RFA Lyme Bay

RFA Lyme Bay is a Royal Fleet Auxiliary landing ship dock that is serving as the mothership for the Royal Navy's autonomous mine-countermeasures force package. On 27 May 2026 the crewless minehunter RNMB Ariadne docked inside Lyme Bay off Gibraltar on its first attempt, marking the first successful at-sea recovery of an autonomous minehunter into a mothership in Royal Navy history. In early June 2026, Lyme Bay called at Toulon and embarked the French Navy's Sirius USV alongside Ariadne, the first time both nations' autonomous MMCM systems have operated from a single mothership in a deployment context. Commander Dan Herridge described the exercise as "bringing together people, platforms and technology at short notice". Both systems are products of the Anglo-French MMCM programme in development since 2015. Oman then authorised the UK and France to begin clearing mines on its southern Hormuz route shortly before 7 July 2026, but a tanker attack that same day set the timeline back before Lyme Bay's force package could start clearance.

The ship carries both RNMB Ariadne and the Project Beehive Kraken K3 SCOUT USVs, making it the platform from which the Royal Navy's first operational autonomous mine-countermeasures force is commanded and controlled. The use of a large support ship as an autonomous vessel carrier reflects the Royal Navy's doctrine of crewed platforms as motherships for uncrewed systems, with crew ashore or aboard the mother vessel rather than above the minefield. The Toulon integration extends that concept to Coalition operations: a single RFA hull now operates allied autonomous systems from two navies under one roof. The Kraken K3 SCOUT USVs it carries gained a second delivery route on 8 July 2026, when Kraken and Capewell completed the world's first extracted-load USV airdrop from an A400M, meaning future K3 hulls can reach a theatre without needing Lyme Bay to carry them the whole way.

Lyme Bay's Hormuz deployment is the operational realisation of the First Sea Lord's 19 May 2026 doctrine. The mission is described as strictly defensive; clearance operations had still not begun as of the tanker attack that followed Oman's 7 July authorisation.