CARDIGAN BAY – The crew is poised. A sailor in deep blue overalls is glued to a radar, continually scanning the seas around a cavernous Royal Navy warship. Next to her, two young men hold binoculars to the ship’s windows. Clamber down two ladders, and three dozen crew members are staring at feeds of information from powerful sensors, on glowing, brightly coloured screens.
Then they spot it; a drone on the horizon. And it’s coming in fast.
As militaries around the world race to adapt to drone warfare, The i Paper was granted rare access to join the crew on board HMS Dauntless for a week of exercises off the coast of Wales. A Type 45 destroyer, HMS Dauntless specialises in air defence, and is capable of creating a protective bubble over an area of land or sea.
The training programme, Exercise Sharpshooter, teaches them shoot down drones and simulated missiles – tasks these sailors may well face in reality.
Russia has this week been accused of sinking a merchant ship off the coast of Europe, using drones to take out the vessel. In the Red Sea, Houthi militants have been firing drones at commercial vessels since 2024, killing several sailors, with the Navy deployed to take them out.
This wargame forces the crew to respond day and night to unexpected attacks from the air or the sea, testing their weapons – and their wits – for an assault that could unfold within minutes.
The first few seconds: Detection
Often, a threat will first be spotted in the ship’s operations room, a secret site nestled deep in the underbelly of the vessel. Almost pitch black, it hums with the sound of air conditioning and chatter. Inside, 40 analysts sit in rows, each looking at three screens showing the ship’s location and other objects nearby, their supervisors hovering nearby.
The crew spend eight hours here at a time, wearing flame-retardant overalls, headsets and white leather gloves to protect their skin in case of explosions.
This room is the brains of the ship, bringing together feeds of information from radar detections to human intelligence to help the sailors detect the oncoming threat. From the vessel off the coast of Wales, its radars can detect threats as far as Paris, monitoring hundreds of drones or missiles simultaneously, and launching weapons to take them out.
“We’ll have different stations around the ops room, and they’ll be looking out at different ranges on their radar,” said Dan, a fighter controller who manages the fighter jets working with the ship to respond to threats. “As soon as they see something at various different ranges, they’ll then report that through, and we’ll then work through trying to figure out what it is, what it’s doing, and what we can do about it.”
After a missile or drone has been spotted, the crew will work to identify it, looking at its speed, size, location and imprint on the electromagnetic spectrum, gathering around a monitor to discuss it. At the same time, they must protect themselves, with a tannoy going off to alert the crew to an incoming threat so they can cover their heads and arms with protective gear.
45 seconds onwards: Select a response
Once they can confidently determine the threat, the team can pull together options for a response. Lieutenant Commander David Ferguson, who spent six weeks on board HMS Richmond as it tackled Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea in 2024, said his crew had responded in as little as 45 seconds.
HMS Dauntless, one of the Navy’s most powerful warships, has six different types of weapon and hosts a Wildcat helicopter, itself capable of launching its own missiles. The ship’s biggest gun, the 45 Naval Gun, can fire 25 rounds per minute – each bullet larger than those fired by a tank.
It is the crew’s job to match these capabilities to the threat in hand – as quickly as possible. To do this, they will start with the furthest capability, aiming to shoot the target down from as far away as possible, moving through its defences until it reaches close range.
“We call it layered defence,” says Dan, standing in the operations room in his overalls. “We’ll push that boundary out as much as we can. Fighter jets are a really good way because we can send them far away really fast, we can then send them back to resupply without using our own weapons on board.
“We can then use things like our helicopter, and our missiles that can then fire much further away. And then as we work through, we’ve got the [large] guns, all the way down to machine guns, which are a really close last defence.”
The time it takes to respond to an attack can vary dramatically. “Sometimes they can be sort of split-second decisions,” said Dan. “Sometimes they can be over minutes and hours as we get different intelligence and feeds and detection ranges. It really depends. That’s part of the art, I guess.”
First 15 minutes: Take action
When a decision has been made, the operations team radio up to the team in the Bridge, the command centre of the ship, to move the ship into the right position to fire. The 7,500-tonne warship turns, the body of the ship tilting and the horizon appearing to slant outside the window, before it levels out again. It is enough to turn your stomach.
The ship’s semi-automated Phalanx gun fires for a few seconds at a time, creating an ear-splitting drilling sound which echoes around every corner of the ship, usually alternated with the sharp pop of a machine gun from the deck outside. But the most visceral of all is Dauntless’s main 45 gun, mounted on the front of the ship, and creates a boom so powerful it rattles the ceiling panels.
The Royal Navy frequently works with allies including the US and France, and if other friendly warships are nearby, decisions will be made in connection with them. This helps them avoid doubling up – or hitting one another.
“It’s all about that coordination. That battle space management is another one of the roles that we’ll be doing to make sure we both employ them effectively, but also safely,” said Dan, who frequently talks to allies over his headset.
If needed, an armed helicopter can lift off from the ship in under 15 minutes. Once in the air, they fly in the direction of the target, locate it on their cameras and sensors, and wait for approval from the ships’ operations room to fire or monitor.
“We bring the ability for the ship to extend its camera range, its radar range, and its weapons, so they can then focus on another area of warfare,” said Arnie, a 26-year-old flight observer who manages navigation, weapons and sensors while his partner flies the helicopter. “We’re just an extension arm of the ship, and able to do more.”
Jets, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly facing threats from jamming, where an enemy interferes with GPS signals or ground communications so they lose navigation. But these Wildcat pilots can “operate in any environment”, using maps, radars or the drift and speed of the aircraft to work out where they are. Even in a rapidly changing battlefield, “there’s lots of old-fashioned methods, which still are relevant today”.
First few hours: Raise it
Navy warships have the authority to act autonomously, without approval from headquarters from land, but updates about attacks will be fed back to a team of officials on land.
If the attack is serious or unexpected, these updates can reach the First Sea Lord, the Navy’s chief, the Chief of the Defence staff – the head of the entire military – and even the Prime Minister. Special and military advisers within the Naval staff and military of defence would help top officials to formulate a wider response.
In the most serious case, the UK could convene a meeting of Nato, the western military alliance of 32 countries committed to protecting one another in case of attack, which can devise a collective response, ranging from a sternly worded warning to a full-scale military deployment.
While I am on board, HMS Dauntless deals with more than a dozen simulated attacks, successfully passing the exercise to allow it to deploy on operations in real life. With threats from Russia and Yemen’s Houthi militants only growing, the stakes have never been higher.