People, Ports, Power - Keeping the Royal Navy ready to fight tonight...

A flurry of announcements recently has highlighted the importance of refits and basing for the Royal Navy. Hardly the most high profile or ‘sexy’ of topics for many followers of defence issues, but one that cuts to the heart of why the UK retains such globally capable and deployable armed forces.

On Monday 8 October, it was formally announced that the Type 26 ‘City’ class frigate would be homeported in Plymouth, ensuring that this would be the RN’s ASW centre of excellence for decades to come. While hardly a well-kept secret, the confirmation will come as welcome news to locals, keen to see affirmation that Devonport Dockyard has a long term future.

Basing of ships is an increasingly high-profile issue, and one that can arouse strong emotions. The days of there being multiple classes of ships scattered across the UK have gone forever, instead with modern ships generally being based by class in one port. This move not only makes life easier from a personnel perspective, but also makes offers considerable economic benefits too.

Practically, it is much easier to retain people if they know that the bulk of their seagoing career will be spent on one type of platform operating out of one port. For many specialist roles, it is possible for Ratings to spend a large chunk of their careers now focused on just one class of ship, interspersed with time ashore. The importance of this is it gives them certainty for buying a house, settling down and feeling confident about getting time with their family and friends.

While the weekly commute to and from a remote home may be manageable in the early years of a career, by the time sailors have got older and acquired partners and families, the Sunday night routine of travelling to work for the week quickly loses its allure. By ensuring that there is relatively plot stability, in the long term sailors can feel more confident that when not at sea, their chances home are much higher – a major factor in retention, particularly for older longer serving personnel.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Similarly, building a centre of excellence increases the pool of people in one location able to go to sea and support a ship as required. Gapping is an inevitable part of life now (and arguably has been since 1945), and career managers need to balance many different priorities when trying to work out which gap to fill. From a retention perspective, if HMS NONSUCH has a gap that needs filling urgently, its much easier to pull someone from the local pool of people, than ‘crash draft’ someone from the other end of the country.

This may sound a trivial issue, but for the RN, ensuring long term stability of manpower structures at all ranks and rates is absolutely critical to its ability to operate. Many branches have tiny numbers of people at some levels, so an early or unexpected resignation by one person can cause a ripple effect that reverberates across many different people as posts are juggled, people moved at short notice and the system tries to bear yet another gap. This is why base porting goes a long way to helping ease the pressure.

More widely it makes sense as an economic move – its much easier to keep all the spare parts, supply chain and associated kit required to support the ships in one location, rather than spread across the country – particularly when numbers are much smaller than in the past. Why maintain two supply chains when you only need one?

Long term it encourages investment in a facility – if the plan is for a site to operate Type 26 for the next 30-40 years then this encourages investment for the long term to create a proper support centre of excellence. This in turn provides reassurance to industry who have more confidence to invest in one location for the long term, rather than relying on ever-changing short-term plans.

These basing decisions then are high profile, for they indicate the long term future for a base and its potential evolution. The RN now seems to have settled on a pattern whereby Portsmouth will function as the Destroyer / Hunt Class / OPV / Carrier hub, Plymouth on the Amphibious forces / survey ships and ASW Frigates, and Faslane will host the Submarine Service and Sandown class MCMVs.

This provides a pattern of long term stability, but also exposes that there will be a significant amount of political and media interest in where the Type 31 ends up being based too. The potential for a further five frigates to be homeported somewhere will be keenly pursued by local politicians and companies, keen to see each port stand a chance of hosting new vessels and the associated support contracts.

Meanwhile the MOD has also announced almost £1bn in long term contracts to ensure the refit work for the RFA and survey ship force. This sum of money represents a considerable amount of refit work for many years to come and has been divided up among several different yards across the UK (the ‘Save the Royal Navy’ website has a good breakdown HERE of the work packages).

This matters for two reasons – firstly it serves as a timely reminder that the UK relies heavily on the commercial yards to provide long term support to large parts of the Royal Navy. With refit work going on across the UK in Falmouth, Cammell Laird and Tyneside, this in turn generates significant opportunities to deliver highly skilled engineering work into these areas with the promise of long-term work and boosts for the local economy.

It provides a long-term set of employment opportunities for people wishing to take up engineering as a career, and helps safeguard a long supply chain of UK companies who will be able to provide parts and material for these refits. One of the often forgotten parts of the strength of UK capability is the diverse and hugely capable supply chain of companies that help design, manufacture and deliver capability for the front line. These work packages are a vital part of securing their long-term future too.

More widely, the size of the contracts also acts as a reminder of how expensive ships are to operate long term. For planners who need to make in year savings measures, deferring refits or reducing their scope can be an easy way to save money, albeit at considerable cost to capability and ship availability in the medium term. Balancing off this decision between short term gain and medium term pain is a perennial problem for RN planners who need to consider the needs and availability of the fleet now, and in five years’ time.

It also reminds us that when considering major savings cuts why deletion of ships is a good way to make widespread savings. For example the first ‘lot’ of refits is for three older FORT class vessels and the two WAVE class tankers and is worth £357m. If in a defence review the decision was taken to draw down warship numbers, in turn this reduces the need for RFA support (these ships exist to support the RN fleet). If, purely hypothetically the outcome of the MDP was that the RN no longer needed one WAVE class, then a significant amount of this £357m would no longer be needed to be spent. Even with contract penalty clauses, it is likely that a not inconsiderable amount of money could be saved by not refitting a vessel (which is why when the RN chose to pay off three Type 23s back in the 2000s it intentionally chose the vessels needing a refit even though they were younger than other ships).

When you add this figure to the wider costs saved such as annual running costs, the crew freed up to man other ships, thus increasing availability of other platforms, and the long term need to not replace the hull, then the potential savings accrued from paying off a ship across several budget lines are very considerable.

In 2016 the WAVE class cost approximately £10m a year to run  (INFO HERE) – if you assume a further 20 years of life in the hull, then suddenly from a long term perspective paying off one hull generates £200m plus savings of long term running costs, plus £40-50m minimum in refit costs – plus any other associated costs that may accrue.  If you are running an overheated budget, then looking out medium term and seeing savings of that order is suddenly very tempting when trying to make costs balance out for the years to come. This perhaps explains the logic of why the RN looks to pay ships off to save money – its not just the often paltry in year running costs that matter, but the long-term savings too.

Of course, all this is irrelevant if the Royal Navy doesn’t send its ships to sea mind you. According to the Daily Mirror (HERE) the RN Type 45 fleet spent less than a year at sea last year among all 6 hulls. Not only is the article factually incorrect (it may come as news to the crew of HMS DARING that they didn’t go to sea last year given they were deployed in the Gulf), but it also doesn’t capture the challenges of keeping a force at sea.

No navy out there can keep 100% of a class of warships at sea all the time. Ships are complex and challenging to operate and require regular maintenance and support work to keep them ready. Their people require working up to a state of readiness to deploy, and proper down time to recover too. While in a crisis manpower and ships can be surged out to address a threat, this comes at a long-term cost of both disrupted maintenance and people retention.

The RN Type 45 force has been worked relatively hard in its early life, but it is still getting up to speed. Challenges with machinery have led to refit work, coupled with manpower shortages meaning that at least one ship at a time is in long term ‘harbour training ship’ status, effectively commissioned but not seagoing (but not in reserve). This is usually the platform next in line to be refitted and would come at a time when the vessel would not be deploying anyway – for instance HMS DARING and HMS PORTLAND have both post deployment gone to very low readiness for this reason.

With a force of 5 hulls the RN has done a great job of ensuring that at least two are either deployed or about to deploy at any one time. Another will be in longer term refit, while the remaining two will either be in short term maintenance, working up for, or returning from deployments. Over the course of a multi-year period this usually means the RN has 1-2 Type 45 permanently deployed, another 1-2 able to go to sea as required and another 1-2 at very low readiness. This is the same ratio as just about any other navy on the planet works to.

It is inevitable that with each ship running to a slightly different programme, there will be points when they spend less time at sea in a year than other times. Does this mean they are broken – no, absolutely not.

For the RN it must consider both the short term need to get ships to sea and the long-term sustainability of the Class as a whole. These ships will be the mainstay of the UK maritime air defence capability for the next twenty years. Working them hard early in their life may look good to people who want to see ships at sea, but it comes at the cost of causing long term maintenance challenges that will only increase as they get older, and risk overall availability in the long term.

Far better to keep them at sea in a smaller but measured manner now, rather than risk it all to create a single photo opportunity of four or five at sea together that will let internet fanboys feel good about themselves on discussion forums.

It is also essential not to break the people that crew these ships. The RN may have some of the most capable fighting vessels on the planet, but it cannot fight without people. The pool of personnel is finite and needs careful management. Breaking the plot of engineers in order to get ships to sea may satisfy short term needs, but it comes at a price – legion are the tales of disaffected RN personnel who quit after one to many surprise deployments or sea drafts and who put Family first.

In a time of national crisis then everything changes, but in peacetime there is little point in burning out an already hard working and heavily committed force of people who take many years to replace just to get a ship to sea to satisfy the naysayers who feel the nation is doomed because of not enough ships going to sea.

Arguably one thing that could increase availability of ships overall is to bite the bullet and pay some of them off. The RN effectively operates a force of 17 escorts as it is, and struggles to crew them fully. A long term view may be that a force of 12-14 escort hulls, but manned to 100% plus may be a better more credible force to generate escorts at sea, than 19 hulls where there is not insubstantial gapping. Such a move would be politically unpalatable, but represent a realism measure that would arguably strengthen and not weaken the RNs seagoing capability – far better to have more ships at sea in commission than we do now without manpower gaps, than more ships but alongside without enough people.

The long-term remedy for this is arguably to get more people – but until the RN can make the case for funding to increase its size and then recruit and retain people into the Service, then that will take some years to work through. It is a solution for 10 years from now, not tomorrow.

Overall then it has been an interesting few weeks for the RN, and this is without considering issues like Saif Sarrea 3 or various other announcements. The next few weeks are likely to see further stories on defence as the MOD moves to progress the Defence Review to its next stage – whether this results in more stories of cuts remains to be seen. But one thing is clear, for all the talk of how many ships we may have and what they are doing, there is nothing more vital than people to keep them going – either at sea as part of the Crew, ashore as part of the civilian support force or in industry delivering the refits and technology required to give the RN its cutting edge. Its not about technology, its about people – because the Team really does work.