New Paradigm of Sea-Domain Warfare and Its Impact on Naval Design

Chapter 1 — Introduction: The Fault Line in Naval Power

There is a moment in the life of every military institution when the gap between what it is and what it needs to be becomes impossible to ignore. For the world's navies, that moment is now. Not because of a single technological breakthrough or a dramatic defeat at sea, but because of a slow accumulation of changes that have collectively pushed naval warfare past a threshold. The old certainties—that bigger ships with more firepower win battles, that sea control is the prerequisite for everything else, that a fleet's strength can be measured in tonnage and hull numbers—no longer hold. What has replaced them is messier, more distributed, and far less comfortable for institutions built around the logic of the industrial age.

The clearest illustration of this shift came in the closing weeks of 2025, when three of the world's most capable navies announced visions for their futures that could hardly have been more different. On 8 December, the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, stood before the Sea Power Conference in London and unveiled Atlantic Bastion, a programme that one French naval analyst described as a deliberate switch from "a relatively small number of major units" to "a more distributed-small-sized-units navy working as a network of things" (Royal Navy, 2025, para. 4). The idea, in its simplest form, is a wall of drones: a semi-permanent mesh of autonomous surface and subsurface vessels, AI-enabled sensor grids, and existing warships and aircraft, all knitted together to watch over the North Atlantic's undersea infrastructure and to hunt Russian submarines. Jenkins called it "a revolutionary underwater network—more autonomous, more resilient, more lethal and British built," and framed the programme as "a blueprint for the future of the Royal Navy" (Royal Navy, 2025, para. 3).

Barely two weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, President Donald Trump announced something very different. The Golden Fleet, as it was quickly dubbed, would be anchored by a new class of battleships—the first American capital ships of their kind since the Second World War. The Trump-class vessels, displacing around 35,000 tons and carrying 128 vertical launch system cells, hypersonic missiles, railguns, and directed-energy weapons, would cost between $15 billion and $22 billion for the lead ship alone (U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget, 2026). The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle, insisted that the Golden Fleet was "not a collection of platforms" but "a warfighting system, a fleet design, a new Navy paradigm" that represented "a fundamental shift in how we think about naval combat power" (as cited in Seapower Magazine, 2026, para. 2). Yet the programme's centrepiece was, unmistakably, a very large and very expensive ship—the apotheosis of the high-value platform that distributed lethality was supposed to have rendered obsolete.

And then there was Türkiye. While London and Washington were announcing their competing visions, Ankara was quietly demonstrating a third path—one that borrowed from both but was anchored in a distinctive strategic logic. In January 2026, the Turkish Navy deployed a task group centred on the amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu to the Baltic Sea for NATO's Steadfast Dart 2026 exercise, conducting the first operational use of armed drones from a flat-deck ship in Alliance history (Naval News, 2026). The Anadolu, a 27,000-ton vessel originally designed to operate F-35B fighters, had been transformed into the world's first dedicated drone carrier after Türkiye's expulsion from the F-35 programme. Rather than pursuing expensive and attrition-vulnerable crewed fighter operations, Ankara had reimagined the ship as a mobile base for unmanned systems—a floating launch pad for the Bayraktar TB3, a UCAV designed specifically for short-deck operations. The task group that accompanied it included the I-class frigate TCG İstanbul, an 80 per cent indigenous warship built under the MILGEM programme, and the upgraded Barbaros-class frigate TCG Oruçreis, whose mid-life modernisation had replaced 21 systems aboard a 1990s-era hull (Anadolu Agency, 2026). Together, these ships represented something new: a hybrid force that mixed crewed and uncrewed platforms, legacy and cutting-edge systems, all knitted together by indigenous combat management software and a defence industry that had become a net exporter of naval technology to NATO and EU members.

The contrast between these three approaches—British dispersion, American concentration, Turkish hybridity—is striking enough to serve as a framing device for everything that follows. Here are three navies, all facing the same strategic environment, all acknowledging that the character of naval warfare has changed, and yet arriving at different conclusions about what to build. The Royal Navy, constrained by budgets and maintenance backlogs, is betting on dispersion, autonomy, and mass. The US Navy, still the world's dominant maritime power, is hedging—pursuing a high-low mix in doctrine while simultaneously committing to a capital ship programme that sits awkwardly with the logic of that doctrine. The Turkish Navy, a middle power with regional ambitions and a rapidly maturing defence industry, is threading a different needle: using unmanned systems not as a replacement for crewed platforms but as a force multiplier for them, and building a fleet that is small enough to be affordable but networked enough to punch above its weight.

This essay takes that tension seriously. Its central argument is that the cumulative effect of precision strike democratisation, autonomous systems, and multi-domain integration has pushed naval warfare past a threshold where incremental improvements to legacy platform designs can suffice. The paradigm has shifted. The question is whether naval architecture will follow.

Defining the Terms

Before going further, it is worth being precise about what is meant by "paradigm" here. The word is often used loosely, but it carries a specific weight in the study of military affairs. A paradigm, in this context, is not merely a doctrine or a strategy. It is the set of assumptions—often unstated—that shape how a navy thinks about what ships are for, what threats matter, and what victory looks like. When those assumptions change, the ships change too, sometimes slowly, sometimes with wrenching disruption.

The old paradigm, the one that dominated naval thinking for most of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, was built around sea control. The purpose of a navy was to control the sea—to ensure freedom of action for one's own forces and to deny it to the adversary. Sea control was understood as a condition that could be achieved, defended, and used as the foundation for everything else: power projection, amphibious operations, trade protection, the whole edifice of maritime strategy. The instruments of sea control were capital ships: battleships in the first half of the century, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines in the second. These platforms were expensive, complex, and few in number, but they were understood to be worth the cost because they concentrated combat power in a way that nothing else could (Mahan, 1890; Gray, 1992).

The new paradigm is organised around a different logic: sea denial. Sea denial does not seek to control the sea. It seeks to make the sea unusable for the adversary, to raise the cost of operating in a given maritime area to the point where the adversary chooses not to. A Brazilian naval study published in 2026 put it well: "The rise of the logic of Sea Denial, enabled by distributed lethality, constitutes the most relevant transformation of naval strategy since the introduction of the aircraft carrier" (Silva & Oliveira, 2026, p. 14). Sea denial is easier than sea control—it always has been, as any student of naval theory knows—but what has changed is that the instruments of sea denial have become dramatically more accessible. A navy no longer needs a fleet of capital ships to deny the sea to a superior adversary. It needs precision missiles, unmanned platforms, networked sensors, and the will to use them.

The other terms that recur throughout this essay deserve brief definition. Distributed lethality is the principle of dispersing combat power across a larger number of platforms rather than concentrating it in a few high-value units. The concept originated in the US surface warfare community in the mid-2010s, when Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden and his colleagues released a new strategy for surface warfare that they called "Distributed Lethality," proposing a fundamental shift from defensive to offensive operations (Rowden, Gumataotao, & Fanta, 2015). The idea was summarised in the memorable phrase "if it floats, it fights," but it has since evolved into something broader and more consequential. Distributed Maritime Operations, the US Navy's current operating concept, extends the logic to the fleet level, integrating crewed and uncrewed platforms across multiple domains. The concept, as described in a 2024 Navy document, means "dispersing the fleet while concentrating effects" and demands "distributing, integrating, and maneuvering people, platforms, munitions, and data across time, spectrum, and space" (U.S. Navy, 2024, p. 7). Hybrid navy, a term the Royal Navy has adopted, describes a force structure that deliberately mixes crewed and uncrewed systems, treating autonomy not as an add-on but as a structural feature of the fleet. Combat mass, finally, is the quality that distributed forces are supposed to generate: not the concentrated mass of a single powerful platform, but the cumulative effect of many smaller, cheaper, more numerous systems operating in concert.

The Black Sea as Empirical Anchor

Abstractions have their uses, but the paradigm shift described in this essay is not a theoretical construct. It has been tested in combat, and the results are difficult to ignore. The Black Sea campaign of 2022–2025, in which Ukraine—a country with no significant naval tradition and almost no warships to speak of—succeeded in denying the sea to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, is the single most important empirical case for the argument that naval warfare has changed. Ukraine sank the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian fleet, using anti-ship missiles. It retook Snake Island, a strategic outcrop in the northwestern Black Sea, in a combined operation that relied on drones and precision strikes. By mid-2025, according to analysis published in the US Naval War College Review, Ukraine had destroyed roughly a third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet (Robinson & Richard, 2025).

The Ukrainian approach, which Dr. John Robinson of the University of Virginia's National Security Policy Center and Admiral Charles Richard, former commander of US Strategic Command, have called a "Littoral Strike Complex," combined unmanned systems with precision-guided missiles, decentralised command and control, and third-party sensors and networks (Robinson & Richard, 2025). The result was a configuration that, in their words, "is greater than the sum of its parts"—a network of land-based strike systems, naval mines, and uncrewed platforms that forced the Russian fleet to operate at a much greater distance from Ukraine's coast and reduced its freedom of action in the northwestern Black Sea to almost nothing. As Robinson and Richard (2025) argue, threats in the littorals are now "increasingly omnidirectional," making naval combat "less linear and more unpredictable," and sea control itself must be understood as "increasingly temporary and contested" (p. 58).

What makes the Black Sea case so instructive is not simply that a weaker navy defeated a stronger one. That has happened before, and naval theorists from the Jeune École onward have built careers on explaining how it can be done (Hughes, 2000). What is new is the mechanism. Ukraine did not rely on a single wonder weapon or a clever tactical trick. It built a system—a network of sensors, shooters, and decision-makers, some human, some machine—that was resilient enough to absorb losses and adaptive enough to evolve as the war progressed. The Russian fleet, by contrast, was optimised for a different kind of war: one in which the primary threat came from other fleets, not from a distributed network of land-based and unmanned systems. Its ships were large, expensive, and few in number. Each loss was painful, and each loss made the next operation more dangerous. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, could afford to lose drones by the dozen. The cost-exchange ratio was, and remains, brutally asymmetric.

The most dramatic demonstration of this asymmetry came in December 2025, when Ukrainian underwater drones struck a Russian Project 636.3 Varshavyanka-class submarine—a "Black Hole" boat carrying Kalibr cruise missiles—in the port of Novorossiysk. It was the first time in history that an underwater drone had disabled a submarine in its own base. The Austrian military expert Colonel Markus Reisner, commenting on the attack, observed that the Russian fleet had "largely retreated to ports, where it is effectively deprived of the ability to operate," but that "even there, Ukrainians repeatedly manage to deliver effective strikes" (as cited in Defence Review, 2025, para. 6). The strategic implications were profound: "No ship can be considered safe anymore" (Defence Review, 2025, para. 7).

The Turkish Case

Türkiye occupies a distinctive position in this landscape. It is not a superpower, nor is it a weak state exploiting asymmetric tactics out of desperation. It is a middle power with a maturing defence industry, a strategic geography that spans the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Eastern Mediterranean, and a naval doctrine—Mavi Vatan, the Blue Homeland—that explicitly seeks to secure maritime interests across all three. The Blue Homeland concept, initially outlined in 2006 by Admiral Ramazan Cem Gurdeniz, has since become the mainstay of Ankara's maritime policy, and a draft law submitted to parliament in 2026 would enshrine it at the legislative level (Daily Sabah, 2025).

What makes Türkiye's naval trajectory so relevant to the argument of this essay is that it represents a third way between the American and British approaches. The US Navy, as we have seen, is hedging—pursuing distributed lethality in doctrine while investing in large, expensive capital ships. The Royal Navy is betting on dispersion, autonomy, and mass. Türkiye is doing something different: it is building a hybrid fleet that uses unmanned systems as force multipliers for crewed platforms, and it is doing so with an indigenous defence industry that has become a significant exporter.

The Anadolu is the centrepiece of this approach. Originally conceived as a light aircraft carrier capable of operating F-35B fighters, the ship was reconfigured after Türkiye's expulsion from the F-35 programme into a dedicated drone carrier. The Bayraktar TB3, designed specifically for short-deck operations, has completed over 100 successful flights from the Anadolu, including live-fire missions in the Baltic Sea during Steadfast Dart 2026 (Naval News, 2026). In a December 2025 demonstration, a TB3 launched from the Anadolu enabled the long-range command and control of an Aselsan Albatros-S kamikaze unmanned surface vehicle, with military delegations from Italy, the UK, Spain, Japan, and Brazil observing (Anadolu Agency, 2026). The same demonstration featured TB3s firing MAM-T, MAM-L, and KEMANKES-1 munitions at targets on an island off the coast of Antalya.

But the Anadolu is not the whole story. Türkiye is building a comprehensive fleet, including the TF-2000 air defence destroyer, whose first block construction began in late 2025, and the MİLDEN submarine programme, the country's first fully indigenous submarine (Defence Review, 2025). These programmes are not merely technological achievements; they are expressions of a strategic ambition to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers and to build a navy capable of operating across Türkiye's three surrounding seas. And they are finding export markets: in December 2025, Türkiye completed its first-ever export of a combat ship to a NATO and EU member state, delivering the Akhisar corvette to Romania (Daily Sabah, 2025). Portugal, too, contracted Turkish industry for logistics support ships (Naval News, 2025b). With existing export programmes delivering MILGEM-derived corvettes to Pakistan, Ukraine, and Malaysia, Türkiye has established itself as a credible supplier of modern naval vessels to allied nations seeking capable platforms at competitive prices.

This matters for the argument of this essay because it demonstrates that the new paradigm is not only accessible to superpowers and asymmetric challengers. Middle powers with industrial capacity and strategic vision can build hybrid fleets that combine crewed and uncrewed systems, indigenous and imported technology, regional ambition and alliance interoperability. The Turkish case suggests that the future of naval architecture is not monolithic. It is plural. Different navies will make different choices, conditioned by their geography, their industrial base, and their strategic culture. The paradigm shift is real, but its expression will vary.

The Argument in Brief

The chapters that follow trace the implications of this shift for naval design. Chapter 2 examines the changing character of sea-domain warfare in detail, drawing on the Black Sea and Red Sea campaigns to identify the five interlocking shifts—transparency, network primacy, the rise of sea denial, the vulnerability of fixed bases, and the importance of industrial resilience—that together constitute the paradigm change. Chapter 3 analyses the doctrinal responses, contrasting the distributed lethality of the US Navy's Distributed Maritime Operations with the Royal Navy's hybrid navy concept and Türkiye's drone-carrier approach, and identifying the design tensions each approach generates. Chapter 4 focuses on the most disruptive design driver: the integration of uncrewed systems as primary fleet elements, examining how naval architecture is being rethought from first principles when crew habitability is no longer the organising constraint. Chapter 5 examines the impact of hypersonic weapons on surface combatant design, using the Zumwalt-class conversion as a case study. Chapter 6 addresses the enabling design philosophies—modularity, integrated electric power, and software-centric design—that make the new paradigm physically realisable. Chapter 7 argues that logistics and industrial capacity are as important as platform design, and that the viability of distributed operations depends on a sustainment architecture that does not yet exist in adequate form. Chapter 8 synthesises the argument into a set of design principles for the new paradigm and identifies the unresolved tensions that will shape naval architecture for the next generation.

The essay's central claim is not that the old paradigm is dead. It is that the old paradigm is no longer sufficient. The navies that adapt most successfully will be those that understand the new paradigm not as a replacement for the old one but as a set of additional requirements—that can operate distributed forces and concentrated forces, that can fight in a contested electromagnetic environment and a contested maritime one, that can sustain operations in the absence of fixed bases and fixed assumptions. The design implications of that requirement are profound. They are also the subject of this essay.

Chapter 2 — The Changing Character of Sea-Domain Warfare

The argument that naval warfare has undergone a paradigm shift rests on a claim about the character of the contemporary maritime battlespace. That claim can be stated simply: the sea is no longer opaque. For most of naval history, the ocean was a medium of concealment. Ships could disappear over the horizon, submarines could hide beneath the surface, and fleets could manoeuvre beyond the range of an adversary's sensors. The vastness of the sea was itself a form of protection. That protection has now largely vanished.

The consequences of this change are difficult to overstate. When the sea is opaque, navies can concentrate force without fear of being detected. When the sea is transparent, concentration becomes a liability. The shift from opacity to transparency is the foundational change from which most of the other developments in contemporary naval warfare flow. It is the reason why distributed lethality matters, why sea denial has become more potent than sea control, and why the vulnerability of fixed bases and logistics nodes has become a central planning problem.

This chapter examines five interlocking shifts that together constitute the changing character of sea-domain warfare: the transparency of the battlespace, the primacy of the network over the platform, the rise of sea denial as the dominant operational logic, the vulnerability of fixed bases and logistics nodes, and the growing importance of industrial and logistical resilience. Each shift is examined through the lens of recent conflicts—primarily the Black Sea campaign and the Red Sea crisis—and each has direct implications for naval design.

The Transparent Battlespace

The first shift is the most fundamental. The proliferation of sensors—satellites, drones, maritime patrol aircraft, undersea sensor networks, and shore-based radar—has made it increasingly difficult for naval forces to operate undetected. A 2025 Australian Sea Power Centre analysis observed that "the 2025 battlespace will require persistent, forward ISR ahead of and in-stride with the force to maximise warning times," and anticipated that "small nano-technology sensors will become available, allowing superior and undetected surveillance of the battlespace" (Australian Sea Power Centre, 2025, p. 3). The implication is clear: the days when a fleet could hide in the vastness of the ocean are over.

This transparency is not evenly distributed. The subsurface domain remains more opaque than the surface, and the seabed—where critical infrastructure like undersea cables and pipelines lies—is largely unmonitored. But the trend is unmistakable. China is building an undersea sensor network that aims to "turn the ocean transparent," according to a 2025 analysis in Defense One (Defense One, 2025). The United States and its allies are investing in similar capabilities. The result is a battlespace in which concealment is temporary at best, and in which the side that can process and act on sensor data faster gains a decisive advantage.

The implications for naval design are profound. If a ship can be detected, it can be targeted. If it can be targeted, it must be able to defend itself or avoid detection. The traditional answer to this problem was to build ships that were fast, heavily armed, and well-protected—able to survive an attack and continue fighting. But the cost of building such ships has risen dramatically, and the number of threats they face has multiplied. A single destroyer may now be targeted by anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, and submarines simultaneously. No amount of armour or speed can guarantee survival against such a barrage.

The alternative is dispersion. If a ship cannot survive a concentrated attack, then the logical response is to avoid concentration. This is the logic that underpins distributed lethality, and it is the logic that is driving the shift toward smaller, cheaper, more numerous platforms. But dispersion creates its own problems. A dispersed force is harder to coordinate, harder to sustain, and harder to concentrate for decisive action. The network that binds it together becomes a critical vulnerability. And the platforms that make up a dispersed force must be capable enough to contribute meaningfully to the fight—not mere targets.

Türkiye's approach to this problem is instructive. Rather than choosing between concentration and dispersion, the Turkish Navy has pursued a middle path: a fleet that is dispersed enough to avoid presenting a single high-value target, but concentrated enough to generate meaningful combat power. The Anadolu task group that deployed to the Baltic in 2026 exemplified this logic (Naval News, 2026). It was a task group, not a dispersed flotilla—four surface combatants operating together, with the Anadolu serving as flagship and command-and-control hub. But it was also a hybrid force, integrating crewed warships with embarked unmanned systems, and it was designed to operate independently, thousands of kilometres from home, without relying on a fixed base. This is the kind of compromise that the new paradigm demands: forces that are neither fully concentrated nor fully dispersed, but capable of shifting between the two as circumstances require.

The Primacy of the Network

The second shift follows from the first. If the battlespace is transparent and forces are dispersed, then the network that connects them becomes the centre of gravity. The platform is no longer the primary unit of naval power; the network is. A 2025 study of the Indonesian Navy's adoption of Network Centric Warfare captured this shift well, noting that "the transformation of modern defense strategy has shifted from platform-centric to network-centric approaches" (Prasetyo & Hidayat, 2025, p. 147). The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force has gone further, pursuing what it calls a "software-first" transformation that explicitly prioritises "network and data" over "hardware performance." As the JMSDF's equipment planning director put it, naval operations are "rapidly expanding from the physical domain to the non-physical domain," and Japan needs to shift to "capability-centred, software-first" approaches to maintain operational agility (as cited in Naval News, 2025a, para. 5).

The implications for naval architecture are significant. If the network is the centre of gravity, then the ship's combat system—the software that integrates sensors, weapons, and decision-making—becomes as important as its hull, propulsion, and weapons. A ship with a superior combat system can outperform a ship with superior physical characteristics. This is why the US Navy's Distributed Maritime Operations concept emphasises "information dominance" as "the key enabler in this new form of maneuver warfare, by which we confound the adversary's ability to find, fix, and attack our forces" (U.S. Navy, 2024, p. 9).

But the primacy of the network also creates vulnerabilities. A network can be jammed, spoofed, or hacked. It can be degraded by physical attack on its nodes or by cyber operations against its software. And it can be overloaded by the sheer volume of data that modern sensors produce. The US Naval Postgraduate School has developed a concept called Network-Optional Warfare to address this problem, noting that "vulnerabilities arise for naval forces using constant communications due to lost stealth and dependence on external information" (Bordetsky & Kaff, 2025, p. 4). The solution, according to this framework, is to design forces that can operate effectively with or without network connectivity—using emissions control, low-probability-of-intercept communications, and pre-defined signal books to maintain covertness and tactical surprise when necessary.

For naval designers, this means that ships must be built to operate in both networked and degraded modes. They must have sufficient onboard processing power and autonomy to function when the network is unavailable, and sufficient communications bandwidth to contribute to the network when it is. This is a demanding requirement, and it has implications for everything from the ship's power generation and cooling systems to its crew size and training requirements.

The Turkish Navy's GENESIS-ADVENT combat management system, installed aboard the Anadolu and the I-class frigates, offers one example of how this requirement is being addressed in practice. The system is designed to integrate sensor data from multiple sources and to support distributed operations, but it also includes features that allow ships to operate autonomously when communications are degraded (Naval News, 2025c). The fact that Türkiye has developed this system indigenously—rather than relying on foreign suppliers—is itself significant, because it means that Turkish warships can be upgraded and adapted without depending on external vendors. In a contested environment where supply chains and technical support may be disrupted, this kind of industrial autonomy becomes a form of operational resilience.

The Rise of Sea Denial

The third shift is the most strategically consequential. Sea denial—the ability to prevent an adversary from using the sea—has become more important than sea control. This is not a new insight. Naval theorists have long recognised that denial is easier than control (Hughes, 2000). But what has changed is the scale and accessibility of denial capabilities. Precision-guided missiles, unmanned systems, and networked sensors have made it possible for relatively small and inexpensive forces to deny the sea to much larger and more expensive ones.

The Black Sea campaign is the definitive demonstration. Ukraine, a country with no significant naval forces, succeeded in denying the sea to the Russian Black Sea Fleet—forcing it to retreat to ports, where it remained vulnerable to attack (Robinson & Richard, 2025). The mechanisms were diverse: anti-ship cruise missiles, surface drones, underwater drones, and land-based strike systems, all knitted together by a decentralised command-and-control network. As Colonel Reisner observed, "the reason lies in the innovative use of surface and underwater maritime drones, for which the Russian fleet has so far found no effective countermeasures" (as cited in Defence Review, 2025, para. 8).

The Red Sea crisis offers a second case study. Since late 2023, Houthi forces in Yemen have conducted hundreds of attacks on commercial and military vessels using anti-ship missiles, drones, and unmanned surface vessels. By March 2025, the Houthis had reportedly conducted 170 strikes against US warships and 145 against commercial vessels (European Naval Review, 2025). At least four commercial ships were sunk. The campaign disrupted global shipping, forced costly rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, and demonstrated that a non-state actor armed with relatively low-cost weapons could impose significant costs on a superpower.

What makes the Red Sea case particularly instructive is the cost-exchange ratio. The Houthis were using drones and missiles that cost thousands of dollars to intercept with weapons that cost millions. A European report on the crisis concluded that "the naval operations carried out in the Red Sea have shown that asymmetrical strategies are often more impactful than the traditional military power upon which major countries rely" (European Naval Review, 2025, p. 22). This is the logic of sea denial in its purest form: the denial force does not need to defeat the control force; it only needs to make the cost of maintaining control prohibitive.

The strategic implications are clear. For navies that have traditionally relied on sea control—the ability to use the sea for their own purposes—the rise of sea denial means that uncontested access to the maritime domain can no longer be assumed. For navies that seek to deny the sea to an adversary, the proliferation of precision weapons and unmanned systems has opened new possibilities for asymmetric strategy. And for naval designers, the rise of sea denial means that ships must be built to survive in an environment saturated with threats—not just from other ships, but from land-based missiles, drones, and submarines.

Türkiye's naval doctrine reflects an acute awareness of this shift. The Mavi Vatan concept is not a doctrine of sea control in the traditional sense. It is a doctrine of maritime assertion—of securing Türkiye's interests in the Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea against competitors who may have superior naval forces (Daily Sabah, 2025). The Turkish Navy's investment in anti-ship missiles, unmanned systems, and distributed sensor networks is designed to give Türkiye the ability to deny the sea to adversaries without needing to match them ship for ship. The Bayraktar TB3, with its ability to conduct anti-submarine warfare and to command unmanned surface vessels, is a sea-denial platform as much as a power-projection platform. It extends Türkiye's sensor and shooter reach far beyond the horizon, at a fraction of the cost of a crewed maritime patrol aircraft or a helicopter.

The Vulnerability of Fixed Bases

The fourth shift is closely related to the third. If the sea is transparent and denial capabilities are proliferating, then fixed bases and logistics nodes become vulnerable. The Russian experience in the Black Sea is again instructive. After Ukrainian drone attacks forced the Black Sea Fleet to withdraw from Sevastopol, the Russians moved their ships to Novorossiysk, only to find that their new base was also within range of Ukrainian drones. In December 2025, Ukrainian underwater drones struck a Russian submarine in Novorossiysk harbour, demonstrating that even heavily defended port facilities are not safe (Defence Review, 2025). Satellite imagery later showed that the entrance to the naval anchorage had been sealed with barges and boom barriers—defences that reduced vulnerability to further attacks but also effectively trapped Russian vessels inside the base, "complicating any rapid sortie into the Black Sea" (Defence Review, 2025, para. 9).

The vulnerability of fixed bases is not limited to the Black Sea. In December 2025, French military forces were forced to activate urgent anti-drone protocols after five unmanned aerial vehicles breached the airspace of the Île Longue nuclear submarine base (Defence News, 2026). The same year, a retired British naval officer warned that sabotage of undersea cables connecting the UK to Europe and the US could plunge NATO's Maritime Command into "complete communications darkness" (Royal Navy, 2025).

For naval designers, the vulnerability of fixed bases has two major implications. First, ships must be designed to operate for longer periods without access to shore-based maintenance and resupply. This means greater onboard endurance, more robust self-repair capabilities, and reduced dependence on external logistics. Second, ships must be designed to operate from dispersed, austere locations rather than centralised bases. This means shallow-draft vessels that can use smaller ports, modular systems that can be maintained by smaller crews, and logistics architectures that can deliver supplies to distributed forces.

The Turkish Navy's Baltic deployment illustrated both imperatives. The task group was supported by TCG Derya, the Turkish Navy's first fleet oiler with gas turbine propulsion, whose high-speed capability allowed her to keep pace with the combatants rather than constraining task group mobility (Naval News, 2026). The Anadolu itself was designed with a well deck for landing craft, vehicle storage for armored units, and extensive command facilities, making it capable of operating as a forward base for amphibious operations as well as a drone carrier. And the I-class frigate İstanbul, with its 80 per cent indigenous systems, was designed to be maintainable and upgradable without dependence on foreign suppliers—a critical consideration when operating far from home in a contested environment (Daily Sabah, 2025).

Industrial and Logistical Resilience

The fifth shift is perhaps the least visible but the most consequential over the long term. The new paradigm demands not just new platforms but a new industrial and logistical architecture. Distributed operations require distributed logistics—the ability to sustain dispersed forces in contested environments. And sustained operations require industrial capacity—the ability to replace losses and produce new systems at scale.

The US Navy has begun to grapple with this challenge. A June 2025 report to the House Armed Services Committee emphasised that "a strong, resilient, and effective industrial base, composed of shipyards, depots, ship designers, and associated supply chains" is essential to naval power (House Armed Services Committee, 2025, p. 3). A 2025 study from the Eisenhower School highlighted emerging innovations such as artificial intelligence, automation, distributed manufacturing, and uncrewed systems as paths to greater efficiency and resilience (Eisenhower School, 2025). The Navy has invested $448 million in an AI-driven Shipbuilding Operating System to improve schedules and reduce delays. But these efforts are remedial. The US maritime industrial base has atrophied from 55 shipyards at the end of World War II to a much smaller number today, and rebuilding it will take time.

Türkiye offers a different model. The Turkish defence industry has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, and naval platforms have become a significant export category. In 2025, Türkiye's defence and aerospace exports reached $10.054 billion, with naval platforms and military ship projects playing a decisive role in European and NATO markets (Deniz Haber, 2026). The export of the Akhisar corvette to Romania—the first sale of a Turkish warship to a NATO and EU member state—and the contract to build logistics support ships for Portugal demonstrate that Turkish shipyards have become competitive in markets previously dominated by Western European suppliers (Daily Sabah, 2025; Naval News, 2025b). With existing export programmes delivering MILGEM-derived corvettes to Pakistan, Ukraine, and Malaysia, Türkiye has established itself as a credible supplier of modern naval vessels to allied nations seeking capable platforms at competitive prices.

The Turkish case suggests that industrial resilience is not simply a function of scale. It is also a function of strategic intent. Türkiye has deliberately built an indigenous defence industry as a matter of national policy, reducing dependence on foreign suppliers and creating export markets that sustain production capacity. This approach has its costs—indigenous development is expensive and time-consuming—but it has also produced a naval force that is less vulnerable to supply-chain disruption and more capable of sustaining operations in a contested environment. The I-class frigate, with its 80 per cent indigenous content and over 220 Turkish companies contributing to its construction, is a case in point (Yeni Şafak, 2025). It is not merely a warship; it is an expression of a strategic choice to prioritise industrial autonomy over short-term cost savings.

Conclusion

The five shifts described in this chapter—transparency, network primacy, sea denial, base vulnerability, and industrial resilience—are not independent developments. They are mutually reinforcing. Transparency makes concentration dangerous, which drives dispersion. Dispersion makes the network critical, which creates new vulnerabilities. Networked forces armed with precision weapons make sea denial more potent, which makes fixed bases more vulnerable. And the demands of distributed operations make industrial and logistical resilience more important than ever.

Together, these shifts constitute a paradigm change. The old paradigm assumed that sea control was the prerequisite for naval success, that capital ships were the instruments of sea control, and that fixed bases and established logistics chains could support fleet operations. The new paradigm assumes that sea denial is as important as sea control, that distributed forces armed with precision weapons are the instruments of denial, and that fixed bases and established logistics chains are liabilities as much as assets.

The implications for naval design are profound. Ships must be smaller, cheaper, and more numerous. They must be networked but capable of operating without networks. They must be able to survive in an environment saturated with threats. They must be maintainable by smaller crews in austere conditions. They must be adaptable to new missions and new payloads. And they must be producible at scale by an industrial base that is itself resilient.

The chapters that follow examine how navies around the world are responding to these imperatives, and what their responses reveal about the future of naval architecture.

Chapter 3 — Distributed Lethality and the Hybrid Fleet

The paradigm shift described in the previous chapter has not gone unnoticed by the world's navies. It has, however, produced markedly different responses. Some navies have embraced distributed lethality as an organising principle, restructuring their fleets around larger numbers of smaller, networked platforms. Others have hedged, pursuing distributed operations in doctrine while continuing to invest in large, expensive capital ships. And some—most notably Türkiye—have charted a third course, building hybrid fleets that combine crewed and uncrewed systems in ways that neither the American nor the British approach fully anticipates.

This chapter examines these doctrinal responses and the design tensions they generate. It begins with the origins of distributed lethality in the US surface warfare community, then traces its evolution into the more comprehensive concept of Distributed Maritime Operations and its expression in the Golden Fleet initiative. It then examines the Royal Navy's Atlantic Bastion programme as a contrasting approach, and Türkiye's drone-carrier concept as a third model. The chapter concludes by identifying the design tensions that cut across all three approaches: the tension between concentration and distribution, between exquisite capability and mass, and between survivability and affordability.

The Origins of Distributed Lethality

The concept of distributed lethality emerged from a specific strategic problem: the increasing vulnerability of high-value units to anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities. In January 2015, the Surface Warfare leadership of the US Navy—including Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, Rear Admiral Peter Gumataotao, and Rear Admiral Peter Fanta—released a new strategy for surface warfare that proposed a fundamental shift from defensive to offensive operations (Rowden et al., 2015). Their reasoning was simple: force a potential adversary to counter the US Navy's attacks, and therefore limit the adversary's ability to conduct its own attacks. Instead of the surface forces constantly responding to the adversary's attacks and playing defence, the admirals proposed that the tables be turned and that the Navy force the adversary to defend itself.

The context was the growing A2/AD capabilities of potential adversaries, particularly China. As those capabilities developed, the Navy's ability to operate high-value units such as aircraft carriers and large-deck amphibious ships—and to conduct unopposed strike operations—was becoming more limited. The Navy's traditional operational style of massed carrier strikes and cruise missile attacks was much less viable when the enemy had the capability to target and kill these assets at ranges that exceeded those of the Navy's own aircraft and cruise missiles. If a carrier could not be put at risk to conduct a strike, then distributed lethality became necessary to affect the enemy. Many small surface forces would be difficult to target, and would force the enemy either to react to the threat—and therefore open the door to a carrier attack—or to ignore the new threat and therefore take losses.

The concept was refined over the following years. In the ideas put forth by Admirals Rowden, Gumataotao, and Fanta (2015), small groups of surface combatants would be dispatched into a disputed operations area to establish temporary sea control. These small groups of surface combatants, traditionally referred to as Surface Action Groups, were recast as Adaptive Force Packages. In this formulation, sea control referred to destroying or neutralising all enemy forces capable of opposing the force. After temporary sea control had been established, the force would conduct its assigned mission, which could range from a land strike to an amphibious operation.

The concept was radical in its implications. It inverted the traditional logic of naval warfare, in which concentration of force was the path to victory. It suggested that dispersion—not concentration—was the key to survival in a contested environment. And it placed new demands on naval design: if surface combatants were to operate in small, dispersed groups, they needed to be capable of independent action, equipped with sufficient offensive and defensive systems to survive without the protection of a carrier strike group.

From Distributed Lethality to Distributed Maritime Operations

By the mid-2020s, distributed lethality had evolved into a more comprehensive concept: Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO). DMO is the operating concept of the Department of the Navy for using US naval forces in combat operations against an adversary—particularly China—that has substantial capabilities for detecting and attacking US Navy surface ships with anti-ship missiles and other weapons. A 2024 Navy document describes DMO as the fleet tactics that capitalise on the diverse capabilities provided by the Navy and its partnership with the Marine Corps (U.S. Navy, 2024). As the reach of missiles gets longer, and lower-cost robotic systems make ship defence costlier, the Navy must put more munitions on more platforms in more places to prevail on a globalised battlefield.

DMO means dispersing the fleet while concentrating effects. The approach demands distributing, integrating, and manoeuvring people, platforms, munitions, and data across time, spectrum, and space. Information dominance is the key enabler in this new form of manoeuvre warfare, by which the Navy confounds the adversary's ability to find, fix, and attack its forces (U.S. Navy, 2024). DMO is, in the Navy's own words, "complex, fleet-level warfare on a scale we have not executed in nearly a century, blending decentralization and unity of effort in a way that places intense new demands on fleet commanders" (U.S. Navy, 2024, p. 12).

The key features of DMO are worth enumerating because they have direct implications for naval design. First, dispersing Navy units over a larger area within the theatre of operations, so as to make it harder for an adversary to detect and target Navy units, while still permitting Navy units to support one another and concentrate their fires on adversary targets. Second, spreading the Navy's sensors and weapons across a wider array of ships and aircraft, so as to reduce the fraction of the Navy's sensors and weapons that would be lost due to the destruction of any one ship or aircraft—avoiding "putting too many eggs into one basket." Third, making greater use of longer-ranged weapons, unmanned vessels, and unmanned aircraft. And fourth, using resilient communication links and networking technologies to knit the resulting widely dispersed force of manned and unmanned ships and aircraft into a coordinated battle force that can withstand and adapt to enemy attacks on Navy communications and networks.

These features are not merely operational preferences. They are design drivers. A ship designed for DMO must be able to operate as part of a dispersed force. It must have sufficient communications bandwidth to contribute to the network. It must have sufficient onboard sensors and weapons to contribute to the fight. It must be able to operate for extended periods without resupply. And it must be affordable enough that the Navy can buy enough of them to achieve the dispersion that DMO demands.

The Golden Fleet: A High-Low Mix

The Golden Fleet initiative, announced by Admiral Caudle in January 2026, represents the US Navy's attempt to translate DMO into a concrete force design. The initiative organises naval forces to fight as tailored Battle Groups under the Navy Warfighting Concept, integrating a high-low mix of carriers, large and small surface combatants, submarines, aviation, and unmanned systems, synchronised through an Enhanced Mission Command Framework that empowers initiative while preserving unity of effort (Seapower Magazine, 2026).

The high-low mix is the key feature. The "high" end consists of the Navy's most capable platforms: aircraft carriers, large surface combatants, and submarines. The "low" end consists of smaller, cheaper platforms: frigates, corvettes, and—crucially—unmanned systems. The low end would be "attributable" uncrewed systems that could be built and deployed rapidly, providing the mass and dispersion that DMO demands without requiring the Navy to invest in large numbers of expensive crewed warships.

The Golden Fleet is, according to Caudle, "a globally maneuverable, combat-credible Fleet built around our Nation's most decisive instruments of maritime power: aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, frigates, submarines, naval aviation, and supporting forces operating across all domains and the electromagnetic spectrum" (as cited in Seapower Magazine, 2026, para. 4). The Navy's future force design will include 280 to 300 crewed ships and a large number of uncrewed vessels, with small ships and unmanned systems providing wide-area coverage and continuous tactical containment of adversaries.

But the Golden Fleet also includes a capital ship programme that sits awkwardly with the logic of distributed lethality. The Trump-class battleships, displacing around 35,000 tons and carrying 128 vertical launch system cells, are the antithesis of the small, cheap, numerous platforms that DMO envisions. They are the apotheosis of the high-value unit—the kind of platform that A2/AD capabilities were supposed to have rendered vulnerable. The Navy's justification is that the battleships will carry hypersonic weapons and directed-energy systems that smaller platforms cannot accommodate, and that they will serve as command-and-control hubs for distributed operations. But the tension between the Golden Fleet's distributed rhetoric and its capital-ship reality is difficult to ignore.

Atlantic Bastion: The Royal Navy's Hybrid Approach

The Royal Navy's Atlantic Bastion programme represents a different approach—one that is more fully committed to dispersion, autonomy, and mass. Unveiled by First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins in December 2025, Atlantic Bastion is a multi-layered underwater surveillance and anti-submarine warfare network designed to protect critical undersea infrastructure and counter Russian submarine activity. The programme links autonomous surface and subsurface vessels, AI-enabled sensor grids, and existing naval and air platforms into a fused network of crewed warships, submarines, unmanned platforms, and distributed acoustic sensors powered by AI analytics (Royal Navy, 2025).

The strategic logic of Atlantic Bastion is different from that of DMO. The US Navy's Distributed Maritime Operations is a global concept, designed to enable the US fleet to operate in the Western Pacific against a peer competitor. Atlantic Bastion is a regional concept, focused on the North Atlantic and the undersea infrastructure that connects Europe to North America. But the design implications are similar. Atlantic Bastion requires platforms that can operate autonomously for extended periods, sensors that can detect and track submarines without human intervention, and networks that can fuse data from multiple sources into a coherent operational picture.

The Royal Navy's approach has been to leverage industry rather than develop systems indigenously. The government has allocated £14 million in seed funding, with private sector investment matching at a four-to-one ratio. Twenty-six companies have submitted new sensor designs, and twenty firms are demonstrating early systems, some of which are expected to enter water trials in 2026 (Royal Navy, 2025). This approach allows the Navy to access a wider range of technologies and to iterate more rapidly than it could with a purely in-house programme. But it also creates dependencies on commercial suppliers and raises questions about interoperability and long-term sustainment.

The First Sea Lord has framed Atlantic Bastion as "a blueprint for the future of the Royal Navy," combining "autonomous systems, AI and existing fleets to detect, deter and defeat those who threaten us" (Royal Navy, 2025, para. 3). The programme is not a replacement for the Royal Navy's crewed warships; it is an additional layer of capability that extends the Navy's reach and persistence at a fraction of the cost of additional crewed platforms. In this sense, it is closer to the Turkish model than to the American one: it treats unmanned systems as force multipliers for existing forces, rather than as substitutes for them.

Türkiye's Drone-Carrier Model

Türkiye's approach to the new paradigm is distinctive because it is neither a wholesale embrace of dispersion nor a continued investment in large capital ships. It is a hybrid model that uses unmanned systems to extend the reach and capability of crewed platforms, while also investing in the industrial capacity to produce those platforms indigenously.

The Anadolu is the clearest expression of this model. The ship was originally designed as a light aircraft carrier, capable of operating F-35B fighters. After Türkiye's expulsion from the F-35 programme in 2019, the ship was reconfigured to operate the Bayraktar TB3, a UCAV designed specifically for short-deck operations. The result is the world's first dedicated drone carrier—a ship that can launch, recover, and sustain unmanned aircraft at sea (Anadolu Agency, 2026).

The operational concept is different from that of a traditional aircraft carrier. A traditional carrier generates combat power through the sortie rate of its crewed aircraft. The Anadolu generates combat power through the persistence and reach of its unmanned aircraft. The TB3 can remain airborne for over 24 hours, far longer than a crewed fighter. It can carry precision munitions—MAM-T, MAM-L, and KEMANKES-1—and it can be armed for anti-submarine warfare, as demonstrated during the Seawolf I 2026 exercise. Perhaps most importantly, it can serve as a communications relay and command-and-control node for other unmanned systems, extending the reach of the network without requiring additional crewed platforms (Anadolu Agency, 2026).

The Anadolu task group that deployed to the Baltic in 2026 illustrated how this concept works in practice. The task group comprised four surface combatants: the Anadolu as flagship, the I-class frigate İstanbul, the upgraded Barbaros-class frigate Oruçreis, and the fleet oiler Derya. Three Bayraktar TB3 drones were embarked, and they conducted 232 sorties during the exercise, with all takeoffs and landings conducted autonomously (Naval News, 2026). The TB3s demonstrated their ability to operate as part of a networked force, commanding unmanned surface vessels and relaying sensor data to the task group.

This approach has several advantages. First, it is more affordable than building and operating a traditional carrier air wing. The TB3 costs a fraction of a crewed fighter, and it does not require the same level of maintenance and support infrastructure. Second, it is more flexible. Unmanned aircraft can be reconfigured for different missions—strike, surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, communications relay—without the extensive training and certification requirements of crewed aircraft. Third, it is more attritable. If a TB3 is lost, it can be replaced more easily than a crewed aircraft and without risking the life of a pilot.

But the approach also has limitations. Unmanned aircraft are more vulnerable to electronic warfare and jamming than crewed aircraft. They have limited situational awareness and cannot make the same kind of complex decisions that a human pilot can. And they depend on a communications link to the ship, which can be degraded or severed. The Turkish Navy has addressed some of these limitations by giving the TB3 autonomous takeoff and landing capabilities and by designing it to operate with minimal bandwidth. But the fundamental limitation remains: unmanned systems are not yet a substitute for crewed systems in all missions.

Design Tensions

The three approaches examined in this chapter—American DMO, British Atlantic Bastion, and Turkish drone-carrier—are not mutually exclusive. They share a common recognition that the character of naval warfare has changed and that navies must adapt. But they also generate design tensions that cut across all three approaches.

The first tension is between concentration and distribution. Distributed lethality and DMO call for dispersion. But dispersion creates command-and-control challenges, logistics challenges, and sustainment challenges. The Turkish approach—a task group that is dispersed enough to avoid presenting a single high-value target but concentrated enough to generate meaningful combat power—is one way of managing this tension. But it is not a complete solution. A task group is still a concentration of force, and it can still be targeted. The question is whether the benefits of concentration outweigh the risks.

The second tension is between exquisite capability and mass. High-end platforms—carriers, large surface combatants, submarines—are exquisite. They are capable of a wide range of missions, but they are expensive and few in number. Low-end platforms—frigates, corvettes, unmanned systems—are less capable individually, but they are cheaper and more numerous. The Golden Fleet's high-low mix is an attempt to balance these two imperatives. But the balance is difficult to strike. Too much emphasis on the high end produces a fleet that is too small and too vulnerable. Too much emphasis on the low end produces a fleet that lacks the capability to conduct the full range of naval missions.

The third tension is between survivability and affordability. The new paradigm demands ships that can survive in a contested environment. But survivability is expensive. Armour, redundant systems, and advanced defensive weapons all add cost. The more survivable a ship is, the fewer of them a navy can afford. The Turkish Navy's I-class frigate, with its 80 per cent indigenous content and over 220 Turkish companies contributing to its construction, represents one attempt to manage this tension by reducing costs through indigenous production (Yeni Şafak, 2025). But even indigenous production has limits. The question is whether a navy can build enough survivable ships to achieve the dispersion that the new paradigm demands.

Conclusion

The doctrinal responses to the new paradigm are diverse, reflecting different strategic cultures, industrial capacities, and geographic circumstances. The US Navy is hedging, pursuing distributed operations in doctrine while investing in capital ships that sit awkwardly with that doctrine. The Royal Navy is betting on dispersion and autonomy, using industry partnerships to access a wider range of technologies than it could develop in-house. The Turkish Navy is threading a different needle, using unmanned systems as force multipliers for crewed platforms and building an indigenous industrial base that reduces dependence on foreign suppliers.

These differences are not merely matters of preference. They reflect the different constraints and opportunities that each navy faces. The US Navy has the resources to pursue a high-low mix, but it also has the burden of global commitments that constrain its ability to specialise. The Royal Navy has a clear regional focus—the North Atlantic and the undersea infrastructure that connects Europe to North America—but limited resources. The Turkish Navy has a regional focus that spans three seas and an industrial base that is still maturing, but it also has the advantage of strategic clarity and a willingness to accept risk.

The next chapter examines the most disruptive design driver of all: the integration of uncrewed systems as primary fleet elements. It asks how naval architecture is being rethought from first principles when crew habitability is no longer the organising constraint, and what this means for the future of naval design.

Chapter 4 — The Unmanned Turn: Designing for Autonomy at Scale

For most of the history of naval architecture, the human being has been the measure of the ship. The dimensions of a hatch, the height of a deck, the volume of a mess, the capacity of a ventilation system—every one of these parameters derives, ultimately, from the physical and psychological needs of the crew. A warship is, in the most literal sense, a machine built around people. It must keep them alive, keep them functional, and keep them fighting. Even the most advanced combat systems are, in the end, designed to serve human decision-makers, and the ship itself is designed to serve the systems.

This is what makes the current moment in naval design so genuinely disorienting. For the first time since the transition from sail to steam, naval architects are being asked to design warships that do not have to accommodate human beings at all. Or, more precisely, they are being asked to design a spectrum of platforms ranging from fully crewed to fully uncrewed, with every possible intermediate configuration in between. The organising constraint that has shaped naval architecture for centuries—the need to keep people alive at sea—is no longer universal. Where it applies, it applies with undiminished force. Where it does not, the design space opens up in ways that are still being explored.

This chapter examines what happens when that constraint is removed. It begins with the conceptual shift from autonomy as a technological aspiration to autonomy as a design driver. It then examines three families of platforms—large uncrewed surface vessels, drone carriers, and collaborative combat aircraft—that illustrate different approaches to the problem. It analyses the design implications of eliminating crew spaces, reallocating internal volume to fuel and payload, engineering fault-tolerant systems for months-long deployments, and adopting a maintenance philosophy that defines endurance by quayside service intervals rather than onboard repair capability. And it argues that the unmanned turn is not a single development but a spectrum, with different navies and different platform families occupying different points along it.

Autonomy as a Design Driver, Not a Feature

The first conceptual shift is the most important, and it is easy to miss. For the past two decades, autonomy in naval systems has been treated primarily as a technological capability—something that is added to existing platforms to make them more capable. A crewed ship might be given an autonomous navigation system; an existing hull might be retrofitted with a remote-controlled weapon station; a helicopter might be replaced by a drone that performs the same mission. The platform remains the same; the autonomy is an upgrade.

What is happening now is different. Autonomy is being treated as a primary design driver—a constraint that shapes every other decision about the ship. As the Royal Institution of Naval Architects put it in a 2026 assessment of BMT's Project MODUS, "Autonomy is a primary design driver, not a retrofit. Every decision about hull form, internal arrangement, systems architecture and maintenance philosophy flows from the requirement to operate without crew" (Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2026, p. 5).

This distinction matters because it changes the sequence of design. In the traditional approach, the naval architect begins with a mission requirement, designs a hull and propulsion system to meet that requirement, and then asks how much crew is needed to operate the resulting ship. In the autonomy-first approach, the naval architect begins with the requirement to operate without crew, and then designs the hull, propulsion, and systems around that constraint. The crew is not a given; it is a variable. And in many cases, the optimal value of that variable is zero.

The US Navy's No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) programme is the clearest expression of this logic. The programme's demonstrator, the USX-1 Defiant, was designed "from the ground up to never accommodate a human aboard" (Baird Maritime, 2025, para. 2). As DARPA describes it, "By removing the human element from all ship design considerations," the programme intends to demonstrate "significant advantages, to include: Size, cost, at-sea reliability, greater hydrodynamic efficiency, survivability to sea-state" (as cited in Baird Maritime, 2025, para. 3). The Defiant has no bridge, no crew quarters, no galley, no air conditioning, no waste management systems—none of the infrastructure that exists solely to keep human beings alive and functional. What it does have is a simplified hull design that allows "rapid production and maintenance in nearly any port facility or Tier III shipyard that traditionally supports yacht, tug" operations, and a volume of internal space given over to fuel and sensors rather than life support (Baird Maritime, 2025, para. 4).

The design implications of this shift are profound. When you eliminate the crew, you eliminate a whole category of systems: habitability systems (heating, ventilation, air conditioning, water supply, waste management), safety systems (lifeboats, fire suppression designed for human evacuation, emergency lighting), and human-factors systems (lighting, noise control, ergonomic workspaces). You also eliminate the weight and volume associated with those systems, and the power generation and cooling capacity required to support them. The space and weight that are freed up can be reallocated to fuel, payload, or additional sensors. And the power that would have gone to life support can go to propulsion or to weapons.

But you also create new problems. Without a crew, there is no one to perform maintenance, no one to respond to casualties, no one to make decisions when communications are degraded. The ship must be designed to operate reliably for extended periods without human intervention—which means fault-tolerant propulsion systems, redundant sensors, and software that can detect and respond to failures autonomously. The US Navy's 720-hour "no touch" power demonstration, conducted between 2023 and 2024, was a direct response to this problem. During the test, no human intervention or preventative maintenance was allowed on the engine equipment for 30 continuous days. The successful completion of the test meant that the tested engine was "eligible for future use aboard USV platforms," and it indicated that "propulsion systems are mature enough to power an unmanned ship for 30 days without requiring maintenance" (as cited in Naval News, 2025a). The follow-on goal is more ambitious: the USX-1 Defiant is designed to operate at sea for a year without human intervention, with "graceful degradation" technology that allows it to withstand failures of individual components while maintaining operational capability.

Three Families of Uncrewed Platforms

The unmanned turn is not a single development but a spectrum. Different platform families occupy different points along that spectrum, reflecting different mission requirements, different levels of technological maturity, and different assumptions about the role of human operators.

The first family is the large uncrewed surface vessel (LUSV)—a platform designed from the outset to operate without a crew, with no provision for human habitation. The USX-1 Defiant is the most radical example, but it is not alone. BMT's Project MODUS family, unveiled at DSEI 2025, includes designs for a 40-metre medium USV and a 75-metre large USV, both conceived around autonomous operation (Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2026). Navantia UK's LASV75, a 75-metre, 1,000-tonne concept, is similarly "conceived from the outset as an uncrewed platform," dispensing with "traditional crew accommodation and associated support systems in order to maximise payload flexibility and endurance" (Navantia UK, 2026, para. 3). The Liberty-class USV, developed by Blue Water Autonomy in partnership with Damen, is a 60-metre steel vessel with a range of over 10,000 nautical miles and over 150 tonnes of payload capacity, built on a proven hull form and re-engineered "from the inside out" for autonomous operation (Baird Maritime, 2025).

These vessels share certain design characteristics. They are optimised for endurance rather than speed, because endurance is what enables persistence in a contested environment. They have modular payload bays that can accommodate containerised mission systems, interchangeable sensor fits, and—in the case of the Liberty class—missile launchers and logistics payloads. They are designed for maintainability by smaller crews at austere facilities, not by large crews at centralised bases. And they are designed for affordability, because the whole point of uncrewed platforms is to generate combat mass that a navy could not afford to generate with crewed ships. As the Royal Institution of Naval Architects observed of Project MODUS, "Uncrewed vessels that simply replicate the cost of crewed ships will not solve the combat mass problem; they will compound it" (Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2026, p. 9).

The second family is the drone carrier—a crewed platform that operates uncrewed systems as its primary weapon. Türkiye's TCG Anadolu is the clearest example. Originally designed as a light aircraft carrier capable of operating F-35B fighters, the ship was reconfigured after Türkiye's expulsion from the F-35 programme into a dedicated drone carrier. The Bayraktar TB3, designed specifically for short-deck operations, has completed over 100 successful flights from the Anadolu, including live-fire missions in the Baltic Sea during NATO's Steadfast Dart 2026 exercise (Naval News, 2026). In December 2025, a TB3 launched from the Anadolu enabled the long-range command and control of an Aselsan Albatros-S kamikaze unmanned surface vehicle, with military delegations from Italy, the UK, Spain, Japan, and Brazil observing (Anadolu Agency, 2026). The same demonstration featured TB3s firing MAM-T, MAM-L, and KEMANKES-1 munitions at targets on an island off the coast of Antalya.

The Anadolu model is distinctive because it does not eliminate the crew; it repositions them. The ship itself is crewed, but the systems that generate combat power—the aircraft—are uncrewed. This has several advantages. The crew can maintain and operate the ship in the traditional way, which reduces the demand for fault-tolerant autonomy and allows for more complex maintenance procedures. The ship can serve as a command-and-control hub for a distributed network of uncrewed systems, extending the reach of the network without requiring additional crewed platforms. And the uncrewed aircraft can be configured for different missions—strike, surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, communications relay—without the extensive training and certification requirements of crewed aircraft.

The third family is the collaborative combat aircraft—an uncrewed system designed to operate alongside crewed platforms, extending their reach and multiplying their effectiveness. The MQ-28A Ghost Bat, developed by Boeing Australia, is the most mature example. The Ghost Bat is an 11.7-metre uncrewed aircraft with a range of more than 2,000 nautical miles, designed to operate autonomously or in coordination with piloted jets. It has conducted collaborative tests with Australian F-35A and US F-15EX fighter jets, and it is being evaluated by the US Navy as a model for future industrial partnerships. Japan is considering purchasing the Ghost Bat to enhance the defence of its southwestern islands (Naval News, 2025a).

The Ghost Bat is not a warship, but it is relevant to naval design because it illustrates a different approach to the unmanned turn. Rather than replacing crewed platforms, it augments them. It does not eliminate the human operator; it extends the operator's reach. And it is designed to be produced at scale, with modular payload bays and an open architecture that can accommodate different sensors and weapons as technology evolves. As one industry analysis put it, "Autonomy alone is not a capability unless the aircraft can be deployed, updated, repaired, and trusted in operational tempo" (Seapower Magazine, 2025, para. 6). The Ghost Bat's design reflects that insight: it is not just a flying sensor or a flying weapon; it is a system that must fit into a force package without creating excessive workload for pilots, maintainers, or commanders.

The Internal Geometry of the Crewless Ship

The most concrete way to understand the design implications of the unmanned turn is to look at what happens inside the hull. When you remove the crew, the internal geometry of the ship changes in ways that are not immediately obvious but that have cascading effects throughout the design.

The first change is the elimination of habitability systems. On a crewed warship, a substantial fraction of the ship's internal volume is devoted to keeping people alive and functional: berthing spaces, messing facilities, sanitary spaces, medical facilities, ventilation and air conditioning, water storage and purification, waste management. On a large destroyer, these systems can account for 20 to 30 per cent of the internal volume and a comparable fraction of the ship's electrical load. Removing them frees up that volume and that power for other uses.

What happens to the freed volume depends on the mission. On the Liberty-class USV, the internal space that would have been occupied by crew accommodations is given over to fuel and payload. The vessel has a range of over 10,000 nautical miles and over 150 tonnes of payload capacity—figures that would be difficult to achieve on a crewed vessel of comparable size (Baird Maritime, 2025). On Project MODUS, the freed volume is used for modular payload bays and, in the case of the medium USV, a dedicated sonar gondola integrated into the hull. The gondola is "optimised for sensor performance and doubles as a stabilising keel," a design solution that would be impossible on a crewed vessel because the space would be needed for other purposes (Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2026, p. 11).

The second change is the reallocation of weight. Ships are weight-limited as well as volume-limited, and the removal of crew and habitability systems reduces the weight that must be supported by the hull. That weight can be reallocated to fuel (increasing range and endurance), to payload (increasing combat capability), or to structure (increasing survivability). The USX-1 Defiant, for example, is described as having a "simplified hull design" that allows rapid production and maintenance, and a "considerable volume" of the vessel given over to fuel tanks and sensors rather than life support equipment. The vessel is also "quite low in the water" because it has no bridge or weather decks, making it "very difficult for enemy radar to detect" (Baird Maritime, 2025, para. 7).

The third change is the elimination of human-factors constraints. On a crewed ship, the design of every space is constrained by the need for human access, human comfort, and human safety. Hatches must be large enough for a person to pass through. Passageways must be wide enough for two people to pass. Equipment must be positioned so that it can be operated and maintained by a human being with human reach and strength. When the crew is removed, those constraints disappear. Equipment can be packed more densely. Spaces can be smaller. Access can be designed for robots rather than people.

The fourth change is the redesign of the propulsion and power systems for autonomous operation. A crewed ship's propulsion system is designed to be operated and maintained by human beings. An uncrewed ship's propulsion system must be designed to operate reliably for extended periods without human intervention, and to fail gracefully when it does fail. The Liberty class, for example, uses a "fault-tolerant dual-propulsion configuration" with "autonomous configuration of fault-tolerant propulsion systems" that enable "automated control and fault management with limited human intervention on months-long deployments" (Baird Maritime, 2025, para. 8). The US Navy's 720-hour power demonstration was designed to validate that a diesel engine could operate for 30 days without any human intervention, including preventative maintenance. The next generation of uncrewed propulsion systems will need to do better: the USX-1 Defiant is designed for a year at sea, with "graceful degradation" technology that allows it to maintain at least 15 knots even if individual power modules fail.

Maintenance Philosophy: Quayside, Not Onboard

The most consequential design implication of the unmanned turn may be the shift in maintenance philosophy. On a crewed warship, maintenance is performed onboard, by the crew, using spare parts and tools carried aboard. The ship is designed to be self-sufficient for the duration of its deployment, with the crew able to repair equipment, replace components, and respond to casualties without external support. This philosophy shapes everything from the layout of the engine room to the size of the ship's storerooms to the training of the crew.

On an uncrewed vessel, this philosophy is inverted. Maintenance is performed at the quayside, between deployments, by shore-based personnel. The ship is designed to be maintained in port, not at sea. The crew that would have performed maintenance aboard is replaced by a shore-based support team that services the vessel when it returns to base. And the ship's endurance is defined not by its fuel capacity or its stores, but by its maintenance interval—the period of time it can operate before it must return to port for servicing.

Project MODUS is explicit about this. The design targets "operational periods of up to 60 days through simplified propulsion, appropriate redundancy, and equipment designed to be removed and serviced on the quayside rather than onboard" (Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2026, p. 8). The philosophy is not "how long can the ship operate without maintenance?" but "how long can the ship operate before it must return to port for maintenance that cannot be performed at sea?" The answer depends on the reliability of the systems, the redundancy built into them, and the design of the interfaces that connect them to the shore support infrastructure.

This shift has implications that extend beyond the ship itself. It requires a different kind of shore infrastructure—one designed for rapid servicing of uncrewed vessels rather than for the traditional alongside maintenance of crewed ships. It requires a different kind of logistics chain—one that delivers spare parts and consumables to the quayside rather than to the ship. And it requires a different kind of personnel—technicians who specialise in the maintenance of autonomous systems rather than sailors who can operate and repair a wide range of shipboard equipment.

It also creates a new vulnerability. A crewed ship can be maintained in a forward operating area, using its own resources and the resources of a forward base. An uncrewed ship must return to a maintenance facility, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. If that facility is damaged or denied, the ship cannot be maintained. The distributed operations that uncrewed vessels are supposed to enable depend on a distributed maintenance architecture—forward support facilities, mobile repair teams, and the ability to perform complex maintenance at austere locations. That architecture does not yet exist in adequate form, and building it will be one of the major challenges of the next decade.

The Turkish Approach: Unmanned Systems as Force Multipliers

Türkiye's approach to the unmanned turn differs from the American and British approaches in a subtle but important way. The US Navy's NOMARS programme and the Royal Navy's Project MODUS both aim to replace crewed platforms with uncrewed ones—to generate combat mass by building ships that do not require crews. Türkiye's approach is to use uncrewed systems to make crewed platforms more capable—to extend their reach, multiply their sensors, and increase their firepower without requiring additional crewed hulls.

The Anadolu is the clearest expression of this logic. The ship is a crewed platform, but its primary weapon system—the Bayraktar TB3—is uncrewed. The TB3 can remain airborne for over 24 hours, far longer than a crewed helicopter or fighter. It can carry precision munitions and conduct anti-submarine warfare. And it can serve as a communications relay and command-and-control node for other uncrewed systems, extending the reach of the network without requiring additional crewed platforms. During the December 2025 demonstration off Antalya, a TB3 launched from the Anadolu commanded an Albatros-S kamikaze USV at long range, demonstrating a new kind of cooperative engagement in which the uncrewed aircraft serves as the eyes and the uncrewed surface vessel serves as the sword (Anadolu Agency, 2026).

This approach has advantages that the pure-replacement model lacks. It is less technologically demanding, because the crewed platform can perform maintenance and respond to contingencies that would be difficult for an autonomous system. It is more flexible, because the uncrewed systems can be reconfigured for different missions without modifying the host platform. And it is more resilient, because the loss of an uncrewed system does not mean the loss of the crewed platform that operates it. The Anadolu can lose a TB3 without losing the ship; a pure uncrewed vessel that suffers a catastrophic failure is lost entirely.

But it also has limitations. The crewed platform is still a high-value target, and it still requires a crew—which means it still consumes the personnel and training resources that uncrewed systems are supposed to conserve. The uncrewed systems depend on the crewed platform for launch, recovery, and maintenance, which means they cannot operate independently for extended periods. And the crewed platform's endurance is still limited by its own fuel and stores, even if its uncrewed systems can range farther.

The Turkish approach is not a substitute for the American and British approaches; it is a complement to them. It suggests that the unmanned turn is not a single pathway but a spectrum, and that different navies will occupy different points along that spectrum depending on their strategic circumstances, their industrial capacity, and their tolerance for risk. A navy that needs to generate combat mass quickly, at low cost, will be drawn toward pure uncrewed platforms. A navy that already has capable crewed platforms and wants to extend their reach will be drawn toward the drone-carrier model. And a navy that needs to operate in a contested environment where communications are degraded will need to design for autonomy at every level, from the individual platform to the fleet as a whole.

Conclusion

The unmanned turn is the most disruptive design driver in contemporary naval architecture. It forces naval architects to reconsider assumptions that have been unquestioned for centuries—that ships are built around people, that maintenance is performed onboard, that endurance is defined by fuel and stores. It opens up design spaces that were previously closed: hull forms optimised for hydrodynamic efficiency rather than human habitability, internal arrangements driven by payload and fuel rather than crew access, propulsion systems designed for autonomous fault tolerance rather than human maintenance.

But the unmanned turn is not a revolution that will replace crewed warships overnight. It is an evolution that is creating a spectrum of platforms, from fully crewed to fully uncrewed, with every possible intermediate configuration. The navies that adapt most successfully will be those that understand this spectrum and can operate effectively across it—that can integrate crewed and uncrewed systems into a coherent force, that can design platforms for autonomy without sacrificing the human judgment that is still essential to the conduct of war, and that can build the industrial and logistical architecture that uncrewed operations demand.

The next chapter examines another disruptive design driver: hypersonic weapons. It asks how the introduction of weapons that travel at five times the speed of sound is reshaping the physical and operational geometry of surface combatants, and what this means for the future of naval design.

Chapter 5 — Hypersonic Strike and the Reordering of Ship Design

The introduction of hypersonic weapons into naval service is not simply the addition of a new missile to an existing launch platform. It is a change in the physics of naval combat, and changes in physics have a way of cascading through every decision that follows. A weapon that travels at five times the speed of sound, manoeuvres unpredictably in the terminal phase, and can reach targets over a thousand miles away compresses the time available for detection, decision, and response to a window measured in minutes rather than hours. That compression, in turn, reshapes what ships must carry, how they are powered, where they can operate, and what roles they can perform. The Zumwalt-class conversion is the most concrete expression of this reshaping, and it is where any serious examination of hypersonic strike and naval design must begin.

The Zumwalt Conversion: From Gun Ship to Strike Platform

The story of the Zumwalt-class is, in many ways, a story about the cost of getting the future wrong. The ships were conceived in the 1990s as stealthy, land-attack destroyers designed to support amphibious operations with long-range naval gunfire. Their centrepiece was the Advanced Gun System, a pair of 155mm guns capable of firing the Long Range Land Attack Projectile to ranges of over 60 nautical miles. The concept was compelling on paper. In practice, it collapsed. The cancellation of the Long Range Land Attack Projectile programme left the guns without suitable ammunition, and the cost of each round—estimated at upwards of $800,000—made the system unaffordable even if the ammunition had been available. By the early 2020s, the Navy had three $8 billion destroyers with main guns that could not fire the projectiles they were designed for, and no clear path to making them useful (Government Accountability Office, 2026).

The decision to convert the Zumwalts into hypersonic strike platforms was, in that context, an act of salvage. Beginning in 2023, the Navy removed both 155mm Advanced Gun Systems from USS Zumwalt and replaced the forward gun mount with four large-diameter Advanced Payload Module tubes, each capable of housing three Conventional Prompt Strike missiles. The second gun emplacement's internals were gutted, allowing for the recovery of previously occupied space under the empty gun housing for other uses. The installation was completed in November 2025, and the ship began sea trials in January 2026. When Zumwalt returns to service, she will be the first vessel in the US Navy armed with hypersonic missiles, carrying twelve CPS rounds in the forward housing (Government Accountability Office, 2026).

The design consequences of this conversion are instructive because they illustrate the physical realities that hypersonic weapons impose on surface combatants. The most immediate consequence is the dramatic reduction in magazine capacity. The two 155mm guns that were removed could, in theory, have carried hundreds of rounds. Their replacements carry twelve missiles. The trade-off is not merely numerical. It is a change in the ship's relationship to its weapons. A gun ship can sustain fire for extended periods; a hypersonic strike platform can fire twelve times and then must return to port to reload. The ship's combat endurance is no longer defined by the volume of its magazine but by the number of launch tubes and the logistics chain that sustains them.

This reduction in magazine depth has implications that extend beyond the ship itself. A surface combatant carrying twelve hypersonic missiles is not a sustained-fire platform. It is a strategic strike asset, designed to deliver a small number of high-value weapons against targets that cannot be reached by other means. Its value lies not in its ability to engage in prolonged combat but in its ability to hold high-value targets at risk from long distances, as part of a broader deterrent or strike posture. The Navy's decision to proliferate CPS across the fleet—first on the Zumwalts, then on Block V Virginia-class submarines, and eventually on the Trump-class battleships—reflects an understanding that hypersonic strike is a capability that must be distributed across multiple platforms rather than concentrated in a few (Government Accountability Office, 2026).

Power, Cooling, and the Integrated Electric Architecture

The second design consequence of hypersonic weapons is less visible than the reduction in magazine capacity but equally consequential. Hypersonic weapons are demanding customers. They require large amounts of electrical power for launch support systems, cooling for the missile and its associated electronics, and data processing capacity for the targeting and fire-control chain. On a ship designed without those requirements in mind, accommodating them would be impossible. On the Zumwalts, it was possible because of a design decision made decades earlier.

The Zumwalt-class ships are equipped with an Integrated Power System that generates approximately 78 megawatts of electricity, nearly what a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier generates. The system can produce 58 megawatts of reserve power even while cruising at 20 knots (Government Accountability Office, 2026). This is the margin that makes hypersonic strike possible. The CPS launch system, the cooling plant that dissipates the heat generated by the missile and its support equipment, and the combat system that processes targeting data all draw on that reserve. Without it, the conversion would have been impossible.

The Integrated Power System was not designed for hypersonic weapons. It was designed for a ship that was expected to carry railguns and directed-energy weapons—systems that also demand enormous electrical power. The fact that it can accommodate hypersonic strike is, in a sense, a fortunate accident. But it is an instructive one. It suggests that the ships best positioned to adapt to new weapons are those designed with excess power generation and cooling capacity, even if the specific systems those capacities were intended to support never materialise. Power margin is a form of strategic flexibility.

The conversion process was not without problems. The first full shutdown and restart of the hybrid-electric propulsion system since the ship was delivered to the Navy six years earlier revealed failures in parts of the technology, contributing to a delay of some ten months in the ship's return to service (Government Accountability Office, 2026). The Integrated Power System is notoriously complex, and its integration with the new hypersonic launch systems required extensive testing and troubleshooting. The experience is a reminder that the margin for adaptation is not free. It must be paid for in engineering effort, testing time, and the willingness to accept delays when systems do not perform as expected.

Hypersonic Strike and the Compression of Decision Timelines

The third design consequence of hypersonic weapons is operational rather than physical. Hypersonic strike compresses the decision timeline in ways that reshape the requirements for command, control, and sensor systems. A Conventional Prompt Strike missile travels over 1,700 miles at speeds exceeding Mach 5. From launch to impact, the time available for the target to detect the missile, assess the threat, decide on a response, and execute that response is measured in minutes. In some scenarios, it may be measured in seconds.

This compression has implications for every element of the ship's combat system. It drives demand for larger sensor apertures and more powerful computing, because the ship must detect and track targets at greater ranges and process that information faster. It drives demand for resilient command-and-control architectures, because the decision to launch a hypersonic weapon may need to be made by commanders who are not aboard the ship and who may be operating in a degraded communications environment. And it drives demand for automation, because human decision-makers cannot process the volume of data that modern sensors produce within the time available.

The Navy's approach to this problem is reflected in the design of the CPS launch system itself. The missiles are launched using high-pressure cold gas, a technique sometimes described as a "mortar launch," rather than a traditional hot-launch system. Cold launch reduces the thermal signature of the launch and allows the missile to be ejected from the tube before its rocket motor ignites, which simplifies the design of the launch system and reduces the risk of damage to the ship if the missile fails to ignite. But cold launch also imposes its own requirements: the gas generation and storage systems must be reliable, the launch tube must be capable of withstanding the pressure, and the missile must be able to transition from ejection to powered flight without human intervention (Government Accountability Office, 2026).

The Turkish Dimension: TAYFUN and the Diffusion of Hypersonic Capability

The hypersonic revolution is not confined to the United States. Türkiye has been developing hypersonic capabilities of its own, and the TAYFUN missile system is the clearest expression of that ambition. First publicly displayed at the IDEF 2025 defence exhibition in Istanbul, TAYFUN is described as Türkiye's longest-range missile to date, with a stated range of 500 to 800 kilometres and future versions aiming to exceed 1,000 kilometres. The missile is engineered for high precision, reportedly capable of striking targets within a margin of approximately five metres, including moving naval assets at sea. Turkish defence analysts note that TAYFUN is hypersonic, resistant to jamming, and difficult for adversaries to intercept (Defence Review, 2025).

The TAYFUN programme matters for the argument of this essay for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that hypersonic strike capability is not the exclusive preserve of the world's largest military powers. Türkiye, a middle power with a maturing defence industry, has developed a hypersonic weapon that it intends to deploy on naval vessels. The missile is mobile-launched, allowing for rapid relocation and quick deployment, features that increase its survivability in contested environments. The naval variant, when it enters service, will give Turkish warships a standoff strike capability that they currently lack.

Second, the TAYFUN programme illustrates a different model of hypersonic integration than the one pursued by the US Navy. The Zumwalt conversion required the removal of existing weapon systems and the installation of new launch tubes, a process that took three years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Türkiye's approach, by contrast, is to develop hypersonic weapons that can be integrated into existing launch systems, including the vertical launch systems aboard the I-class frigates and the TF-2000 destroyers. This approach is less ambitious in terms of magazine depth—a frigate cannot carry twelve hypersonic missiles—but it is more scalable and more affordable. It reflects the Turkish Navy's broader strategy of using indigenous weapons and platforms to achieve capabilities that would otherwise be out of reach (Defence Review, 2025).

The Broader Design Implications

The Zumwalt conversion and the TAYFUN programme are specific cases, but they point to broader design implications that will shape naval architecture for the next generation.

The first implication is that ships must be designed with power and cooling margin. The Zumwalts could be converted to hypersonic strike because they had 78 megawatts of generating capacity and the cooling systems to match. Ships designed without that margin will be unable to adapt to hypersonic weapons, directed-energy weapons, or the next generation of high-power sensors. The lesson is not that every ship needs an Integrated Power System of Zumwalt-scale capacity. It is that the cost of power margin is worth paying, because the alternative is a ship that cannot be upgraded.

The second implication is that magazine depth must be reconsidered. The twelve missiles carried by a Zumwalt are a strategic capability, not a tactical one. They can hold a small number of high-value targets at risk, but they cannot sustain a prolonged engagement. Navies that intend to use hypersonic weapons as part of a broader strike campaign will need to invest in reloading infrastructure—forward bases, tenders, or autonomous resupply vessels that can rearm ships at sea. Without that infrastructure, hypersonic strike platforms are one-shot weapons.

The third implication is that the distinction between strategic and tactical weapons is blurring. A Conventional Prompt Strike missile is a conventional weapon, but its range, speed, and penetrability give it effects that were once associated with nuclear systems. The decision to launch a hypersonic weapon is not a tactical decision that can be delegated to a ship's commanding officer. It is a strategic decision that requires national-level authorisation. This has implications for command-and-control architectures: the ship must be able to receive and execute launch orders from higher authority, and it must be able to do so in a communications environment that may be degraded or contested.

The fourth implication is that hypersonic weapons will accelerate the trend toward distributed operations. A ship carrying twelve hypersonic missiles is a high-value target. If it is detected, it will be attacked. The logical response is to disperse hypersonic strike assets across a larger number of platforms, so that the loss of any one ship does not eliminate the capability. This is the logic that underpins the Navy's plan to proliferate CPS across the fleet, from Zumwalts to Virginia-class submarines to Trump-class battleships. But dispersion creates its own challenges: the more platforms carry hypersonic weapons, the more complex the command-and-control architecture becomes, and the more vulnerable the network that binds them together.

Conclusion

Hypersonic strike is not a weapon that can be bolted onto existing ships without consequence. It requires power, cooling, space, and a command-and-control architecture capable of compressing decision timelines to the point where human intervention becomes a liability rather than an asset. The Zumwalt conversion is the most advanced example of what this means in practice: a ship stripped of its original weapons, reconfigured around a new strike capability, and returned to service as something its designers never intended it to be. The TAYFUN programme is a different expression of the same logic: a middle power developing hypersonic weapons that can be integrated into existing platforms, not because it can afford to rebuild its fleet around them, but because the technology has become accessible enough to make that possible.

The next chapter examines the enabling design philosophies—modularity, integrated electric power, and software-centric design—that make the new paradigm physically realisable. It asks how ships must be designed not just to accommodate new weapons but to adapt to new weapons as they emerge, and what this means for the relationship between naval architecture and technological change.

Chapter 6 — Modularity, Electric Power, and Software-Centric Design

The weapons and platforms described in the previous chapters do not exist in a vacuum. A hypersonic missile needs a launch system, a power supply, and a fire-control chain. An uncrewed vessel needs a propulsion plant that can run for months without human intervention and a combat system that can identify and engage targets without a crew to make the final call. A drone carrier needs the electrical capacity to launch and recover aircraft, the data links to command them, and the software to knit them into a coherent operational picture. None of this happens by accident. It happens because of design philosophies—modularity, electric power, and software-centric design—that are themselves responses to the new paradigm. These philosophies are not weapons. They are the conditions that make weapons possible.

This chapter examines these three enabling philosophies and argues that they are, in their own way, as disruptive as the platforms they support. Modularity challenges the assumption that a warship's configuration is fixed at build. Integrated electric power challenges the assumption that propulsion and combat systems are separate domains. Software-centric design challenges the assumption that a ship's combat capability is determined by its hardware. Together, they represent a shift in how naval architects think about what a ship is—not a finished product, but a platform for adaptation.

Modularity: The Ship as a Container

The first enabling philosophy is modularity. The idea is simple: rather than building a ship for a single mission, build a ship that can be reconfigured for multiple missions by swapping out containerised payloads. A vessel that is a minesweeper today can be a strike platform tomorrow and a command node the day after. The ship becomes a host for modules; the modules define the mission.

The concept is not new. The US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship programme attempted something similar in the 2000s, with mission modules for anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, and surface warfare. The programme failed—not because the concept was wrong, but because the modules were too complex, too expensive, and too difficult to swap in practice. As one analysis of the LCS experience put it, the Navy "failed to predict the complexity of building effective modules" (Vavasseur, 2025, p. 34). The lesson was not that modularity is unworkable; it was that modularity must be designed into the ship from the keel up, not bolted on afterwards.

The current generation of modular designs reflects that lesson. SH Defence's Cube system, developed by a Danish firm, is built around standardised mission modules shaped to fit within the footprint of conventional shipping containers. These modules can be rapidly loaded into mission bays or positioned on deck using built-in handling infrastructure, allowing a vessel to be reconfigured for different roles "without returning to port for extensive refitting" (Defence News, 2026, para. 5). The company describes the system as "open-access," meaning any shipbuilder or equipment manufacturer can develop modules within the standard, and it supports capabilities across air, surface, and subsea domains. A transport vessel can be turned into a missile platform, a command node, a drone mothership, or a diver support ship "without requiring structural modifications" (Defence News, 2026, para. 6).

The Italian Navy has taken a similar approach with its Thaon di Revel-class patrol frigates, which are designed to carry containerised mission modules. At the Paris Naval Conference in February 2026, Admiral Giuseppe Berutti Bergotto, chief of staff of the Italian Navy, described modularity as central to the service's future: "All our future ships, they will be specifically designed for this kind of capability." The primary role of the ship remains the same, but the ship must be able to "attack different missions" by swapping payloads (as cited in Defence News, 2026, para. 9). The Italian Navy has even experimented with fitting different containers on the deck of a commercial vessel, testing the limits of what modularity can achieve.

The Royal Netherlands Navy has embraced a similar logic, but with a sharper focus on cost. Vice Admiral Harold Liebregs, commander of the Royal Netherlands Navy, described modularity as being "like Lego, building blocks are already there, you just need to put them together." But he added a caution: "keep it simple. Don't over-integrate." The Dutch navy's multi-role support vessels are designed to mount containerised versions of the Barak ER surface-to-air interceptor and the Harop loitering munition, with crews of only six to eight sailors. The purpose is to bring "more firepower to sea" at a fraction of the cost of a traditional warship. As Liebregs put it, "It's an affordable way to augment our fleet. These kinds of ships are very adaptable, and it fits very well to short-cycled innovation" (as cited in Defence News, 2026, para. 11).

Türkiye's approach to modularity is distinctive because it is rooted in a broader industrial strategy. The MILGEM programme, which has produced the Ada-class corvettes and the Istanbul-class frigates, was designed from the outset around the principle of platform commonality. As one analysis of the programme observed, "the initial project aimed at the maximum possible unification of ships, which differ (though not significantly) in size and displacement" (Defence Review, 2025, para. 12). The difference between a Turkish frigate and a corvette is fourteen metres in length and seven hundred tonnes of displacement, with minimal differences in offensive armament. This commonality is not merely an engineering convenience; it is a production strategy. By standardising subsystems across platform classes, Türkiye has been able to distribute hull production across multiple shipyards, reducing the interval between launches and ensuring parallel outfitting of ships before they enter service.

The results have been striking. The Ada-class corvettes were built at a rate of roughly one ship every two years. The Istanbul-class frigates, built under a parallel construction framework between STM and the TAIS shipyard consortium, are being delivered even faster. In July 2026, Türkiye launched its sixth Istanbul-class frigate, TCG Karadeniz, at Sedef Shipyard, demonstrating what one analysis called "the implementation of the parallel construction concept developed by STM and the TAIS shipyard consortium to speed up ship delivery cycles" (Naval News, 2025b, para. 4). Sedef and Sefine shipyards were each assigned a frigate for simultaneous construction within a thirty-six-month framework, a model that draws directly on the mass-production principles used in American shipyards during the Second World War.

The modularity of the MILGEM programme extends beyond the hulls to the systems. The I-class frigate TCG İstanbul, for example, was built with approximately eighty per cent indigenous content, with over 220 Turkish companies contributing to its construction (Yeni Şafak, 2025). The combat management system, the sensors, the weapons, and the propulsion systems are all either developed in Türkiye or integrated by Turkish firms. This is not modularity in the containerised-payload sense that the Dutch and Italians are pursuing. It is modularity in the industrial sense: the ability to mix and match subsystems from a domestic supply chain, to upgrade individual components without redesigning the entire ship, and to export platforms that can be tailored to the requirements of foreign customers. When Türkiye sold the Akhisar corvette to Romania, it was selling a platform that could be configured to Romanian requirements without rebuilding the ship from scratch (Daily Sabah, 2025).

The two approaches to modularity—containerised payloads and industrial commonality—are not mutually exclusive. They address different problems. Containerised payloads address the problem of mission flexibility: how to make a single ship capable of performing multiple roles. Industrial commonality addresses the problem of production scalability: how to build enough ships, fast enough, at a cost that a navy can afford. Both are responses to the same underlying pressure—the demand for combat mass in an environment where individual platforms are increasingly vulnerable. A navy that can reconfigure its ships for different missions is a navy that can generate more combat power from the same hulls. A navy that can build ships quickly and cheaply is a navy that can replace losses and sustain operations over time.

Integrated Electric Power: The Ship as a Power Grid

The second enabling philosophy is integrated electric power. The concept is straightforward: rather than using separate engines for propulsion and separate generators for ship's service power, use a single set of generators to produce electricity that is distributed to both propulsion motors and combat systems. The ship becomes a floating power grid, with electricity as the common currency that flows to wherever it is needed.

The advantages are significant. A ship with integrated electric power can redistribute power between propulsion and combat systems as the tactical situation demands. When the ship needs to sprint, power goes to the propulsion motors. When it needs to fight, power goes to the radars, the weapons, and the combat system. When it needs to do both—which is increasingly the norm—the ship's power management system allocates electricity to the systems that need it most, within the limits of the generating capacity. As one analysis of the Type 26 frigate's propulsion system put it, the integrated electric architecture "only has two main modes of operation: for high speeds, the Rolls Royce MT30 gas turbine transmits rotation directly to the propellers through gearboxes; for cruising speeds and below, two electric propulsion motors are used, powered by up to four diesel generators, while the gas turbine is off" (Marine Insight, 2025, para. 8).

The Type 26 is a useful case study because it illustrates both the advantages and the complexity of integrated electric power. The ship's propulsion system is a CODLOG configuration—Combined Diesel-Electric or Gas—which combines a Rolls-Royce MT30 gas turbine rated at 36 megawatts with four MTU diesel generators and two electric propulsion motors. The MT30 provides the power for high-speed sprints; the diesel generators and electric motors handle cruising and silent operation. The system is designed for acoustic stealth—the Type 26 is widely considered the best anti-submarine warfare ship in the world—and the electric propulsion mode allows the ship to operate quietly at low speeds, when submarine detection is most critical (Marine Insight, 2025).

But integrated electric power is not just about propulsion. It is about creating a power architecture that can accommodate future weapons and sensors. The Zumwalt-class destroyers, as discussed in the previous chapter, were designed with an Integrated Power System that generates approximately 78 megawatts of electricity—nearly what a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier generates. That power margin is what made the hypersonic strike conversion possible. Without it, the ship could not have accommodated the Conventional Prompt Strike launch system, the cooling plant, and the combat system upgrades that the conversion required (Government Accountability Office, 2026).

The Turkish Navy's approach to electric power is more pragmatic than the American or British approaches, but it is no less strategic. The TF-2000 air defence destroyer, whose first block construction began in late 2025, is equipped with a CODOG propulsion system—Combined Diesel or Gas—consisting of two LM2500 gas turbines and two diesel engines. The ship will be capable of speeds of 26 knots or more, with a range of approximately 8,300 nautical miles at economical speed. The CODOG configuration is not an integrated electric architecture in the Zumwalt sense; the gas turbines drive the propellers mechanically, and the diesel engines provide cruise propulsion. But the TF-2000 is designed with the power generation and cooling capacity to support its combat systems, including the MİDLAS vertical launch system with up to 96 cells, the ÇAFRAD phased-array radar, and the ADVENT combat management system. The power architecture is sized to the mission, not to an abstract ideal of electrical integration (Defence Review, 2025).

The Turkish case suggests that integrated electric power is not a binary choice. It is a spectrum. At one end is the fully integrated architecture of the Zumwalt, with its massive power margin and its capacity to accommodate weapons that do not yet exist. At the other end is the CODOG architecture of the TF-2000, which is optimised for the systems the ship actually carries. Most navies will occupy points in between, depending on their strategic requirements and their industrial capacity. The important thing is not the specific architecture but the principle: ships must be designed with the power generation and distribution capacity to accommodate new systems as they emerge. Power margin is strategic flexibility.

Software-Centric Design: The Ship as a Computer

The third enabling philosophy is software-centric design. The idea is that a ship's combat capability is increasingly determined not by its hardware but by its software. The sensors, the weapons, and the propulsion systems are the body; the combat management system is the brain. And the brain is what determines how effectively the body performs.

The shift toward software-centric design is visible in the changing priorities of navies around the world. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force has pursued what it calls a "software-first" transformation, explicitly prioritising "network and data" over "hardware performance." As the JMSDF's equipment planning director put it, naval operations are "rapidly expanding from the physical domain to the non-physical domain," and Japan needs to shift to "capability-centred, software-first" approaches to maintain operational agility (as cited in Naval News, 2025a, para. 5). This is not a rejection of hardware; it is a recognition that hardware without software is inert. A radar that cannot process its data is a metal dish. A missile that cannot receive targeting information is a tube of explosives. The software is what turns them into weapons.

The Korean experience offers a concrete example of what software-centric design looks like in practice. At MADEX 2025, Hanwha Systems unveiled an AI-powered combat management system designed to reduce crew requirements and individual workload within a surface ship's Combat Information Center. The system leverages artificial intelligence and automation to process signals and data from air-search radars, surface-search radars, and EO/IR sensors. It automatically identifies targets, distinguishes between hostile, friendly, and civilian vessels, and significantly reduces the burden of manual tasks traditionally performed by multiple operators. The system also features threat modelling, automated engagement option analysis, and real-time fire control adjustments to improve the accuracy of naval gunfire. Hanwha expects crew demands to be cut by up to 25 per cent, and the system is expected to be added to the Korean Navy's next-generation KDDX destroyers and FFX Batch-IV frigates (Naval News, 2025a).

Hanwha has also developed a compact Integrated Bridge System that enables just two operators to manage a vessel via three main integrated displays, departing from the traditional wide, linear bridge layout that requires a large crew. The system provides real-time monitoring of navigation and engineering control systems, with preset screen configurations tailored to the current situation and mission. The goal is not merely to reduce crew size; it is to reduce cognitive load, allowing the remaining crew to focus on decision-making rather than data management (Naval News, 2025a).

Türkiye's approach to software-centric design is rooted in the GENESIS-ADVENT combat management system, which has been developed indigenously by the Turkish Naval Forces and Turkish industry over more than two decades. The GENESIS system was the first national combat management system developed by the Turkish Navy, and it was succeeded by the ADVENT system, a network-enhanced data-integrated combat management system developed by HAVELSAN in collaboration with the Turkish Naval Forces. ADVENT is now in service aboard the I-class frigate TCG Kınalıada and other platforms, and it has been exported to Romania—the first sale of a Turkish combat management system to a NATO and EU member state (Naval News, 2025c).

The ADVENT system is not merely a piece of software. It is an architecture for integrating sensors, weapons, and decision-making across a fleet. It supports network-centric operations, allowing ships to share data and coordinate actions in ways that would be impossible with standalone combat systems. It has been adapted for submarine applications as ADVENT MÜREN, which will be integrated into the MİLDEN submarine programme. According to Havelsan CEO Mehmet Akif Nacar, the AI-powered ADVENT MÜREN system will "help manage the entire operational chain, ranging from sensors to weapons, while assessing environmental conditions and intelligence during missions." The system will be integrated with homegrown munitions, including Roketsan's underwater Atmaca cruise missiles and the Akya torpedo, with fire control systems developed by Havelsan. The goal, as Nacar put it, is for Havelsan to "take on the role of combat system integrator for all national weapons and sensors developed under the MILGEM project" (as cited in Naval News, 2025c, para. 7).

The significance of this approach lies not just in the technology but in the industrial strategy behind it. By developing combat management systems indigenously, Türkiye has acquired the ability to upgrade its ships' software without depending on foreign suppliers. This is a form of operational resilience that is often overlooked in discussions of naval power. A navy that can update its combat system software overnight, without waiting for a foreign vendor to release a patch, is a navy that can respond to new threats more quickly. A navy that controls its own software architecture is a navy that can integrate new sensors and weapons without redesigning the entire system. Software-centric design is not just about capability; it is about sovereignty.

The Convergence of the Three Philosophies

The three enabling philosophies described in this chapter—modularity, integrated electric power, and software-centric design—are not independent. They are mutually reinforcing. Modularity requires software that can reconfigure the combat system when payloads are swapped. Integrated electric power requires software that can manage the distribution of electricity between propulsion and combat systems. Software-centric design requires hardware that can accommodate new processing demands, which in turn requires modularity and power margin.

The convergence of these philosophies is visible in the most advanced naval designs. BMT's Project MODUS, for example, combines modular payload bays, an integrated electric propulsion architecture, and an autonomous combat system that can operate without a crew (Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2026). The US Navy's NOMARS programme combines a crewless hull form, fault-tolerant propulsion, and autonomous decision-making software (Baird Maritime, 2025). The TF-2000 combines a modular vertical launch system, a CODOG power plant with growth margin, and the ADVENT combat management system (Defence Review, 2025). In each case, the ship is not a single platform with a fixed capability. It is a system of systems, designed to adapt to changing requirements over its service life.

This convergence has implications that extend beyond individual ships. It suggests that the future of naval architecture is not about designing better ships but about designing better systems—systems that can integrate new modules, accommodate new power demands, and absorb new software. The ship becomes a host for capability rather than a carrier of capability. The navy that can manage this transition most effectively will be the navy that can generate combat mass not by building more ships, but by getting more out of the ships it has.

Conclusion

Modularity, integrated electric power, and software-centric design are the enabling philosophies of the new paradigm. They make it possible for ships to accommodate hypersonic weapons, to integrate uncrewed systems, to operate in a contested electromagnetic environment, and to adapt to threats that have not yet emerged. They are not as dramatic as a hypersonic missile or a drone carrier, but they are just as consequential. Without them, the platforms described in the previous chapters would be impossible.

The Turkish case is instructive because it demonstrates that these philosophies are not the exclusive preserve of the world's largest navies. Türkiye has developed indigenous combat management systems, built ships with modular architectures, and designed power plants with growth margin—not because it has unlimited resources, but because it has made strategic choices about what matters. The MILGEM programme, with its emphasis on platform commonality and parallel construction, is a model of how a middle power can generate combat mass without matching the shipbuilding output of a superpower. The ADVENT combat management system, with its network-centric architecture and its AI-powered decision support, is a model of how a navy can achieve software sovereignty. And the TF-2000, with its modular vertical launch system and its growth margin, is a model of how a ship can be designed for adaptation rather than obsolescence.

The next chapter examines the logistical and industrial dimensions of the new paradigm. It argues that the viability of distributed operations depends not just on the platforms but on the sustainment architecture that supports them—the bases, the supply chains, the repair facilities, and the industrial capacity that make it possible to keep ships at sea. Without that architecture, the platforms described in this essay are not weapons. They are targets.

Chapter 7 — Logistics, Sustainment, and the Industrial Base

The platforms described in the previous chapters—the drone carriers, the hypersonic strike ships, the modular frigates, the uncrewed vessels—are not weapons in isolation. They are nodes in a system that must be fed, maintained, and replaced. A ship without fuel is a hulk. A missile without a reload is a threat that has already been spent. A fleet without a shipyard is a fleet that cannot absorb losses. The new paradigm of sea-domain warfare is not just a paradigm of combat; it is a paradigm of sustainment. And the navies that master it will be those that understand that logistics and industrial capacity are not supporting functions. They are combat capabilities in their own right.

This chapter argues that the viability of distributed operations depends on a sustainment architecture that does not yet exist in adequate form. It examines three interlocking challenges: the vulnerability of traditional logistics in contested environments, the emergence of new sustainment concepts and platforms, and the industrial base that must produce and replace the systems on which distributed operations depend. It also draws a set of comparisons with other warfighting domains—land, air, space, and cyber—to show where the maritime challenges are unique and where they mirror the experience of other services.

The Vulnerability of Traditional Logistics

The first challenge is structural. The logistics architecture that sustained naval operations for most of the post-war period was designed for an environment in which sea lines of communication were secure, ports were available, and resupply ships could operate with relative impunity. That environment no longer exists.

The Center for Maritime Strategy put the problem bluntly in a July 2025 assessment of Distributed Maritime Operations. "The core tenets of DMO—long-range fires and a distributed force structure—expose significant gaps in the Navy's ability to sustain operations across vast and contested maritime domains," the assessment observed. "The increased distance of warships heightens the vulnerability of the Combat Logistics Force. In a peer conflict, Indo-Pacific Command will require these essential but soft targets to operate deep within contested environments—where they would be highly susceptible to adversarial targeting" (Center for Maritime Strategy, 2025, para. 4). The Combat Logistics Force, composed of oilers, dry cargo ships, and ammunition ships, was built for a world in which resupply operations could be conducted at leisure. In a contested environment, these ships become high-value targets—slow, weakly defended, and predictable.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has framed the problem in terms of what it calls "the last mile," though the term is something of a misnomer. "Traditionally, the last mile referred to delivering supplies from ship to shore under fire," one analysis observed. "Today, persistent surveillance, low-cost guided weapons and precision strike have expanded the risk envelope. The last mile is no longer a short dash. It is a contested, continuously observed and broad stretch of water" (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2025, p. 6). In the Indo-Pacific, that stretch of water can be over 1,700 kilometres wide. Large supply ships operating within range of persistent surveillance, long-range sensors, and AI-enabled targeting will be detected and tracked long before they reach their destinations. They are, in effect, targets waiting to be engaged.

This is not a hypothetical problem. The Red Sea crisis demonstrated that even non-state actors armed with relatively low-cost drones and missiles can impose significant costs on commercial shipping and naval forces (European Naval Review, 2025). The Black Sea campaign demonstrated that a peer adversary can deny the sea to a superior fleet using distributed precision weapons (Robinson & Richard, 2025). If these lessons are applied to the logistics chain that sustains a distributed fleet, the implications are sobering. A navy that disperses its combat forces to avoid detection and targeting must also disperse its logistics. Otherwise, the adversary simply targets the logistics instead of the combatants.

New Concepts, New Platforms

The response to this challenge has taken several forms. The most prominent is the concept of Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, or EABO, which the US Marine Corps has developed as a framework for sustaining distributed forces in contested environments. EABO envisions small, low-signature units operating from austere locations within the adversary's weapons engagement zone, supported by a logistics architecture that is itself distributed and survivable.

The Marine Corps has begun to test this concept in exercises and, in at least one case, in combat. In September 2026, US Marines deployed an EABO-style logistics operation in the Middle East, supporting operations against Iran. The operation involved over 1,600 accident-free combat aviation hours, more than 300 aircraft refuelled at sea and ashore, the transport of approximately 360,000 kilogrammes of cargo, and the movement of 5,000 personnel (Seapower Magazine, 2026). The concept was designed for operations inside the enemy's defence zone, and the military considered it a success—not because it was easy, but because it demonstrated that distributed logistics could work under fire.

But the EABO concept has its critics. Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Warren of the US Marine Corps has argued that the emphasis on distributed logistics may be misplaced. "Sustaining distributed forces does not necessarily require distributed logistics," he wrote in the US Naval Institute Proceedings in February 2026. "The time, effort, and resources needed to sustain dispersed troops in a peer fight could quickly hamper the military's ability to mass fires" (Warren, 2026, p. 35). Warren's alternative is to defend "iron mountains"—large, well-defended logistics hubs in the outer reaches of the adversary's weapons engagement zone. "The United States, Ukraine, and Israel have proved over the past three years that critical areas can be defended from overwhelming assault as long as the defenders are well-provisioned," he argued. "Even if some enemy munitions slip through a screen, most support hubs, such as Al Asad and Camp Bastion/Leatherneck, are so massive that even a 21,000-pound GBU-43/B bomb would not level the entire base" (Warren, 2026, p. 37).

Warren's argument is a useful counterpoint to the prevailing enthusiasm for dispersion. It reminds us that there is no single solution to the logistics problem. A distributed force may require distributed logistics, or it may require a smaller number of hardened logistics hubs, or some combination of the two. The choice depends on the specific threat environment, the geography of the theatre, and the resources available to the defender. What is clear is that the traditional model—large, centralised logistics bases and slow, predictable resupply ships—is no longer viable.

The autonomous resupply vessel is one of the most promising responses to this challenge. BlackSea Technologies' NightTrain, an 85-foot autonomous vessel with a payload capacity of about 70 tonnes and a range of approximately 2,700 nautical miles, is designed to deliver containerised cargo directly to forward forces operating in contested maritime environments. The vessel carries standard ISO containers and releases cargo without reliance on ports, cranes, aircraft, or protected infrastructure. "With NightTrain we have engineered a system that enables end-to-end resupply from staging bases to austere shorelines, sustaining forces operating inside denied environments," said Todd Greene, BlackSea's director of Advanced Technologies. "Its survivable design, long-range performance, and ability to operate without fixed logistics nodes allow commanders to sustain forces where traditional sealift and airlift cannot operate" (as cited in Seapower Magazine, 2025, para. 3).

NightTrain's design reflects the lessons of the new paradigm. Its small radar cross-section—it is described as a semi-submersible—allows it to minimise the odds of detection and interception, "ideal for a vessel designed for autonomous resupply voyages through contested waters" (Seapower Magazine, 2025, para. 4). It supports multiple classes of supply, including subsistence, fuel, and ammunition, using standard container interfaces, which allows it to integrate into existing logistics planning and supply chains without specialised infrastructure. And it is designed to be produced at scale, using commercial shipbuilding practices rather than the bespoke methods of traditional naval construction.

Türkiye's approach to logistics is different, but no less instructive. The Turkish Navy's fleet oiler TCG Derya, the second-largest ship in the fleet after the Anadolu, was built at SEFINE Shipyard under a contract signed in 2018 and delivered in 2024. The ship is equipped with gas turbine propulsion, which gives it the speed to keep pace with combatants rather than constraining task group mobility. During NATO's Steadfast Dart 2026 exercise in the Baltic Sea, Derya provided logistics support to allied units, including the Anadolu task group. The ship is designed to supply fuel, water, medical supplies, and provisions to multiple ships simultaneously, and it includes a NATO-standard Role-2 hospital facility for medical evacuation and treatment (Naval News, 2026).

What makes Derya significant is not its size or its capabilities—it is a fleet oiler, not a revolutionary platform. What makes it significant is that it was built indigenously, by a Turkish shipyard, using Turkish engineering and Turkish industrial capacity. The ship is a symbol of Türkiye's broader strategy of reducing dependence on foreign suppliers and building a naval force that can operate independently across the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Eastern Mediterranean. In a contested environment where supply chains may be disrupted and foreign support may be unavailable, the ability to build and sustain one's own logistics ships is a form of strategic autonomy.

The Industrial Base: The Foundation of Combat Power

The third challenge is the most fundamental. A navy can have the most advanced platforms in the world, but if it cannot replace them, it cannot sustain combat operations over time. The industrial base—the shipyards, the supply chains, the workforce, the machine tools—is the foundation on which naval power rests. And in the United States, that foundation is crumbling.

The numbers are stark. US shipyards produce just 0.20 per cent of the world's compensated gross tonnage annually, while China, South Korea, and Japan collectively produce ninety-four per cent. The US maritime industrial base has atrophied from 55 shipyards at the end of World War II to a much smaller number today. The Eisenhower School's 2025 assessment of the maritime industrial base identified "policy shortcomings, workforce shortages, aging infrastructure, fragile supply chains, and inconsistent demand signals" as the chief obstacles to revitalisation (Eisenhower School, 2025, p. 17). The Navy has struggled to increase the size of the fleet for two decades, and its shipbuilders face "infrastructure and workforce challenges that have made the Navy's goals difficult to accomplish" (House Armed Services Committee, 2025, p. 5).

The consequences are visible in specific programmes. The Constellation-class frigate programme, intended to provide a cheaper, more producible alternative to the Littoral Combat Ship, has been delayed by immature design and constant weight growth. The Virginia-class submarine programme is behind schedule, with challenges including "the complexity of the ship, workforce experience, supply chain issues and, in some cases, a lack of modernization at shipbuilding facilities" (House Armed Services Committee, 2025, p. 7). And the munitions industrial base is under strain, with the Navy's capacity to produce missiles and other precision weapons lagging behind demand.

Germany's cancellation of the F126 frigate programme in June 2026 offers a European parallel. The programme, which was intended to produce six 10,550-ton anti-submarine frigates for approximately €10 billion, was scrapped after the contractor, Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding, gave notice that the ships could not be delivered within the agreed timeline or budget. The German Defence Ministry opted instead to procure eight MEKO A-200 frigates from ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, a smaller but more proven design. The first four would cost approximately €6.3 billion, with an option for four additional ships exercisable through the end of 2026 (Naval News, 2026). The decision reflected a recognition that production speed and scalability are themselves combat capabilities—and that a fleet of ships that cannot be delivered on time is a fleet that does not exist.

Türkiye's industrial strategy offers a contrasting model. The MILGEM programme, which has produced the Ada-class corvettes and the Istanbul-class frigates, was designed around the principle of platform commonality and parallel construction. The Istanbul-class frigates are being built at a rate of roughly one ship every eighteen months, with multiple shipyards—Sedef, Sefine, and Anadolu—working in parallel on different hulls. The sixth Istanbul-class frigate, TCG Karadeniz, was launched at Sedef Shipyard in July 2026, demonstrating what one analysis called "the implementation of the parallel construction concept developed by STM and the TAIS shipyard consortium to speed up ship delivery cycles" (Naval News, 2025b, para. 4). The model draws directly on the mass-production principles used in American shipyards during the Second World War—principles that the United States itself has largely forgotten.

The Turkish defence industry has also become a significant exporter, which sustains production capacity in ways that domestic orders alone cannot. In 2025, Türkiye's defence and aerospace exports reached $10.054 billion, with naval platforms playing a decisive role (Deniz Haber, 2026). The export of the Akhisar corvette to Romania—the first sale of a Turkish warship to a NATO and EU member state—and the contract to build logistics support ships for Portugal demonstrate that Turkish shipyards have become competitive in markets previously dominated by Western European suppliers (Daily Sabah, 2025; Naval News, 2025b). With existing export programmes delivering MILGEM-derived corvettes to Pakistan, Ukraine, and Malaysia, Türkiye has established itself as a credible supplier of modern naval vessels to allied nations seeking capable platforms at competitive prices.

The Turkish case suggests that industrial resilience is not simply a function of scale. It is also a function of strategic intent. Türkiye has deliberately built an indigenous defence industry as a matter of national policy, reducing dependence on foreign suppliers and creating export markets that sustain production capacity. This approach has its costs—indigenous development is expensive and time-consuming—but it has also produced a naval force that is less vulnerable to supply-chain disruption and more capable of sustaining operations in a contested environment.

Comparisons Across Domains

The logistics and sustainment challenges facing navies are not unique to the maritime domain. They are, however, expressed in ways that are shaped by the distinctive characteristics of the sea.

On land, logistics has always been constrained by geography—by the need to move supplies over roads, railways, and pipelines that can be interdicted by the enemy. The Russian army's failures in Ukraine in 2022 were, in large part, logistics failures: poor equipment maintenance, few or exposed logistical assets in frontline units, and a failure to plan for an enemy that would target its lifelines (Biddle, 2004). The Ukrainian response—using drones and precision weapons to strike Russian supply columns—has parallels with the maritime threat to logistics ships. But there is a crucial difference. On land, supplies can be moved by multiple means—trucks, trains, pipelines, even pack animals—and the loss of a single convoy does not necessarily halt the entire operation. At sea, the options are more limited. Supplies must move by ship or by aircraft, and both are vulnerable to interdiction in ways that land-based logistics are not.

In the air, logistics is defined by the need to keep aircraft flying. Fuel, spare parts, and munitions must be delivered to forward air bases, often under threat of attack. The US Air Force's concept of Agile Combat Employment is, in many ways, the air-domain equivalent of Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations: the dispersal of aircraft and support personnel to austere locations to complicate enemy targeting. But air logistics is constrained by the size of the aircraft that can land at forward bases and the volume of supplies that can be delivered by airlift. A C-17 can carry approximately 77 tonnes of cargo; a Liberty-class USV can carry over 150 tonnes (Baird Maritime, 2025). The sea offers greater capacity, but at the cost of greater vulnerability.

In space, logistics is a matter of orbital mechanics and launch schedules. Satellites cannot be resupplied in the traditional sense; they must be replaced. The industrial base that produces satellites is concentrated in a small number of countries and companies, and the loss of a launch facility can have strategic consequences. The maritime domain has more options—more shipyards, more ports, more routes—but the principle is the same: the ability to replace losses is a function of industrial capacity, and industrial capacity takes time to build.

In cyberspace, logistics is almost instantaneous. Software can be updated in minutes; new capabilities can be deployed with a download. But cyberspace is also the domain in which logistics is most vulnerable to disruption. A cyberattack on a logistics network can paralyse the movement of supplies without a single shot being fired (Bordetsky & Kaff, 2025). The maritime domain is increasingly dependent on cyberspace—for communications, for navigation, for command and control—and that dependence creates new vulnerabilities that the traditional logistics architecture was not designed to address.

What these comparisons reveal is that the maritime domain is not unique in facing logistics and sustainment challenges, but it is distinctive in the combination of constraints it faces. At sea, supplies must move over long distances, through contested waters, to platforms that are themselves dispersed and often operating in austere conditions. The options for resupply are limited, the vulnerability to interdiction is high, and the industrial base that produces the ships and systems is concentrated in a small number of countries. The maritime logistics challenge is, in a sense, the sum of the logistics challenges faced by other domains—with the added complication that the sea itself is a medium that offers no cover and no roads.

Conclusion

The new paradigm of sea-domain warfare is not just a paradigm of combat. It is a paradigm of sustainment. The platforms described in the previous chapters—the drone carriers, the hypersonic strike ships, the modular frigates, the uncrewed vessels—are only as effective as the logistics and industrial base that supports them. Without fuel, they cannot move. Without ammunition, they cannot fight. Without shipyards, they cannot be replaced. And without a sustainment architecture that is as distributed and resilient as the combat forces it supports, they cannot survive in a contested environment.

The responses to this challenge are still emerging. Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, autonomous resupply vessels like NightTrain, and the Turkish model of indigenous industrial capacity all represent different approaches to the same problem. None of them is a complete solution. The EABO concept is still being tested, and its critics argue that distributed logistics may be more trouble than it is worth (Warren, 2026). Autonomous resupply vessels are promising but unproven at scale. And the industrial base challenges facing the United States and its allies are decades in the making and will take decades to fix.

But the direction of travel is clear. The navies that will succeed in the new paradigm will be those that treat logistics and industrial capacity not as supporting functions but as combat capabilities. They will build ships that can be maintained at austere locations, supply chains that can survive interdiction, and industrial bases that can replace losses at scale. They will understand that the ability to sustain combat operations over time is as important as the ability to win a single engagement. And they will recognise that the sea is not just a medium of manoeuvre. It is a medium of sustainment—and the navy that controls its own sustainment controls its own destiny.

The next chapter synthesises the argument of this essay into a set of design principles for the new paradigm. It asks what naval architects should learn from the changes described in the preceding chapters, and how those lessons should shape the ships of the future.

Chapter 8 — Conclusion: Design Principles for the New Paradigm

The preceding chapters have traced a single argument through a series of interlocking developments: the transparency of the maritime battlespace, the primacy of the network over the platform, the rise of sea denial, the vulnerability of fixed bases, the unmanned turn, the hypersonic revolution, the enabling philosophies of modularity and electric power, and the logistics and industrial foundations on which all of it rests. The argument is that these developments are not separate trends to be managed individually. They are symptoms of a single, deeper shift in the character of naval warfare—a shift from a paradigm organised around concentration and control to one organised around distribution and denial.

This concluding chapter does three things. First, it synthesises the design implications of the preceding chapters into a set of principles that naval architects and fleet planners should treat as the starting point for future platform design. Second, it identifies the unresolved tensions that will shape naval architecture for the next generation—the problems for which the new paradigm does not yet have adequate answers. Third, it reflects on the plurality of responses to the paradigm shift, arguing that the future of naval architecture is not a single design but a spectrum of designs, conditioned by strategic geography, industrial capacity, and national ambition.

Design Principles for the New Paradigm

The first principle is that combat mass is a design objective, not a by-product. The old paradigm treated mass as a function of tonnage—the more ships you have, the more combat power you can generate. The new paradigm treats mass as a function of distribution—the more nodes you have in a network, the more resilient and adaptable your force becomes. This means that naval architects must design platforms that can be produced in large numbers at acceptable cost. The US Navy's Drone Dominance Program, which seeks to deliver more than 300,000 cheap and expendable drones at unit costs dropping from $5,000 to $2,300, is an extreme expression of this principle (U.S. Navy, 2026). But it applies across the spectrum, from loitering munitions to frigates. A ship that cannot be built in numbers is a ship that cannot generate combat mass. And a navy that cannot generate combat mass cannot sustain distributed operations.

The second principle is that modularity must be designed in, not added on. The Littoral Combat Ship experience demonstrated that modularity bolted onto an existing design is unworkable (Vavasseur, 2025). The current generation of modular platforms—the SH Defence Cube system, the Italian Navy's containerised mission modules, the Turkish MILGEM programme's platform commonality—succeed because they were conceived from the keel up around the assumption that the ship's configuration will change over its service life (Defence News, 2026). For naval architects, this means designing ships with standardised interfaces, open-architecture combat systems, and payload bays sized to accommodate future systems rather than current ones. The ship becomes a host for capability, not a carrier of it.

The third principle is that power and cooling margin are strategic assets. The Zumwalt-class conversion to hypersonic strike was possible because the ships were designed with an Integrated Power System generating approximately 78 megawatts of electricity—nearly what a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier generates (Government Accountability Office, 2026). That margin was intended for railguns and directed-energy weapons that never materialised. But it made the hypersonic conversion possible. The Type 31 frigate's electric power generation creates "in excess of a megawatt of power margin solely assigned to be harnessed by future capabilities as technologies develop" (Marine Insight, 2025, para. 11). The lesson is not that every ship needs Zumwalt-scale power generation. It is that ships designed without power margin are ships that cannot be upgraded. In a paradigm where the pace of technological change is accelerating, the ability to accommodate new systems is as important as the systems themselves.

The fourth principle is that software is the ship's combat system. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force's "software-first" transformation, the Korean Navy's AI-powered combat management system that reduces crew requirements by up to 25 per cent, and Türkiye's indigenous ADVENT combat management system all point in the same direction (Naval News, 2025a; Naval News, 2025c). The sensors, weapons, and propulsion systems are the body; the software is the brain. A ship with a superior combat system can outperform a ship with superior physical characteristics. And a navy that controls its own software architecture can upgrade its ships without depending on foreign vendors. Software sovereignty is a form of operational resilience.

The fifth principle is that hybrid manned-unmanned teams are the basic tactical unit. The BAE Systems concept of a hub ship operating with multiple lower-cost "loyal wingman" vessels captures the logic: combine a command platform with multiple, lower-cost wingmen to generate aggregate missile mass, sensor coverage, and resilience. The HII framework for Distributed Maritime Operations similarly integrates "core manned fleet and autonomous unmanned capabilities" through "data-driven command and control of autonomous platforms" and "containerized, modular, rapidly deployable effects" (Seapower Magazine, 2026, para. 8). For naval architects, this means designing ships that can serve as command nodes for uncrewed systems, with the communications bandwidth, processing power, and command-and-control infrastructure to manage a distributed force. The Turkish Anadolu, with its embarked Bayraktar TB3 drones serving as communications relays and command nodes for other uncrewed systems, is one expression of this principle (Anadolu Agency, 2026). But the principle extends to every platform class, from frigates to submarines.

The sixth principle is that industrial resilience is a combat capability. The US maritime industrial base has atrophied from 55 shipyards at the end of World War II to a much smaller number today, and the shipbuilding setbacks stemming from "overly complex designs and iterative design change procedures" have resulted in "cost growth, delays, and cancellations" (Eisenhower School, 2025, p. 22). The Eisenhower School's 2025 assessment identified "policy shortcomings, workforce shortages, aging infrastructure, fragile supply chains, and inconsistent demand signals" as the chief obstacles to revitalisation (Eisenhower School, 2025, p. 17). Türkiye's MILGEM programme offers a contrasting model: platform commonality, parallel construction across multiple shipyards, and an export strategy that sustains production capacity. The I-class frigate TCG Istanbul was built with approximately 80 per cent indigenous content and over 220 Turkish companies contributing to its construction (Yeni Şafak, 2025). The sixth Istanbul-class frigate, TCG Karadeniz, was launched at Sedef Shipyard in July 2026 under a parallel construction framework that draws on the mass-production principles used in American shipyards during the Second World War (Naval News, 2025b). The lesson is that a navy that cannot replace its losses cannot sustain combat operations over time. Industrial capacity is not a supporting function. It is a precondition for naval power.

The seventh principle is that sustainment architecture must be as distributed as the force it supports. The Combat Logistics Force, composed of oilers, dry cargo ships, and ammunition ships, was built for a world in which resupply operations could be conducted at leisure. In a contested environment, these ships become high-value targets (Center for Maritime Strategy, 2025). The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has observed that "persistent surveillance, low-cost guided weapons and precision strike have expanded the risk envelope. The last mile is no longer a short dash. It is a contested, continuously observed and broad stretch of water" (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2025, p. 6). Autonomous resupply vessels like BlackSea Technologies' NightTrain, with its 70-tonne payload capacity and 2,700-nautical-mile range, represent one response to this challenge (Seapower Magazine, 2025). But the principle extends beyond any single platform. Distributed operations demand distributed logistics, distributed maintenance, and distributed industrial capacity. A navy that disperses its combat forces but retains a centralised logistics architecture is a navy that has created a target it cannot defend.

Unresolved Tensions

The design principles described above are not a complete solution to the problems of the new paradigm. They are a starting point. Several unresolved tensions will shape naval architecture for the next generation, and naval architects must design with them in mind even if they cannot be resolved.

The first tension is the vulnerability of the network. Distributed operations depend on communications links that can be jammed, spoofed, or hacked. The US Naval Postgraduate School's concept of Network-Optional Warfare addresses this problem by designing forces that can operate effectively with or without network connectivity (Bordetsky & Kaff, 2025). But the problem is not fully solved. A dispersed force that loses its network is a collection of isolated platforms, each vulnerable to being defeated in detail. The French Navy's REFLEXION MARINE has identified three problems that emerge "when connectivity, data abundance, and AI are woven into naval command and control without adequate governance" (as cited in Naval News, 2025a, para. 12). These problems already exist. The question is whether naval architects can design ships that are resilient to network degradation without sacrificing the coordination that makes distributed operations effective.

The second tension is the autonomy paradox. Uncrewed systems offer the promise of combat mass at lower cost and without risking human lives. But the more autonomous a system becomes, the more difficult it is to control and the more difficult it is to hold accountable for its actions. The Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies has highlighted "concerns about disrupted accountability chains, vulnerabilities to cyber interference, and the risk of escalatory dynamics arising from interactions among multiple autonomous platforms" (Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, 2025, p. 8). The US Navy's intelligence architecture remains "rooted in assumptions built for a manned fleet, leaving a dangerous mismatch between what the Navy wants unmanned systems to do and what its intelligence infrastructure can support" (Naval News, 2025a, para. 15). The autonomy paradox is not a technical problem that can be solved by better software. It is a governance problem that requires new frameworks for human-machine command, new standards for meaningful human control, and new doctrines for the employment of autonomous systems in contested environments.

The third tension is the cost-exchange ratio. The logic of sea denial rests on the assumption that cheap precision weapons can impose disproportionate costs on expensive platforms. Ukraine's campaign in the Black Sea demonstrated that this assumption is valid (Robinson & Richard, 2025). But the cost-exchange ratio cuts both ways. A navy that relies on cheap drones to defeat expensive ships must produce those drones in enormous numbers, which requires an industrial base capable of mass production. And a navy that defends against cheap drones must develop countermeasures that are themselves affordable. The US Navy's Drone Dominance Program, with its target unit cost of $2,300, is an attempt to solve this problem (U.S. Navy, 2026). But the problem is not fully solved. A navy that spends $2 million on a missile to shoot down a $2,300 drone is a navy that will run out of missiles before the adversary runs out of drones.

The fourth tension is the risk of over-extension. Distributed operations demand more platforms, more logistics, more maintenance, and more personnel than concentrated operations. The US Navy's plan for a hybrid fleet of approximately 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed vessels is ambitious (Seapower Magazine, 2026). But the industrial base that must produce and sustain that fleet is not yet adequate to the task. The Golden Fleet initiative envisions a force of 280 to 300 crewed ships and a large number of uncrewed vessels, but the Navy's shipbuilding programmes are already behind schedule and over budget (House Armed Services Committee, 2025). The risk is that the Navy commits to a distributed force structure without building the industrial and logistical architecture that makes it sustainable. A distributed force that cannot be sustained is not a distributed force. It is a dispersed collection of targets.

The Plurality of Responses

The Turkish case is instructive precisely because it does not fit neatly into any of the categories that the American and British approaches define. The US Navy is hedging, pursuing distributed lethality in doctrine while investing in capital ships that sit awkwardly with that doctrine. The Royal Navy is betting on dispersion, autonomy, and mass, using industry partnerships to access a wider range of technologies than it could develop in-house (Royal Navy, 2025). Türkiye is doing something different. It is building a hybrid fleet that uses unmanned systems as force multipliers for crewed platforms, and it is doing so with an indigenous defence industry that has become a significant exporter (Anadolu Agency, 2026).

The Anadolu task group that deployed to the Baltic in 2026 exemplified this approach. It was a task group, not a dispersed flotilla—four surface combatants operating together, with the Anadolu serving as flagship and command-and-control hub. But it was also a hybrid force, integrating crewed warships with embarked unmanned systems, and it was designed to operate independently, thousands of kilometres from home, without relying on a fixed base. The task group comprised the Anadolu, the I-class frigate İstanbul, the upgraded Barbaros-class frigate Oruçreis, and the fleet oiler Derya. Three Bayraktar TB3 drones were embarked, and they conducted 232 sorties during the exercise, with all takeoffs and landings conducted autonomously (Naval News, 2026). The TB3s demonstrated their ability to operate as part of a networked force, commanding unmanned surface vessels and relaying sensor data to the task group.

This approach has advantages that the pure-replacement model lacks. It is less technologically demanding, because the crewed platform can perform maintenance and respond to contingencies that would be difficult for an autonomous system. It is more flexible, because the uncrewed systems can be reconfigured for different missions without modifying the host platform. And it is more resilient, because the loss of an uncrewed system does not mean the loss of the crewed platform that operates it. The Anadolu can lose a TB3 without losing the ship; a pure uncrewed vessel that suffers a catastrophic failure is lost entirely.

The Turkish case suggests that the future of naval architecture is plural. Different navies will make different choices, conditioned by their geography, their industrial base, and their strategic culture. A navy with global power projection requirements and a large industrial base can pursue a high-low mix anchored by large capital combatants. A navy with constrained resources and a regional focus may be driven toward a hybrid navy centred on networked unmanned mass. A middle power with a maturing defence industry may find the distributed firepower model—fast attack missile boats and aerial drones networked into a kill web—the most cost-effective path. The paradigm shift is real, but its expression varies.

Conclusion

The new paradigm of sea-domain warfare is not a future that is coming. It is a present that has arrived. The Black Sea campaign demonstrated that a weaker navy can deny the sea to a stronger one using distributed precision weapons and uncrewed systems (Robinson & Richard, 2025). The Red Sea crisis demonstrated that a non-state actor can impose significant costs on a superpower using relatively low-cost drones and missiles (European Naval Review, 2025). The Turkish Anadolu demonstrated that a middle power with an indigenous defence industry can build a hybrid fleet that punches above its weight (Anadolu Agency, 2026). And the hypersonic revolution demonstrated that the weapons of the future will demand power, cooling, and command-and-control architectures that most existing ships cannot provide (Government Accountability Office, 2026).

The design principles that emerge from this paradigm are not a blueprint for a single fleet architecture. They are a set of requirements that any fleet architecture must satisfy. Combat mass must be a design objective. Modularity must be designed in. Power and cooling margin must be treated as strategic assets. Software must be treated as the ship's combat system. Hybrid manned-unmanned teams must be the basic tactical unit. Industrial resilience must be treated as a combat capability. And sustainment architecture must be as distributed as the force it supports.

These principles are demanding. They require naval architects to design ships that can be built in numbers, adapted to new missions, upgraded with new systems, and sustained in contested environments. They require navies to invest in industrial capacity, logistics infrastructure, and software sovereignty. And they require governments to treat shipbuilding not as a procurement problem but as a strategic capability.

The navies that master these requirements will be those that understand the new paradigm not as a replacement for the old one but as a set of additional demands. They will build fleets that can operate distributed forces and concentrated forces, that can fight in a contested electromagnetic environment and a contested maritime one, and that can sustain operations in the absence of fixed bases and fixed assumptions. The design implications of that requirement are profound. They are also the subject of this essay.

The sea is no longer opaque. The platforms that will fight on it must be designed for transparency, for distribution, and for persistence. The navies that adapt will be those that understand that naval architecture is not a technical discipline in isolation. It is the material expression of strategic choice. And in the new paradigm, the choices are starker than they have been in a century.

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