Royal Navy's next-gen fleet defence decoy system gets big thumbs up from experts

The Royal Navy's new warship protection decoy system that offers a significant advantage over the current model has been given the seal of approval by more than two dozen experts.

Serving personnel, civil servants, scientists and engineers – who are all specialists in electronic warfare and decoy defences or are involved with multi-billion-pound warship programmes – were impressed by their first sight of the Ancilia launcher.

Ancilia, which was developed by Systems Engineering and Assessment (SEA), will replace the existing Seagnat system that's fitted to major Royal Navy ships.

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Agile and flexible

Like its predecessor, Ancilia is relatively small, lightweight and capable of firing multiple countermeasures.

But Seagnat is fixed, meaning it can only fire in the direction it is pointing and at a specific angle.

Ancilia, in contrast, can swivel rapidly and adjust the angle the decoys are fired at to maximise their effectiveness.

This means there is no need to manoeuvre the ship to counter any incoming threats.

The experts' visit to SEA's Barnstaple facility covered technical discussions and culminated with a live demonstration of the launcher being put through its paces.

"It was impressive to witness SEA's pre-production Ancilia trainable launcher put through its paces in front of all the stakeholders," said Neil Clelland, the senior principal anti-ship missile scientist with Dstl, the government's military laboratories.

"It demonstrated the real engineering progress made so early in the design phase."

Fundamental changes

Mr Clelland added: "Ancilia provides a paradigm shift in the Royal Navy's capability to deploy electronic warfare countermeasures to meet the threat with new more flexible tactics.

"Importantly the new countermeasures interface will enable the exploitation of intelligent countermeasures which are currently being researched to meet the evolving threat."

Two Ancilia systems are due to be fitted to all six Type 45 destroyers as well as the entire next-generation frigate force.

This includes eight Type 26 City-class submarine hunters and five Type 31 Inspiration-class general purpose warships.