The Curiously Canadian Case for Type 26.

 

There is interesting news this week in both Australia and Canada over their major naval procurement programmes. Both countries are committed to buying locally manufactured Type 26 frigates for their future surface ships force, while Australia is also buying 12 French designed diesel submarines.

In both cases there have been media articles in the last week over the programmes and concerns. In Canada, the challenge has been that the cost has grown to a total of $77bn for 15 escorts. There has been cost growth from an originally scheduled $14bn many years ago, and the first of class will not now be delivered until 2031. This has led to suggestions in some media quarters that Canada could do things faster and more cheaply if it simply bought an off the shelf foreign design now and got on with things.

Meanwhile in Australia there is an element of brinksmanship going on over the trade offs required for the submarine construction programme, with the Australians expecting at least 60% of the spend on the project to be spent in Australia. This was reportedly seen as very difficult by the French, and it was rumoured Australia was on the verge of walking away from the deal.

Both cases illustrate in different ways the challenges with building modern warships, and in getting a strategy right that delivers ships on time, capable of doing the job required and which sustains an indigenous industrial base.

In the case of Canada, the RCN has for years wanted to replace its four Tribal class destroyers (which were nearly 45 years old when the last finally paid off in 2017) and the 12 Halifax class frigates, which were built in the late 1980s, and entered service from 1992.

Canada has a requirement for a capable surface ship able to operate as a credible NATO partner nation, and able to participate in high intensity operations around the world. As a ‘two ocean navy’ and focused on delivery of security in the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific oceans, the Royal Canadian Navy has a huge challenge in being able to meet the many and varied threats in its areas of interest.

The aspiration has been for the purchase of modern and very advanced vessels capable of operating at the highest conflict levels – thus reaffirming Canadas place as a modern maritime power, and a credible player in NATO, 5-EYES and wider Pacific security architecture.

The challenge though is that this programme has been delayed, with work on the original Tribal replacements dying a death and being merged into the Halifax replacement plan. This in turn meant that Canada had lost the ability to effectively construct high quality warships at home due to the dearth of orders for new ships. By the time the first Type 26 enters service, it will have been 35 years since Canada last commissioned a major surface warship, which is a very significant gap.

This has led to real challenges in trying to decide how to regenerate Canadian shipbuilding, and in turn poses a real issue of skills generation. While some very limited orders have been made for conversions (e.g the tanker Asterix), what hasn’t really happened is any construction of very high-end warships, which are a very different game.

The issue now is that Canada will need to establish, almost from scratch, a frigate construction programme and workforce for a finite period of time without a clear plan of what follows on when the last hull is completed. At the same time it will need to run on ships that are becoming increasingly elderly – it is likely that most of the Halifax class will see more than 40 years of service, and some may approach their 50^th birthdays before being replaced – something that will pose an increasing maintenance and resource challenge.

 Could things be done more cheaply or quickly? Almost certainly yes, but only if you are willing to make massive compromises. It could be possible, for example, to look to licence build an existing design that is already in service. There are plenty of designs out there that could be licence built and brought into service in the next few years -probably at less cost than the T26 programme.

But while this may sound easy, its also a recipe for disaster. It’s easy to look at country X and say ‘they’re buying this ship for that much’ and assume that Canada is getting a bad deal. But Country X is likely to have a very different set of requirements, and their design will reflect it.

For example, Canada needs a ship able to operate with NATO and 5 EYES as a fully integrated player – this adds cost to fit specific systems and equipment that is compatible. Canada will also want to fit bespoke systems to meet national needs – again this will require design changes, that come at a price. Bolting on all manner of different requirements that Canada needs to meet the unique operational circumstances adds price and complexity to the design.

While you probably could take an off the shelf design and build it now, it would be just that, an off the shelf design. It wouldn’t be optimised for local needs, and it wouldn’t have the right equipment, comms, meet local design standards, or be certified for use with national equipment.

You are then faced with two choices – either bring a cheap ship into service that is entirely unsuitable and not designed for your needs, but is a lot cheaper, or spend an enormous amount of money shifting the design to better reflect your needs. If you choose the latter, then suddenly you are adding cost and time in, and the 2031 date will slip even further.

If you choose the former, then you have to accept that the design is ‘as it comes’ and will have minimal Canadian input – so limited industrial offsets, very little economic benefit, and the long-term support solutions will firmly be tied into the country of origin and not Canada. In other words, Canadian taxpayer dollars will be spent to support a foreign economy.

This is where Australia is struggling now in deciding to invest in submarines, using foreign designs. The argument over where spend falls is challenging as it relies on there being sufficient industrial capability in country to deliver what is required, when it is required. It also raises the issues of whether it is more important to spend wherever in order to get the right military capability, or spend in country to sustain the economy and sovereign defence industrial base.

Its extremely easy to browse ship catalogues and assume a country is getting a bad deal because another is buying a design more cheaply. But in reality, it’s important to realise that nations buy the ships that meet their specific needs, and these often vary wildly. Under the skin of a modern ship lies all manner of complex and sensitive equipment, stores and capabilities, and what works for one country will not work or be appropriate for another.

This sounds binary, and unfortunately it is. The reality of ship design is that getting a warship that you want, and which does what you want it to do is extremely expensive. Restarting production lines when they have been closed for decades is even more expensive and so is closing them down again if there are no further orders. There are wider questions on long term support too – buying into a joint programme like Type 26 gives Canada the ability to gain leverage and economic value for money when it comes to through life support costs.

The Canadians have to learn to rebuild ships, and they are doing this through the construction of the Harry De Wolfe class OPV, an arctic patrol ship displacing some 6000 tonnes, but which is relatively unsophisticated when it comes to warship design. The challenge ahead is to make the step up over the next couple of years and ensure that the industry can jump from manufacturing OPVs to Type 26 frigates.

The big challenge for Canada is that this is occurring during a period where fundamental decisions are needed about the role Canada wants to play on the world stage. Further delay to these vessels will cause the force to ‘rust out’ again in the cyclical manner that seems to have beset the RCN on many occasions throughout its history. There is too a looming need to take tough decisions on other replacement plans – the Victoria class SSK (the former Upholders) are now all around 30 years old, while the Kingston class patrol ships are also ageing.

Major investment decisions are needed soon to preserve many of these capabilities, and to prioritise what matters most. An F35 buy is also under consideration, and there are requirements for other military hardware too. At some point the money will run out, and tough decisions are required on what has to be sacrificed or delayed.

The risk Canada has is that its national tendency to defer decisions till the last possible moment, then take a decision could have very serious consequences when it comes to the long-term sustainability of the Canadian Forces. It is hard to see a path through the next 20-30 years which sees all current RCN capabilities maintained and replaced – if anything, the diesel submarine force looks the most vulnerable.

Canada has the luxury of isolation and a rich neighbour, and it could, were it to wish to do so, substantially cull its defence expenditure. An utterly cold-hearted assessment would be that for all the moaning by the US about freeloading, Canada could cull defence spending safe in the knowledge that their neighbours would need to do something to mitigate any gaps (for example in air defence).

Arguably the RCN is a luxury – there is no direct need to Canadas existential status that calls for the RCN to deploy globally with NATO or in the Gulf or Pacific. But to say this is to miss the point that Canada is a global player with a long and proud history of doing the right thing and supporting nations in need. This means that tough decisions will be required of Canadian defence, and taxpayers in years to come, to work out what needs to change in order to keep the RCN, and the wider Canadian Forces too as a credible long-term force.

From a UK perspective, the Canadian experience of facing tough decisions and rising costs is perhaps an opportunity to reflect on the UK’s shipbuilding plans. While sometimes unfairly maligned, recent years have shown that the UK seems to have gotten the best of both worlds when it comes to ship building.

From the outset, the maintenance of a national sovereign warship design capability has been essential. In the last 20 years the UK has built Carriers, LPDs, destroyers, frigates, SSNs and is now underway on building SSBNs – all indigenously designed. Never under estimate the value of a national ability to design at home a requirement that meets your needs.

There has been a consistent and stable pattern of work for decades now – the Type 23 programme rolled into the Type 45 programme, and the Carrier programme generated additional work.

When a pause seemed likely, lessons were learnt from previous pauses (such as attack submarine construction in the 1990s) and a credible plan put in place to build the Batch 2 River class to keep a semblance of work going ahead of the ramping up of the Type 26 and 31 programmes.

The key message throughout is that there hasn’t been a day this century when there has not been a major surface warship for the Royal Navy under construction somewhere in the UK – as one project has ended, another has already been under way. This has been critical to retaining skills and experience, and helping keeping things going even when work was thin on the ground.

The advantage of this is that the RN doesn’t face lengthy delays in the same way to get replacements into service – it knows that there are multiple ships under construction now, entering service in the next few years. It also knows that it has a programme of work well into the 2030s and beyond for ship builders which can guarantee long term prospects.

At the same time, by relying on a UK design, the RN is not beholden by the challenges of getting a ship into service that doesn’t meet its needs, or one that ends up not being a good long term investment for the taxpayer.

It is perhaps most telling that the current Wikipedia page for the new Canadian OPV notes that the Harry De Wolfe is not only the first warship to be built in Canada since 1998, but at 6000 tonnes, she is the largest Canadian warship in 50 years.

By contrast whenever you listen to a presentation by the RN, be it today, 2010 or 2000, there has always been a clear ‘future capability’ vision that talks at length about the ships coming into service. They are not just visions, they are quickly realised into steel and physical form. The Royal Navy is a service that not only consistently knows where it is, it also has a clear road map, plan and supporting domestic industry to get it to where it next wants to go. This is a priceless commodity.