The Ministry of Defence has told Parliament that four Maritime Mine Counter Measures systems have been procured for the Royal Navy, that two have been delivered, and that one of them has entered service in support of potential operations in the Middle East. In the Government’s Major Projects Portfolio return for the Mine Hunting Capability programme, into which those systems are delivered, the programme carries a total baseline whole-life cost of £459 million, an end date of 31 March 2034 and a delivery confidence assessment of Amber. None of those figures establishes how much maritime access the Royal Navy can assure. A mine-countermeasures force provides that access by turning information about an underwater threat into a decision that ships can act upon. Autonomous detection changes how that information is collected, but the usable capability also depends on identification, authorised intervention, trained personnel and the means to repeat the task. Moving sensors and remotely operated vehicles away from a crewed minehunter redistributes these responsibilities across equipment, command centres, support organisations and host platforms, so the capability has to be read through the relationships between its parts rather than through a count of autonomous boats. That is what leaves the central question open: at what point does a delivered configuration become a mission package that a navy can accept, sustain and repeat?