Fighting with the Fleet You Have and Building Availability into the Autonomous Systems Age

In 2017, I sat down with then Chief of the Australian Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, at a moment when the Royal Australian Navy was entering the largest recapitalization of its fleet since the Second World War. New submarines, new destroyers, new amphibious ships were all coming, but Barrett was clear about where his attention actually had to be and not on the fleet that was coming, but on the fleet that was already at sea.

“You have to fight with the fleet you have now,” he told me. “That is not an option; it is a necessity.”

His answer to that necessity was availability. Not readiness in the numerical sense of hulls on a roster, but the harder question of how often ships can actually get to sea and stay there. As he put it then, ships sitting in drydock don’t deter anyone. The Collins-class submarine fleet, small as it was, had to be made available at a much higher rate, and the lessons from that effort were meant to become the template for how Australia operated its future frigates and submarines from the day they entered service, rather than relearning the lesson a generation later.

Barrett’s insight was as much organizational as technical. He talked about the “Ship Zero” concept, putting the systems program office, the maintenance group, and the training staff in the same building, working the same problems together, rather than scattering that expertise across separate commands. Availability, in his formulation, was not a metric to be reported. It was a mindset to be built into the design of the force from the ground up, alongside the new submarine program then being shaped with a French design house and an American combat systems house working together for the first time.

Almost a decade on, the calculus of availability is being rewritten by a variable Barrett did not have in front of him in 2017: the maturing role of autonomous systems across the fleet. If his central question was how to raise availability with the manned force he had while preparing the manned force he was building, the question for today’s navies is how autonomous systems change what “availability” even means for both fleets at once.

There are at least five ways this plays out.

The first is in ship repair itself. Robotic systems applied to maintenance and repair work can compress the time a ship spends in port or in dry dock, directly attacking the drydock problem Barrett flagged as the enemy of deterrence.

The second follows from the first: the cycle-repair periods that pull major surface combatants out of the operational fleet for extended stretches can themselves be shortened as robotic and automated repair techniques mature, returning hulls to available status faster than the traditional depot-level maintenance cycle allows.

The third concerns systems upgrades. Barrett’s navy was already moving toward designing ships that could take on new payloads rather than requiring bespoke, ship-by-ship upgrade programs. Modularity, pursued deliberately, shortens the time a ship is offline for a combat-system upgrade, because the ship is built from the outset to swap payloads rather than be rebuilt around them.

The fourth is where the autonomous systems era departs most sharply from Barrett’s frame. It is no longer only about how available the manned ship is. It is about how much of that ship’s payload capability can be offloaded onto an autonomous systems mesh fleet operating alongside it. A destroyer or frigate does not need to carry, or be down for the installation of, every capability it might need if a mesh of unmanned surface and underwater systems can replace, enhance, or supplement those payloads externally, extending the manned ship’s reach without requiring the ship itself to change. Reach, in this formulation, becomes as important a variable as availability itself.

The fifth is the design implication of the first four: new ships need to be built with modularity as a central design principle, not an afterthought, so that swapping systems and absorbing upgrades can happen at the pace the mesh fleet and the threat environment demand, rather than at the pace of a traditional shipyard refit cycle.

Seen together, these five shifts extend rather than replace Barrett’s argument. He insisted that availability had to be designed in from the start rather than retrofitted after the platform arrived that the Ship Zero mindset, the workforce transition, and the modular submarine program all had to be shaped together, as a national commitment rather than a Navy program.

The autonomous systems mesh fleet is the next iteration of that same logic. It does not ask the Navy to abandon the availability-first approach Barrett built. It asks the Navy to widen the aperture of what counts as available, from the readiness of a single hull to the readiness of a distributed force in which manned ships and autonomous systems are jointly responsible for capability at sea.

Barrett’s closing point in 2017 was that none of this could be done “without a national commitment” that building a 21st century combat fleet was an industrial and national undertaking, not simply a Navy acquisition program. That framing holds with even greater force now. A mesh fleet of autonomous systems is not simply a technology to be bought. It is an enterprise to be built, sustained, and continuously innovated across the life of the platforms it supports, precisely the “continuous build process”

Barrett described for the frigates and submarines then on the drawing board.

The fleet you have today and the fleet of the future are, in the autonomous systems age, no longer sequential problems to be solved one after the other.

They are becoming a single, integrated design problem, and Barrett’s availability-first instinct was an early and clear-eyed way of seeing that this was coming.

Coming early next year: