Solving A Problem That Doesn't Exist - Up gunning the River Class...

Should the Royal Navy up arm and up gun its River class offshore patrol vessels? A simple question, but one which seems to spur more debate on online naval debating space than any other issue.

In many ways, although fantastic ships, the Rivers are perhaps the wrong size – too big to appear like an OPV, too small to be an escort, they strike many commentators as ‘the little big ships that could’. Much derisory comment is made about their main armament being a 30mm gun, while others see huge potential for upgunning them with masses of additional weaponry.

Some of these suggestions are routine – for example maybe adding additional remote weapon stations or a UAV capability. Others seem determined to turn an OPV into a frigate – adding larger main guns or anti-ship missiles. Finally some suggestions veer on the radical – turning them into ASW corvettes for example.

HMS FORTH in the Falkland Islands - Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The challenge for all these upgrades though is that they are easy to suggest and far more difficult to deliver. When considering adding additional weaponry on, much of the debate seems to focus on the placement of the weapon system – there are ship plans aplenty on the net of RN vessels with all manner of replacement systems fitted.

Its easy to map out the spot where you desired weapon can go – but that seems to be as far as many people take the debate. There is very rarely any serious consideration about how you actually go about adding additional capabilities to a ship, or how you do this.

All ships have a finite design growth limit – you can add additional bits to them, but there will always be a point where the design cannot be taken any further for safety reasons (at its simplest, become too top heavy and you soon have a new submarine on your hands, whether you want to or not).

When adding a new capability we need to ask ourselves, what is the impact of this on the overall ship design – for example, what would adding a (for the sake of argument) harpoon battery on a River class do for its stability, operating characteristics and so on. Is it fundamentally safe to add this, or would doing so compromise the ships design?

We also need to consider the hotel services requirements. This doesn’t mean checking into a 4* hotel, but rather what impact would fitting this kit have on the ship and its ability to support it. So, in the case of a new missile system, does the ship have the ability to provide enough power to keep it operational? Would adding additional fire control radars, support systems and the various infrastructure needed to maintain it onboard place too much strain on the ships systems?

What would amending the below deck layout mean in terms of compartment use and space? All ships are honeycombs, and a rabbit warren of carefully designed spaces intended to be fitted with equipment, life support systems and the myriad of cabling needed to operate the ship.

Where are you going to put all the support systems and how will you move the ships internal layout around to cope with this? What impact would putting a missile maintenance workshop and support office onboard have in terms of internal structure? Would it compromise safety (e.g. fire safety) in some way and how will you arrange the cable runs appropriately?

What about the combat management side of life – what changes are needed to the ops rooms and combat system to support this new equipment? Do you need a major refurbishment of the Ops Room and how does it impact on your ability to fight the ship?

Finally, how do you solve the accommodation issues – if you are embarking permanent new crew, what does this mean not just for cabin space, but food, logistics and so on? All of this may sound incredibly minor, but it does need to be thought about.

The point here is that you cannot just bolt a weapon system on, except the most basic designs like GPMG or mini-guns and not have a major impact on the way the ship is configured and works. This can be achieved, but it may call for trade offs, and these may actually have a more negative impact than expected on the ship.

All of this is before we even get to the challenge of the refit itself, which will take the ship off task for months or even years for a very ambitious change. Its not just the work, but the wider delays if things slip, and the inevitable challenges of integration and making sure the ship works and can actually operate as planned.

Adding anti-ship missiles to a River class would pose real delay to their availability as you fit it, run the trials, do the testing and make sure the ship is safe to operate the weapons as intended. In the meantime, the ship isn’t doing the work expected of her, so you are running gaps in the operational programme as a result.

The suggestion too that adding a sonar and making the ship into an ASW corvette needs consideration. Its entirely right to suggest, as some have done on social media, that in WW2 the RN surged a force of escort ships to sea as a stopgap to escort convoys.

There is a very compelling argument that could be made that these ships could be used in a similar way – perhaps armed with a sonar and some form of ASW capability, they could form the core of a support ASW capability. This sounds great in theory- adding more ASW platforms to the force at a time when they are in short supply.

The problem though is that the River is not designed, nor intended for ASW work. In WW2 fighting submarines was a quite different proposition. Submarines were essentially surface ships with a limited ability to submerge for short periods of time. Fighting them involved rudimentary depth charges and other ASW weapons, plus relatively simple sonar to find them.

Todays modern submarines are infinitely more capable. Equipped for modern sonar, and an ability to  listen in and find people easily, coupled with significantly enhanced endurance, a well handled hostile submarine is hard to find, and hard to kill.

ASW work is slow, it is methodical and it requires very good co-operation across a range of sensors, platforms and domains to track and kill hostile submarines. Those fighting the ASW battle need every advantage up their sleeve to ensure they can track and destroy their opponent.

Central to this is investment in good sonar, good processing capability and the ability to be as silent as possible. One reason the Type 26 force is so expensive is because it is designed to take the fight to the most capable of our putative opponents nuclear submarines. It needs to be as silent as possible to evade detection and preserve the element of surprise. It needs a highly effective sonar and the means to process and interpret this information.

It needs to be able to work effectively as part of an integrated task group, sharing the hunt with allies, other submarines, airborne assets and other data sources, and do so in a manner that keeps it on task in the vilest of weather for days at a time.

Finally it needs to be able to support and deploy heavy ASW helicopters like the Merlin to fly a long distance and kill the target with torpedoes before it can get close enough to pose a threat to the ship itself.

Brought together this calls for not only an expensive platform, but also a lot of training and time spent working on ASW tasks to keep skills honed. This isn’t something you can just pick up as a secondary duty, its something you do day in day out to prevent skills fade.

The River class is a superb platform for the job it is designed to do, but it is not designed or intended to be an ASW platform. It is relatively noisy, it is not able to support heavy ASW aviation, nor is it designed or able to mount the necessary sensors to track and monitor possible submarine contacts.

In the event of an ASW operation, our opponent’s submarines would know it was there long before our own ship found it. If it was by some miracle able to find it, then it would be in the unenviable position of only being able to fire while comfortably inside firing range of an opponent’s torpedoes. This is not necessarily a good thing…

As a friend of the authors with experience of ASW frigate command put it, it would be wise not to suggest using a River class for ASW in earshot of an ASW Frigates crew, because otherwise  “a grumpy CO will hunt them down and hit them upside the head with a f*cking spade”  for making such a foolish suggestion…

The simple message here is that we should be wary of messing with things just because they look good on paper. The River class is designed to do the 99% of jobs that RN ships can do very well – low level patrols, disaster relief, supporting the local community etc.

They are superb at maintaining a presence, or just reassuring locals that the Royal Navy is in town. They will spend much of their careers on low key naval operations around the world fundamentally delivering this work. The worry is that people see them and assume that a ship intended to do maritime policing work isn’t armed to carry out maritime warfighting in the same way as a frigate or destroyer.  

That an OPV can’t do this work shouldn’t be a surprise. Frankly if you’re in the stage where your OPV is needed to charge headlong into the guns of an enemy fleet in the manner of HMS GLOWWORM, something has gone very badly wrong indeed.

There are several risks of up gunning these ships too much. Firstly, it takes limited resources away from other upgrade options and eats in to the design capacity. There is doubtless a list of improvements that will see their way onto the Batch 2 ships – an improved 30mm gun, or additional weapon stations. But these are cheap and simple updates to do and could be done with little impact on the ships and their availability.

But, adding complex refit work in means money for other upgrades, either here or on other ships falls by the wayside and we end up with the worst of both worlds, a major weapon system deployed on a ship that we’d really rather not put in harm’s way.

The usual challenge at this point is either ‘well other navies use this design and up gun them’ or ‘but surely an RN ship needs to defend itself’. On the first challenge, yes, they do. The River class has variants in other navies, but these designs are built to a totally different set of user requirements, they are intended for very different roles and they may have very different attitudes to both design growth and their safety cases.

The navies sticking plethora of guns and anti-ship missiles onboard may do so because they lack other ways of delivering this, or because they anticipate being in a short notice fight where having this is necessary, so they’ve invested appropriately in combat systems etc to ensure they can do this.

For the Royal Navy the chances of a solitary Batch 2 coming under fire out of the blue, and then retaliating without recourse to using anti-ship missiles on a random target is, to put it mildly, stretching credibility to its limits. What nation would declare war on the UK by firing a missile at a River class and why?

When considering if RN vessels have the right weapons, we should ask ourselves ‘what is the job we want them to do’ not ‘what would look most ally and what incredibly inconceivable requirement should we use to justify its installation’.

Its akin to say that because not every British Army tracked vehicle hasn’t got a 120mm gun, they are at risk and need upgrading. In reality there are plenty of tracked vehicles in the Army, with a myriad of weapon systems and capabilities. The trick is to ensure that you have the right mixture of assets available to all the jobs required

Perhaps the one aspect that gets most often forgotten in all of these debates is not the equipment, but where the people will come to actually operate it all. Every weapon system we deploy comes with a price tag in terms of both the crew onboard to maintain/operate it, and also the associated shore footprint.

To introduce (for example) a SSGW bespoke to the River class would pose a significant headcount challenge. You’d need additional trained crew to support it, maintain it and ensure it was fit for purpose. This poses challenges both for training and career profiles and poses a real challenge to the training pipeline – where do these people come from, and what impact could it have?

The people element is often forgotten, but it is critical. The RN is not flush with spare trained ratings sitting around who could go to jobs like sonar teams or weapons maintainers. To add in extra requirements on billets like a River class actually could cause real short term disruption, possibly to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

It is this that is perhaps the most crucial point of all. Everything that gets purchased in the Armed Forces needs to have some kind of requirement underpinning it. There needs to be a reason why public money should be spent on something, and a compelling case to do so.

In the case of the River class, it is genuinely hard to fathom the requirement for seriously increasing their armament beyond the most modest of weapons upgrades. If you look at their role – very low key maritime constabulary work, operating in low threat and benign waters and not intended to go into battle against other warships, then what is the need for anti-ship missiles or other similar upgrades?

While it is tempting to keep saying ‘but what if’, the process of saying ‘what if’ is not reason enough to spend money. There needs to be a palpable requirement and rationale and right now its hard to spot it. We have ships capable of carrying out ASW,  and we have ships capable of doing ASuW, so what urgent requirement are we trying to answer here that we cannot do far more easily (and cheaply) with existing platforms?

This isn’t to say that we should not upgrade platforms through their lives – far from it. These ships will be worked hard, and beneath their skin we’ll probably see all manner of internal changes that make them more capable to do their intended job. The future prospects for  remotely operated vehicles is intriguing, as is the potential for some kind of small RPAS for maritime surveillance work.

What matters though is remembering that these are ships armed and equipped for the job we want them to do. Moaning that they are not carrying bells and whistles systems is missing the point- these are relatively simple vessels, with small crews, low maintenance needs and an ability to operate as a flag flying presence. They are not first-rate ships of the line and nor are they intended to be.

Every proposed ‘quick’ upgrade is usually anything but, and to integrate multiple systems onto a ship not designed from the outset to take them is usually a recipe for cost growth and compromise. If anyone tells you differently, show them a picture of HMS BLAKE after her conversion to a helicopter carrier – a textbook example of wasting millions of pounds to create a ship that wasn’t particularly good at ASW, and which required as many people to keep her at sea as an INVINCIBLE class carrier…

The Batch 2 River class represent a very positive future for the RN. Neatly filling the slot of longer ranged patrol ships, they can do most of the jobs abroad that heavier ships used to have to do, freeing these hulls up for other duties.

But care must be taken to not assume that because they do roles formerly filled by frigates, that they are somehow frigates and operated and armed as such. We need to be wary of confusing our willingness to fight with the equipment of our ships.

Just because a ship does not sail the seven seas armed to the teeth does not mean its crew are not capable of fighting – it means that they have the tools required to do the job asked of them for the role required – and not gold plating for the sake of Internet Admirals egos.

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