Sea Control - Sea Control: 594: From Hulls to Pods with Emma Salisbury

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Links1."The Trump-class Battleship: Spectacle Wins Out over Combat Power," by Emma Salisbury, Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 8, 2026.2. "Want of Frigates: Why Is It So Hard For America to Buy Small Surface Combatants?" by Emma Salisbury, Foreign Policy Research Institute, December 1, 2025.3. "Atlantic Bastion: The Future of Anti-Submarine Warfare," by Emma Salisbury, Foreign Policy Research Institute, August 11, 2025.4. Emma Salisbury FPRI page.

All right, welcome aboard Sea Control fans. This is Jay. My guest today is Dr. Emma Salisbury. She's going to talk about her essay entitled, From Hulls to Pods, Why NATO's Navies Should Be Aware of the Illusion of Mission Modularity. And that's included in the new book from ISPK's Seapower series titled Guardians of the North Atlantic, NATO Maritime Strategies and Naval Operations in Turbulent Times. So, Dr. Salisbury, you're no stranger to the podcast, I know, and probably not to our listeners either if they've been involved in this world for the last several years. But could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. And thank you so much for having me on, Jay. It's a pleasure to be here. um so i am currently a senior fellow at the national security program at the foreign policy research institute and also a fellow at the royal navy strategic study center um i write a lot about naval shipbuilding uh fleet structure anything naval mostly and i post a lot of terrible jokes on social media which is probably where many of your listeners will know you from i disagree not not terrible at all so so uh we'll get right into it thanks so much for that anyone involved in naval affairs for the last few decades i think has probably heard the term

but could you share your definition of mission modularity absolutely so essentially it means instead of procuring a traditional surface ship what a navy does is it acquires a series of standard hulls which have spaces or bays in that hull for installing mission modules. So these are self-contained capability packages basically which are often held in something that just looks like a shipping container but ruggedized for military use. That container then hooks into the hull systems and then changes its operational mode. So your hull gives you the basic services, your power, water data exchange command and control the module then brings the capability so you could have mine sweeping anti-submarine warfare drones etc and then once that particular operation is

over you can take your ship to port and have it reconfigured for a different mission by swapping out one or more of those modules so all you have to do is get your modules to dockside switch them out and then you have a ship that can do something completely different thank you so i'll i'll lead in with going see that seems like a great idea why would why would this why could there be any problems with this whatsoever so uh based on that uh what inspired you to write on this particular topic well i originally um started out writing about the literal combat ship um which is the very famous example of mission modularity for the US Navy. I won't get in here to the myriad problems with the LCS. It's only about a 30 minute podcast. So yeah, we really don't have time for

that. I'm sure your listeners will be very aware of those. But one of the interesting things about the LCS is it's meant to be mission modular, but its modules have never been swapped out. so none of the freedom class or the independence class have ever been reconfigured with mission modules so this made me think what's the point of mission modularity if you're not doing the modularity and then I thought what does modularity look like in other NATO navies do other navies do it better do they do it similarly do they do those swaps out what is the thinking of other NATO navies about modularity which is why I decided to write this essay because this covers modularity in all NATO navies so the um the concept was originated by the Danish with the

Stanflex system which they've used to very great effect so it does mean it is possible to do it well um so I wanted to think about why modularity is used differently in different navies and then what the problems are with it. So as you say, it does sound great, but there are problems that do arise from using it. And what really worries me about mission modularity is that if you focus too much on modularity, you start thinking you can solve all of your problems. So you start to only potentially look at solutions that fit within modularity. You may change your capabilities so they fit within a containerized module and i just think that you know navies need to be aware of that danger and try not to see naval capabilities through that lens so they are using mission

modularity where it is applicable and where it can do good things for the fleet and for operations but not relying on it so much that it kind of shifts how they're thinking about fleet operations more generally awesome that was that was yeah thank you thanks for that one that's it that's a very good summation of these things i'm for timestamp for recording this in january 2026 and we're we're referencing i assume something i assume you wrote probably a year or so ago since it's out in the book here so i'm assuming research and all was done done um on that a little while ago do you have any has anything i guess changed i'm going to go off topic a little bit here off that we talked about earlier has anything changed since you wrote that have you seen

any other successes failures or things that uh the u.s has changed of course our uh well lots of change in the u.s in the last year but our uh ideas from national leadership about what the fleet's going to look like we've canceled the uh the frigate constellation class frigate program that was going to come out which also at some point was discussed about having some modularity on there. Anyway, has anything big changed amongst NATO navies or others since you've written this that either give you hope or make you more concerned? I think that most of the modularity that we see in NATO navies is very much on the frigate classes of ships. So it's for small surface combatants. And that's actually a decent use of modularity because those ships

have so many potential options for their missions that actually adding that flexibility of modularity is probably a good thing um so you have um the danish navy as i said but also the italians and my own british royal navy um all using modularity in very much the frigate space um so i was a bit worried that we'd see modularity trying to be kind of bolted onto destroyers or you know the bigger surface combatants where that may not be what you need and we haven't seen that so that gives me some hope um but as you say the um a lot has changed in the US since I wrote this essay um and yeah I mean American ship building and ship design at the moment seems to be a um very fraught area so i'll be very interested to see what the new ffx design does with modularity

and also you know anything on sort of the small surface combatant area that comes out of the u.s navy because their ship designs seem to be very imaginative shall we say so i could see modularity doing some crazy stuff hopefully hopefully some decision makers will take your your good work and in the context as they move forward thoughts and prayers um it may be obvious also but could you share a little bit about the book's broader theme of turbulent times for nato navies yes i mean when we did um the original concept of the book this was uh two years ago um and it was already a very turbulent time um for nature with the russian invasion of ukraine being kind the catalyst for a lot of um what NATO is is dealing with at the moment that's only really

gotten worse um since we came up with this book concept um I mean only this week we've seen Russian shadow fleet vessels uh in UK waters we've seen um the Russian research ship in big inverted commas the Yantar um skulking around Britain and Ireland there's been all of those sabotage efforts with undersea infrastructure and all of this is Russian hybrid warfare so the from the maritime perspective as well like the situation has only got more turbulent over the last two years and I don't think any of us expected things would get less turbulent while we were writing this book but I think things have got a lot worse than at least I envisaged at the time and in particular that comes with the current state of the u.s because a lot of

european nato allies are very worried about what america would actually do in the event of a lot conflict with russia um a lot of us have been asking questions like would america come to help us at all would they you know what capabilities would they give would america give us kind of background capabilities like intel and logistics but maybe not ships or you know and there's so many questions that was not what we had to think about back when we did this book so that i think has been kind of the key extra turbulence shall we say yeah again for a time stamp this is january 8th 2026 so hopefully nothing's changed too drastically everything could be even worse right exactly but i think your the general themes of this book and certainly your topic are gonna

shipbuilding is not something that uh you know these ships aren't getting cranked out a few a day like back in world war ii so i think that this is gonna this is evergreen topic here and it's great um i want to go back a little bit because again i think a lot of folks are familiar with your writing uh on the simsec here uh podcast gonna be familiar with you could you get a little bit more just in general about I was curious how how folks get into this topic in general um you know as a just could you tell us about just your educational background and all that brought you to this because again you're quite well known amongst amongst the navy world I think right now so anyway just some of that for some of our listeners please yeah honestly it was

completely accidental um so i my undergrad degrees uh are politics um and i've worked for gosh about 17 years now in um british parliament so um i'm a senator for a member of parliament um and then i was doing my master's and i was doing a war studies module which i'd never done before and I just absolutely loved it and it really kind of brought together all of my kind of childhood fascination with ships and planes and you know I was brought up on Top Gun so maybe this was kind of inevitable um and then I stupidly thought I'm going to do a PhD um and my my undergrad degree was also in economics so my PhD thesis was about the defense industrial base um and the military industrial complex and so it was a very kind of joint

dissertation so i had army uh navy air force you know lots of different case studies um but it was focused on the us and the uh case study that i had published was on the cls and um that did very well and people assumed i was navalist and they kept asking me to do navy things and i kept saying yes and i really enjoyed all of it and so that was how i specialized so if i'd you know if i published my u.s air force one then you know i may have been a u.s air force specialist um but no the the navy got me so you're in it you're an official navalist now fantastic i just liked it most folks come to these uh even if they've been in the you know Maybe they come to these levels of expertise via a nonlinear path.

So I just think it's fun to talk down those roads. Awesome. And definitely, you've got good cred to write on this topic. So you're a person, folks on both sides of the Atlantic should be paying attention to, I think. I certainly do. Really appreciate, again, you joining us, talking about this. Before we go, what else are you working on? You've always got a lot of stuff going on.

So could you tell us what else you're working on and where folks can keep up with your good work? well for uh fpri i tend to be the one who writes about us shipbuilding mistakes um so i have a piece on the constellation class and then today um as we're recording um i had one on the trump class battleship um you can probably imagine the level of snark in this analysis but it is a professional analysis i should say um so if anything else terrible happens over the next couple of months i will probably try and write about that um i've also been writing about um the royal navy obviously as a brit um i i should um so i have a paper out on atlantic bastion which is the royal navy's um asw effort um across the north atlantic um and that's all from fpri

nice thanks so much and you were uh you're easy to find on uh twitter and blue sky i believe and probably a few other platforms so fantastic absolutely yeah and we will we will put some links to some of that in the uh show notes folks so you want to you can you can follow focusing following on that well with that i just again want to thank you so much dr salisbury for joining us thanks for a very uh time all evergreen yet timely topic i think really really appreciate it appreciate you uh joining us and appreciate all your good work thank you so much for having me jay it was awesome to talk to you thank you all right See you next time.

Thank you for watching.