This post is going to be a little different from previous, as it concerns the recent collision and grounding of the Norwegian frigate HELGE INGSTADT after a collision with the tanker SOLA TS. This is something I take a close interest in, both personally and professionally, and the abundance of open source information allows me…

This article was originally written for the Wavell Room as part of their Maritime series in October 2018 and updated to reflect better language. Link. Warfare is an inherently human endeavour, yet the rate of change in the design, application and capability of uncrewed systems has the potential to place humans at a far greater…

Unmanned and Autonomous Systems in the Naval Environment The aim of this blog article is to take a holistic look at unmanned systems in the maritime environment.  This will not be a summary of systems already in existence and in development, but instead is intended to be an operator’s perspective on those features and capabilities…

The recent activity surrounding the Type 31 programme has again brought to the fore the long running debate about what it should be, as well as reinvigorate the debate about what frigates are, why we 'need' them, and how we increase our hull numbers at the expense, perhaps, of some of the 'gold plating' we…

As a lead-in to this post I tried to share my understanding of the broader notion of a frigate, in order to set some context for what I really wanted to wax lyrical about - the new frigate designs that the Royal Navy is developing.  I regard the Type 31 frigate project as one of…

The Elbit Systems USV 'SEAGULL' Recently I was privileged to experience two closely related yet separate organisations that are opening up new opportunities to advance the field of anti-submarine warfare.  They were the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation in La Spezia, Italy, and the Elbit Systems facility in Haifa where they are developing…