Thales has launched a new mission capability package designed to help navies in their respective transitions towards delivering ‘hybrid’, crewed/uncrewed, mine warfare operational outputs.
While being a new package, Expeditionary PathMaster integrates existing Thales naval mine warfare (NMW) concepts and capabilities, including the company’s M-Cube mission management system and Mi-Map sonar analysis application software; and the e-POC expeditionary portable operations centre hardware. The company’s idea is to combine these elements into an affordable, scalable, rapidly deliverable mission package, using a ‘building block’ approach allowing navies to pick the capability they need and when.
Releasing details to media, Thales said Expeditionary PathMaster is ready now. It can be operational in a navy following a six-month integration process.
The concept is designed to provide full mine countermeasures (MCM) mission capability globally, through integrating crewed and uncrewed assets including those from a third party (like autonomous and remotely controlled uncrewed underwater vehicles [UUVs], as well as conventional, crewed minehunters), Thales said in a 26 March statement.
The statement noted that Expeditionary PathMaster, based on a system developed for France’s Marine Nationale (MN) and already tested successfully with the Lithuanian Navy, reflects current naval operational requirements by providing capacity to secure critical undersea infrastructure and deliver expeditionary and amphibious operations.
Building blocks
In their journeys towards introducing uncrewed capabilities and force structures, navies – using established roadmaps – are building ‘hybrid’ NMW at different scales and rates. “We want to be able to deliver – with the building blocks now available – systems or part of the system to support these countries in their own journey,” Benoît Drier de Laforte – Thales’ operational advisor for MCM, and a former MN officer – told a media briefing.
Around the backbone of M-Cube and Mi-Map, sensors and other assets from both crewed and uncrewed platforms (the former, including legacy vessels) can be integrated into the Expeditionary PathMaster construct, Drier explained. Together, the package offers a modular, ‘toolbox’ construct that can be scaled up from operation on a single, three-screen laptop to use across an entire command centre. It can be installed on different hardware, too.
The package can also be applied to other operational tasks like anti-submarine warfare, Drier added.
MCM operations use acoustic wave properties to map the seabed and detect suspicious objects, Drier said. “The most challenging part of MCM operations relies on the ability to distinguish the suspicious echoes from the underwater environment. This step is called the classification phase.”
Effective classification is crucial in ensuring all mines in a mission area are discovered in a time-efficient manner, without needing to investigate every contact, and enabling the area to be re-opened for shipping as soon as possible, he added.
“The second challenge raised by using uncrewed systems is the huge amounts of data human operators have to deal with,”Drier said. Modern, high-resolution sonar antennas generate significant data volumes: a tool like Mi-Map enables real-time and post-mission data analysis relating to detection, classification, and localization requirements, and in so doing reduces operator workload, he added.
The M-Cube and Mi-Map elements have been integrated together previously. When harnessed with Thales’ artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator cortAIx, M-Cube works with Mi-Map “to manage multiple parallel sonar analysis sessions …, providing real-time updates on session progress and detected objects”, the Thales statement said.
Improving target classification is a central element of what the package’s AI-enhanced capability adds. Thales said the package components combine to process sonar data up to four times faster while delivering 99% precise target classification. Drier added that trials with navies have shown this figure can be achieved even under demanding operational and time constraints, like securing port access.
Feedback flow
Although a new construct and with no contracts yet received to supply Expeditionary PathMaster, demonstrations conducted include for existing Thales customers and other navies. “We have already integrated the new system, we have already put the system in the hands of some customers, and we have already put some systems in the water as the Expeditionary PathMaster,” Drier said.
Thales has developed the building blocks of this new capability through previous work with the French, Japanese, Singaporean, and UK navies, for example. Particularly, through its existing contract as industry prime for delivering the France/UK Maritime Mine Counter Measures (MMCM) programme for the MN and UK Royal Navy (RN), data has flowed back from the two navies to inform Expeditionary PathMaster development, Drier explained.
This feedback also revealed what Drier referred to as “a new paradigm” brought about through uncrewed system operations. “In addition to the sonar antenna and signal processing, we could see that the ability to simultaneously deploy and co-ordinate a wide range of uncrewed assets plays a central role in overall efficiency,” he explained. M-Cube’s role in providing a clearer operational picture to assist faster decision-making is key, here.
The individual Expeditionary PathMaster blocks – e-POC, M-Cube, and Mi-Map – have already been delivered to the MN and RN, and are being used in qualification processes and exercises. In this context, the construct has demonstrated its third-party integration capacity with MN A27 and RN REMUS 600 UUVs. The MN is also using scaled-up e-POC capability (with integrated M-Cube and Mi-Map software) across its MCM command centres.
Blocks have been used in NATO Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) exercises, too. Furthermore, Expeditionary PathMaster has been tested with the Lithuanian Navy, which is looking to integrate UUV operations with its in-service mine hunters. Expeditionary PathMaster offered the ability to do this very quickly, Drier said.
“We really want to be able to integrate any kind of asset already in service in some navies, or that would be a priority for a navy as a national solution,” he added.
Underlining the flexibility and affordability designed to sit centrally in the construct, Drier continued: “The size of the ‘toolbox’ relies more on the choice of the assets you want to put into it – but it offers the ability to build a more affordable ‘toolbox’, especially if it is the first step in developing uncrewed system [capability] for the navy.”
As navies take this first step, the ‘toolbox’ approach also helps them manage and develop their doctrine, organization, equipment, and human resource training to prepare for using uncrewed systems on operations, he added.
Naval News Comment
In early 2026, there has been significant politico-military focus on the Gulf and the mine threat to the Strait of Hormuz. Yet, Expeditionary PathMaster’s development reflects longer-term, steadily returning requirements amongst NATO navies for building NMW capability. NATO and its navies are preparing for the likelihood, in the event of crisis or conflict, that key sea lines of communication, maritime choke points, and littoral shore access areas would be contested, and possibly mined. This is a lesson NATO will be learning from the extensive use of mines in the Black Sea, in the ongoing Russo-Ukraine war. Events in the Gulf regarding Hormuz access have, however, reiterated the role of multinational coalitions – formal or otherwise – in potentially conducting operations to ensure access through choke points. Expeditionary PathMaster is designed to enable interoperability in such activities.
