Does the Royal Navy Need a Bigger Navy? (Part 1)

 

The House of Commons Defence Committee has released a report into the Royal Navy, its size, availability, and its future. The report, selectively peppered with nautical phrases and a reworked quote from Jaws, puts across a strong view on both the current state, and the future state of the Royal Navy.

The report starts with what feels like the now obligatory assessment that somehow the world has changed, and we’re all about the grey zone now. To be honest reading these constant statements that the world has changed is getting a little bit dull. If you drill into it, has the world really changed, or are we just doing the same basic jobs with different names?

If you review the map in the report of the current deployments and tasks of the Royal Navy, the chart shows a series of deployments to global locations that has remained practically unchanged in decades.

The ships may have changed, as has the technology, but the core tasks have not. The Royal Navy continues to deliver maritime presence around the world through a combination of hi-low mix deployments, from the Carrier Strike Group through to the low-end maritime policing carried out by the RIVER class OPVs.

Its hard to spot any deployment on that list that wasn’t previously present in 2010, 2000 or 1990. In fact, you could argue that the disposition and missions are not dissimilar to 1910, 1900 or 1890 – the ports are similar, the roles are similar although the ships are different (and the Russians were less of a challenge back then).

To suggest that the world has changed is perhaps a strong statement – rather the threat continues to evolve, but the core role of the RN remains unchanged - to deter an attack of the UK, to defend our interests and allies and to provide security in challenging places for those who call for it.

A read of the full paper identifies what can be seen as three core themes – we don’t have enough working ships at sea, we’re scrapping ships but also delaying new ships, and the ships we have don’t seem to have enough offensive weaponry on them. Are these concerns reasonable though?

 There is a persistent debate to be had on warship availability and whether the Royal Navy has enough ships to do the job asked of it. On the one hand, parts of the force is elderly and approaching life expiry, but on the other the Type 45s have allegedly got propulsion issues.

The challenge for the Royal Navy is less about the number of ships it has, and more about the amount of time at sea it can get with them. There is little point in having 20 warships if only 4 of them can go to sea for want of crew or equipment. Similarly, having 20 warships on paper, where it turns out several of them are in the middle of years long refits and don’t possess engines or weapons is also not terribly helpful.

The RN took the decision in the Integrated Review to pay off two Type 23s that were due a major refit, to free up two theoretical ships company worth of crew and save on refit and life extension costs.

On paper the RN is now down two escorts, but in reality, this reduction will have no impact on practical ship availability. Both ships were due to have been out of service for several years, and by the time they would have returned to the fleet, other ships in the form of the Type 26 and 31 will be entering service. The net loss to the RN is minimal in terms of days at sea doing maritime tasking, and the gain is the ability to free up crew to take on other roles elsewhere in the system.

The problem is that we look at the availability of ships from a zero-sum game of ‘I have this many ships, therefore my navy is good versus my opponent who has this many fewer ships, so they are weaker than me’. We don’t focus on availability for sea, we don’t think about tasking and how it can be done, and we don’t focus on how to keep ships on station for the long term, not just the short-term numbers.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

This was evident in the discussion on the Type 45, where the report seemed to think that the Royal Navy only had one Type 45 available earlier this year. This seems to be a very specific way of interpreting information.

Of the 6 ships in the Type 45 force, the RN has historically aimed to keep about 2-3 of the 6 at sea on deployment or worked up and ready to deploy in short order. This is a stretching target that many navies would struggle to do.

Warship generation is a difficult task – think of it like taking a car for a drive. Its relatively easy to take a ship to sea and do some gentle steaming, much like you may go for a Sunday drive. Now think about the jump to having a formula one car in a race, with a whole team of people ready to support and maintain it if things go wrong – deploying a worked-up warship is akin to this, with huge amounts of work and effort needed to be ready to not just sail, but also operate and fight at the highest intensity if required.

The Royal Navy has excelled at ensuring that its Type 45 force hits sustainable levels of deployed and worked up availability to ensure the force is ready and able to go to sea if needed – not for a Sunday drive, but as a Formula 1 racer. The effort needed to do this is huge, and beyond many navies to sustain on an enduring basis.

In the case of the 45 fleet, this summer saw two 45s deployed at sea as part of the Carrier Strike Group, one of which had a temporary period alongside to conduct unplanned maintenance. Was it mildly disruptive – yes, a little bit. Did it cause the operation to be cancelled, or the ship to return home – no, it did not.

Ships having issues while deployed is a tale as old as time and is neither surprising nor something to worry particularly about. The RN has intentionally put very good logistics support chains in for a reason to ensure that things can be fixed if they go wrong. This isn’t a problem unique to the RN either – one of the UK’s strengths is that it can pull into friendly ports and rely on host nation support to carry out a turbine change – by contrast the Russians need to deploy their Task Groups with a rescue tug precisely because when they break down, there are very few friendly ports to go to.

At the same time as the UK had two Type 45s worked up, on deployment and away from UK waters for 7 months, a third Type 45 was in a short-term maintenance period. These are utterly routine events that every warship does – they are a chance to carry out odd jobs, conduct routine maintenance and ensure the ship is ‘match fit’.

In this case the maintenance period was for a fully worked up warship that was about to deploy on operations, and which had the need arisen could have gone to sea extremely quickly if required. To suggest that the RN was somehow at fault for failing to ensure Type 45 availability, when 50% of the force was either deployed, or available at short notice for sea is disingenuous at best – particularly given this was a snapshot of the summer leave period when historically ships are alongside.

This of itself highlights a concern about the creeping level of ‘strategic oversight of tactical issues’. We have seen in recent years the use of open source media to focus on ships comings and goings, and then assume when a ship doesn’t sail that there is something wrong and that the RN is broken.

The level of scrutiny into the ‘why hasn’t HMS DIAMOND sailed’ when she was in Singapore was ridiculous – there was all manner of speculation on the net about what was wrong, had she broken down, had something else happened, all of which was reliant on rumours and not official information.

We’ve seemingly got to a position now where RN ships cannot do anything without some kind of comment or assumption that because they’ve not sailed, they must have broken down. The reality is that programmes change regularly, plans change, and events change, and there is no requirement or need for the RN to provide a running commentary on what its ships are up, much to the dismay of various hostile intelligence services.

Nothing has changed in terms of how this is handled onboard ship, and plans can and do change with astounding regularity depending on events. What has changed is our ability as a species to monitor and comment, and as such CO’s now find themselves and their ships subject to an incredible amount of scrutiny from amateur armchair admirals, loudly proclaiming something is wrong to their internet echo chamber.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

A wider issue of concern both of the Committee and armchair admirals is that of the armament of ships and whether RN vessels are relatively speaking lacking in offensive weaponry.

A perennial subject of debate is the lack of anti-ship guided weapons or the seeming lack of ships bristling with weaponry compared to Russian or Chinese peers. A better question though is ‘why do these Russian ships need so many weapons – is it because they think the threat is real, or because they need to be certain that something / anything may work if required’ -arguably the latter is more likely than the former.

The RN has historically had a bit of an odd relationship with surface launched anti-ship missiles – although it has operated them for almost 50 years, they’ve never really been heavily invested in. Only two main types of missiles have been bought – Exocet and Harpoon, the latter is now approaching its 35^th anniversary of first RN use, and they’ve never been mounted in large numbers of RN ships (4 & 8 respectively).

By contrast the RN has been an incredibly keen leader in the field of light weight antishipping missiles on helicopters, and in layered gun defences, but it has sought to try to keep the investment in areas where the there is more chance of positively IDing a ship and ensuring the correct one is destroyed.

Such long-range systems are not cheap and require time in the dockyard to install, and time to test and integrate. In the case of the interim solution, it has emerged that the total cost of procuring a few sets to cover a roughly 5-year gap would be in the £250m bracket – that is a lot of money to deploy a limited coverage on a few ships for a very specific mission set.

The challenge facing financial planners is working out where the best investment is overall for the Royal Navy. Is it better to spend money on a short term solution to cover a capability gap in an area that has historically been a relatively low priority (noting that the RN has chosen for years to not fund upgrades or replacements), or to defer this and spend the money elsewhere – but in doing so ensure funding is ringfenced for the medium term to get a proper replacement in service.

We are likely to be on the cusp of new hypersonic missile technology that could revolutionise how missile wars are fought – is it better to save the funding and invest in a long term capability solution, or buy into something as an interim measure that may or may not do the job, and could actually become a long term ‘not quite as good but we’ve bought it so we may as well keep it’ solution?

Obviously plenty of people would like to see RN ships bristling with weapons, but that is neither always practical nor affordable. The more weapons you install, the more time you need to keep ships alongside for to refit it and integrate it, and then you need extra people and eat into the ships design reserves to install the kit. Every change has an impact, both positive and negative, and they’re not always worth it.

For example, is it worth the RN investing in buying corvettes armed with lots of anti-ship missiles, as suggested by some in the report? This design works well for a coastal navy that needs to deter aggression and which is headcount poor, doesn’t need bigger ocean going ships and where it needs to fire a mass of missiles quickly onto a fairly well known target set when you aren’t too concerned about who else you hit.

For the Royal Navy a group of heavily missile armed corvettes would potentially be little more than a liability – poor seakeeping would make them of little relevance for a globally deployed navy, while they would be too small to easily take a hit and survive – but you’ve invested so much in them in terms of weapon load out that they have become high value targets in their own right -unable to defend themselves effectively without being overwhelmed, you’ve compromised significantly on the design to deploy ships you cannot afford to lose in combat, but which cannot protect themselves.

Corvettes are great for some navies, but they are not, and should not, be the answer for the Royal Navy when it comes to handling the challenge of anti-surface warfare.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

What this debate perhaps better highlights is not whether the ships are under armed, but the funding puzzles that the MOD has to balance off. Each upgrade or new piece of equipment installed requires a complex web of multi-year funding and support to ensure it can be ordered, built, installed, operated, and supported.

It is not as simple as saying ‘here is a cheque for £X Million’, rather it is about balancing off competing priorities which may pose challenges over several years, across different budgets and trying to ensure that whatever is purchased can be installed without impacting on ships time at sea. It also means finding the right people, and training infrastructure to ensure the kit can be used, and in putting support contracts in place too.

All of this is expensive and requires proper scrutiny. It may seem easy from the outside to go ‘why not spend money on a long rang anti-ship missile’ – but if buying that missile means sacrificing several other equally important projects, is this still the right course of action.

While people will want to say, ‘well we just need more money’, this isn’t really the realistic answer to the problem. The RN has got a lot of delegated authority to reprioritise and move funds around to focus on tackling the challenges that it thinks it needs to address. Imagining up more money, at a time of fiscal restraint and where there is already an extremely generous financial settlement in place for the MOD (relative to many other departments) is unrealistic.

This will disappoint people, but the RN, like the rest of Government, must play the hand that it is dealt. If it feels that on balance the combination of longer-term investment in exceptionally capable SSGW is better to free up short term funding for other projects, then this is a trade-off that has not been arrived at without considerable scrutiny and analysis, using data not available to external audiences. We may not like the answer, but it will have been reached for the best reasons at the time.

There is a wider question perhaps of what this fiscal decision means for the wider impact of the Royal Navy – is a navy with reduced anti-ship capability best placed to deter its opponents, and what message does it send? Having the ability to shoot down high-speed tennis balls is one thing, but how do you respond by means other than a strongly worded letter?

Considering this challenge of balancing off the credibility of deterrence, with the wider perspective on the challenges of shrinking the fleet to grow the fleet, and how the UK retains a credible shipbuilding capability not just now, but for the long term are all complex and serious questions to consider.

They are also arguably a step too far in a blog that is already approaching 3000 words long, so will form the second part of this article in due course as otherwise, we’re going to need a bigger blog…