PARIS — Navies across the globe are facing the need to adapt quickly to evolving threats by rapidly fielding emerging technologies, and France is trying to accomplish this by putting engineers right beside naval officers onboard its ships, the French navy’s chief of staff said Nov. 4.

Adm. Nicolas Vaujour said during a panel discussion at the Euronaval conference in Paris that the distance between an engineer and a ship’s chief petty officer must be reduced to zero.

In the weeks following the conference, the French navy plans to have engineers who specialize in artificial intelligence work alongside chief petty officers onboard ships “in order to understand very well what we need, what we really need,” Vaujour said.

Adm. Benjamin Key, First Sea Lord of the U.K. Royal Navy, said as opposed to the “20th century analog way of viewing the world,” today the technologies needed for maritime operational advantage are evolving “at digital speed and pace.”

As such, “the most important people in any ship are the ones that are able to envisage and grasp the digital opportunities and necessities,” Key said. “Now, we're seeing people who are engaged in a naval contest who may never have been to sea, and it is a very different way of thinking about how you achieve the freedom of maneuver on the high seas, which we want for all those who are going about their lawful and peaceful business.”

There will always be a need for surface ships and submarines, “but the way in which they're operated, the key people onboard and the skill sets we need to take in are going to be extremely different from those that we've been used to,” he said.

For example, “the speed at which we want to iterate the capabilities is going to be far quicker than the speed at which we can build a hull,” he said. “So, you have to detach the operational capability from the platform, and that is quite a mindset shift.”

Key said similar initiatives are happening in the United Kingdom where people undertake “zigzag careers” in which they serve in the military and then go on to work in industry but remain reservists “so that they can then come back in, and then you get that cross-pollination of understanding.”

“Once you've got that, you've actually got an ecosystem that is prepared to take more risk,” Key said. “What we've traditionally built under an acquisition system is quite a long concept of assessment phase, very tightly defined parameters against which the contract is judged, then you place the money down, the product is passed over and making any changes is a very time-consuming” process.

“What we need now is something that feels to me much more like a partnership where risk on both sides is more comfortably managed in order to iterate and innovate to maintain operational advantage, and that requires us, I think, to have a subtly different relationship,” he said.

Vaujour said having engineers onboard ships will represent a new type of partnership with industry, “but I think they are ready to do that.”

Increasing industry’s understanding of “where we are, what we need … will accelerate” innovation, he said.

“We have to take risks. The industry [has] to take risks. We have to take risks together, and we have to test together,” he said.