To build a deployable Navy - the Royal Navy, ships at sea and shipbuilding

The Royal Navy has found itself the target of a number of media articles recently focusing both on its current ship availability for the escort force, and also its future construction plans. The charge is that too few ships are available, and too few ships are planned to be built, and something is fundamentally going wrong. Is this criticism fair, or is it perhaps misplaced?

The availability of escort ships is a perennial topic of concern to many commentators. On paper the RN has 19 escorts available, of which 13 are Type 23 Frigates and 6 Type 45 destroyers. In reality 2 of these are in very long term low readiness (one Type 45 and one Type 23), providing a credible force of about 17 escorts which are in the programme at any one time.

Today of this force of 17 ships, 9 are active (7 x Type 23 and 2 x Type 45), with a further 5 Type 23s in longer term ‘LIFEX’ refits to provide them additional life capacity (including the fitting of a new missile system), and three Type 45s are in various levels of refit or maintenance. How serious a problem is this?

T Boat and T45- Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

On a normal day the RN usually looks to maintain about 4 standing roles – the Gulf escort, a second escort that ranges from Med/Gulf as required, the Fleet Ready Escort (e.g the 24/7 very high readiness escort) and the Towed Array Patrol Ship (TAPS) which conducts very high readiness ASW work.

On top of this there are usually additional deployments built around support to the Carrier force, the Amphibious force and also general wider deployments – for example the Asia Pacific deployment last year by several RN vessels. It is reasonable to assume that at any one time there are 1-2 extra hulls deployed or very shortly to deploy on these sort of tasks. In broad handfuls then this requires a force of 6 deployed or deployable ships.

To deliver all this requires a force substantially larger than you may think. With one third of the fleet worked up, there is then a second tier which is either the ‘returners’ or the ‘next to go’. This constitutes the ships running in UK waters on exercises, or conducting training evolutions like FOST or other work.

These ships are often recently returned from a deployment, and usually have a fast turn around – for instance HMS DRAGON deploying later this year to the WESTLANT deployment is only a few months back from a major deployment to the Gulf and Med. Again, this in broad handfuls constitutes roughly a third of the force.

Finally there is the refit component, which is the short and longer term maintenance required to keep a ship going. They are phenomenally complex pieces of engineering and require a lot of attention to keep working properly. Therefore some ships will routinely be alongside for planned maintenance where they cannot easily go to sea, or they will be in long term multi-year refits.

In the case of the Type 23 force, it is mid way through a major update to make the ships relevant for the next 15 years of service. Designed in the early 1980s for ASW in the North Atlantic, the force has been worked very hard and well past its originally intended lifespan (18yrs). The midlife update will see the fitting of new missiles, new radars and a variety of other improvements intended to keep it at the cutting edge of naval capability for years to come.

This is a slow business though, and can take longer if faults are found, or spending delayed to meet with wider budget pressures. However it is vital that this is done, otherwise the RN is left with a force that is not able to hold its own operationally in places like the Gulf.

The wider consideration too is when looking at availability stats to look at the timings. Right now it is late July and many ships are either back from deployment, or operating to get ready for well deserved summer leave periods.

The RN relies on its people to crew the vessels it possesses – running them too hard and keeping them at sea all the time may make commentators feel good, but merely exhausts the crews, and leads to people leaving. Ensuring ships time at sea is sensibly programmed to both deliver on tasks, but also not break the human component is essential.

Likewise where possible, letting ships go alongside for summer leave and spend well deserved time with families is also key. There is no point having a navy if you don’t have enough sailors to operate it effectively.

Its also important to understand that the RN could surge if required for a genuine crisis, but running at crisis levels constantly doesn’t help in terms of carefully planned maintenance to ensure long term sustainable structures.

The current fleet employment rate feels inherently about right for a force in this current structure. The Type 45 force is consistently generating and deploy 2 hulls from 4 realistically available, and the 2 remaining are working up  or maintenance and then quickly deploying. The Type 45 force is worked very hard, and sustaining 2 at sea or ready for operations is actually a pretty impressive achievement. Similarly the Type 23 force generation rate is impressive, particularly given the forces age and ongoing LIFEX work.

In practical terms then, while to a layperson the numbers may look a bit low, they actually seem pretty much where every other navy aspires to be – roughly 1/3^rd deployed, 1/3^rd in home waters or working up and 1/3^rd in deep refit. Its hard to see how the Royal Navy has ‘failed’ for fundamentally meeting the same broad levels of availability as every other navy – particularly so when many of its ships are meeting global deployments and  not just having to operate in local waters.

The big challenge has to be long term ensuring enough people are available to crew these ships on an enduring basis. Failure to recruit and retain, and more importantly failure to make the work/life balance such that people feel they want to walk away and see their family is the issue here, far more than worrying about how many Type 23 frigates are deployed in the Gulf.

It may sound a hackneyed cliché, but ‘it’s a marathon not a sprint’ and ensuring there are always more ships to relieve those on station is what matters here. That relies on ensuring the people and the equipment is up for the job, not thrashing it without sound reason, partly because the replacements may be some time away.

Indeed the future ship building programme has been the subject of adverse comment in a series of very oddly written articles in the Mail that were, putting it kindly, full of errors. The general theme though seemed to have been that there aren’t many ships on order and they all seem to be the wrong type.

The reality though is that the UK planned naval construction programme is in pretty rude health at the moment. There are a number of warships under construction with a package of work in terms of frigates being built out to the mid 2030s and possibly beyond.

Part of the challenge in previous years has been the ‘feast or famine’ cycle which has seen too much offered at times, then adverse contractions later on when there was no need to order new hulls. Much of the work this century has focused on trying to keep yards on a long term sustainable footing, generating ships to a regular drumbeat and providing more assurances to the supply chain about the long term nature of the work.

In practical terms this means a stretching out of the T26 construction to come in behind the CVF project, but the reward is 8 cruiser sized hulls now for the UK. The Type 31e design is potentially going to offer a similar package, but if the recommendations made in the National Shipbuilding Strategy report are adhered too, may also see further hulls built in due course.

The challenge is to ensure that the people and the skills remain gainfully employed long term – not finding themselves out of work with gaps. There is only so many orders to be made, and while it may be tempting to say ‘oh accelerate Type 26 now’ what happens when that finishes and there are no orders to come?

Ensuring there is a long term warship design and shipbuilding capability in the UK is critical here – not just throwing money at the problem in the short term. This ties into the wider reality that even if all 8 T26 were under construction tomorrow, the work up, trials and generation of crews would be a real challenge due to the running down of the Type 23 force.

People often don’t pay enough attention to the very real challenges both of introducing equipment to service, but also taking it out of service. Handling a simultaneous working up and running down is difficult and requires a lot of crew and effort to do properly. Far better to do it right, and not potentially experience challenges if unexpected problems occur, than to rush into service and discover a problem that means no vessels are available.

Similarly the submarine force was criticised for ‘only’ putting one of the DREADNOUGHT class into production. An easy accusation to make, but one that doesn’t seem to take into account the fact there is only finite capacity in Barrow, and that there is a very carefully designed plan to drawdown the V class and introduce the D class into service by the mid 2030s.

Too often there is a fixation on the idea that if we’re not building lots of things now, we’re doing something wrong. In reality keeping a credible shipbuilding programme going, ensuring that workers are employed and not lost (as was found to extreme cost with the ASTUTE build) and bringing ships into service with the right support solutions and crew is far better value for the taxpayer, and far more effective for the Navy, than rushing and throwing money at the problem.

It is also worth noting that many people who demand more ships be built now also demand all manner of extra changes and new equipment, from more missiles to adding Towed Array to a Type 31. This sort of idea sounds great, but there seems to be a disconnect between the goal of getting ships operational and getting ships with new kit.

Fitting new capabilities to a vessel isn’t as simple as just bolting it on and sailing away. The integration process is lengthy requiring a lot of engineering work, trials and heavy work to ensure it is fit for purpose. Every change requires time doing trials, not doing operational work.

When added together, some of the proposed ‘fantasy fleet’ changes to some ship designs seem to put forward ideas that could, if enacted, add literally years to the programme of a vessel before she could be operationally employed. Be wary of assuming more ships should come with an upgrades shopping list as it really just adds delay now, not capability. If you want more ships quickly, then perhaps the question is ‘how simple and stripped down can we make the design’ not ‘how much more can we bolt on’?

In broad terms though the RN shipbuilding programme is actually in a very good place. It promises work for the long haul on a sustainable basis, and with the additional exports of Type 26 designs, potentially a lot of opportunities for through life support too. There is finite capacity in the UK and the risk of throwing money to buy more ships is that of not enough yards and not enough people to build the ships or crew them.

The RN wants to grow and has made no secret of its public desire to use Type 31 as the medium-term platform to do this. But avoid thinking this makes it easy to grow though. Expansion is a slow burn business, something that takes years to do properly and relies on a lot of work across many different areas including training, infrastructure and finally getting the ship to sea. Demands to grow the navy quickly are easy to make, but hard to deliver.

What matters now is to continue to make the case for seapower, to continue to support UK industry and deliver world class ships to the front line and to continue to recognise that globally, the RN is absolutely at the cutting edge of working its ships hard and delivering a very high level of global capability day in, day out. Its easy to knock these efforts, but the truth is the RN of today is a global leader in ship readiness and employment, not a force that is failing.