I went inside the Navy’s secret battlespace barely anyone knows about

Inside a darkened ops room, several banks of monitors have picked up three unknown aircraft bearing down on a group of Royal Navy ships.  

Onboard the heavily armed destroyer HMS Dragon, we have just seconds to assess the military-grade data and make a series of life-or-death calls.  

As Air Warfare Officer, the final say is down to me.  

While I correctly identify one of the rapidly approaching jets on a radar monitor blinking data at me to be a passenger plane, I’ve failed to act on another flying in from the sea to our west.  

The warplane fires a missile into one of the ships in the Carrier Strike Group — a group of Navy vessels providing mutual protection  — causing significant damage and potential loss of life.

This time, it’s just a simulation.

It’s one of several scenarios — located near a generic coastline that looks vaguely like East Africa — where I’m given an operator’s seat and headset at the secretive nerve centre run by BAE Systems in Portsmouth. 

The maritime battlespace simulator, named MIMESIS after the ancient Greek term for imitation, has a deadly serious aim: keeping the Navy well-drilled and ahead of its adversaries across the globe.  

I was one of the first journalists to be given a run-through of the ‘synthetic’ training — which is classified to the general public — used by all of the Navy’s warfighters from rookies to admirals.

It’s the high-fidelity wargame that most people don’t know exists, and it’s being used to run scenarios ranging from attacks by drone swarms to 3,000mph cruise missiles that would otherwise be extremely complicated and costly to simulate in ‘live’ training. 

Technology yet to make it to the battlefield can also be experimented with. 

Earlier, I left my phone in a meeting room for security reasons and was taken to the ops room through the heart of the manufacturing plant, located in a nondescript building.  

We passed a workfloor where some of the latest maritime military technology — including an autonomous underwater vehicle and a ‘Spearfish’ heavyweight torpedo — was on display.

HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, featured in the James Bond movie No Time to Die and there is a hint of Q and the advanced technology about the facility’s hub during my visit on Wednesday.

I’m accompanied by a team including BAE’s solutions lead Paul Morris, a former Royal Navy Commander of 24 years’ service, who explains that the crucial element is turning the vast reams of information available in modern warfare into actionable data. 

As I discover, a ‘ghost in the machine’ can also be added into the scenarios to keep the operators on their toes.

In my case, it’s the ‘friend or foe’ element. 

Cdr Morris demonstrates how to deal with the attacks, also including ‘sea-skimmer’ missiles a couple of metres above the water, calmly saying ‘splash’ over the radio when the threat has been eliminated.

‘It gives you that focus on how quick and accurate you need to be and adds context onto it,’ he says when we return to a meeting room.

‘You want to be successful in your role but you also want to protect your mates, the people on the ships, and making sure you can defend them.’ 

Richard Goldstone, business development lead and also a former Royal Navy commander, who has 31 years’ service, adds: ‘Everyone’s job in the ops room is just as important and if one person does not do their job properly, the performance in the whole team dips. 

‘You’re protecting your shipmates but you’re also protecting a billion pounds worth of the UK’s assets and that “whole” ethos runs throughout the training. You fight to survive and to win, but there’s a lot of jeopardy behind it if you don’t do your job properly.’ 

I ask Cdr Morris if the heightened threat environment in places like the Black Sea, where the UK is supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, has sharpened minds in training. 

‘You can’t be blind to what’s going on in the wider world and the wider context of increasing threats, but I never really used to focus on one thing, because you always had to be prepared to go out and deal with what is presented to you,’ he replies. 

‘I’ve been out on deployments where you tell yourself, “it must be this we’re going to deal with”, and all of a sudden something else pops up.  

‘That is one of the great attributes of maritime forces, that flexibility, the inherent ability to move anywhere in the world and to deliver an effect no matter where you are.  

‘You prepare for the worst, but you don’t know what’s going to pop up.’ 

Cdr Morris gives the example of British Navy ships on drugs patrols in the Caribbean in 1982, when they got the call to go to the Falklands to respond to the Argentinian invasion.

Nick Benedeck, whose job is capturing new business, describes MIMESIS as ‘like Esports on steroids’ that can provide general skills while also recreating the type of places that the Navy is due to deploy in, down to the terrain, seabed and weather. 

‘We can prepare the specific environments, the geography, the adversaries that the Navy is going to face in a given theatre,’ he says.  

Although there is no open world action such as in Call of Duty or Commandos — the visuals mirror real Navy systems — some of the development aspects do overlap with gaming and a couple of the specialists I see in the building look fresh out of university.  

The next step is for MIMESIS to be routinely used as part of ‘live’ training onboard Navy ships at sea, the team tells me.  

At present, the Navy has been responding to Russian military vessels, thought to include spy ships, in the English Channel and is operating in trouble spots including the Middle East and the Black Sea. 

Alongside Cdr Morris, I’ve had a safe introduction to the digital sandbox. 

But as I pull out of Portsmouth there’s no escaping the sense that, for Navy personnel operating in an increasingly hostile and uncertain world, such critical decisions may one day have to be taken for real.  

Do you have a story you would like to share? Contact josh.layton@metro.co.uk

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