Preliminary note: After spending days searching for the French fleet in the Mediterranean Sea before finding it at the Battle of the Nile (1798), admiral Nelson is alleged to have written: ‘Was I to die this moment, want of frigates would be found stamped on my heart!’ Paine Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), p. 489.

One hardly needs to be a prophet to see that the shift of naval warfare into its fifth age, the age of robotics, has begun and is accelerating.^(1),(2) Let us therefore project ourselves into 2040 to see how proliferating robots will affect not only the character of war at sea but perhaps its very nature.

Back to the Future—The Naval Playground in 2040

In 2024, robots are already present: it is enough to observe the Black Sea and the Red Sea to see their increasing use in all naval confrontations, and most combat navies plan to have a significant ratio of robots in their orders of battle—above and under water.⁽³⁾ However, we are only at the beginning of wider use of robotics, currently with machines that operate alongside humans, in limited numbers and with a limited level of autonomy.

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