French missile-maker to build autonomous command centres for UK Navy

French defense company Thales has secured a significant contract from the UK’s Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) to develop next-generation portable autonomous command centres for the Royal Navy’s Mine Counter Measures (MCM) capabilities. This £10 million initial investment, potentially expanding to £100 million, aims to revolutionize maritime autonomous mine hunting by integrating multiple unmanned assets into a cohesive system of systems. The project supports the UK’s Strategic Defence vision for a “Hybrid Navy” by enhancing operational effectiveness and personnel safety through advanced AI-powered command and control solutions. Central to the new command centres will be Thales’s M-Cube Mission Management System, a combat-proven software suite already used by several navies globally for planning, executing, and evaluating both conventional and autonomous MCM missions. Additionally, the Mi-Map planning and evaluation software, featuring AI-driven automatic target recognition and machine learning, will streamline and improve mine detection accuracy beyond traditional methods. Developed with support from Thales’s AI accelerator cortAIx