Fit To Fight Tonight?

It has been revealed that HMS DIAMOND, a Type 45 destroyer, is returning home significantly earlier than planned from her deployment due to ‘broken propellers’. This has led to the curtailing of her Middle East deployment and the prospect of a Christmas at home for her crew. For the RN, 2017 was supposed to be ‘the Year of the Navy’, yet as the year draws to a close, it seems to be in a position where it does not have a single escort ship deployed outside of home waters. The MOD have reasonably pointed out that today there are 16 ships outside of home waters on operations (primarily in the Gulf, South Atlantic and Caribbean) with a further 16 preparing to deploy.

The RN is fond of using the mantra ‘we must be ready to fight tonight’ as a reminder that when on operations, there is a need to switch from a peacetime mentality to going to war in a matter of hours. With this latest news, coupled with the revelations about further cuts, the question needs to be asked – ‘Is the RN fit to fight tonight’?

How bad is this news?

Since 1980 the Royal Navy has maintained a permanent presence ‘east of Suez’ in the Gulf, sustaining one or two destroyers & frigates in the region at all times (so-called ‘task lines’). Until a few years ago the RN maintained two escorts permanently in the region – usually a destroyer & frigate to support operations, contingency plans and deliver wider defence engagement. This usually took the form of 6-7 month deployments, with ships handing over in region.

This was cut to one escort a few years ago at the same time as deployment lengths increased to 9 months (which in practise was 8 months with a month off in the middle for a leave period). In the last 15 months HMS DARING spent a significant period of time in the Gulf before being replaced by HMS MONMOUTH back in April.  The plan seems to have been that HMS MONMOUTH was to be replaced by HMS DIAMOND, swapping out the general purpose capability of the Type 23 with an air defence platform. The Type 45s are highly valued in the Gulf due to their exceptional radar / SAM combination and ability to integrate well with the USN CVBG (when that is in region).

With DIAMOND heading home without entering Suez, the RN finds itself on the verge of a difficult decision. MONMOUTH has been deployed now for a very long time, and is reported to be heading home (albeit she is still in the Med), but the option to turn her around and extend on task is still there.  The risk at present is that the RN has for the first time in nearly 40 years found itself without a single escort ship east of Suez. There is no sugar coating the fact that this is reputationally embarrassing, and more importantly comes on the back of a constant whittling down of the RN force east of Suez.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The RN force in the Middle East has for many years been built around 1-2 escorts, 4 MCMVs, a tanker & stores ship (sometimes combined as an AOR), a repair ship and/or LSD(A) and supporting hydrographic and submarine forces on an occasional basis. On a normal day you would reasonably expect to see 10-12 RN/RFA ships operating in the region.

Today there are four MCMVs and an LSD(A). There are no escorts or tanker. A nearly 40yr old dry stores ship (FORT ROSALIE) is reportedly about to begin a deployment to the region, but is still en-route. The force has been hollowed out, losing its high end warfighting units and its enablers like the tanker – which plays a critical part in supporting wider coalition operations, and gaps seem to be taking ever long to fill.

The reduction in force levels is not isolated to the RN – the USN routinely now gaps its Carrier Battle Group in the region for several months of the year, and other navies tend to keep a maximum of one escort ship locally. But for the RN to gap its escort task line at a time when many other nations are able to sustain it shows just how thinly stretched the RN is right now.

The problem is that this gapping comes on the back of reports of further cuts to RN strength and will serve to build concerns in the minds of allies as to whether the RN is credibly able to ‘fight tonight’ in the event of a crisis. For years the certainty has always been that come what may, the Royal Navy would be in the region and ready to fight. It now looks like this can currently no longer be taken for granted – a message that will sit poorly both with Washington, who expect the UK to take up some of the ‘carrier gap’ by deploying QUEEN ELIZABETH to the region, and with wider Gulf allies who look to the UK to provide high end warfighting skills.

How do we fix this gap?

For the RN the challenge is that as an organisation it sets the very highest standards and expectations of its people and platforms. For a ship to deploy ‘through the ditch’ and go East of Suez is not just a matter of sailing from the UK and rocking up a few weeks later for an extensive round of cocktail parties. Any ship deploying on OP KIPION will have gone through a sustained period of work ups to ensure her crew are trained to operate in the very complex maritime security environment and able to do anything from handling suspected piracy incidents to being able to fight a high conflict.

The passage requires ships to tackle three of the worlds great maritime chokepoints (Suez, Bab-al-Mendab and Straits of Hormuz), all of which pose major security risks. Only last year HMS DARING was repeatedly at action stations as she escorted UK entitled ships through the BAM in a high risk environment. Similarly a Straits of Hormuz transit is a challenging operation requiring not just seamanship, but diplomatic skills and an ability to judge incidents to prevent a tactical problem like an Iranian go-fast coming too close becoming a strategic crisis. It is worth watching the documentary filmed on HMS OCEAN last year to see how challenging some of these evolutions really are.

Similarly ships deploying into an operational theatre require modifications or fitting of specific equipment. They need to be certain that it all works, that the Ships Company is trained and able to operate as required and any additional augmentees (such as RM security teams) are fully integrated. Finally there needs to be confidence that the platform is able to deploy at the right standard, able to operate at the highest levels and does not have any significant defects that could impinge on her ability to operate in a high threat environment.

This is one reason why traditionally the RN has relied on a 3:1 ratio of ships to tasks – you need time to ensure that the ship deploying is able to work up and be ready to sail, and you need time on return to wind down and take leave. It is often forgotten that the work up to a deployment can be as long and time consuming as the deployment itself – with all the attendant pressures this places on family and friends.

Reading between the lines it seems that the RN and PJHQ were not sufficiently confident in the ability of HMS DIAMOND to operate in the region effectively due to her ongoing issues to send her through Suez and chop over to CJOs control. On the one hand this is, perhaps paradoxically, good news. Not because of the cancellation, but because it demonstrates that the RN and PJHQ are prepared to take genuinely tough decisions in cancelling a deployment rather than sending a vessel not 100% able to fight into the region. Had they sent her through, the risk to UK sailors could have been considerable if the fault had occurred at a dangerous time (such as a Straits transit).

The problem though is that there is not seemingly another platform worked up and ready to go now to replace MONMOUTH. This is not necessarily something that would be fixed with having more ships in the fleet though. You need to be able to have sufficient ships at sufficiently high readiness to deploy and able to do so in a manner that doesn’t disrupt the wider programme.

Every ship in the RN has a clear programme of activity mapped out for it – almost down to the day for a significant period of time ahead. This programme maps out where the ship is going and when she will be in refit and more importantly what training is required to get her ready to be on task at a specific point in time. The fleet programmers have to balance off the challenge of meeting agreed standing military tasks like KIPION, balancing sufficient time in maintenance/refit to keep ships operational and ensure they won’t fall over later on, and ensure crews are not run ragged and leave (thus causing a downstream retention problem), and they need to do this while being able to respond to the unexpected.

To take a worked up ship off one programme (e.g. in old money taking a ship due to be a Falklands Guardship and instead sending her to the Gulf at 3 days notice) is doable, but involves a lot of juggling about to then rejig programmes to find another platform to send to the Falklands. Having more ships would only help in cases such as this if they were held at a high level of readiness and were able to slip seamlessly into the programme. In reality it is unlikely that a much larger navy would have any large number of ships worked up to deploy at this level of notice for 8-9 months.

The challenge for the RN now is to decide what to do about the gap and whether it is worth bearing the gap, or sending a short notice deployer out for a few months instead. The problem with temporarily covering the gap is that it causes major disruption to another ships programme – for instance, you could identify a T23 or T45 that is advanced in her work up cycle and accelerate it, and deploy her for 4-5 months to cover the bulk of the gap.  But in doing so you then take the ship off the task she was programmed for, causing both  a longer term gap that will need to be fixed and also impacting on manpower harmony too. The risk is that to fix a short term reputational gap, the RN could actually cause itself a much bigger long term problem instead that disrupts a significant chunk of the escort fleet.

Whither the Escort Fleet?

The RN today really has to explain what the purpose of its escort fleet is actually for. To the layperson they see a force of 19 ships which cost billions of pounds to build and hundreds of millions to keep operating every year. Yet to a layperson they don’t seem to be at sea anywhere near as often as they used to be, and they seem to break down a lot. The Type 45 fleet (at least in the eyes of the public) seems to spend much more time alongside in Portsmouth than it does at sea.

There are a number of discrete tasks that need to be met in home waters that do need worked up ships – the Fleet Ready Escort and the Towed Array Patrol Ship – essential tasks to ensure the UK is well placed to respond to unexpected visitors. These require worked up ships and cannot easily be gapped without considerable risk to wider UK security and the Deterrent. There are a number of tasks in European waters which require escorts too – the constant churn of NATO exercises and reassurances visits, and also work in the Med handling some of the migrant crisis.

These roles are unglamorous and often not associated with a specific deployment, but do need to be done. By Humphrey’s reckoning, this year only 4 escorts have actually deployed outside of the UK/NATO waters area on actual operations – HMS DARING (deployed 2016-2017 to Gulf), HMS PORTLAND (deployed 2016-2017 to Falklands via Gulf), HMS MONMOUTH (early 2017 – Dec 2017 to Gulf) and HMS DIAMOND. Other ships such as HMS DUNCAN have done shorter tours in NATO waters, and there has almost certainly been a constant flow of activation for operations via FRE and TAPS. The problem for the RN though is that it doesn’t seem to be very good at explaining why it needs 19 ships to do this – the taxpayer does not see the enormous effort required to work a ship up to fully operational state, nor easily understand why 19 ships can only generate 2 actually on station outside of home waters at a time.

The curious problem is that the RN does in the medium term need more ships, but in the short term it needs enough manpower to fully crew the ships that it does have. Programmers have to balance off the need to deploy and meet outputs with the need to not break their people. In the medium term most RN officers openly admit a fleet of 23-30 escorts is what is needed to have sufficient ships to do the tasks asked of them – but to get there will require decades of recruitment to grow the right people. In the short term the RN has to be able to coherently explain to a sceptical public why it needs more people and ships when in their eyes it can’t get the ones it has to sea anyway.

There are no easy solutions to a problem like this. You could look at forward deploying an escort into the Middle East on a permanent basis, and stage one out of Bahrain and HMS JUFAIR. On paper this looks attractive as a means of always having an RN vessel on station. In reality it would probably cost more money and reduce availability to do stuff.

It would cost more as if you use Bahrain as a base port, you’d need to put a lot more spare parts and logistics support in place to support the ship on an enduring basis. You also need to programme in time for maintenance periods and refits over a sustained cycle and consider how to manage crew changes in a way that kept the ship fully operational. This would cause disruption and extra costs as you’d constantly be moving crew in and out of region – rather than keeping the ship as a formed unit for the duration of the deployment. It is doable, but less than optimal. It would attract a large manpower bill to keep a single ship supported locally on an enduring basis.

There are also the additional unexpected ‘extra’ costs – such as all the extra visits to region by support staff, quality assurance and training teams. The need to determine how the ship remains fully operational in the eyes of FOST when it would have an ever changing crew, and finally the need to ship out lots of parts for regular use that normally get provided by a baseport. All of this is eminently doable, but is not necessarily as cheap as just rotating an escort through on a sustained basis which enters theatre ready to conduct warfighting operations.

Finally the question is what ship do you send, and what impact does this have on the wider RN fleet? The RN essentially has 3 types of ship now – the GP and ‘ASW tail (e.g. Towed Array) variants of the T23 and the air defence T45. Both the ASW T23 and T45 are seen by allies, particularly the US as hugely capable platforms and are keenly sought. But, to permanently tie one up in the Gulf means reducing their availability for other tasks, like FRE, TAPS or escorting a carrier. The GP T23 is less capable, but still valuable, but for allies would they prefer to see an old non specialised hull in the region permanently, or know they can have a rotating platform that helps meet their specialist needs? More importantly, how would tying one hull up in the Gulf permanently impact on the wider fleet programme? There are no easy answers to questions like this.

Conclusion

As 2017 comes to a close, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the RN has had a bloody awful year. For all the good news of QUEEN ELIZABETH going to sea, it has struggled to show why 2017 has been ‘the year of the Navy’. Regular reports of huge planned cuts, an ongoing manpower crisis, damning media articles on the proclivities of the Submarine service and now reports of the most critical overseas deployment being gapped for the first time in nearly 40 years all add up to the perception of a Service that has lost its way.

By itself the failure of DIAMOND to make it to the Gulf is not embarrassing – it is a reality that very complex machinery can, and does, break. The T45s have operated successfully in the Gulf on several occasions without major incident. But it helps build a picture of a Service that is struggling to keep ships at sea. The fact that as the year draws to a close, it appears likely that the RN will not have a single escort ship deployed outside of UK waters for the first time probably in centuries is an insight into how stretched it is and how difficult it is to sustain the pace of deployment. 

We are now really seeing for the first time the RN fail in a most public way on meeting its escort commitments – for a Service used to winning and not publicly letting the team down, this is a painful place to be. The hope has to be that from a publicity perspective 2017 was the ‘Nadir of the Royal Navy’ not the ‘Year of the Royal Navy’ and that sustained investment in recruitment, retention and maintenance to keep platforms at sea will make this a one off, and not an increasingly common incident. 

On the positive side we must consider that the RN is, and remains a globally deployable navy. It has ships operating in the majority of the worlds oceans - it has had a challenging year, but compared to any other Navy out there, it is perhaps significantly better placed to meet, address and resolve the challenges it faces. 

The question that anyone who cares about the RN right now has to ask is simple – ‘Is the Royal Navy ready to fight tonight’?