Digitally Empowering Naval Fleet Support

Throughout history, the Royal Navy (RN) has invested in technical innovation to gain warfare advantage over its opponents. However, innovation often comes with change to the asset design, its operation and through life support. The most obvious example was during the turn of the 20th century when the RN moved from coal to oil powered propulsion systems, resulting in a major change to the skills of the crew and the support chain.   
The demands placed on the RN have continued to grow during the 21st century, with a fleet of highly complex surface ships and submarines that provide the UK conventional and nuclear strike capability. This paper explains how warfare advantage can be further improved by information exploitation that is targeted at the improvement of fleet availability, capability and safety by empowering the operator and its shore-side support organisation. 
The projects described in this paper have been developed in collaboration with the RN as part of the Maritime Support Information Exploitation Strategy (known as MarSIX). The paper therefore discusses the information principles used within Babcock’s Support Strategy to deliver Navy Command’s MarSIX vision.