Hybrid navies: Integrating uncrewed capability into carrier strike

A carrier strike group (CSG) is by definition a multidomain construct. Its airwing seeks to generate effect at sea and ashore while securing the aircraft carrier itself. The carrier is also protected by surface ships in the air and surface domains, and by submarines in the underwater and surface environments. These CSG assets can also generate offensive effects both at sea and ashore. A CSG provides significant mass for deterrence and defence. However, in contemporary naval operations, even something as large as a CSG needs more mass. Here, NATO navies are assessing options for integrating maritime uncrewed systems (MUS) like uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) in CSG capabilities and operations to add more mass, particularly (but not only) for lower-end tasking to allow the CSG’s crewed assets to focus on core high-end warfighting requirements.

CSGs are complex beasts, integrating at an operational level the highest-end conventional warfighting capabilities both onboard the carriers themselves and across the strike group. The capabilities a CSG brings and the effects it generates mean that, at a politico-strategic level, it is one of the most prized assets for defence and diplomacy a country can possess. This in turn, however, means very few countries possess such a capability. Amongst NATO’s navies for example – with the exception of the US Navy (USN) – the Alliance’s carrier-operating navies possess these ships in only small numbers (although even the USN’s 10-carrier fleet could be seen as a relatively limited number compared to its commitments). In today’s returning era of state-based naval power and competition at sea, CSGs are continuing to retain a prominent defence and diplomacy role. However, to expand their outputs while allowing their traditional carrier strike capabilities to be focused ever-more sharply on high-end deterrence and defence requirements, NATO’s carrier navies are looking to integrate MUS into their CSGs to meet certain operational requirements.

MUS capabilities can be used by a CSG to support a range of operational needs. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demonstrate this range of options. They can be employed to conduct carrier onboard delivery tasks at short distance around the CSG or at longer distance from shore. They can provide sustained surveillance, either close in to the CSG or as its outer ring acting as a long-range picket. Working with the airwing itself, they can be used for air-to-air refuelling support, or as ‘loyal wingmen’ alongside crewed fast jets, adding to the sensing and strike capability of the individual aircraft.

Uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) – especially larger models – can also provide forward-deployed picketing capability, running out ahead of the CSG to add advanced sensing capacity as well as the ability to conduct strike operations at sea and ashore.

Uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) are perhaps the one capability that is not as straightforward to integrate into a CSG to provide direct support, primarily because a CSG is a constantly moving beast and communications across the underwater domain continue to be challenging. However, where UUVs potentially can play a core role is in providing indirect support, for example if deployed from a nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) operating as part of the CSG, or being deployed in numbers well ahead of a CSG to provide sensing barriers or sanitisation of an area of potential strike operations or of any maritime choke points that exist in a planned transit route.

Across the scope of MUS developments, NATO’s carrier-operating navies are conducting trials to test capabilities and concepts of operation (CONOPS) for these systems to see how they can support and enhance CSG activities.

Naval plan

Of NATO’s carrier navies, the USN has been experimenting with MUS for the longest time period. However, as the world’s most powerful navy, and with a spine of crewed frontline platforms larger than any other navy apart from China’s, the USN may have different requirements for uncrewed capabilities and may see MUS as shaping its future in different ways to other navies.

The USN’s initial focus fell on using UAVs in air support activities, such as on-station tanking, before it explored air-based concepts that included developing strike capabilities for UAVs (under unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), programmes). On the surface, large USVs will offer the navy options to deploy these platforms within CSGs but pushed forward to their outer defensive ring to provide offensive surveillance and strike in order to clear transit routes or conduct strikes ashore to reduce threats.

Despite the communications issues in the underwater domain, the USN does have an active UUV programme for its SSN force. After successfully developing a torpedo-tube launch-and-recovery (TTL&R) concept and system, the capability – in the form of an HII Yellow Moray (REMUS 600) UUV – is now operational onboard the Virginia-class SSN USS Delaware. The boat has forward-deployed to the European theatre, taking this capability with it. Across its SSN fleet, the navy intends to have this capability permanently available on at least one boat.

With the USN having standing requirements to improve surge capacity and lethality at scale, as well as decision advantage, uncrewed platforms can support such requirements and add operational and strategic value for the navy. A lesson it has learned from Ukrainian operations in the Black Sea in the Russo-Ukrainian war, is how off-the-shelf robotic and autonomous systems offer a rapid and proven solution for building sea denial capability.

 

Certainly, the USN’s most recent ‘Navigation Plan’ (‘Nav Plan’), published in late 2024 and focused on building USN warfighting capability – to provide readiness to enhance the navy’s long-term capability and operational output, but also to prepare for the possibility of war with China by 2027 – underlined clear development lines for USN MUS capability. Under what is termed ‘Project 33’ – a concept designed “[to] get more ready players on the field by 2027” – the USN is aiming, as one of seven projects, to scale robotic and autonomous systems integration with more platforms at greater speed. Such capabilities will be at the core of the navy’s ‘future hybrid fleet’, augmenting multi-mission conventional forces through expanding reach, resilience, and lethality via manned/unmanned teaming (M/UMT) concepts.

The ’Nav Plan’ noted that: “By 2027, we will integrate proven robotic and autonomous systems for routine use by the commanders who will employ them. We will integrate mature capabilities into all deploying carrier and expeditionary strike group certifications to refine our approach to command and control of [M/UMT] at sea.” In this context, the ‘Nav Plan’ added that the next phase in innovating MUS capability will be to prioritise key operational problems across critical mission areas including surveillance, fires, networking, logistics, and deception.

Enhanced capability

Since 2021, the UK Royal Navy (RN) has been conducting a series of trials from its Queen Elizabeth class carriers using UAVs, not only to add operational capability to the ships and their carrier strike groups (CSGs) but to keep the CSG concept at the cutting edge of technology development.

This development work is continuing with the RN’s latest CSG activity, the CSG25 deployment to the Indo-Pacific theatre being delivered on Operation ‘Highmast’. The deployment is demonstrating how autonomous capabilities can be blended into a conventional carrier airwing to meet different requirements, including adding mass.

CSG25 also reflects the RN’s pathway towards deploying and integrating MUS into its current and future force structures: this pathway leads towards what was set out in the UK’s latest Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published in June 2025, which directed the RN along a heading of developing a ‘hybrid navy’. This means developing crewed and uncrewed capabilities in tandem. The CSG25 deployment reflects just this, with UAVs being operated onboard, while the deployment of 24 F-35B Lightning II fighter aircraft takes the UK’s carrier capability past its full operational capability development milestone. Personnel from 700X Naval Air Squadron – the RN’s MUS centre of expertise – are embarked on the carrier HMS Prince of Wales for CSG25 to trial, for example, the Malloy Aeronautics T150 UAV, to transport equipment.

ESD also understands that the RN plans to conduct USV trials with the CSG. The SDR also headlined both the RN’s direction in developing MUS capability, including for CSGs, and the impact this could have both for the UK and NATO. “We will provide leadership in NATO, by transforming our aircraft carriers to become the first European hybrid airwings – with fast jets, long-range weapons, and drones,” according to the SDR.

 

“The RN must continue to move towards a more powerful but cheaper and simpler fleet, developing a ‘high-low’ mix of equipment and weapons that exploits autonomy and digital integration,” the SDR continued. “Carrier strike is already at the cutting edge of NATO capability, but much more rapid progress is needed in its evolution into ‘hybrid’ carrier airwings, whereby crewed combat aircraft (F-35Bs) are complemented by autonomous collaborative platforms in the air, and expendable, single-use drones.”

Such a ‘hybrid’ carrier airwing will be central to how the RN transforms its skills, equipment, and ways of operating to be part of an integrated force in the maritime domain, the SDR noted. Underlining the integrated, joint nature of any carrier airwing and the role of MUS therein, the review added that the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) must develop autonomous collaborative platforms that can operate with fourth-, fifth-, and future-generation aircraft, and from UK carrier decks.

Broadly, the RN’s plans for developing MUS are based around progressing as fast as possible in generating MUS capability and maintaining flexibility to adjust direction without becoming set on a single path, while ensuring that key tasks that need crews remain crewed – such as high-end anti-submarine warfare (ASW), which still requires an SSN – all aided by overcoming and even lowering barriers to system integration. Delivering a hybrid navy will, after all, increase integration requirements and challenges.

 

ASW is an early focus area for the RN in developing and integrating uncrewed capability with a view to developing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) mass and presence. Under ‘Project Cabot’, a two-phased approach is underway, developing: ‘Atlantic Net’ around a contractor-owned, contractor-operated, naval oversight (COCONO) model to bringing commercial UUVs into operations to provide a networked sensing ‘net’ in the North Atlantic; and then ‘Atlantic Bastion’, with the RN transitioning to a navy-owned and -operated MUS fleet and with a particular focus on UUVs and USVs to provide the persistent mass and presence, integrated with crewed platforms.

For the UUV capability, one key area of development is the Navy’s Excalibur extra-large UUV (XLUUV) operational demonstrator. Known originally as ‘Project Cetus’ and developed under the RN’s ASW Spearhead project, the XLUUV was first launched in February 2025. The RN is also interested in TTL&R UUVs.

As regards USVs, while the RN is still in the early stages of understanding how best to operate them, it is focused on developing greater range, endurance, and levels of concurrency for these vehicles, and is looking at concepts to enable them to be operated in twos or threes, carrying different payloads and moving data around between them.

Alongside advancing ‘Atlantic Bastion’, a key priority for the RN in the next four years is casting the ‘Atlantic Net’ out, including getting technology demonstrators into the water within that timeframe, or much sooner. ‘Atlantic Net’ is seen as a key tool for the RN to help learn what it needs in terms of MUS capability. One element of this learning process is to understand the MUS role in the phase that exists between peacetime and wartime, including in relation to ‘grey zone’, hybrid threats. In the hybrid context, with NATO activities like ‘Baltic Sentry’ and projects like Task Force X Baltic being designed to develop surveillance, presence, and deterrence capability to counter threats to critical underwater infrastructure, USVs in particular can provide presence and rapid response outputs.

With the RN currently starting out on a ‘crawl, walk, run’ process for delivering MUS capability, such projects are designed to help the RN develop its understanding of what it needs and what it wants to do, including retaining the flexibility to adjust and adapt as needed. The navy is aware too that platforms procured to meet a particular requirement, role, and task are often found in due course to be suitable for others.

 

Alongside developing platforms, the RN is focused on the command-and-control (C2) and integration software and architecture that will link these platforms together, as well as harnessing and disseminating the data they gather. Of course, the value in MUS capability is their data output, as opposed to the platforms themselves.

Future carrier

For the French Navy, its focus on generating uncrewed capabilities to operate alongside its carrier capability is falling on development plans for its next-generation carrier, which is being delivered under the Porte-Avions de Nouvelle génération (PA-Ng) programme. Delivery and commissioning of the future carrier are scheduled for 2027 and 2028, respectively.

Like the RN and USN, France’s new carrier is being designed and developed to carry a ‘hybrid’ airwing of crewed and uncrewed assets, with the ship’s design tailored to embark a crewed/uncrewed mix of 30 aircraft (with the uncrewed systems being both UAVs and UCAVs). The ship’s catapult launching concepts will be able to accommodate the different launching requirements for both crewed and uncrewed air vehicles. UCAV capability is anticipated to be available from 2040.

Like the USN, the Marine Nationale sees UAVs as providing both support and combat functions for a carrier. Janes reported from the Paris Air Show 2025 that the French armed forces ministry displayed a UAV designed to operate as a ‘loyal wingman’.

‘Loyal wingman’ concepts often include the uncrewed aircraft supporting the crewed aircraft, for example, in the suppression/destruction of enemy air defence (SEAD/DEAD) roles, thus prospectively allowing the crewed aircraft to approach its targets ashore with reduced risk. For the French Navy, its amphibious vessels will also continue to be used as ‘drone ships’.

Dr Lee Willett

Author: Dr Lee Willett is an independent writer and analyst on naval, maritime, and wider defence and security matters. Previously, he was editor of Janes Navy International, maritime studies senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, London, and Leverhulme research fellow at the University of Hull’s Centre for Security Studies.