Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to Box 12 page 15 of the Strategic Defence Review 2025, updated on 8 July 2025, how do mission bays facilitate (a) rapid upgrades and (b) spiral development.

The Royal Navy has embraced the mission bay concept, which are spaces on our ships into which modular capabilities can be inserted quickly, easily and at very low cost.

Mission bays offer the opportunity to support a standardised footprint capability module (be this a ‘pod’ or otherwise). This supports spiral development by narrowing the boundary (or scope) of any developments to this footprint, relying upon the initial standardisation specification. Therefore, rapid upgrades can be embedded within the platform through the much shorter route of exchanging the podded or modular component, rather than engaging in constructive re-design of a system already integrated into the platform.