First Sea Lord Normal Sir Gwyn Jenkins Speech at DSEI 2025

Good afternoon,

We face a world that’s more and more contested and unpredictable, with fast technological developments reshaping warfare.

My mission is to maneuver the Royal Navy to warfighting readiness over the subsequent 4 years.

This is important if we’re to strengthen deterrence and stopping battle on this new period of risk.

The 2025 National Security Strategy laid naked the dimensions of the problem that we face – Russian aggression menacing our continent, strategic competitors intensifying, extremist ideologies proliferating, know-how reworking warfare, and hostile state exercise occurring in and across the UK, impacting our pursuits.

The maritime area, the ocean and our delivery routes stay the important cornerstone to our nationwide safety and progress in our financial system.

Today the Royal Navy guards that area in order that meals, vitality, items and knowledge circulation unimpeded into our day by day lives.

And as a part of our membership of NATO the Royal Navy maintains the last word guarantor of our nationwide safety – the Strategic Nuclear Deterrent.

Our work stays basically the identical because it has for a whole lot of years – maintain the ocean lanes open, defend our nation from seaborne assault, promote and defend our nationwide pursuits world wide.

The work can be acquainted to many First Sea Lords earlier than me.  But the way in which we do it’s altering, altering quick, and that’s what I need to speak about right now.

We have 4 instant priorities: nuclear, innovation, management, and agility.

Nuclear deterrence is our prime precedence, requiring a whole-force effort throughout submarines, infrastructure, and protecting forces.

Innovation is crucial to adapting on the tempo of technological change, each in how we work and within the functionality we use.

Leadership Excellence is about inspiring and empowering groups whereas delivering outcomes, creating an setting the place everybody can thrive.

Agility is important to take away boundaries, streamline processes, and having a concentrate on what actually issues.

For 35 years, now we have operated underneath the presumption of a “peace dividend,” taking calculated dangers towards rising threats. This has resulted in a lowered fleet dimension and inevitable readiness challenges.

But the maritime area but stays the one important to our nationwide safety.

Our operational schedule is as relentless as ever, with international deployments from the High North to the Indo-Pacific, securing commerce routes and supporting allies.

Many of our ships, just like the Type 23 Frigates, are ageing, prolonged to twice their deliberate service life.

And we work arduous to recruit and retain the expertise we’d like, and I’m proud to serve alongside our excellent folks, however we have to frequently discover methods of doing higher, and adapt sooner.

The Strategic Defence Review was clear that we’re at a turning level. At the 2025 NATO Summit, the UK Government made the pledge to spend 5% of GDP on nationwide safety by 2035.

An funding centered on lethality, readiness, munitions stockpiles, and technological innovation. Throughout its historical past the Royal Navy has been buccaneering, modern and pioneering.  These are the traits we now want, to fulfill the brand new challenges we face. 

I come right here right now to make my first speech as First Sea Lord to share my strategy with you, our business companions. Because it is just collectively that we are able to efficiently meet the challenges we face.

We want your creativeness, your concepts, your innovation and your collaboration.

As our PM stated yesterday ‘our Armed Forces are only as strong as the industry that stands behind them.’ 

We must do issues in a different way, to develop and diversify the fleet.  To pace up the event of latest capabilities and applied sciences by working with you to enhance the flexibleness with which we create, function and enhance the means we’d like to have the ability to combat and to win.

Together we are going to reimagine the Royal Navy as a brand new hybrid Navy.  We will transfer to a dispersed however digitally related fleet of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous platforms that can redefine maritime navy energy.

We have a daring imaginative and prescient, which can place our nation within the vanguard of autonomous warships and maritime warfare – underneath, on, above and from the ocean.

That is not only for the Navy – however for UK business as nicely. We need you to grow to be the world’s main exporter of autonomous vessels, in addition to constructing the perfect warships on the planet – as we’ve seen with the £10 billion Norway deal.

But let me be actually clear – this isn’t an aspiration for some distant level sooner or later.  It is a necessity now.

This will create a bigger and extra deadly fleet, with larger agility and resilience, and it’s a transfer that can begin whereas I’m the First Sea Lord. To do that, we will probably be guided by a easy however highly effective precept: “uncrewed wherever possible; crewed only where necessary.”

This is not only a technological shift – it’s a strategic transformation in how we undertaking energy, protect lives, and adapt to the tempo of recent warfare. 

To illustrate, I’ll give examples of what we have to do above, underneath, on and from the ocean.

We could have Hybrid Airwings by the tip of this decade, main NATO nations in a brand new means of air warfare from the maritime. 

By the time the Carrier Strike Group returns to the Indo-Pacific for its subsequent episodic deployment, its Carrier Air Wing will probably be virtually unrecognisable – a fusion of crewed and uncrewed platforms, optimised for pace, survivability, adaptability and fight energy.

To deliver this to life, to make it actual, together with your assist.

We intend to launch the primary jet-powered collaborative platform drone as an idea demonstrator off a Queen Elizabeth-class plane provider as quickly as subsequent yr. 

Atlantic Bastian is a groundbreaking idea revolutionising how we defend the UK and its allies within the underwater setting. 

It will present a formidable underwater defence posture from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to the Norwegian Sea. 

A mix of crewed and uncrewed host platforms will probably be networked collectively, however able to unbiased operations, making a system of methods that can allow us to search out, monitor and if required act towards our opponents, including each mass and lethality to our already succesful Submarines, Ships and plane within the North Atlantic.

We could have our first Bastion sensors within the water subsequent yr.

For the floor, think about within the close to future, a Type 26 Frigate goes into the North Atlantic.  It is essentially the most superior Anti-Submarine Frigate on the planet, a very world main ship functionality with a extremely educated and only crew.  But it isn’t alone.  It is crusing in firm with two uncrewed escorts, who use AI to work in tandem with the warship.  Together, they supply a 3 ship job group in their very own proper. 

The escorts will defend the mum or dad ship, including to its sensors, weapons and decoy capabilities.  Because they haven’t any crew, the escorts usually are not complicated vessels, they’re simple to provide at scale, even simpler to configure to particular mission necessities as the duty calls for. 

If this sounds fanciful, it isn’t. 

It is my purpose to have the primary of our uncrewed escort ships crusing alongside our RN warships inside the subsequent two years.  We will then start scaling throughout the Navy. 

This strategy won’t solely revolutionise our capability to place mass to sea, it would basically change our future shipbuilding programme, enabling us to interrupt the paradigm of solely ever greater, dearer and complicated warships. 

We are additionally working to take this strategy into our ideas for each the MRSS as a part of our future littoral ships and for the T83 as our future Air Defence Destroyer, which can basically change and enhance what might be produced.  I would like each to be based on a household of vessels, with crewed capabilities at their coronary heart, however extra modular, resilient, dispersed and highly effective.  Fit for contemporary warfighting.

Alongside all of this it could be remiss of me not to discuss the continued transformation of the Commando Force and their strategically very important position in assist of each the Fleet and wider Integrated Force. 

Our Royal Marine Commandos mix the perfect of human expertise, chosen and educated to function independently within the harshest environments, with the very newest in know-how.

Our Marines anticipated the way forward for trendy warfare and have for nearly 10 years been reworking in a means that now appears prescient for the warfare in Ukraine. 

But now they have to go additional. 

Ever extra dispersed on the battlefield, related however able to unbiased motion, enabled by ever extra autonomy, they would be the embodiment of a twenty first Century Commando.  

This is important as a result of the High North specifically stays a crucial space for the UK and a susceptible northern flank for NATO. It will not be solely the gateway to the Atlantic for Russia’s more and more succesful submarine drive, however it’s a area the place local weather change is setting the stage for intense state competitors over territory, entry and sources. 

Our continued capability to function and combat on this most demanding setting is very important – and the UK Commando Force, as essentially the most skilled and credible excessive chilly climate operators, would be the tip of our NATO spear.  

All this – the entire transformation of our drive – will necessitate the largest change of the tradition, workforce coaching and expertise for our sailors and marines because the flip of the final Century.

We are going to overtake the Royal Navy’s strategy to maritime warfare coaching to make sure our persons are absolutely outfitted to fulfill the work they’re requested to do, creating the warfare preventing leaders of the longer term.

And Leaders matter.

Leaders in any respect ranges dictate an organisation’s tradition. Because of this, inside the subsequent 100 days, we are going to trial new instruments to enhance the way in which we assess management in any respect ranges, specializing in each the flexibility to ship outcomes and the impression leaders have on

the tradition and well-being of the folks in our groups.

We will discover the perfect instruments to assist us establish these leaders who can observe management excellence – that’s, delivering outcomes whereas motivating and galvanizing their folks to be the perfect that they are often.  When we establish them, we are going to promote them, put them in positions of authority and collectively they are going to assist us to rework the Royal Navy.

Our job is to be able to combat with what now we have now, not what we hope to have sooner or later. Within 100 days, we could have outlined, war-gamed and agreed a plan to make sure the Royal Navy is credible and strikes to warfighting readiness over the subsequent 4 yr.

To do that we have to remodel ourselves and we’d like your assist, your partnership.  We will all, collectively, want to guide our allies into a special means of warfare, rediscover how one can combat at scale and have the braveness to rework in order that we are able to win that combat.  Lead, combat, win – to make Britain safe at dwelling and powerful overseas.

We want companions in business, massive and small, to ship the innovation we should have. I thanks for all you already do for us, and I sit up for what we are going to do collectively within the years forward.