Sailing into a Storm? What Could COVID-19 Mean for the Royal Navy?

The Royal Navy has confirmed that HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH will next sail on 27 April as part of her long planned programme. This news, confirmed via the Sunday Times today raised questions about whether the ship should sail, and how she could keep her crew safe given the fact that both US and French carriers have returned to port due to COVID-19 outbreaks.

The pandemic and ensuing lockdown has raised all manner of challenges and issues for the armed forces, and this is the latest example of how, for at least the next few months short term protection may have a potentially longer term impact. But the response has also shown the armed forces at their finest, with all three Services quickly rising to the challenge of supporting the Civil Power, while also continuing business as usual.

There have been two very different strands of operations underway recently – the first has been the superb mobilisation of UK forces to provide support to a variety of tasks in the UK. While MACA tasking is a routine part of many units lives, it is still something that requires skill and training to deliver well.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

For the Royal Navy this has meant deploying helicopters across the South West to provide air support for the evacuation of sick patients and getting them to hospital – a critical task in regions where ambulances are thinly stretched and the road networks remote to get to hospitals.

The RN has also provided a wide range of medical personnel, both regular and reservist to carry out support to the NHS. If anything this crisis highlights the value of decisions taken nearly 30 years ago to move the UK military into the wider NHS system (for example only this week the RN Hospital Unit in Plymouth celebrated its 25^th anniversary of opening), benefitting not only the armed forces, but the wider NHS too. Right now scores of RN medical personnel are on the front line of the fight against COVID-19, helping deliver the best possible care to patients.

Another task that emerged at short notice was the dispatchof RFA ARGUS in her medical role, sailing across the Atlantic to the West Indies where she will be able to provide a combination of medical care, plus potentially vital interventions should any natural disasters occur.

This deployment, planned seemingly at very short notice is a tribute to the flexibility of the RN, RFA and their people. Of particular note was the manner in which the ‘Junglies’ of 845 Naval Air Squadron embarked three cabs onto the ship, just a couple of weeks after their return from the Arctic, and returning to sea in order to sail to tropical waters.

That the Squadron was able to so quickly turn their assets around and redeploy people to support an entirely new deployment, hot on the heels of a winter deployment is a real testimony to the strength of the people in the Fleet Air Arm, and their ‘can do’ attitude. The Jungly force is once again proving itself a critical enabler for UK interests globally.

Other good news stories include the ability of the RN to draw on its reserve forces components to help stand up and support operations at home. The Maritime Reserve has long been an integral part of the Naval Service, and today makes up some 10% of the overall Service. In very short order their people and facilities have quickly been brought into use to support UK ops and help deliver critical assistance to those who need it.

In many ways COVID-19 has highlighted the best of the Royal Navy and its people with the ability to pivot support so quickly to help focus on providing aid to those who need it at home.

But more widely the normal business of operations has not stopped. Around the world RN ships remain on a variety of operations and tasks, from HMS FORTH down in the Falklands, to the Gulf where Frigates and MCMVs remain on task and busy supporting British shipping.

In the West Indies the newly arrived HMS MEDWAY continues to provide an invaluable presence moving from island to island, conducting training and support to local nations, while she settles into her routine.

Lets also not forget the work of the Hydrographic force, whose ships move around the world at such a speed, they rarely have time to drop their anchors in just one location for long. HMS ENTERPRISE is out in the Far East, while HMS SCOTT has just returned from the Falkland Islands and supporting SAR operations near Chile.

Meanwhile in home waters, a variety of ships are carrying out tasking such as escorting Russian warships in the channel, or routine operational duties elsewhere. HMS SUTHERLAND has remained out at sea and on duty, able to respond to tasking as needed, using a variety of innovative ways to keep the ship supplied and COVID-19 free, proof that at times quick thinking can make a huge impact.

The challenge though is looking ahead to the summer months and beyond. COVID has almost certainly ripped a huge hole in every armed force on the planets plans for the year, and its likely that the long term impacts will be felt for some time, if not years, to come.

For instance the RN will need to think carefully about how it supports its critical assets in getting them ready for force generation and conducting exercises as needed. The plan for the QE this year was for a final ‘proof of concept’ deployment out to the USA to embark UK and USMC F35 jets ahead of the CSG21 deployment next year. It is likely that the sailing in late April will be a key milestone in preparing for this deployment.

The big questions to ask will be how do you prepare the ship for deployment if the crew become ill and what happens then? Does the UK follow the US or French example of returning to port, or does it push on regardless and keep the exercise programme going? While the lives of sailors must be paramount, there is a wider question around what the impact would be on the return to full carrier strike operations if the planned programme was delayed this year.

The other challenge is how do you keep the force ready to go in an era of social distancing? Given the incubation period of the virus, the challenge must be to work out when to put crews into quarantine ahead of sailing, and the impact this has on their routines and way of life. More widely, how do you assure the chain in its entirety from sailor on the ship through to dockyard worker to be certain they are infection free? It would be a great irony if a ship was laid low due to an infection caused by a third party who came into contact with the ship ahead of sailing.

This perhaps illustrates one of the big challenges that will need to be answered in the next Defence Review – does more need to be brought in house to assure control over it? Having a ‘just in time’ support system, or extensive privatised assets that used to be done by Service Personnel makes a lot of sense when you need to cut budgets or free up headcount. But, what happens when suddenly you need to exercise complete control over the lives of your workforce?

The problem though is that bringing this sort of privatised capability ‘in house’ is expensive and means finding money to solve it. This is unlikely to be easily found, so the question quickly becomes ‘what do you want to scrap or stop doing in order to reinforce the in house assets’?

This is the sort of difficult decision that needs to be carefully looked at – does the system alter course and reverse 30 years worth of downsizing and cuts, seeking to eke out as much as possible to third parties, or does it stay the course but accept more risk, or have more control over what its contractors have to deliver? There will be difficult decisions ahead in this area.

The pandemic has perhaps too highlighted the challenges of operating a forward deployed navy in an era of global lockdown. Finding ports to conduct crew changes, rotations of key personnel, shifts of CO’s and the like isn’t always easy. Doing it when air travel is suspended and the ability to get the right stores, spare parts and supplies in to the right port isn’t always a given is potentially challenging.

If anything this crisis has highlighted that while rotating crews is great in an era when you can fly people home quickly, does it work when you cannot be certain you can conduct the handover, and what happens when your ability to get into / out of a country is disrupted.

As planners look towards the back end of the year, its likely that all manner of challenges like this will emerge as they look to work out how to keep ships deployed, operational and with access to safe ports to conduct vital port calls and refits.

Other issues that are likely to start causing a headache will be ensuring that this doesn’t disrupt the longer term ability of the RN to do its job when things return back to a greater semblance of normalcy. Right now personnel are deployed across the country supporting all manner of tasks, and much of the normal day to day way of life and support or training is likely to have been paused.

The question is what happens to ensure that where training is stopped, it can be restarted as fast as possible, and how do you pick up where you left off? All manner of handovers are likely to be have been delayed, people are in the wrong roles or training abandoned – is there potentially a bow wave of challenges building up as the training system attempts to reboot itself?

Of particular interest is what happens to things like BRNC Dartmouth and HMS RALEIGH. At the moment the RN careers website states that training is still going on, so hopefully courses will continue as planned. But what happens to people passing out who need to be loaded onto Phase 2 courses or specific trade or promotion training?

This may sound a minor issue, but the impact on career training and ensuring that the production line that is the military professional training system can continue unabated is something that could have an impact that may be felt for many years to come. Due to the way the system works, delays in running a course can completely alter the state of the personnel plot, or have an impact out of all proportion, often on small branches – just look at the RAF Fast Jet training pipeline where delays waiting for courses can lead to people spending, literally, years waiting to get to the front line.

The RN to this day remembers the pain of closing HMS RALEIGH to new entrants for a short period in the 1990s, creating an institutional issue that has taken nearly 30 years to filter through the system due to the lack of people in the right point in their career. Now while there is a strong argument to be made that the ‘black hole’ as it was sometimes called was as much a testament to Naval Service inability to genuinely change and fix career challenges to solve this problem, instead shrugging shoulders at the idea of fixing it and waiting for a few decades to pass so it would go away of its own accord, there is also the argument that the RN wants to do anything it possible can to avoid another ‘black hole’ emerging 30 years later.

Its likely that if at all possible keeping the recruiting system going, and the training pipeline alive, particularly at HMS RALEIGH, is likely to be of the highest importance right now to prevent another set of problems that can quickly build up to cause decades of headaches to career managers.

Finally there is perhaps a question to be asked about striking the balance between fighting the near battle and being ready to fight the operational battles. Does COVID-19 mean that the RN should pause operations more widely and focus purely on the crisis at hand, or should this be treated as a near term issue that, no matter how challenging it seems, be overcome and thus there needs to be a focus on both preparing for potential contingency operations, but also planning for the next set of operations and deployments.

So, while much of the attention on COVID-19 has been on winning the short term battle, the much bigger set of challenges is going to be as much about rebooting the military and ensuring that they are able to not only get back on operations as quickly as possible, but also that the system as a whole can continue to support them.

In many ways COVID has forced significant changes in the way the armed forces do business – it has seen new technology and ways of working embraced, and forced difficult questions to be asked about how to ensure the military continue to be able to support operations. What is encouraging is that the ‘can do’ attitude that exemplifies the British military continues to be present in abundance – what will be interesting is to see what happens when things calm slightly and there is space to answer the question ‘what next’?