As autonomous threats accelerate in congested maritime environments, British sovereign technology SMEs are proving the capability the Royal Navy needs is already here.
Portsmouth, UK, Wednesday 6th May – As part of the Royal Navy’s roadmap for delivering the hybrid navy, industry took part in Trident Sprint 2, a technology demonstration culminating in a Distinguished Visitor day on Thu 30 Apr. Hadean – operating as the Decide coalition member of Sceptre – showcased a fully integrated, end-to-end Sense–Decide–Effect chain in the maritime domain, powered by its dominAI Command & Control platform. The demonstration drew live data feeds from across the Sceptre coalition’s sovereign UK capabilities, fusing them into a single, operationally relevant picture in real time and then generating probabilistic Courses of Action within minutes.
The Threat Cannot Wait
The Royal Navy’s Exercise Trident Sprints have made plain what commanders already know: congested and contested maritime environments – characterised by degraded, denied, and intermittent communications (DDIL), and the proliferating threat of swarm tactics and armed maritime drones – demand a fundamentally different approach to decision-making.
dominAI: Compressing the OODA Loop, augmenting decisions and providing insight at Maritime Speed
At the heart of the Trident Sprint demonstration was Hadean’s dominAI platform, a next-generation C2 system that ingests and fuses multi-domain tracks into a single consumable operating picture, enriched by doctrine, intelligence, and simulation.
Hadean demonstrated the power of the coalition to deliver at pace by using dominAI to ingest data with live feeds from ACUA Ocean maritime vessels, Evolve UAS platforms, Vizgard AI vision, and AIS overlays – all egressed via 2iC’s resilient communications stack in common NATO formats. The C2 picture was enhanced by overlaying relevant maritime doctrine, capability reference open-source data such as geospatial intelligence to contextualise the sensor picture for commanders. This ingested J2- threat assessment generated potential Red Force Courses of Action in a consumable format directly into the C2 interface with countering multiple Blue Force Courses of Action provided rapidly. Each assessment underpinned by concurrent probabilistic simulation runs, providing commanders with quantified success likelihoods
Crucially, dominAI does not replace the human decision-maker. It compresses the time between observation and informed decision by using simulation to test human thinking, providing first-mover advantage in the OODA loop at exactly the moment when time-critical choices carry the most severe escalatory consequences.
SCEPTRE: A Sovereign, End-to-End Capability
The Sceptre coalition, formed in direct response to the UK Strategic Defense Review and the Defense Industrial Strategy, was built precisely for this moment. The Royal Navy cannot wait years for bespoke programmes. The capability it needs is being delivered by British SMEs right now. Sceptre is a coalition of UK sovereign defense technology companies, each delivering a critical component of the modern maritime Sense–Decide–Effect chain. Together, they address the Royal Navy’s requirement to counter Uncrewed and Autonomous Systems (UxS) in congested and contested environments without dependency on geopolitically uncertain suppliers or adversarial supply chains.
Coalition members demonstrated at the event include:
- Vizgard: AI computer vision delivering find, identify, and triage of targets at speed
- Evolve Dynamics: UAS platforms providing robust and persistent ISR feeds into the operating picture
- Labrys: Ready access to human intelligence networks in austere and degraded environments
- 2iC: Resilient communications assuring connectivity across DDIL operating environments
- ACUA Ocean: Maritime sentinel capability with 50-day uncrewed endurance at sea
- Hadean: AI-powered Command & Control and high-fidelity concurrent simulation, fusing multi-domain data into actionable decisions.
“I am incredibly proud of what the Sceptre coalition demonstrated at Trident Sprint 2. dominAI sits at the Decide point of the Sense, Decide, Effect chain, but the demonstration only works because of the data, connectivity and platforms our coalition partners brought to it. Vizgard, Evolve, Labrys, 2iC and ACUA Ocean are mission partners in the truest sense, and together we offer the Royal Navy a sovereign capability it can use now.” – Craig Beddis