UK Defence Minister Luke Pollard confirmed on 17 July 2026 that Britain will procure three offshore support vessels jointly with Norway as the next tranche of the Mine Hunting Capability (MHC) programme, with £90 million set aside inside a wider £1.3 billion autonomous mine-countermeasures effort.1 The ships are motherships, built to carry, store, maintain and control the autonomous Ariadne-class minehunters now positioned off Hormuz.
An uncrewed minehunter still needs a hull to launch, recover, refuel and command it. That is why the first-of-class HMS Stirling Castle was a converted oil-rig support vessel bought for about £40 million rather than a warship built from scratch. Committing money to three more of them turns a single deployed asset into a class, the load-bearing part of the autonomy transition that headlines rarely name.
Building with Norway also ties Britain's mine-hunting backbone to a Nordic supply chain at the same moment a Norwegian prime, Kongsberg, is threading through both the US and European undersea programmes, evidence that the autonomy build-out is running along partnership lines rather than purely national ones.
