The Utter Pointlessness of Reserve Fleets

One of the pleasures of social media is the ability to follow the reaction to Defence Questions by knowledgeable correspondents. Whenever questions are put to Ministers in the House of Commons, journalists like Jonathan Beale, Deborah Haynes and David Willets (all listed in alphabetical order!) are well worth following on twitter to capture both the questions and reactions and to identify new issues to write about for this blog. Today was a good example of spotting a question to Gavin Williamson that is worth commenting further on.

Mark Francois asked the Secretary of State whether the Royal Navy should keep older Type 23 frigates in reserve as they pay off whilst the newer Type 26 / 31 class enter service. There was polite demurral from the Minister, with suggestions that perhaps ships were disposed of too quickly.

The subject of ‘Reserve Fleets’ is something that often comes up across the internet whenever naval forces are discussed. To many casual observers there is an innate draw to the idea of holding ships back as a contingency against a potential threat. No matter how appealing this idea seems on the surface though, there are a multitude of good reasons why keeping complex warships in reserve at the end of their life is usually a very bad idea.

In broad terms these reasons boil down to four key areas – Maintenance & Material and  People & Training. Each of these areas poses a challenge which brought together makes it extremely difficult to consider keeping a ship credible once she has paid off.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Maintenance & Material

The Royal Navy has historically not maintained a large reserve fleet since the 1950s, when the combination of the loss of conscript manpower, the increasing complexity of warships adding to reactivation times and the reality that any global conflict would go nuclear quickly meant that reserve fleets were relatively worthless.

After the late 1950s the RN maintained a ‘Standby Squadron’ that usually comprised several vessels that while not fully active, were kept in reasonable running order. For many years Chatham dockyard functioned as the home of the Squadron, which usually comprised ships drawn from classes still in service, that could be brought up to readiness quickly to replace other vessels at sea. This occurred during both the Cod War and the 1982 Falklands War.

It is not clear when the Standby Squadron was formally discontinued, but it played a key part in the RN force structure into the 1980s. For instance, the 1981 defence review foresaw a number of escorts (possibly 7-8 out of 50) being held in quasi-active status. The RN also maintained other ships in full reserve –such as during the lifetime of the INVINCIBLE class when usually one of the three was placed into reserve for a year or two ahead of deep refits.

The key distinction here is that this sort of set up required a heavy investment of resources and manpower to keep the ships maintained and fit for sea. A modern warship is never truly alone during her active life – there are always people onboard to maintain systems and keep watch over her. By contrast ships that decommission and pay off will progressively see less and less people onboard until one day they have been stripped down and become ‘dead ships’, and they will be left to rot until the scrappers take them.

To keep a ship in a salvageable condition, able to be made ready for sea requires a significant amount of maintenance and upkeep. This is something that is costly, requiring regular dockings, inspections and repairs, as well as the cost of keeping the ship preserved and vaguely usable. To put a ship into Reserve with the intention of using her again does not mean she can be forgotten about – quite the contrary, they require regular care and maintenance.

To put a ship into reserve at the end of her life and be certain of using her again would require an additional refit to rectify defects. It would also require regular inspections, support and attention throughout the period in reserve.

For a ship that is likely to be used again, it makes reasonable sense to do this as every pound spent on preventative maintenance is likely to save many more in reactivation costs. For a ship likely to pay off, this makes far less sense – you are spending a lot of money to park a ship and wait for it to be scrapped.

Ships placed in reserve on the assumption that they will be brought back into service will also need parts for them to be fitted with during their reactivation. The Type 23 force is going to be extensively stripped of parts to be placed on Type 26 frigates (and potentially Type 31e) – these ships have acted as the testbeds for the Type 26, and much of their equipment is destined for reuse.

Forcing a policy of keeping ships in reserve raises difficult questions about how they are supplied, and whether to run on contracts and stores of equipment to be held in readiness to put on them. Were you to reactivate a Type 23, then there will probably be no spare parts in the chain to fit to her. When these parts include minor systems like missile launchers and fire control radars, you quickly realise that a reactivated frigate will be practically defenceless.

As ship classes come to the end of their lives, supply contract cease to be placed and it gets harder to find spare parts for them. The Type 23 force is currently subject to various contracts to provide all the support for the ships, but the underpinning spares purchases will reduce and cease as the fleet draws down in size.

For the MOD keeping a reserve force of older Type 23s raises difficult questions – do you run on expensive spares contracts purely for these older ships to ensure compatible spare parts are available? Do you spend a lot of money on an additional ‘one time buy’ intended to put spare parts by for 2-3 ships worth of reactivations, which may cost millions of pounds, but are likely to never be used?  As the Type 23 force reduces, finding spare parts to keep them ready for sea is going to be harder and harder. Reactivating them will require spending money the MOD hasn’t got now on the off chance that they may be needed for sea later.

The problem of material becomes even more challenging when you consider how you maintain enough stocks of munitions and IT systems for a reactivation. Modern munitions are incredibly complex pieces of machinery, designed to do a very specific role and requiring a lot of time and effort to design and support them.

In the 1970s it was significantly easier to bring a ship out of reserve into service when the main armament of many of the Standby Squadron ships was usually some form of light gun (4.5” down to 20mm) and the RN still had a substantial stores depot network filled with legacy equipment, often dating back to well before WW2. For example it was a relatively easy matter to add on additional 40mm Bofors mounts that were manufactured during WW2 to ships going to the Falklands conflict.

Today modern RN does not have stores depots full of legacy weapons. The munitions stockpile does not have vast depots filled with equipment dumped and forgotten about for decades that can be pulled out in a crisis.. There are not random crates of long forgotten dusty VLS seawolf missiles lurking in the back of a tunnel in Copenacre. Modern missiles require care and maintenance, which in turn needs a complex supply chain and support contracts to keep going

Similarly, unlike in the 1960s and 70s where ships were fundamentally very similar to their WW2 era counterparts, modern vessels are built around computer networks and combat systems. These require regular maintenance and upgrading to ensure they are credible. Any ship in reserve is going to either require a lot of work to bring them up to speed and make them compatible with the rest of the Fleet, or it will be required to sail without the essential equipment able to help it fight.

To bring a Type 23 that has reached the end of its life out of reserve and into refit means taking a 25-30year old ship that hasn’t been properly maintained for many years, putting her in a dry dock and spending a lot of public money to refit her using spare parts that may or may not exist anymore (and may well have been cannibalised to add parts during repairs to other ships), and adding radars, missiles, guns and other items even down to basics like wiring, plumbing and seals that have been removed to fit to other ships and then hoping that the combat system can be updated to modern standards.

A good analogy would be that taking a ship out of reserve and into useful front-line service is akin to a 30 old family estate car that hasn’t been driven for more than 5 years and has been left outside in the rain, and then taking it down to the garage and repairing it to convert it into a modern sports car…

The sheer cost involved in putting an old Type 23 back into active service from reserve is eye watering when you consider the capability you’ll receive in return. This is even before you consider the time and manpower aspects.

Manpower and Training

The notion of a reserve fleet makes a lot of sense when you have a lot of manpower ready to crew the vessels who can not only crew them, but more importantly know how to operate them properly. This is a great theory, but the problem is that the Royal Navy already does not have enough manpower available to crew its surface fleet.

From a force of 19 ships, two have permanently been in ‘Harbour Training Ship’ or ‘dead ship’ status for some years now. Their identities vary, but the usual form is to take vessels back from long deployments and due a refit, disband the ships company and then put them alongside in very low readiness ahead of going into a refit. They will then return to sea with a new ships company at a future date.

A modern ships company is not a group of identical sailors who are easily found. Instead it is a couple of hundred highly trained individuals with centuries of experience between them in how to safely operate and fight a warship at sea. These skills are often niche, not easily found and generated from a small group of people.

Generating a ships company from scratch is a challenging process, particularly for bringing an older vessel out of reserve. It requires people to have the right skills and experience and be able to know their way around the ship and how to make them work properly. Allied to this is the problem of finding trained hands who can operate the ships equipment to its full potential. It is one thing to draft a junior rating to a ship to do a straightforward job. It is a totally different thing to find a collection of senior rates with the ability to work in an Ops Room environment which may involve using equipment no longer in use in the wider navy.  As the T23 force dwindles in size, the pool of people with current credible experience on them will decline – making it harder than ever to find spare qualified hands who can bring a ship out of reserve.

The decision to keep a force of Type 23s in reserve may lead to issues with the training pipeline – will training courses still need to be run to keep sailors current on the equipment and systems capabilities that the older ships have so they can use them properly? There will come a point, particularly with older systems, that the training pipeline gets turned off, and no new users trained on them. If you want to keep ships in reserve, you need to determine whether this means some training courses can or cannot be stopped – which places a financial and training burden on the RN to keep people trained on equipment that probably won’t be used again, but which they need to keep personnel qualified on.

Why Bother?

This perhaps begs the question – what exactly is the point of keeping Type 23s in reserve? The usual argument employed is that it safeguards against a Falklands style crisis. In reality the likely process of refitting an elderly Type 23 from reserve would be akin to a major refit, taking a substantial amount of time (likely at least 6- 12 months if not longer) to get the ship ready and safe for sea.

The process of moulding a ships company, getting them ready to get to sea and then ready to pass FOST before deploying is an even longer process -realistically this is another 6 – 12 months at the very minimum.

In practical terms refitting a Type 23 from reserve to go to sea with a ships company that can do the job is going to take a minimum of 2 years – and this is assuming no problems are found, suitable equipment and spares are available and that there are bodies available to properly man the ship (a big question given RN manning challenges at the moment) as well as Duty Holders willing to sign off on the likely substantial risks that will be incurred in sending her to sea. If the best that can be offered is the idea that two years after a ship is sunk, then the RN may be able to generate a partially armed, nearly 30 year old escort as a replacement, at substantial cost, then why not simply build a new ship?

Reserve fleets are not a magic panacea to the problem of ships being sunk. They make sense for very simple warships that would require less work to make ready for sea – and even this comes at a cost. The RN is using £12m to keep the three Batch 1 RIVER class in reserve, even though they are likely to never go to sea again. The cost for keeping three Type 23s as a reserve is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than this again.

A very rough sum is that its costing roughly £4m to keep each RIVER class in Reserve for approximately 3 years. In 2016 the annual running cost of a RIVER was approx £3.5m – not including substantial other central costs (Link HERE to Think Defence article). So in rough terms it will cost the RN about 30% of the annual running costs of the ship just to keep her alongside.

For the Type 23 force, using 2016 prices, the cost was £11.75m per year to run the ship. So, three ships x three years in reserve would be approximately £36m just to keep a ship in a very basic level of reserve pending a decision to reactivate them. The average major refit cost for a Type 23 is around £20m – which it is likely to be required for any reactivation, meaning that the cost of putting all three back into service would be a further £60m. These are very rough numbers but give an idea of the scale of the financial cost that would be incurred if the RN did decide to mothball and reactivate Type 23s.

What Role?

The blunt reality is that reserve fleets of decommissioned warships simply do not have a credible role in the 21^st century. There is a small number of opportunities for ships who are in reserve pending funded refit or waiting for a formal decision on their future to be taken – but these are few and far between.

If reserve fleets still made sense, then most major navies would retain credible ones. In reality no Western navy operates a credible reserve force, intended to be activated quickly during a general mobilisation. The days when the UK could have dozens of TON class MCMV mothballed around the coastline waiting for RNR crews to take them to sea quickly passed over 60 years ago. Today reserve ships are simply old ships waiting to die.

The US Navy for many years kept enormous reserve fleets moored around its coastline. The old ESSEX class carrier USS ORISKANY was slated to be held in reserve from the late 1970s, and then put forward for reactivation. The cost was estimated to be $520m in 1981 (equivalent approximately of £1bn today) after just 5 years in reserve.

The reality is that ships put into reserve quickly deteriorate in physical condition and are quickly next to useless. The USN has considered plans to put older carriers back into service as recently as 2017, when the USS KITTY HAWK was briefly looked at with a view to reactivation – a plan that quickly got cancelled and the ship listed for disposal instead.

Given all this, it is incredibly difficult to see what possible value the RN would gain from spending scarce resources to keep elderly ships in reserve. It would absorb significant amounts of funding that could be spent on brand new ships. It would take sailors away from billets they could fill to ease gapping in the active surface force, and it would take so long to recommission the ships (which would be a shadow of their former capability) that the crisis would long have passed by the time they put to sea in an operational condition.