Persistent Shadow consortium showcases MARS uncrewed surface vessel and layered maritime effects to support Royal Navy’s North Atlantic vision.
The Royal Navy has evaluated a new generation of autonomous maritime capabilities at SubSea Craft’s UK headquarters in Portsmouth, in a major demonstration aligned with Atlantic Bastion – the programme launched by the First Sea Lord to strengthen Britain’s security against evolving threats in the North Atlantic.
The demonstrations brought together a consortium of defence primes and specialist SMEs known as Persistent Shadow, headed by SubSea Craft, to showcase a credible pathway to autonomous anti-submarine warfare (ASW) across the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap.
Anchoring the demonstration was MARS, a multi-purpose uncrewed surface vessel (USV) designed to maximise survivability and operational disruption in contested environments. Built on an open architecture, MARS can deliver effects across the domains of warfare using payloads from multiple vendors. Alongside MARS, consortium members deployed undersea sensors, communications and command-and-control capabilities to illustrate persistent, layered maritime awareness and denial effects in the High North and the GIUK gap.
Interoperability was central to the showcase. Leonardo, Capgemini and Viasat contributed digital and data capabilities to profile MARS’s force-multiplying effect, with CONOPS also developed showing MARS operating alongside other USVs and wider fleet assets. The full Persistent Shadow consortium — VRAI, Rafnar, Forcys, Viasat, ACUA Ocean, Capgemini, Leonardo and GreenRoom Robotics — delivered complementary capabilities across uncrewed surface and subsurface, autonomy, sensing, communications and command-and-control.
The demonstration took place just one month after the First Sea Lord publicly unveiled Atlantic Bastion, underlining the agility of UK industry in responding to evolving sub-threshold threats in the North Atlantic.
Dame Penny Mordaunt, Chair of SubSea Craft and Former UK Secretary of State for Defence, said: “Achieving an autonomous anti-submarine warfare capability across the GIUK Gap is a complex task, one that requires bold partnerships across industry and government. Alongside our consortium partners, we have demonstrated a credible pathway to meeting the Royal Navy’s future force design and Atlantic Bastion vision. SubSea Craft’s open architecture design provides a bedrock from which platforms like MARS can be integrated across UK Defence capabilities.”
For the UK defence supply chain, the showcase signals an expanding pipeline of opportunity for British primes and SMEs working in uncrewed systems, autonomy, sensing and secure communications as Atlantic Bastion progresses.
