Inoperable or just Maintenance?
The Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace MP has stated that of the 76 RN/RFA vessels, just 57 are available and 19 are ‘inoperable’. This has led to suggestions in some quarters that the Royal Navy is struggling to meet its goals due to the numbers not available. Is this something that we should be concerned about?
Inoperable is a strong word, and one that in some quarters, particularly some with a naval background, would interpret as meaning ‘long term broken’ – it implies that a piece of equipment is simply unable to work and is not capable of functional use. This usually means refits or long term capability gaps till a solution can be found. In other words the ship is knackered and not suitable for any form of use.
Warships are complicated engineering marvels, requiring extensive work and support to keep operational and effective. A modern escort ship is a floating town, able to generate power to provide life support and hotel services, propulsion, aviation operations and the ability to operate a variety of very complicated electronic systems and weapon systems, and it is built to do this while surviving damage from enemy attack.
This complex world requires attention on a regular basis, both to make sure that the constituent parts still work as planned, and also to update and replace parts with more modern or better alternatives, or to provide planned upgrades. For instance, it is common for new ships entering service to undergo a short refit to add in any extra capability upgrades that may have been rolled out since construction began, and to rectify any defects.
For the purposes of planning how the fleet works, the Royal Navy looks to provide enough ships to meet agreed defence tasks. In simple terms the MOD works out what tasks are required of it, and what military assets are needed to meet them. This can range from providing a constantly available SSBN to deliver the deterrence mission through to deploying the ice patrol ship to Antarctica.
Once these commitments are understood, planners can work out how many ships / planes / tanks are needed to meet this goal. For example, it may be agreed that the RN needs to sustain multiple overseas deployments, and also be able to generate a carrier strike group too.
If, purely hypothetically the requirement for this is 6 ships, then the next task is to work out how many ships are needed to ensure 6 ships are constantly available. Usually, this has historically been at a 3:1 ratio – one ship is on task or ready to fulfill it, one is in some form of work up or other training ahead of being assigned to the role, and one is just back or in refit.
In practical terms this means that the RN never looks to get 100% of its force to sea, but rather to ensure it doesn’t fail to ensure enough ships are available to meet all the tasks that it is required to do. Consequently there is always going to be a mismatch between the number of ships owned, and the number of ships deployed.
When it comes to refits, these are complex and complicated affairs which can range from a simple period of maintenance alongside to fix minor routine defects (akin to taking the car into the garage to fix something), through to spending time in dry dock for more in depth work – for instance it is common to see ships do a short term docking period to do more complex work, or where it isn’t feasible to do the work with the ship in the water.
Often in these cases the ships company will remain with the vessel, but perhaps living ashore, as they go through the process of getting the ship ready to go to sea again. The ship remains a living entity though with a close to full company as the plan is for the vessel to quickly return to operations.
By contrast every few years a ship will undergo a much deeper level of refit, which not only requires dry docking, but will usually see the ship put into the hands of the dockyard on a long term basis. When these occur, the ship pays off and her complement disbands or is reassigned to new roles – the Commanding Officer leaves, and is usually replaced by a ‘Senior Naval Officer’ for the ship while she is in refit.
The goals of these refits is to replace worn out parts, give the ship a thorough update and also on occasions fit new weapons and sensors. This is a complex process as it requires removing old systems, wiring, offices and workshops and putting an entirely new system in in its place, all the while alongside other work.
These projects can take many years to do – in the 1950s for instance the aircraft carrier HMS VICTORIOUS was in the hands of the dockyard for the best part of a decade to convert her into a modernised angled deck carrier. In the 1960s the ARK ROYAL underwent a lengthy refit lasting several years to permit her to operate Phantoms.
In the case of the Type 23 frigate, 6 are currently going through an extensive mid life update programme designed to refurbish and refresh platforms to, in some cases, nearly double their original life expectancy. This requires the fitting of new missile systems and radars and giving the ships a deep refit to make them able to operate for another 10-15 years. This is a real challenge, particularly for a hull that was originally designed for an 18 year lifespan and not to receive a mid life refit.
Finally some RN and RFA vessels are not at sea right now for lack of manpower – this isn’t to say they can’t go to sea, but that the people to crew them do not exist in the right numbers to get the ship operational. This is particularly an issue for the RFA at the moment.
The key takeaway from all of this is that ships in refit are not all totally inoperable and unable to go to sea. It is absolutely the case that a frigate in the middle of a mid life update couldn’t be sent to sea in a crisis – she is unlikely to have any engines or weapon systems fitted, let alone a Ships Company. But, a Destroyer undergoing a short term docking could almost certainly be brought out of refit in a hurry if required and the crisis necessitated it.
To that end, Humphrey respectfully disagrees with the Ministers use of the phrase ‘inoperable’ and would suggest that saying a quarter of the RN’s ships are in for maintenance may be a better way of describing the situation.
More widely, there was suggestions that the Minister wanted more to be done to fix the situation, apparently not seeing it as good enough. Its hard to be certain what was specifically said as the evidence from the session isn’t currently available online – hopefully it will be soon though. But, the options for increasing availability do pose a variety of challenges.
It would be possible, for example, to reduce the number of refits that ships do and keep them at sea for longer. Such a move would ensure that there were more hulls available for tasking, but their material state may vary, and as time went by defects would increase, parts would life expire or need replacing and there is no guarantee that the ship would necessarily be able to deploy as a fully worked up vessel.
Is there more value to the RN in having fewer refits, and running ships on for longer – or is the risk of potentially sending a ship into an operational theatre too great? Historically the RN has preferred to only send worked up vessels into operations, drawing them off other tasks and reprioritising to ensure that people are not put at unnecessary risk.
This was most recently seen over the summer when the RN chose to focus resources into the Gulf to ensure cover, drawing HMS KENT, DEFENDER and DUNCAN into operations, which involved a reprioritisation from other efforts.
Would having ships at sea, but in need of refit reduce this pressure, or would the risks be too great of sending a ship badly in need of a refit into the Gulf to ‘fly the flag’ even if she was unable to meet the required operational standard?
The wider problem of running ships on without refit is that this tends to store up longer term issues and make them more expensive to refit, and make refits last longer later on. Much like a car needs regular maintenance to be reliable, ignoring short term servicing may save a bit of money and keep the availability up in the short term, but in the medium term it could be costly. For the RN, keeping a Frigate at sea could ensure more ships for tasking, but potentially cause major problems for the refit programme, which in turn would over a longer period of time probably reduce the number of ships available for tasks.
The other challenge is that the more you push ships, the more quickly they will need refits – if you run more ships at sea at the same time on a heavy operational posture, you are increasing the longer term challenges of availability. It will mean that the ships need to go into refit in a similar time frame – so, for example, the 6 strong Type 45 force means a force of 2-3 hulls can be pretty much constantly available for operational tasking.
But, if you pushed to keep 4 hulls at sea now, disrupting the refit programme the risk is that in a couple of years time, the need to refit will coincide, and could make it much harder to generate hulls. This isn’t to say its impossible, it could be done – but the potential impacts on both the refit programme and the long term schedule planner need to be clearly understood – otherwise potentially deciding this year to have 4 Type 45 at sea could mean only having 1 Type 45 at sea in 4 years time – not great in a crisis.
A key challenge for the teams who look at force generation is ensuring that they can guarantee constant levels of availability, and this isn’t an easy job. Its easy to sit on the internet and struggle to understand why, for example, there are 4 Type 45 in Portsmouth right now. But, if you then realise that with two deployed (DRAGON and DEFENDER) one in short term refit and one in reserve (and possibly one more in deep refit) there are only one - two spare Type 45 hulls available and they will need to be ready to generate to replace in due course. You could thrash those two hulls right now to get four to sea, but the harder question to ask is ‘what replaces DRAGON and DEFENDER?’
The other big challenge in trying to get ships to sea is the perennial problem of headcount and trained personnel. This is a real challenge – right now there are two escorts in long term reserve due to the lack of sufficient people to crew them.
The immediate answer most people have on hearing this is ‘well recruit more sailors then’, which is very easy to say and harder to do. The RN knows that it needs more people in order to get ships companies up to full strength, but this is a business that can take years to do.
The training pipeline is working hard, but it still takes years to get engineers through and into operational roles, and years more to get them to the right level of qualification for Senior Rate roles. Short of utterly changing how recruitment is done, the RN faces a real challenge in growing suitably trained people to fill gaps today.
More widely, even if the RN sped refits up, it is questionable whether it has sufficiently trained personnel to create new ships companies to send them to sea ahead of time. The force is structured and designed to generate crews, and provide them with appropriate time ashore to rest, train and develop.
Many of the sub branches that provide personnel for the fleet are very small, with in some ranks and rates only a few tens of people trained and able to do a specific job. Sending them to sea in place of a shore draft would have negative impacts on their career development, reduce harmony time with families and increase the likelihood of them leaving. If you only have 20 people in the RN trained to operate a specific system at a certain rate, then even two of them putting their notice in would threaten to throw the whole personnel structure out of alignment.
This is before considering the wider impact on the force of drawing people out of shore billets and back into seagoing ones – what impact would it have at training schools, Battlestaffs, operational HQs and so on, and what would this mean? Would it result in hollowing out of shore based roles that may lack the appeal of seeing ships at sea, but without which, the force would struggle to operate?
It may sound easy to say ‘generate two or three more ships companies’ but doing so without a headcount uplift could have really significant long term consequences that could do more harm than good.
The lack of people causes problems in the short term as ships companies have to work harder than ever, and spend ever longer at sea. Fine if you are young and single, but intensely frustrating if you have a partner and children that you are not seeing or spending time with. The problem is that the more you overwork and stretch the force to deliver, the harder it is to retain them, and this vicious cycle only begins again.
The solution that would probably do the most for improving ship availability is also the one that politicians and the media would loathe – pay more ships off. Rather than trying, and failing, to deliver an escort force of 19 ships, the RN may find it easier to deliver a force of 12-14 hulls instead.
This suggestion is likely to provoke gasps of outrage in some quarters, but there is a logic to it. If your most important asset is your people, and you don’t have enough of them, and the ones you do have are being thrashed, then you need to make things easier for them. In the short term, if the RN looked to focus on a force that could put to sea with 100% or more Ships Company, without gaps and without people having to cover others jobs, this would probably make things easier in the medium term.
The history of the RN since WW2 is that of failing to properly manage its people properly, and in constantly struggling to get enough people to sea in the right quantities and roles. Fixing this is critical to ensuring that the Royal Navy of tomorrow is able to put to sea when needed.
Cutting ship numbers is perhaps a realism measure that reflects the reality of the modern RN – it is doing incredibly well to get ships to sea, but the risk is that in doing so, it is burning its people out and storing up longer term problems.
In the medium term the other way to increase availability is to look again at how refits work, and the means by which they will be conducted. Part of the challenge at the moment is arguably trying to conduct a major mid life update on the Type 23 design, which is a frigate expressly designed in the 1980s not to need or require a mid life update. This may account for why this programme is taking longer than expected.
If you look to the future then the QUEEN ELIZABETH class carriers offer a good model of where future refits may occur – regular but much shorter docking periods rather than longer term major refits every half decade or so, which in turn will probably increase their overall availability.
The Type 31 Frigate may offer another way of solving the problem, by instead focusing on serial production of the design and never keeping the ships long enough to require a major refit, and also needing fewer crew than their predecessors, making it easier to keep them at sea or operational.
The planned return to overseas basing raises some opportunities providing the docking periods can be managed. In the Gulf, the permanent presence of HMS MONTROSE on paper provides much longer periods of hull availability through the use of rotating crews and short term refits in Bahrain. The challenge, as was seen in the summer, is when a crisis occurs that coincides with a planned refit and crew change – at times like this the ability to surge ships is of critical importance to maintain the same levels of cover.
In the very long term (e.g. 15-20 year life) there may be an opportunity to grow the RN through the Type 31 force, which would reduce pressure on hulls and make them work less hard (thus reducing some of the maintenance challenges). If this can be delivered, along with a meaningful headcount increase, then there are potentially great longer term opportunities to improve availability even further.
It is important to remember too, when reading language like ‘inoperable’ to remember that the refit cycle is a perfectly normal part of every navies operating cycle. No navy on the planet can generate 100% availability, and, frankly, the RN achieving 75% of hulls available is a genuinely impressive achievement that deserves praise, not derision.
The challenge is how to educate the public that seeing a ship in refit isn’t a sign of failure. Its normal, expected and planned. It perhaps requires more to be done to show how these refits not only indicate just how hard the Royal Navy is working, but also to showcase how these refits would not be possible without the existence of the British defence industry.
Refit work generates a lot of skilled jobs, and keeps industries alive that would otherwise perhaps struggle. There is a wider piece too to explain how availability is a complex business – its not just about sending a ship to sea, but ensuring that the UK industrial base has the capacity to refit the ships, and that the manufacturing base has the ability to conduct the refit. If you are dependent on updating ships, and there is only a single manufacturer available for a widget or a component, then you are reliant on their finite capacity to deliver. It may be possible to increase this, but it would come at a heavy price – is this the best use of the defence budget, or is it better to stagger things out and instead avoid a cycle of ‘boom and bust’ in the yards and supply chain, and ensure long term value for money?
Few people like the idea or thought that a naval vessel needs repairs or refits, they inherently want to see ships at sea. But this is a natural part of the warship life cycle and needs to be done – the Royal Navy, ably supported by UK industry is a world leader in ensuring good availability overall of its force – far better than many of its peers.
The force needs to be handled with care though as the risk is in pushing it harder, getting more ships to sea and either reducing refit time or not doing them at all, the potential exists to break the personnel component, and with it, the longer-term ability of the Royal Navy to operate.
Inoperable is a strong word, and one that in some quarters, particularly some with a naval background, would interpret as meaning ‘long term broken’ – it implies that a piece of equipment is simply unable to work and is not capable of functional use. This usually means refits or long term capability gaps till a solution can be found. In other words the ship is knackered and not suitable for any form of use.
Warships are complicated engineering marvels, requiring extensive work and support to keep operational and effective. A modern escort ship is a floating town, able to generate power to provide life support and hotel services, propulsion, aviation operations and the ability to operate a variety of very complicated electronic systems and weapon systems, and it is built to do this while surviving damage from enemy attack.
This complex world requires attention on a regular basis, both to make sure that the constituent parts still work as planned, and also to update and replace parts with more modern or better alternatives, or to provide planned upgrades. For instance, it is common for new ships entering service to undergo a short refit to add in any extra capability upgrades that may have been rolled out since construction began, and to rectify any defects.
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| Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright |
For the purposes of planning how the fleet works, the Royal Navy looks to provide enough ships to meet agreed defence tasks. In simple terms the MOD works out what tasks are required of it, and what military assets are needed to meet them. This can range from providing a constantly available SSBN to deliver the deterrence mission through to deploying the ice patrol ship to Antarctica.
Once these commitments are understood, planners can work out how many ships / planes / tanks are needed to meet this goal. For example, it may be agreed that the RN needs to sustain multiple overseas deployments, and also be able to generate a carrier strike group too.
If, purely hypothetically the requirement for this is 6 ships, then the next task is to work out how many ships are needed to ensure 6 ships are constantly available. Usually, this has historically been at a 3:1 ratio – one ship is on task or ready to fulfill it, one is in some form of work up or other training ahead of being assigned to the role, and one is just back or in refit.
In practical terms this means that the RN never looks to get 100% of its force to sea, but rather to ensure it doesn’t fail to ensure enough ships are available to meet all the tasks that it is required to do. Consequently there is always going to be a mismatch between the number of ships owned, and the number of ships deployed.
When it comes to refits, these are complex and complicated affairs which can range from a simple period of maintenance alongside to fix minor routine defects (akin to taking the car into the garage to fix something), through to spending time in dry dock for more in depth work – for instance it is common to see ships do a short term docking period to do more complex work, or where it isn’t feasible to do the work with the ship in the water.
Often in these cases the ships company will remain with the vessel, but perhaps living ashore, as they go through the process of getting the ship ready to go to sea again. The ship remains a living entity though with a close to full company as the plan is for the vessel to quickly return to operations.
By contrast every few years a ship will undergo a much deeper level of refit, which not only requires dry docking, but will usually see the ship put into the hands of the dockyard on a long term basis. When these occur, the ship pays off and her complement disbands or is reassigned to new roles – the Commanding Officer leaves, and is usually replaced by a ‘Senior Naval Officer’ for the ship while she is in refit.
The goals of these refits is to replace worn out parts, give the ship a thorough update and also on occasions fit new weapons and sensors. This is a complex process as it requires removing old systems, wiring, offices and workshops and putting an entirely new system in in its place, all the while alongside other work.
These projects can take many years to do – in the 1950s for instance the aircraft carrier HMS VICTORIOUS was in the hands of the dockyard for the best part of a decade to convert her into a modernised angled deck carrier. In the 1960s the ARK ROYAL underwent a lengthy refit lasting several years to permit her to operate Phantoms.
In the case of the Type 23 frigate, 6 are currently going through an extensive mid life update programme designed to refurbish and refresh platforms to, in some cases, nearly double their original life expectancy. This requires the fitting of new missile systems and radars and giving the ships a deep refit to make them able to operate for another 10-15 years. This is a real challenge, particularly for a hull that was originally designed for an 18 year lifespan and not to receive a mid life refit.
Finally some RN and RFA vessels are not at sea right now for lack of manpower – this isn’t to say they can’t go to sea, but that the people to crew them do not exist in the right numbers to get the ship operational. This is particularly an issue for the RFA at the moment.
The key takeaway from all of this is that ships in refit are not all totally inoperable and unable to go to sea. It is absolutely the case that a frigate in the middle of a mid life update couldn’t be sent to sea in a crisis – she is unlikely to have any engines or weapon systems fitted, let alone a Ships Company. But, a Destroyer undergoing a short term docking could almost certainly be brought out of refit in a hurry if required and the crisis necessitated it.
To that end, Humphrey respectfully disagrees with the Ministers use of the phrase ‘inoperable’ and would suggest that saying a quarter of the RN’s ships are in for maintenance may be a better way of describing the situation.
More widely, there was suggestions that the Minister wanted more to be done to fix the situation, apparently not seeing it as good enough. Its hard to be certain what was specifically said as the evidence from the session isn’t currently available online – hopefully it will be soon though. But, the options for increasing availability do pose a variety of challenges.
It would be possible, for example, to reduce the number of refits that ships do and keep them at sea for longer. Such a move would ensure that there were more hulls available for tasking, but their material state may vary, and as time went by defects would increase, parts would life expire or need replacing and there is no guarantee that the ship would necessarily be able to deploy as a fully worked up vessel.
Is there more value to the RN in having fewer refits, and running ships on for longer – or is the risk of potentially sending a ship into an operational theatre too great? Historically the RN has preferred to only send worked up vessels into operations, drawing them off other tasks and reprioritising to ensure that people are not put at unnecessary risk.
This was most recently seen over the summer when the RN chose to focus resources into the Gulf to ensure cover, drawing HMS KENT, DEFENDER and DUNCAN into operations, which involved a reprioritisation from other efforts.
Would having ships at sea, but in need of refit reduce this pressure, or would the risks be too great of sending a ship badly in need of a refit into the Gulf to ‘fly the flag’ even if she was unable to meet the required operational standard?
The wider problem of running ships on without refit is that this tends to store up longer term issues and make them more expensive to refit, and make refits last longer later on. Much like a car needs regular maintenance to be reliable, ignoring short term servicing may save a bit of money and keep the availability up in the short term, but in the medium term it could be costly. For the RN, keeping a Frigate at sea could ensure more ships for tasking, but potentially cause major problems for the refit programme, which in turn would over a longer period of time probably reduce the number of ships available for tasks.
The other challenge is that the more you push ships, the more quickly they will need refits – if you run more ships at sea at the same time on a heavy operational posture, you are increasing the longer term challenges of availability. It will mean that the ships need to go into refit in a similar time frame – so, for example, the 6 strong Type 45 force means a force of 2-3 hulls can be pretty much constantly available for operational tasking.
But, if you pushed to keep 4 hulls at sea now, disrupting the refit programme the risk is that in a couple of years time, the need to refit will coincide, and could make it much harder to generate hulls. This isn’t to say its impossible, it could be done – but the potential impacts on both the refit programme and the long term schedule planner need to be clearly understood – otherwise potentially deciding this year to have 4 Type 45 at sea could mean only having 1 Type 45 at sea in 4 years time – not great in a crisis.
A key challenge for the teams who look at force generation is ensuring that they can guarantee constant levels of availability, and this isn’t an easy job. Its easy to sit on the internet and struggle to understand why, for example, there are 4 Type 45 in Portsmouth right now. But, if you then realise that with two deployed (DRAGON and DEFENDER) one in short term refit and one in reserve (and possibly one more in deep refit) there are only one - two spare Type 45 hulls available and they will need to be ready to generate to replace in due course. You could thrash those two hulls right now to get four to sea, but the harder question to ask is ‘what replaces DRAGON and DEFENDER?’
The other big challenge in trying to get ships to sea is the perennial problem of headcount and trained personnel. This is a real challenge – right now there are two escorts in long term reserve due to the lack of sufficient people to crew them.
The immediate answer most people have on hearing this is ‘well recruit more sailors then’, which is very easy to say and harder to do. The RN knows that it needs more people in order to get ships companies up to full strength, but this is a business that can take years to do.
The training pipeline is working hard, but it still takes years to get engineers through and into operational roles, and years more to get them to the right level of qualification for Senior Rate roles. Short of utterly changing how recruitment is done, the RN faces a real challenge in growing suitably trained people to fill gaps today.
More widely, even if the RN sped refits up, it is questionable whether it has sufficiently trained personnel to create new ships companies to send them to sea ahead of time. The force is structured and designed to generate crews, and provide them with appropriate time ashore to rest, train and develop.
Many of the sub branches that provide personnel for the fleet are very small, with in some ranks and rates only a few tens of people trained and able to do a specific job. Sending them to sea in place of a shore draft would have negative impacts on their career development, reduce harmony time with families and increase the likelihood of them leaving. If you only have 20 people in the RN trained to operate a specific system at a certain rate, then even two of them putting their notice in would threaten to throw the whole personnel structure out of alignment.
This is before considering the wider impact on the force of drawing people out of shore billets and back into seagoing ones – what impact would it have at training schools, Battlestaffs, operational HQs and so on, and what would this mean? Would it result in hollowing out of shore based roles that may lack the appeal of seeing ships at sea, but without which, the force would struggle to operate?
It may sound easy to say ‘generate two or three more ships companies’ but doing so without a headcount uplift could have really significant long term consequences that could do more harm than good.
The lack of people causes problems in the short term as ships companies have to work harder than ever, and spend ever longer at sea. Fine if you are young and single, but intensely frustrating if you have a partner and children that you are not seeing or spending time with. The problem is that the more you overwork and stretch the force to deliver, the harder it is to retain them, and this vicious cycle only begins again.
The solution that would probably do the most for improving ship availability is also the one that politicians and the media would loathe – pay more ships off. Rather than trying, and failing, to deliver an escort force of 19 ships, the RN may find it easier to deliver a force of 12-14 hulls instead.
This suggestion is likely to provoke gasps of outrage in some quarters, but there is a logic to it. If your most important asset is your people, and you don’t have enough of them, and the ones you do have are being thrashed, then you need to make things easier for them. In the short term, if the RN looked to focus on a force that could put to sea with 100% or more Ships Company, without gaps and without people having to cover others jobs, this would probably make things easier in the medium term.
The history of the RN since WW2 is that of failing to properly manage its people properly, and in constantly struggling to get enough people to sea in the right quantities and roles. Fixing this is critical to ensuring that the Royal Navy of tomorrow is able to put to sea when needed.
Cutting ship numbers is perhaps a realism measure that reflects the reality of the modern RN – it is doing incredibly well to get ships to sea, but the risk is that in doing so, it is burning its people out and storing up longer term problems.
In the medium term the other way to increase availability is to look again at how refits work, and the means by which they will be conducted. Part of the challenge at the moment is arguably trying to conduct a major mid life update on the Type 23 design, which is a frigate expressly designed in the 1980s not to need or require a mid life update. This may account for why this programme is taking longer than expected.
If you look to the future then the QUEEN ELIZABETH class carriers offer a good model of where future refits may occur – regular but much shorter docking periods rather than longer term major refits every half decade or so, which in turn will probably increase their overall availability.
The Type 31 Frigate may offer another way of solving the problem, by instead focusing on serial production of the design and never keeping the ships long enough to require a major refit, and also needing fewer crew than their predecessors, making it easier to keep them at sea or operational.
The planned return to overseas basing raises some opportunities providing the docking periods can be managed. In the Gulf, the permanent presence of HMS MONTROSE on paper provides much longer periods of hull availability through the use of rotating crews and short term refits in Bahrain. The challenge, as was seen in the summer, is when a crisis occurs that coincides with a planned refit and crew change – at times like this the ability to surge ships is of critical importance to maintain the same levels of cover.
In the very long term (e.g. 15-20 year life) there may be an opportunity to grow the RN through the Type 31 force, which would reduce pressure on hulls and make them work less hard (thus reducing some of the maintenance challenges). If this can be delivered, along with a meaningful headcount increase, then there are potentially great longer term opportunities to improve availability even further.
It is important to remember too, when reading language like ‘inoperable’ to remember that the refit cycle is a perfectly normal part of every navies operating cycle. No navy on the planet can generate 100% availability, and, frankly, the RN achieving 75% of hulls available is a genuinely impressive achievement that deserves praise, not derision.
The challenge is how to educate the public that seeing a ship in refit isn’t a sign of failure. Its normal, expected and planned. It perhaps requires more to be done to show how these refits not only indicate just how hard the Royal Navy is working, but also to showcase how these refits would not be possible without the existence of the British defence industry.
Refit work generates a lot of skilled jobs, and keeps industries alive that would otherwise perhaps struggle. There is a wider piece too to explain how availability is a complex business – its not just about sending a ship to sea, but ensuring that the UK industrial base has the capacity to refit the ships, and that the manufacturing base has the ability to conduct the refit. If you are dependent on updating ships, and there is only a single manufacturer available for a widget or a component, then you are reliant on their finite capacity to deliver. It may be possible to increase this, but it would come at a heavy price – is this the best use of the defence budget, or is it better to stagger things out and instead avoid a cycle of ‘boom and bust’ in the yards and supply chain, and ensure long term value for money?
Few people like the idea or thought that a naval vessel needs repairs or refits, they inherently want to see ships at sea. But this is a natural part of the warship life cycle and needs to be done – the Royal Navy, ably supported by UK industry is a world leader in ensuring good availability overall of its force – far better than many of its peers.
The force needs to be handled with care though as the risk is in pushing it harder, getting more ships to sea and either reducing refit time or not doing them at all, the potential exists to break the personnel component, and with it, the longer-term ability of the Royal Navy to operate.
I love the way politicians create problems and then say the situation is unacceptable and needs to be fixed! RN ship availability is remarkable given the hand they have been dealt.
ReplyDeleteMy Question still stands: What should the fantasy fleeters that can't join up do with their lives? Shutting up doesn't seem like enough.
ReplyDeleteEvening
ReplyDeleteI don't normally comment on these pages, however the anonymous comment above caught my interest so I thought I would follow up.
Ben Wallace actually admitted culpability for the present situation the the Royal Navy and for that matter the Armed Forces find themselves in currently. He also extended culpability to those civil servants, military leaders and industry suppliers who have all exacerbated the current situation - too much equipment and not enough manpower.
The Royal Navy cannot currently generate enough manpower to crew all the ships available, this is partly due to the defence cuts of 2010 and partly due to a constant need to sustain more ships that the fleet could ever manage to man.
The balance is slowly being restored, the politician who currently recognises this is giving the military the political will its needs to make the tough choices that need to be made over the next 18 months to give the Royal Navy the best chance it has to support all of the roles asked of it:
CASD
Carrier
Amphibious Warfare
Fleet Escorts
Currently the Royal Navy is struggling to maintain the CASD, have enough fleet ready escorts and generate carrier capability.
Simple things can be done quite quickly to reduce RDEL burden, free up manpower and generate combat capability to meet the demand.
1 - Reduce the number of vessels currently declared, retire an LPD (being in reserve is retired anyway), sell the platform to a nation who can actually make use of a fantastic piece of equipment. Reduce the number GD frigates from 5 to 3 - sell them to nations that can actually crew them and use them.
2 - Start the T31 CDEL purchase now, the first frigate is to hit the water in 3 years - training systems should be bought now, a new capability is being added and people, process, organisation and technology in that order need to be made ready to accept it so the RN hits the ground running.
3 - Dont be afraid to deploy a patrol ship where one is required, don't crumble under the pressure of arm chair generals when they say only a frigate or destroyer will do.
4 - Stop moaning about how hard it all is, this blog is always stating how difficult everything seems to be and apologising on behalf of the someone. We get it, you are doing your best but don't moan about it, just get on with it and if you are finding it difficult getting your case across - do better.
5 - Accept there will always be arm chair generals and fleet admirals out there who dream of days gone by and talk of grand fleets armed to the teeth ready to go at a moments notice. They are part of the debate - they read a lot more Hansard than we ever will and through the noise of 5 inch guns and TLAM missiles are actually expanding the debate and giving it depth.
6 - Accept that mistakes have been made, don't find someone to blame but move on. As the minster said, we are all at fault and have all been complicit in the situation we now find ourselves in, what can make or break the MoD is what they (you) do about it.
We find ourselves in a hole, partly of our own making. How much further do we want to dig before we look to try and get out of it and give the armed forces the people and equipment it needs?
You should comment more often, this was very interesting.
DeleteMy thought is that if the RN is waiting and hoping for someone to turn up with extra funds to sort out their problems, then it's never going to happen. The resources they have are the resources they will get, so it's solutions are going to have to be internal.
Any hopes of a sustained increase in the defence budget are indeed destined to flounder. The RN is stuck with the resources it has and talk of new LHDs, a return to operating SSKs etc. are pure fantasy.
DeleteI agree that 2 GP T23 frigates could be decommissioned and sold, along with one of the LPDs. The remaining LPD should go when we have a means of addressing the capability gap. Ultimately the RN has to accept that the amphibious capability will have to be delivered differently in future and without dedicated LPDs. My own view is that the Albions, Bays and Argus sould all be replaced with say 3 multi-role support ships along the lines of the Dutch Karel Doorman JLSS.
I would also say that the B2 Rivers need to be exploited to the full. We know that they were expensive and highly controversial. However, they may prove to be a more useful and cost-effective (in terms of through-life costs) asset than is at first apparent if used in the right way.
There has already been a huge debate about the future of the Albion Class. The very idea that they were to have been withdrawn produced a huge backlash with much support in their favour being displayed at the Commons select Committee on Defence. Following this debate, it was decided to retain them in service until the early 2030's. They are a vital part of the Royal Navy, and to lose them would very seriously undermine the operational effectiveness of our Navy at a time of increased tension and instability in the Baltic States, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula and South China Sea. It would greatly reduce the overall effectiveness of the Service and it would leave a huge capability and equally importantly, a skills gap (1000 redundancies of Royal Marines was considered) that would be extremely difficult to replace, train and regenerate.
ReplyDeleteGeneral Purpose Type 23 Frigates are vital in tasks such as keeping sea lanes open, protecting the freedom to navigate and providing a deterrent to those who would wish to deny such freedoms. Remember, there are only Five of them and HMS Montrose is already forward deployed to the Gulf. So, out of the remaining four, only HMS Argyll is active, HMS Monmouth is awaiting refit (no available dock in the Frigate Complex), HMS Lancaster is somewhere between the end of her refit and Trials / work up, which leaves HMS Iron Duke, and she is docked down in the Sheds. So, that's two active General Purpose 23's out of five. That is over a third of the GP Frigate force, which is to be expected when you consider the cycle of deploy, return, leave, maintenance, Sea training (FOST), deploy again, home, refit etc. It must be recognised that two out of those five, HM Ships Montrose and Argyll have deployed to the Far East in recent times, Montrose going the long way around, making visits to the West Coast of the USA and then eventually after more Port visits, onto her new Base Port in HMS Jufair, Bahrain. Not only are the GP Frigates needed in far flung places around the world, they are also needed closer to home, policing the waters around the UK, North Atlantic, Greenland / Iceland Gap, Baltic etc, flag waving and providing a vital presence, therefore freeing up the ASW Frigates for more high end tasking wherever the operational requirement might be. Five General Purpose Frigates of the Type 31 Class are soon to be ordered and when they come into service, their reduced Ships Companies will mean more available manpower for other ships, as will the eventual introduction of the Type 26 Frigates. So, whilst there are admittedly, still some problems to be resolved, it must be said that things ARE now going in the right direction, and in the years ahead, as the Service returns to a more global posture, we will see a much more robust Royal Navy, one that even more of us can be justifiably proud of.
The Albions are secure in the short-term only and could easily be decommissioned early as part of a future defence review or snap cuts, as happened with 2 out of the 3 Invincibles. You have to be more than an optimist to believe that the Albions will be retained for a further 15 years. The official position is that the Government is 'considering the options available' for replacement of the LPDs. My own view is that large-scale amphibious landings on hostile territory will probably not be a future defence priority, therefore like-for-like replacement is unlikely.
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ReplyDeleteThe Albion LPD has caused some excitement over the last 18 months and was one of the reasons why the Defence part of the SDSR (interim) was removed. When Commando 2000 was launched nearly 25 years ago it was assumed that the RM would still deploy a Bde if required by sea at short notice anywhere in the world. The ORBAT of the Cdo unit was changed and the appropriate shipping was identified to allow a Bde to be lifted and moved to deploy overseas. In reality this never happened, HMG never had enough ships and the Corps was heavily deployed in Iraq and then Afghanistan. Earlier this decade it was decided to reduce the Bde deployment down to a Battlegroup of 1800 men and materials, better reflecting what was actually available and what could actually be deployed, at short notice. As we enter the 2020's the Corps and the RN as a whole find itself rebalancing itself against new threats - you hear words like digital transformation, asymmetric warfare, cyber attacks.
What this really means is that strategic planners are finding more difficult to predict the future making it more difficult for the MoD to plan to build platforms that will deployed 5-10 years from now. You only have to look at the CVF and realise how long platforms take to go from concept through to deployed asset.
The Corps are acutely aware of this hence they have been looking at novel ways to deploy combat capability, at short notice by sea anywhere in the world, part of this realisation means that having 2 LPD's could be seen by some as a luxury that can no longer be afforded. The Albion LPD is crewed by around 300 sailors which by todays standards is very manpower heavy, especially when we have 2 new CVF to man as well. Removing one from the ORBAT reduces the pressure on the RN, specifically its manpower liability and allows more investment in other platforms that could be made available to the RN, more importantly giving the RM more flexibility in the platform they can use to deploy from. This doesn't mean a reduction in the supporting ASRM but allows a better ratio of ASRM to vessel and also encourages more diversity in ASRM shipping.
With regards to T23 GD, HMS Monmouth should be decommissioned, resources should be reassigned to getting T31 ready - sometimes bold moves, whilst painful in the short term have long term benefit. The RN need a bit of breathing space, 19 frigates and destroyers is a mythical number anyway.
Some interesting information on the 'Save the Royal Navy' site today re. the BMT ELLIDA Multi-Role Support Ship concept and the RM refocusing on raiding and seaborne warfare. The ELLIDA is representative of the type of ship we should be building to replace the Albions, Bays and Argus, I would say. Even this site acknowledges that 'the days of slow landing craft directly storming defended beaches are probably over.'
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