In response to emerging forms of naval combat, the French Navy, constrained by real budgetary limits, must make drastic choices on technologies that allow it to adapt in the short and medium term in order to achieve the best operational gain. These choices will have to be accompanied by measures to enable new capabilities to be rapidly integrated into a fleet that is largely renewed, but whose vessels are not very scalable. The human, technical and industrial challenge is therefore significant.
The recent interception and destruction of drones and missiles by French multi-mission frigates launched by the Houthis in the Red Sea, using Aster 15 missiles, illustrates the problems raised by the evolution and proliferation of military technologies. While the effectiveness of a missile valued at more than EUR 1 million against a drone of a few thousand or tens of thousands of euros is not currently being questioned, this mode of action does not constitute a viable long-term response: in tactical time, the consumption of these extremely high-performance munitions to eliminate low-value attacking motives deprives the ships that use them of a potential higher-level threat later on. It is an expression of the danger of saturation: missiles are like a revolver with six or eight strokes, when the magazine is empty, the wearer of the weapon is exposed to new attacks. At a longer time scale, the cost of these missiles and the time and constraints of their manufacture make it impossible to stand up in the long term against an adversary who uses munitions – particularly drones – that are inexpensive and easy to manufacture.
What resources and technologies should be favored to deal with these new threats, which are widely available to “small countries” (even mafia-type or terrorist organizations), while protecting against more advanced threats, such as the hypersonic systems now reserved for major adversaries? For the French Navy, which has seen a massive fleet renewal and faces potential adversaries from all over the world’s oceans, the question is crucial.
A necessary but constrained adaptation
The French Navy is built around nuclear deterrence and the carrier battle group, itself a part of the deterrence function. Budgetary constraints limit resources allocated to functions beyond deterrence, and the permanence of the carrier battle group would only be assured with a second aircraft carrier. This constrained format of the navy places a strain on force generation for its operational commitments. In a coalition, it mobilizes the available means, without it being possible to guarantee entirely the coherence with the desired political commitment; outside a coalition, the means tend to impose the limits of the mission. In both cases, the return of high intensity requires a possible attrition must be factored in the course of the mission, without however being able to call into question the protection of the means of deterrence.
This situation is confirmed by the military programming law with a particular effort to modernize deterrence and a general logic that wants to “win the war before the war”, with consequences on the means necessary for a massive engagement to which the armies are nevertheless preparing. Maintaining a comprehensive military model also limits the scale of each capability. No significant changes are foreseen for the Navy: the recent fleet renewal is complemented with efforts to reinforce overseas assets, but no additional frigates are envisaged, nor any capacity building of existing vessels.
Yet, despite their remarkable technical prowess, these ships, including the operational and defense frigates that will be commissioned in the coming years, were not designed to address the full spectrum of emerging threats. In the next 15-20 years, the hotspots and hybrid conflicts will have multiplied exponentially.
For the French Navy, it is a matter of making the best choices from the point of view of technological and budgetary prospects in order, on the one hand, to adapt the capabilities of its recent ships to current threats and, on the other hand, to anticipate the capabilities of the ships which, at the dawn of the 2040s, will replace the air defense frigates and then once again initiate a new modernization of the fleet. Several axes may be favored.
Seizing the Opportunity of Naval Drones
While many navies, including the main allied navies, rely on sea drones, the French Navy is still in retreat, with the exception of the area of mine warfare. Yet all players agree on the disruptive potential of naval drones, although the direction of the efforts to be made to obtain the best operational gains remains uncertain.
Drones can be used to perform dangerous or uncomfortable tasks for humans (or for ships in naval combat), to perform repetitive tasks, and to lighten the cognitive load of crews. They are also used as effect multipliers or as scouts on the front of a force. They are diverse and can be operated continuously by humans, be programmed for a pre-established mission, or have an autonomous decision-making capability. In naval combat, they operate in three dimensions, above and below the surface. Smaller vessels can augment a frigate’s capabilities, while ocean drones (up to the size of corvettes) can replace them on some missions, saving valuable potential while minimizing the risk of crew exposure to unnecessarily ‘gray areas’.
So the question today is no longer whether, how, for what missions, and with what integration to future and existing capabilities, it is worthwhile to “drone” a navy. The Western navies, particularly the US Navy, which has set up a task force, are conducting numerous experiments in this area. By 2040, technology will enable drones to perform a wide range of relatively simple missions, with decision-making and energy autonomy far greater than today.
It would seem desirable for the French Navy to draw up a roadmap for the progressive integration of drones of the fleet, which could multiply the effects and preserve the limited potential of manned vessels. This would make it possible to plan the means to exit the experimental stage more quickly, to quickly take ownership of these new tools and to benefit from the first operational inputs without waiting for the “perfect drone”. This should reduce the risk of missile a critical shift. The conditions for physical and tactical integration into the fleet are a key issue to be taken into account in this roadmap, as well as actions to inform post-LPM choices, including the development of a drone carrier or drone reception devices on board combat vessels.
Strengthening and diversifying ship self-defense
In the face of diversity and the multiplication of new threats, the French fleet’s self-defense capabilities appear very limited.
In addition to the drone threat illustrated in the air environment by the events in the Red Sea, the French Navy must, like its allied counterparts, be able to deal with extremely effective weapons. Hypersonic systems in particular raise critical questions. The combination of high speed and high speed maneuverability, which makes their trajectory unpredictable, gives them a very high penetration capacity, all the more so since it imposes on the opponent very limited reaction times. Despite this, defense capabilities do exist. However, they remain difficult to implement and their effectiveness is uncertain. For a naval force or a ship, this means avoiding primary sensing (the US option) by, say, blinding the other’s satellites, but getting more satellites will make it increasingly difficult. Against a maneuverable warhead missile, the only effective way to defend against it is to destroy it in space or to trick it into position. Gliders, another category of hypersonic weapons, can be intercepted only when they begin penetrating at altitudes above the capabilities of today’s interceptor missiles, or in the later, highly uncertain part of their path. Effective defense against these systems requires theater-level integration of joint and combined assets. As regards the current ships, the only reasonable prospects in the short and medium term are the activation of precautionary measures to increase the number of siloed missiles (Aster missiles) and the improvement of the performance, in particular the range, of the current missiles. Destruction by laser could be envisaged in the long term, but only with high powers given the thermal protection devices imposed by high speed.
Directed-energy weapons, on the other hand, can have faster applications against other threats, with lower powers. Using lasers or microwaves to damage or destroy their targets, they are indeed conducive to barrier-free spaces such as airborne spaces. For a variety of reasons, only laser weapons appear to have a future at sea. Many projects exist in Europe and elsewhere. These weapons are therefore expected to emerge in the naval sector in the next 5 to 6 years. The cost of firing a laser shot is minuscule, and the absence of ammunition greatly simplifies logistics. Once their power is under control, the effects on the target are variable, ranging from the destruction of a small drone to the damage to ship equipment, from blindness to the destruction of the sensors of an observation satellite. However, the rate of fire today remains very modest and is not sufficient to deal with overwhelming attacks without a combination with other weapons systems.
Lasers represent an accessible and cost-effective means of diversifying self-defense capabilities to counter evolving threats, both for reasons of cost and to avoid, as mentioned in the introduction, consuming a valuable potential on targets with little impact and at the risk of being deprived of the most advanced weapons.
Rapid integration of existing short- or very short-range systems, such as missiles or high-speed guns, can also be a solution. But there are other, more innovative ideas that could be explored, such as the development of deception techniques using artificial intelligence to reduce the effectiveness of the sensors and weapons that oppose them.
In the longer term, in future weapons programs, the electromagnetic gun offers very interesting prospects. Despite integration constraints close to those of the laser for delivering a large amount of energy in a very short time, it has the advantage of being able to launch projectiles at very high speed, at distances of several hundred kilometers. This very high speed makes it potentially an anti-ship weapon with a very high kinetic impact, but also a weapon against the ground by firing a large explosive charge. The likely very low cost and simplicity of munitions are not the least of these weapons’ interests. The Franco-German THEMA (TecTechnology for ElectroMagnetic Artillery) project is planning a demonstrator before 2030. This technology could be available to the successors of the Forbin and Knight Paul air defense frigates.
Space and Collaborative Combat for Information Superiority
But the best weaponry is not enough if informational superiority does not allow an adversary to be located, to know his intentions, and to deny him the same capabilities in order to ultimately act before him and defeat him. In modern naval warfare, the speed of action, the speed of arms and their stealth give this superiority, but also the time factor, a determining weight.
In this context, space is an indispensable but weakening environment. New Space has improved both the performance and resilience of the services it provides, which are central to several functions critical to military operations: telecommunications, navigation and positioning, intelligence, surveillance, and warning. This will continue in the coming years, with growing risks from space congestion and satellite-directed weaponry. The cyber threat, which is the only one capable of simultaneously targeting all capabilities and thus of countering the necessary logic of redundancy combining commercial and specifically military services, will no doubt remain the most serious for global space capabilities. Despite these risks, given technology and lower launch costs, space will allow those who continue to prioritize it in the coming years to continuously monitor a theater. This is a direction that the French armies must maintain if they are to benefit from a new reality: the transparency of the battlefield.
There is not enough space to achieve informational superiority. While elements of a maritime force have historically collaborated at sea, digital technologies open up another dimension to this collaboration, even as the ranges and speeds of weapons threatening naval forces reduce response times and require greater anticipation. Thus, collaborative combat tends to transform the naval force, a collection of ships, into an “information whole” whose sensors and effectors are distributed over various platforms. With weapons thousands of miles in range, this “whole” must extend beyond the navy. Collaborative combat requires the development of a virtual military cloud that allows for seamless communication between land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. The US lead with JADC2[1] raises several key questions for its Western partners: how to maintain interoperability with US militaries without being trapped by their system and technological choices? What standardization of data to safeguard the operational and industrial interests of US allies? In this, it is unfortunate that the military planning law did not provide for a national military cloud. Data standardization within NATO can be a way to assert French – or even European – industrial and operational interests that need to be identified first. These questions will be all the more important because the US’s strategic distance will become clearer if Donald Trump is elected.
Exploring new application areas for artificial intelligence (AI)
In the military field, AI is already a reality in surveillance, monitoring and many sensors. But the broad spectrum of its potential applications remains unexplored. Before another major disruption occurs, the main axis of progress is to identify uses that can benefit from existing technologies: many processes can be improved using available data and up-to-date algorithms, subject to adaptation. The classification of mobiles from an optronic image is a good example, optronics being generally a promising field of application. Lowering the extraction threshold, resulting in an increase in the range of radars, is another. Underwater warfare also offers a wide range of applications, both to better identify a submarine on a sonar image and to optimize the positioning and use of numerous detection means.
What is also at stake is data sharing.
This line of progress may seem limited, but it is likely to allow the rapid emergence of new capabilities and to significantly improve existing ones. It should be a priority for the French Navy.
Benefiting from the Quantum Sensor Revolution
Finally, the Navy must prepare for the quantum revolution. Among them, sensors open the most interesting perspectives in the medium term. The skills of French manufacturers and laboratories are an opportunity to seize. The foreseeable operational gain is such that we should not be outmatched by our adversaries.
Quantum sensors have the potential to dramatically improve system performance. They make it possible to envisage navigation that is both accurate and independent of an external signal. While positioning system signals are routinely jammed, they will be a safety factor for all ships and aircraft, civil or military, equipped with systems incorporating them. But they will also make weapons more precise and effective, because they, too, will be resistant to jamming and navigation, making it easier for them to cross opposing defenses.
In the underwater domain, quantum sensors have two major interests. While the propagation of electromagnetic waves underwater remains a barrier to underwater telecommunications, quantum sensors make it possible to envisage small-sized low-frequency antennas that can be integrated on underwater mobiles. These antennas would allow a submarine to be more closely integrated into a naval force through near-constant communications, which is a real revolution. The same antennas also open up opportunities for the coordinated use of underwater drones that can be exchanged with each other or with surface installations. The second interest is related to quantum magnetometers. Whereas underwater detection today relies mainly on the propagation of sound waves, with their own limits, these magnetometers could considerably widen the ranges of detection based on the variation of the magnetic field linked to the presence of the large metal masses that are submarines. Their areas of undetectability would be reduced accordingly.
At the forefront of underwater detection, the French Navy must invest in these fields, which are essential to the first component of its deterrence.
But to quickly improve the operational efficiency of its ships, regardless of the technologies chosen, the Navy, and the Ministry of Defense more broadly, must redouble their efforts so that innovation can be incorporated on board much more quickly. While progress has been made in identifying technological bricks that may be of operational interest and conducting experiments, their deployment still faces budgetary and sometimes industrial challenges in acquiring new unprogrammed equipment and integrating it into existing systems. There is therefore a step between experimentation and the deployment of innovation, with the need for acceleration covering the entire chain leading to robust use of new technologies in operational situations.
This issue must be taken into account in the capacity of future ships to accommodate innovations in a short loop: technical and financial modularity cannot be a simple option in future naval programs. How to achieve this raises many industrial and political questions, all the more complex because they will be difficult to address at the national level.
[1] JADC2: Joint All-Domain Command and Control : a U.S. project to integrate the command and implementation systems of weapons and sensors from various services and environments, including cyberspace, leveraging a global military cloud.
