The Allied Under Water Battlespace Mission Network provides the architecture infrastructure to deliver command and control, and exploit data use, in seabed warfare operations.
Meeting NATO’s underwater warfare mission – deterring and defending against growing threats across different tasks and regions – is a time-urgent operational requirement for alliance navies. The threat’s significance is also driving their collective integration of crewed and (particularly) uncrewed platforms, sensors (from seabed to space) and effectors at an unprecedented level and speed.
The main aim of such integration is to harness the data generated to build a comprehensive underwater battlespace picture and to enhance understanding of that picture. This process of asset integration and picture generation is being built around a new, NATO-wide command-and-control (C2) and wider interoperability architecture called the Allied Under Water Battlespace – Mission Network (AUWB-MN).
In July 2025 a multinational consortium called ‘Mangrove’ – led by Swedish ship and submarine builder Saab Kockums and comprising research organisations and a dozen-plus companies (from ‘primes’ to small/medium enterprises) – was awarded a one-year contract to deliver Phase 1 of the AUWB-MN programme.
Phase 1 involves constructing and establishing software to build what is termed the Reference Architecture (RA), providing modules, interface standards and protocols to help generate commonality across contributing countries. The RA will be ‘open’: rather than mandating solutions, it will provide a framework for countries to populate it using ‘plug-in’ capability options.
Phase 2 will deliver a software and hardware set-up to validate national implementations of the AUWB-MN through a Test and Reference Environment (TRE). The TRE will assess and assure effective management of, and asset integration across, the RA; here, it is crucial in driving seamless interoperability and interchangeability.
Phase 1 is funded by the 12 NATO countries supporting the NATO Smart Defence Initiative (SDI) ASW Barrier programme, within which AUWB-MN has been developed.
Phase 2 is crucial, but is awaiting funding. The aim is to deliver Phase 2 work from the beginning of 2027.
Funding remains central to accelerating AUWB-MN delivery. However, the countries’ collective commitment to countering the threat is arguably more significant.
“The AUWB-MN value proposition is compelling, and has been accepted by 12 countries. That’s how we’ve moved this forward,” David Burton, a retired UK Royal Navy (RN) commodore leading the programme told a media briefing at the Navy Leaders’ ‘Navy Tech/Seabed Defence’ conference in Gothenburg, earlier in 2026.
“The threat is serious and real,” Burton continued. Russia’s growing submarine capability and the anti-submarine warfare (ASW) requirement this mandates, plus Russia’s use of various crewed and crewed underwater platforms to target critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) nodes, are challenging NATO across the North Atlantic. The AUWB-MN countries recognise both the challenge of countering this threat and the synergies gained in collaboration and cost sharing, Burton added.
Using uncrewed platforms does not mean replacing crewed platforms, Ian Danbury – a retired RN commander now double-hatted as AUWB-MN programme manager and ASW Barrier co-ordinator – told the briefing. “[It is about] augmenting them to create the mass, persistence and in some respects innovation needed to drive forward effective warfare in the underwater battlespace: a space which was contested and is contested still, and in which – we have to be very clear – we need to retain the advantage over our potential adversaries.”
Underlining AUWB-MN’s significance in addressing the ASW and CUI threat, Burton said, “This is a bit of a shift.” The importance of this shift is illustrated in countries buying maritime uncrewed assets (MUS) and deploying them at high-end operational experimentation (OPEX) events like the annual Portuguese Navy/NATO co-hosted ‘REPMUS’ activity, he added. “So, they’re already investing – but this is now moving beyond experimentation into capability delivery.”
Senior alliance stakeholders are also ‘investing’ in accelerating delivery of uncrewed underwater capability into operations. NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) has been driving forward OPEX integration of MUS in operational environments, for example running a series of uncrewed surface vessel activities in the Baltic in 2025.
In 2027 ACT is planning a similar OPEX event in the Arctic, focused on uncrewed underwater vehicles, within a wider Arctic/MUS programme launched on 6 June. This event is AUWB-MN’s headmark aim. Prior to that, ‘REPMUS 26’ will be used to de-risk and assess what Phase 2’s TRE might be able to deliver, with a view to developing this architecture into a standardised NATO product that member navies can then apply to their own capability development process.
OPEX activities like ‘REPMUS’ are crucial to developing concepts like AUWB-MN. “If you want to get your countries to buy into the resources you need to build this at scale, you’ve got to prove it works,” Danbury explained. “If they see it actually does work and does deliver effect, it’s a much easier task then to get the resources to scale, which is what we need to do if we’re going to bring this fully into the operational space.”
NATO’s latest Alliance Maritime Strategy, published in October 2025, noted that “In the maritime domain Russia retains significant capability and is upgrading its maritime forces and introducing new technologies, including underwater reconnaissance and underwater warfare.”
Underwater warfare has traditionally focused on ASW, but today the concept holistically includes the addition of ‘old’ and ‘new’: old, being the return of the naval mine warfare (NMW) risk; and new, being the arrival of CUI threats. NATO’s SDI ASW Barrier programme was established to counter the ASW element. The AUWB-MN concept emerged to provide architecture capability and capacity to address the entire threat – what navies term today underwater warfare (UWW).
Generating geographically holistic coverage across NATO’s area of responsibility, and encompassing the ASW, CUI, and NMW threats, requires a significant uplift in NATO naval mass. The sensing capability alone needed to cover these areas and tasks is vast, stretching from seabed to space.
With NATO’s navies challenged in affording sufficient submarines and ASW-focused frigates, the AUWB-MN concept is designed to support transition from using a smaller number of large platforms to a larger number of smaller platforms, namely MUS, Burton explained. The same paradigm applied for the other tasks, he added, noting, “It very soon became apparent that the architecture we were going to deliver wasn’t just for ASW; it was for seabed warfare writ large.”
Burton described the challenge as building an underwater ‘internet of things’, but having many ‘things’ and no ‘internet’ to connect them. Linking this greater mass of smaller systems is where their value is added and AUWB-MN provides the architecture within which to do this. Such connectivity encompasses C2, secure communications, and – especially – data collection and sharing. “We need to know where all these [adversary] assets are,” Burton said. “This is fundamentally about harvesting, fusing, and exploiting data from multiple sources.”
Covering the ASW Barrier and AUWB-MN programmes in another briefing, this time at the Navy Leaders’ Combined Naval Event in Farnborough, UK, in May 2026, Danbury reiterated the importance of data. “Unless you have the ability to manage the C2 and the data that collectively as an alliance your ASW systems are producing, you will not be able to reach the end-state [of matching user requirements against assessed threats],” he explained. In this context, he continued, AUWB-MN was designed to provide reliable, common battlespace C2 network protocols and data management across allies and their operations.
Harnessing, managing, using and exploiting data to enable NATO navies to tackle the threats they face underlines a crucial point: data is a strategic asset within the AUWB-MN concept. AUWB-MN itself reflects NATO’s underwater battlespace data requirements, from ‘big picture’ down to tactical-level needs.
In ‘big picture’ terms, AUWB-MN provides the architecture for the underwater element of NATO’s North Atlantic Council-approved ‘Digital Ocean’ construct, which is aiming to integrate data from all maritime assets – naval and commercial – into a ‘bigger’ common operational picture (COP). So, Burton explained, AUWB-MN is in strategic alignment with NATO’s overall direction.
At the operational level AUWB-MN will provide a ‘databus’ around which to build various operational planning components, including the underwater COP, mission planning tools and data fusion software. It is also the tool for delivering operational alignment across NATO navies, providing a single architecture that can meet national requirements (like the UK’s new ‘Atlantic Bastion’ underwater sensing network).
At the tactical level the various different assets – crewed, as well as uncrewed – will need to communicate with each other, both directly underwater and indirectly via ground control stations. AUWB-MN will provide the enabling architecture for this.
Including addressing the operational reality of the physical challenges in moving data underwater, AUWB-MN also is addressing how to manage this data volume in terms of storing, moving and analysing it so the data can be used as, when and where needed.
AUWB-MN will also need to handle the operational and tactical complexity data brings. “The data being utilised in any battle within the underwater battlespace can consist of data that needs to be processed in real time, near real time or any number of different strata of slower time, whether that be strategic or even tactical post-mission analysis data. So the data isn’t a simple construct; it’s a complex web,” Danbury told the Gothenburg event.
Danbury explained that, alongside threat platforms’ acoustic data, there are two broad types of environmental data the network aims to collate and exploit: first, historical data collected over long time periods, including bathymetry cycles and seabed environmental data; and second, rapid environmental assessment (REA) data recorded in real time or near real time in the water column during an operation or battle and used to optimise asset use.
Alongside encompassing all elements of the underwater threat, AUWB-MN is designed to cover all areas of the Euro-Atlantic theatre. Very broadly, NATO’s ASW threat may be more specific to the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) Gap and Norwegian Sea, plus the Eastern Mediterranean; the Baltic is a location for CUI and NMW risks; and the Russo-Ukraine war has seen significant NMW in the Black Sea.
AUWB-MN provides an architecture that enables NATO navies to put in place operational concepts that meet their regional needs, for example establishing an ASW barrier that holds at risk adversary submarines around the GIUK Gap.
“Countries should be able to use this to build what they need in waters that are in their area of interest – the Baltic being one, the North Atlantic definitely being one, and the Mediterranean being another, for example,” said Danbury.
