Reserving the Rivers - Could the RNR keep these ships at sea?

It has been confirmed that as part of Brexit contingency planning, approximately £12m has been made available to the MOD to keep all three Batch 1 River class OPVs in reserve pending a full assessment of fishery protection requirements as the UK exits the EU.

This announcement, slipped out in Parliament confirms that for the first time in many years, the Royal Navy will actively maintain a small reserve fleet capability. Other than singleton LPDs like HMS INTREPID and HMS ALBION, who went into reserve after the 2010 SDSR, and whose £100m reactivation was so costly partly because she had spent years alongside without any crew onboard, the RN has actively tried to avoid maintaining any semblance of reserve ‘standby squadrons’ since the mid-1980s.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The cost of keeping three middle aged OPVs that have been worked very hard (each averaging some 300 days at sea per year for the best part of 15 years (that’s approximately 12 of the last 15 years at sea or available for sea) works out at roughly £4m per hull to keep them alongside for the next two years.

The MOD has previously estimated that keeping a River class operational cost about £5.5m per year according to FOI requests. So, to keep one in reserve not doing anything for the next two years will cost approximately £2m per year. In other words, it costs about 40% of the cost of keeping the ship at sea to keep her alongside doing nothing.

This money will presumably be spent on maintenance, preservation and ensuring that if required in two years’ time, they could be reactivated with minimal hassle. It is not clear whether the ships will have crews attached to them to keep them ‘ticking over’ or if they will be left unmanned and routinely docked and repaired. Either way, this is a lot of money to spend for an asset to do nothing.

For the Royal Navy the bigger challenge is not that of recommissioning them in 2020 if needed to scare off pesky fishermen in UK waters, but working out how on earth they could be manned if they had to be recommissioned without doing real and lasting damage to other commitments.

The challenge of the OPV force is that it works incredibly hard, and their ships spend most of their time at sea delivering across a wide range of roles. They rely on a ‘third watch’ manning system, which means at any one time roughly 30% of the ships company is not onboard and is instead on courses or leave – this is the only way that they can keep up with the heavy demand for their services.

To bring them back into service would place a significant manpower burden on the RN, who would need to find approximately 150 personnel on an enduring basis to man them. This may not sound like much in a Naval Service of 30,000 people, but the headline figures conceal the challenges. The surface navy (e.g. trained personnel for the surface fleet) is approximately 15000 strong (the balance being made up by the RM, FAA and Submarine Service).

There is not a generic pool of 15,000 sailors who can be put onboard at no notice. To crew these ships means finding three ships companies worth of crew with the right skills to do specific roles (e.g. engineers, logisticians, warfare specialists etc) in the right ranks/rates and right level of training who can go to sea as needed. Instead there are small (often tiny) sub branches of people – 50 here or 2-300 there who provide the manpower for the whole surface fleet.

The branch structures are designed to generate the right number of bodies on an enduring basis to meet all likely ships complements from carriers to survey vessels. It also needs spare bodies to ensure certain shore based roles that are essential to support shore work in dockyards and headquarters that helps keep the fleet at sea. There is also a small allowance for trying to cover for training, career courses and compassionate or medical cases, and giving people a breather away from the relentless demands of life at sea. Too much sea time or too many sea drafts will quickly lead to retention challenges, which in turn makes the problem worse. Amongst all this the Career Managers must ensure they have enough trained and qualified personnel at the right level to meet all the demands of the Navy.

Suddenly adding in a requirement to generate an additional three ships companies worth of crew places significant pressure. If your sub branch is 70 strong, and you have to constantly generate 40 Leading Seamen for existing seagoing billets, adding in a need to find an extra six leading seamen (say two per ship) on an enduring basis places real pressure on career managers – its equivalent to adding  a 15% additional requirement in billets with no uplift in manpower to meet it. This can make life extremely challenging.

Consequently reactivation has the potential to cause major long term challenges for the RN manpower planners, who may not have a clear idea of where to get the people to man these three ships without gapping posts (reducing the ability of other ships to deploy), paying other warships off early (thus freeing up personnel to meet requirements), or reducing shore time and putting more people to sea (reducing retention and raising costs considerably due to the increased amount of payable allowances for seagoers).

What about the Royal Naval Reserve?

One suggestion put out on social media to meet the manpower needs would be to mobilise the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) to fill the ships companies out and either man the ships themselves, or backfill elsewhere to enable the regulars to go to sea. To Humphrey this is a very emphatic ‘bad idea’.

The RNR until the early 1990s had both sea going and shore based elements, intended to provide both a Minesweeping squadron (known as MCM10) and also onshore HQ support. Defence cuts in the 1990s saw the end of the seagoing role, and the structures required to put RNR personnel to sea as a coherent ships company were lost, with the RNR instead focusing purely on filling shore based billets.

This massive change meant that the RNR refocused its efforts on instead becoming a niche support organisation, delivering across a range of requirements to meet RN needs – such as providing intelligence, information operations, media handling and maritime trade support. Outside of a tiny number of very niche areas (mostly the old amphibious warfare area), hardly any RNR personnel go to sea except for basic training.

The challenge for keeping a seagoing ships company is that you need to be able to maintain the core skills and understanding of how to work safely and effectively onboard a ship – these are easily perishable and require a lot of work to keep up. It worked in the Cold War because RNR units had a sufficient cadre of experienced manpower at all levels to get their ships to sea at the weekend, and occasionally for longer exercises, and they relied heavily on the RN to provide ‘weekday’ cover and sign over the ships on the weekend.

The RNR has long stopped this sort of work, and instead refocused itself into a highly effective organisation that delivers timely support to the RN and MOD. This means it covers areas where it is not sustainable to run full time careers plots (for instance certain very nice roles like working with merchant shipping), or to fill specific slots on battlestaffs. It is not as an organisation designed or able to suddenly up sticks and man three OPVs.

The wider challenge is how do you get people to form the crew in the first place? A real challenge with reservists is deciding on the point when you need to call them out and use them. One suggestion was that the RNR could mobilise people to go to sea and keep the OPVs active while the RN recruited and trained regulars to take over.

Mobilisation is not something that should be done lightly – compulsory mobilisation is a powerful means of getting manpower in a crisis, but immediately ‘times out’ the Reservist from being compulsorily mobilised again for another 5 years. To use this power means you must be certain that you won’t want to call on their services again for that time, and that you have sufficient depth in your manpower plot to instead find a replacement.

You also must match their salaries too, which if you start calling up people can be hideously expensive. Many reservists earn high salaries in their real jobs and will cost a great deal to put in uniform full time. This is absolutely a price worth paying if they can provide skills the RN doesn’t otherwise have, but expensive to get someone to potentially stand on a gangway for 6 months.

The follow-on problem is how do you sustain the mobilisation for the long term of two-three years? The need for 150 personnel is probably doable for one six-month period, but in reality you’d need to mobilise twice per year (assuming three months lead in training, six months on task and then terminal leave etc) to keep RNR crew available on a six month deployment. This means over three years you need 6 mobilisations of 900 personnel – or roughly half the entire RNR. The requirements of ranks/rates needed means the burden will fall disproportionately on certain areas and could easily cause people who are serving but don’t want to mobilise to leave. When added to the long list of exempt personnel who cannot mobilise for very good reasons, your pool of manpower is highly limited.

The point to make here is that the RNR is not a homogenous mass of people able to suddenly turn up en-masse one day and start sailing ships around. They don’t have the skills or people to do this, and it is exceptionally unrealistic to assume that they could be used in this manner. The RNR is an amazing organisation and aimed at providing a small number of people at any one time to support ongoing operations and is capable of a ‘best effort’ when absolutely required. But care should be taken not to break the organisation to meet a goal that it is not able to do.

If not the RNR, then who?

If the RNR isn’t the answer, how do you get the ships to sea if needed without breaking the RN? There seem to be a number of different options open that could work well. Firstly, this could the the opportunity to make better use of both FTRS contracts and intelligently reaching out to the Regular Reserve (e.g. former RN personnel who have left, but retain a legal mobilisation commitment).

There may be an opportunity to recruit former RN personnel who want to come back in for two years or more in order to do an FTRS contract on an OPV. An intelligent recruiting campaign done via linkedin and existing contacts to reach out and test service leavers for interest in coming back could easily generate the 150 people required to get the ship to sea. Assuming they left in the last few years (or even better served on a RIVER class), then the time to retrain is relatively short. In some ways this mirrors the Canadian model of putting reservist staff onto their KINGSTON  class MCDV for two year contracts.

This move could work, and it is interesting to note that it mirrors current approaches by the RAF, who are actively trying to coax former members back in, often at higher ranks than before, in order to fill some of their SNCO and Officer gaps.

More widely it could be possible to look at manning them by one of the tapestry of coastal forces already in the UK. One of the challenges is that there are a great many organisations that do offshore work, but it is dysfunctional and not terribly effectively co-ordinated. For instance the police, border force or regional fisheries protection agency could take them on as hulls. The Scottish FPA has long experience of operating OPV’s and may well welcome additional resources.

Alternatively the MOD could contract the hulls out to a service provider like Serco. Given the widespread contractorization of the RMAS and the Range Safety boats (many of which are small OPVs by themselves like the SMIT class) – there are currently 16 Fast Patrol or OPV sized vessels based around the UK and under contract to MOD for these duties right now - LINK. It may be a step up, but seeking a contractor solution could be one way of doing some of the work of the OPV force.

Ultimately though, while it is pleasing that three Batch 1 RIVER class are being kept on, there is perhaps some frustration that a great deal of public money is going to be spent keeping three ships alongside not doing anything without any guarantee that they will ever sail again under the White Ensign. Such a move may reassure some, and provide a modicum of capability in theoretical reserve, but it is reasonable to ask the likelihood of whether they will be used again.

The RN may well see this as an opportunity to make a case for reactivation under the current defence review, sensing an opportunity to grow the fleet if it can make the manpower work. Alternatively, there may be a case to hold the ships in reserve and instead look to order further Batch 2 in due course to enter service in the mid 2020s alongside the Type31 – such a move would help sustain shipbuilding and buy time for the RN to recruit and train manpower to get them to sea.

This is an encouraging step in preserving capability if required, but the even better next step would be to find the people and the money to get these ships, and successors to sea. Being moored alongside in the harbour may be a fine place if you must take shelter, but it is no substitute for being at sea.