Is Autonomy the End of the Naval Warfare Officer

The end of the Warfare Officer?

You’re not unskilled, they’re the wrong skills.

In a rain-beaten marina on a rugged coastline, near a nameless village more familiar with fishing than fleet operations, a teenage Able Seaman sits inside a converted shipping container. Watching a laptop screen, they remotely pilot a small crewless boat through choppy waters via a suite of cameras and RADAR feeds. For all intents and purposes, they are the Captain.

Down the road, on a slipway framed with lobster pots and fishing gear, a Petty Officer and Leading Hand haul 15-metres of uncrewed craft onto a trailer. With a police escort arranged and explosives securely stowed in a separate vehicle, they tow it down narrow B-roads to its next launch site. Followed by a small convoy of HGVs containing ancillary equipment and spares. Armed with little more than an expense account the skill to reverse an oversized trailer, they fulfil the traditional roles of Navigator and Officer of the Watch where moving naval fighting capabilities is concerned.

These scenes stand in stark contrast to the age-old image of a Commanding Officer directing a Frigates movement across open sea from his chair on the bridge. Modern navies are undergoing a seismic shift in relevance, away from the skill set of their senior officers who cut their teeth on 5,000-tonne, 130-metre warships and bigger, and toward young operators and technicians independently deploying tiny uncrewed systems from the backs of lorries to greater maritime effect.

The hierarchy of most navies has long been built around crewing entire flotillas of ships, with only a limited number of shore-based roles supporting operations from the rear. But the rise of autonomous platforms is disrupting that structure, challenging the relevance of the traditional command pipeline. In tomorrow’s navy, do expert leaders qualified in seamanship and commanding operations from capital ships offer more value than an Able Seaman who can command multiple vessels from a single screen? What does it mean to grow officers through the classic path of shipboard appointments when the conventional warship is fast becoming the exception, not the rule? If most naval capability in the future is delivered from shore, operated remotely, or automated entirely, then is the role of the seagoing ‘sailor’ now something rare and specialised, less a core function and more a niche within a much broader system biasing towards land operations with maritime effectors deployed at reach?

Today, battles at sea are already being won by lone teenagers remotely piloting a USV with helm controls mapped to a modified Xbox controller and laptop from miles away, supported by a mechanic with a Cat C+E licence hauling the latest capability on a trailer, as by a seasoned commander on the bridge of a warship with charge of a crew several hundred strong. Modern Navies are discovering that expertise in the latest iteration of nautical skills no longer guarantees expert opinion in utilising modern technology. This article argues that autonomy and uncrewed systems are reshaping naval power, placing greater importance on digital literacy and low level mechanical skills found in trades once considered vocational, rather than the strategic conversations based on traditional strategic warfare roles.

Navies around the world are rapidly adopting uncrewed systems, on the surface, underwater, and in the air, to take on roles once reserved for fully crewed warships. The U.S. Navy’s Ghost Fleet Overlord programme, for example, fields 90-metre drone ships that have sailed thousands of miles and even launched missiles under remote supervision by operators too junior to stand a traditional bridge watch. Australia has followed suit with Sentinel, a converted patrol boat and now the country’s largest autonomous vessel, monitored by a skeleton crew of engineers camping onboard and advanced autonomy software. The Royal Navy, meanwhile, has demonstrated this shift through its NavyX innovation unit and the XV Patrick Blackett, a 270-tonne modular trials ship where a crew of five has successfully controlled a swarm of uncrewed air, surface, and underwater vehicles, and where a single Royal Marine has remotely piloted an autonomous RIB through congested harbour waters. These developments signal a clear change: the future fleet may be dominated by uncrewed craft, supported from land rather than sea. This doesn’t mean smaller crews, but entirely new roles for shore-based teams managing logistics, control, and maintenance. The operational centre of gravity is no longer the bridge; it’s a laptop in a trailer, parked miles from the waterline. As small teams wield systems that once required entire squadrons, the authority and relevance of the traditional commanding sailor is being fundamentally redefined.

Essential Skills, Not Epaulettes: The Lower-Rank Revolution

The rise of autonomous platforms has exposed an uncomfortable truth for traditionalists: the skills that matter most in today’s navy often sit in the lower ranks, or even outside the chain of command completely. Operating and maintaining drone fleets requires practical, technical expertise that many senior officers, trained in a pre-digital era, simply do not possess. Whilst higher level strategic skills remain largely unchanged; remote piloting and first-person view control has become more important than ship handling, and is now delivered by young sailors, marines, and contractors whose instincts were honed on PlayStations in their bedrooms, not in the historical halls of famous naval academies. The foundations of operational competence have shifted, from formal traditional vocations to an informal digital fluency.

Drone fleets operate as part of loosely connected networks, often coordinated by cyber specialists and sensor operators considered junior by traditional standards, yet fully capable of managing complex systems and controlling ships from remote command centres to dominate entire domains. In this digital battlespace, coding, secure comms, and AI-driven data analysis increasingly outweigh legacy skills like complex task group coordination.

The same shift is visible in engineering and procurement. Modular platforms built for plug-and-play payloads rely on the practical ability to reconfigure systems quickly, skills found in field service engineers and dockside technicians, not in layered departments. A mechanic who can hot-swap electronics or rewire a payload bay is often more valuable in the moment than an engineer managing a formal change process. This is a clear inversion of the skills pyramid. Where expertise once rose with rank, it now lives in the lower tiers, among those who can build, fix, acquire and adapt autonomously, often in isolation and without the weight of bureaucracy.

Autonomous ships require autonomous people

A cultural shift is taking place. Decentralised operations with autonomous systems are pushing decision-making down the ranks. A junior drone operator or AI orchestrator on the ground has far greater real-time situational awareness, through sensor feeds and AI analysis, to act immediately without waiting for approval from higher command, in the same way that a Captain would have autonomy over their ship. Navies are being forced to trust very junior personnel with decisions that would once have been the preserve of senior officers, simply because the speed of unmanned operations demands it, and because the chain between thinker and doer now often resides within a single person, similar to the driver of a car reacting to what they see, instead of the captain of a ship delegating instructions to eventually achieve effect. The traditional tempo of command-and-control now struggles to match the pace of algorithmic warfare. As a result, the next generation of naval leadership may be better suited to an over-sized hoody than gold stripes, but shall remain just as capable of commanding their immediate digital empire with fast judgement, and the ability to improvise under pressure.

So what becomes of the senior and very seniors who built their careers around commanding traditional warships? Put simply, much of their experience no longer aligns with the challenges now shaping naval strategy. This isn’t to say that strategic thinking or leadership is obsolete – far from it! But the nature of whatneeds leading has changed. When a navy’s future involves deploying swarms of low-cost autonomous vessels by road, coordinating distributed fleets with AI, and defending against threats that can sink a billion-pound warship with a few hundred pounds’ worth of modified kit procured from a toy shop, the perspective of someone whose prime years were spent manoeuvring a single frigate, and then leading thousands of people to move task groups, becomes harder to apply. The rise of autonomy has not made senior leadership irrelevant, but it has eroded the value of traditional expertise.

Consider fleet planning. A very senior planner from the old school might call for more frigates, destroyers, or another aircraft carrier, (the retired cohort patrolling Twitter frequently do!) based on decades of experience in strike group operations. But many nations procurement strategies priorities now lean in a different direction, with investment flowing toward autonomous minehunters, extra-large underwater drones, and the proposed uncrewed patrol vessels and motherships. The U.S. Navy openly discusses unmanned ‘killer tomato’ ships designed to take hits and haul missiles, performing the dangerous work so that crewed vessels don’t have to. The trend is clear: vast numbers of cheaper, uncrewed, platforms are replacing the idea of a small number of exquisite, manned ships. Senior officers who built their careers managing large, crewed enterprises have had to adapt or risk being left behind. Some are adjusting their outlook. One U.S. rear admiral recently proposed building a common unmanned hull in volume, fitted with modular payloads, rather than pursuing bespoke, high-cost designs. It’s a telling shift in mindset, and an approach that sounds less like a traditional warfare officer’s preference and more like an engineer’s: prioritising mass production, modularity, and affordability over legacy prestige.

Some seniors remain sceptical, or slow to embrace the shift toward uncrewed systems with valid reasons; concerns about reliability, ethical use of force, and the safety of personnel if autonomy fails. But each year that integration is delayed, the gap between civilian technology and military application grows wider. The risk is that naval leadership becomes out of step, holding on to outdated models and traditions while near-peer adversaries and non-state actors move faster with new approaches. We’ve already seen this play out. Yemeni rebel groups and Ukrainian special forces have used remote and autonomous attack boats with real effect, catching larger, conventional navies off guard. A small team with a few explosive-laden drones can force entire changes in patrol behaviour, forcing flotilla commanders to reassess how they protect major surface assets. In that context, the relevance of rank diminishes. What matters now are ideas, adaptability, and the ability to outpace the problem.

The strategic value of large, crewed warships isn’t vanishing overnight, but it is being steadily eroded at the edges by uncrewed and remotely operated systems that excel in tasks like persistent surveillance, mine clearance, and distributed attack. The command skills historically associated with those missions; managing large crews, ship handling, and classical naval planning are becoming less relevant. Strategy is now shifting toward the mindset of the senior engineer: managing digital systems of systems, balancing a nodal topology of drones and sensors, monitoring AI performance, and keeping the network stable and secure. Increasingly, these responsibilities are being carried out by those with technical fluency and not traditional seniority: civilian contractors, Army NCOs, and communications specialists who operate confidently across digital and operational domains.

In the realm of naval strategy and tactics, some of the most forward-thinking ideas are now coming from those on the lower deck with deep technical expertise. Senior planners who fail to recognise how autonomy is reshaping the fundamentals of naval warfare towards a digital command risk being overtaken by events. Recent operations have already shown how success can hinge on those managing uncrewed systems, data flows, and digital coordination. Whether it’s a swarm of drones disrupting an adversary’s sensors or autonomous vessels extending surveillance beyond traditional reach, the decisive actions are increasingly being shaped by the teams designing, operating, and integrating these technologies, often far below flag level. In this environment, strategic credit may still rise to the top, but the operational advantage comes from those who understand how to make the systems work together.

This is not the end of naval leadership, but it is the end of this evolution of naval leadership as it is currently conceived. The navy of the future will need officers who understand software analysis and digital command, as well as leading large enterprises of people as part of their physical command. If training and promotion pathways don’t evolve to recognise and elevate technical expertise, the risk is clear: an admiralty adrift on billion-pound flagships while real power is wielded by junior operators on land.

Autonomous systems are redrawing the map of naval power. Those navies that adapt by flattening hierarchies, embracing digital skills, and rethinking what leadership looks like will thrive. Those that don’t may find their legacy fleets outpaced, outmanoeuvred, and out-thought by smaller, cheaper, smarter systems operated by people their structures were never designed to promote.