for the USVs used by the UK-France MMCM mine countermeasures solution. For the occasion, HALCYON was instead fitted with a thin towed array for ASW. Also at REPMUS, BAE Systems also demonstrated launch of a representative STINGRAY Mod 2 torpedo from quad-copter drones by its owned subsidiary, Malloy Aeronautics.

As for the Type 93 UUVs, the Royal Navy in the previous years has experimented ASW towed arrays and other sensors, including seabed-deployed payloads, from the mSubs-built MANTA demonstrator of Extra Large UUV (xLUUV). A larger, 17-tons XLUUV known as CETUS is in build with Msubs for the Royal Navy while BAE Systems in team with Cellula Robotics has debuted its HERNE in UK waters at the end of 2024. NATO has identified a requirement for a deployable Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) barrier utilising unmanned system components and the Royal Navy, as a lead player in the key area of the North Atlantic, has fully embraced this concept years ago.

The Royal Navy also increasingly desperately needs solutions to re-instating some “mass” with low manpower requirements considering how recruitment and retention remain a thorny issue. CABOT would respond to those needs, but we’ll see how the Strategic Review affects the Navy’s ability to fund its requirements.

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