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 25th 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’?
In sailing the QE, the QE it’s self is not the biggest challenge to keep virus free. The stores ships the carrier group need to operate will be the first to take on board new potentially infected items.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if stores will be bought ahead of time and disinfected or isolated for sufficient time before they are moved onto the resupply ships?
Are there enough British manned locations on the QE’s planned route to ensure that this takes place properly?
I wonder if there is a current test for the virus that can be used to swob down stores items as a check?
Sir Humphrey has not mentioned the enormous strain the pandemic will place on the families of deployed sailors, marines and other Service people. Being the partner of a deployed sailor is hard enough without having to deal with social isolation, home schooling and the threat of contracting the disease. The Navy (and other Services) will also take a hit if the partners do become ill, so needing the sailor to be returned home to take on childcare or for simple compassionate reasons.
ReplyDelete