As naval fleets around the world grapple with aging infrastructure, evolving threats, and increasingly complex operational demands, the pressure to innovate – while keeping ships mission-ready – has never been greater. Modern navies are being asked to do more with less, often upgrading capabilities while vessels remain in service, navigating workforce constraints, and managing global supply chain disruptions. 

At the recent ShipTech Forum 2025 conference in Ottawa, these challenges took centre stage during a special fireside chat session featuring senior leaders from Canada and the United Kingdom. The discussion explored how both nations are tackling rapid capability insertion, enhancing fleet sustainment, and preparing the next generation of naval platforms and personnel. From modular ship design and continuous survey regimes to talent retention and dry dock capacity, the conversation offered a candid and practical look at the real-world decisions shaping the future of naval readiness. 

Richard Gravel:  

Q: Given the current state of global supply chains, how has that affected your ability to respond and adapt effectively? 

David St. Cyr: We’re certainly aware of what’s going on in the world and we’re managing supply chains very closely. Fortunately, we have good warehousing and a good supply of steel. We are assuming steel is going to get much more difficult to source in the very near future, and we have been looking pretty much global-wide in terms of sourcing steel in all its various shapes and sizes. It’s definitely a concern. 

Richard Gravel:  

Q: Admiral, when we spoke earlier you mentioned the six-year refit cycle for ships, and we’ve talked before about mid-cycle or in-water hull surveys. Are there any new or emerging technologies, processes, or lessons that Canada could take note of to help improve how these surveys are done? Could they help reduce issues during the increasingly long docking work periods? 

RAdm Steve McCarthy:  Let’s start there, with a view that age really does matter when it comes to being able to get through your recertification quickly. We keep our hard structure in class with Lloyd’s over 24 years. We have to take five thickness measurements per plate on a thin hold wall ship that’s 30 years old. That means you’re not getting out of dock too quickly. But we mustn’t cast all of our opportunity for future dockings in that light. The British Type 45 destroyers are built to Lloyd’s naval ship rules. There’s a lot more steel in the structure of the ships. They are a lot more resilient, and we find that we can get those through dry dock for recertification much more quickly. If you can cast your imagination forward to the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers built to Lloyd’s naval ship rules, we keep them in something called continuous carrier availability, with the view that we want to keep the ships available and manage those updates and upgrades at the right time in the ship’s operational program, not as a force majeure for the Navy when the ships are in dry dock.  

And that’s where we’ve gone to with the carriers. We got HMS Queen Elizabeth through her first certification docking in Scotland in six weeks. And if we characterize that in the costs related to keeping a ship in dry dock, it’s about 120,000 pounds (sterling) a week before I’ve lit a welding torch. If I bring you a change and it’s another 10 weeks, that’s over 1 million pounds of time-rated costs. So, I’m really motivated to get ships through the dry dock phase.  

In the UK continuous availability is a theme that we’ve adopted now with Type 45 destroyers, which we call a total availability program. The ships go through a three annual docking cycles, and we’ve started to introduce remote hull survey monitoring techniques. Managing a continuation survey regime is actually easier on larger ships, as their size provides more opportunity to cycle through tanks and access structural areas. Ironically, this can be more straightforward than on smaller combatants like destroyers, which are in high operational demand and offer less flexibility for such work. And getting the time in the program to get into the tanks is tough. For the aircraft carriers, they’re in continuation survey now. So, when we go and write the docking contract, we’ve opened up the docking certificate because it’s in continuation survey for the previous six years. We are doing about a fifth of the tanks, and we know that the structure of the hull is going to be okay, so we can get through the underwater work really, really quickly. That’s a big shift for us. We haven’t done any capability update or upgrade in those aircraft carriers, noting that we’ve now carried out hundreds of changes. We haven’t done any of those in dry dock. They’ve all been done concurrently as free time fits in an availability cycle, or where we’ve had a capability insertion period scheduled for the ship where there’s a bigger change to do.  

Richard Gravel:  

Q: I would ask you as well to just comment on is the RN accepting more risk? And if so, how are you mitigating those types of risks? 

RAdm Steve McCarthy:  In the generation of complex warships that we are building and that we operate today, we’ve seen the level of network integration rise, not as Moore’s Law might have predicted it, but certainly rise to very, very highly sophisticated level. For the Royal Navy, I share unifying objectives my three clients in Navy command – they are to maximize platform availability. We’ve got a small number of highly sophisticated assets. The end user needs them available to be able to take them out to sea to manage our maritime security – we must minimize the whole force workforce demand and to update and upgrade technology at the speed of relevance. The challenge for us is whether we can learn forward to a wartime risk calculus at the speed at which we would expect our adversary to actually have adapted and be updating and upgrading their capabilities. 

Richard Gravel:  

Q: What about the people component? When you’re adding new capabilities, often while ships are still in operation, there’s a significant human element to consider. You need to train operators and maintainers, update operational doctrine, and ensure leadership is aligned as well as considering industry input vis-à-vis capability installation. Could you speak more broadly about the people and talent considerations involved in enabling more rapid capability insertion? 

RAdm Steve McCarthy:  When it comes to the innovation journey, I find that we do tend to rush to a solution that we can sell. In doing so, we miss the true genius of engineers, which is taking an idea or invention and innovating it into a useful product that we can field at scale, and which is lethal to the enemy. We’re not innovating as well as we could be in that space. So, the first bit of the people component, I would say is the skills of the technologists that we can bring to rapidly accelerate those capabilities into service. The bigger the ship, the easier it is to do concurrent engineering because there’s a lot of real estate and you tend to annoy people less. I think the biggest advantage that we’ve seen is that we are not rushing immature design guidance to get it fitted when the ship is in dry dock and then regret that we didn’t finish the design well enough when it comes to trying to set a work trial and accept it. There is another people component to doing this sort of work during the operating cycle. And if we’re spending a long time grinding, welding, operating what is a home for a couple of hundred sailors, we also need to make sure that we thought about the hygiene factors of minimizing their exposure to the production effort that accompanies the engineering.  

Richard Gravel:  

Q: Looking at things from the perspective of the British Navy. Could you speak to the current and planned fleet mix, and how that might influence capability insertion and innovation? For example, is the British Navy moving toward platforms with greater modularity, increased mission flexibility, or designs that support roles like acting as motherships for autonomous systems?  

RAdm Steve McCarthy:  I have a fantastic drawing board, a national shipbuilding pipeline that looks out over the next 10 years that is driving the Royal Navy through its biggest modernization in generations. As we retire Type 23-frigates, we are updating the Type 45-destroyers. They’re nearly through their midlife update, which improves the power system availability, but also installs an update to the combat system. The aircraft carriers are fifth generation, highly integrated platforms, which are really successful. In any future conflict any adversary would seek to punish the United Kingdom by concentrating on the maritime because it historically remains our greatest strength and our greatest vulnerability. That means we need to protect it, and to protect it, the first part of that future fleet mix we’ll look at is mine hunting and sea-bed warfare capabilities that we’ve introduced in two new ships, including the RFA Stirling Castle. She is a host platform for an autonomous mine hunting capability, and by taking people out the minefield, we’ll reduce their risk exposure. That takes us forward to modularity in the Type 26 City-class frigates, similar to your River-class destroyers. There’s a huge mission bay in there, and we’ve got a load of capabilities that come in. It can either be a second helicopter in there, or it can be humanitarian aid disaster relief, or it can be autonomous platforms, including things like a mine hunting capability that we can take forward with a task group, but if there is no other MCM vessel available, we can still take some route clearance capability with us in those ships. 

Looking further ahead, our future air defence strategy envisions a mix of crewed command platforms and uncrewed – or optionally crewed, as the Australians describe them – vessels. These platforms will carry larger weapons arsenals and enable collaborative engagement capabilities to support theatre ballistic missile defence and anti-ship missile defence, particularly in the context of protecting the North Atlantic bastion. This opens up a much greater opportunity to rely on automated and autonomous systems to handle parts of the detect-and-find mission in the North Atlantic with far greater persistence, and without the need to feed people or worry about the comforts and care that come with having a crew onboard. So, it’s about high-endurance autonomous capabilities, high levels of electrification to reduce the number of moving parts and to provide the opportunity for alternate power generating sources to have great persistence, and enough in reserve to do what we need to do, should the time come.  

Richard Gravel:  

Q: David, you heard what Admiral McCarthy just shared, and some of it seemed particularly relevant to your role at Seaspan in Victoria, especially in Esquimalt harbour. Was there anything that resonated with you or that you’d like to comment on or add to? 

David St. Cyr: The people part of the equation is a challenge. That’s definitely the case for the RCN and the shipyard. I think we’re finding with the age of the fleets and competition with the oil and gas industry that the old days of having union halls full of trades ready to work just don’t exist anymore. And we’re now in a very different paradigm in terms of managing the trades that we do have. I won’t say layoffs are a thing of the past, but it’s a very different environment than it was when I joined Seaspan five or six years ago. So, I think a very real realization that there is a definite and limited capacity, particularly with steel within the country.  

In addition, it’s not just the Navy and Coast Guard dealing with aging vessels. We’re seeing the same trend with BC Ferries and across the commercial sector on the West Coast—there are quite a few aging vessels in need of work. As a result, there’s significant competition for the limited pool of skilled trades available to support them all. 

We seem to have a boom and bust echo cycle for the building of ships. If you look at the feet currently, the Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels are 30-plus, frigates are 30-plus, submarines are 30-plus years old. We have a few new Arctic and Offshore patrol ship vessels and that’s great to see. I think once again, we’re looking at a boom or bust situation where we build frigates, we build AOPVs we build Protecteur-class support ships and maybe even MCDV replacements. Thirty years from now, all these vessels will reach the same age at roughly the same time—and it will be my children and grandchildren dealing with a similar situation. They’ll be facing significant steelwork demands across multiple fleets coming due simultaneously, and the reality is, we simply don’t have the capacity to handle that kind of concentrated demand. So, I want to not only acknowledge, the Admiral’s comments about when we procure a new class of ship, I also want to add that we should really be thinking long term and about the potential replacement, and how long those ships are going to serve. It’s not an easy problem to solve. Fortunately, there is no shortage of young smart people that I think can help us with that challenge.  

Richard Gravel:  

Q: Thanks very much, David. I’ll turn to you first for any closing thoughts. Is there anything you’d like to add coming out of today’s discussion or any final reflections you’d like to share? 

David St. Cyr: The only other point I’d add is around capacity—specifically, the limited availability of dry docks, particularly on the West Coast. It’s not just about people; physical infrastructure is also a constraint we’re facing. We have a number of ships that are requiring longer and longer stays in the dry docks. People might ask, “What does shipbreaking have to do with ship repair and capability insertion?” The answer is: quite a lot. Right now, we don’t have dedicated capacity for shipbreaking on the West Coast of Canada. As a result, we’re starting to use some of our already-limited dry dock space for ship disposal. My ask is that we start thinking seriously about dedicated shipbreaking solutions—because if we continue to use dry docks for this purpose, it will absolutely impact our ability to repair, modernize, and maintain the fleet moving forward. 

Richard Gravel:  

Q: Thanks for that. Admiral any last words? 

RAdm Steve McCarthy:  I think I’ll start by going back to 1916, to a report from an admiral reflecting on a First World War battle that has stuck with me. He wrote that “the prelude to action is the work of the engineering department.” I don’t think that’s changed—and it remains just as true today. Being ready to be able to fight and win the next conflict is our focus as an engineering and technical community. And we have a huge responsibility to make sure that the people we send into harm’s way are equipped to fight and win. We can’t relieve ourselves of that obligation.  

But as I offer a shout out to Commodore Keith Coffen who I’m sure is in the audience today, I’ll say that we do it best, but we do it together. And I’m very much looking forward, Keith seeing you in Belfast in a couple of weeks time, where we bring the community people who do this; ourselves, Australians, New Zealanders, colleagues from the United States to collaborate on the right things. Because we can’t do it by ourselves. None of us can succeed in any future combat operation on our own. We need each other. We need to collaborate with the right things, and we need to be ready because the world is not getting any simpler.