Technology demonstrations are opportunities for CMRE to showcase and trial scientific solutions with the operational community. Through participation and demonstration at NATO exercises, events, and experiments, CMRE demonstrates the operational utility of these technologies and receives and integrates feedback directly from operators.

Anti-submarine warfare has been a focus of CMRE's work since its founding in 1959. Today, NATO's deterrence and defence posture requires capacity for state-of-the-art anti-submarine warfare capabilities. This means harnessing emerging technologies, including autonomous systems, for anti-submarine warfare.

CMRE's work on naval mine warfare focuses on developing novel sensors, perception and autonomy algorithms to detect naval mines more effectively, especially in difficult environments. Research under this programme improves NATO's ability to counter naval mines using autonomous unmanned networked capabilities.

CMRE observes, analyses and models the maritime and undersea environment and its impact on NATO anti-submarine warfare operations in strategically important regions notably in the Arctic Ocean. CMRE also develops Autonomous capabilities for rapid environmental assessment.

CMRE works to improve NATO's maritime situational awareness by integrating and processing information across all domains, through developing and demonstrating innovative artificial and information fusion concepts and technologies.

Maritime Resource Enablers facilitate the sharing and exploitation of scientific and experimental datasets within the Alliance and across domains. The CMRE Data Catalogue has made the vast data collected at CMRE discoverable and accessible to NATO and Nations. Additionally, data interoperability standards are developed and implemented to serve as foundations for the work on the Alliance Data Sharing Ecosystem, essential for advancing data centricity in NATO, as demonstrated in 2025 through CMRE's contributions to NATO exercises.

CMRE develops cutting-edge operational and tactical software products and services. Mainsail is an example of a data centric platform developed by CMRE, used in NATO's daily operations to protect critical undersea infrastructure by providing real-time alerts on anomalous vessel behaviour. CMRE continues to improve and enhance its software tools.

Research into Maritime Unmanned Systems Enablers supports effective employment of NATO autonomous systems and focuses on aspects of interoperability, underwater communications, and modelling and simulation. This work includes quantum technologies, secure communications, wargaming, immersive virtual reality environments, and underwater simulations.