Does the Royal Navy Need a Bigger Navy (Part 2)

 

The Royal Navy isn’t currently large enough for the tasks it needs to carry out, and needs to get larger over the next few years. This is an official government view, endorsed most recently in the Integrated Review, which set out a very positive vision for the future role of the Royal Navy.

There is no doubt that the RN needs more ships to deliver the full range of tasks it is committed to. Growing the fleet though in a sustainable manner is more than just clicking fingers and rearranging ORBATS in a manner beloved by commentators and fantasy fleet authors.

While on paper saying ‘oh lets just double the number of Type 31 frigates, as this will solve our problems’  is easy, in reality it is surprisingly difficult to grow a navy quickly, and takes a lot of time and effort to do.  In this second part of the article focusing on the Defence Committees report on the Royal Navy, we consider the challenges implicit in actually delivering a larger fleet.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The RN today finds itself in a particularly challenging position – on the one hand it has gained a lot of very capable new ships in recent years, and it is well positioned to pivot over the next 5-10 years to a significantly more modern force that will operate a diverse range of ships, and grow in size.

But to get there will, paradoxically, possibly require short term reductions in ships in order to free up the headroom (both people and financial) to create the conditions for this new force to emerge.

The big challenge is arguably balancing off the ‘off ramp’ and the ‘on ramp’ of paying off of older capabilities, such as the now venerable Type 23s, while bringing the Type 26 and 31 force into service. This is in addition to handling the transition from the current crewed mine warfare vessels, and moving to a more autonomous solution.

If you imagine the delivery of naval power as a motorway, through which the fleet is travelling at speed, the off ramp represents the junction when various older parts of the fleet leave the force and complete their part of the journey – ideally they should be joined seamlessly by their replacements at the on ramp of the same junction and the fleet continues its journey.

In reality it is far more complex – some ships will take an early junction, while other new ships may be delayed and diverted and not join the journey till a much later junction – but while this is going on, the main fleet has to continue regardless. Sometimes though, taking the older ships off at an earlier junction than planned, may mean its possible to ensure that the newer ships join as planned – but this in turn creates a gap which has to be managed in the short term.

The problem the RN has is trying to balance off delivering its commitments, while ensuring the new force and capability arrives as planned. This calls for people to become available to crew the ships, become properly trained in them, understand how they operate, conduct the trials process and help create a properly worked up ship able to do the job intended of it.

People are the challenge here because they are the most complex and important resource to manage. While on paper there are 30,000 people in the RN/RM, this does not mean there are lots of interchangeable people able to do each others roles.

Think of the RN as a complex organism with dozens of different technical roles and areas, each of which requires people with different skills and specialisations to carry out. While some can be carried out by a new joiner, others require people with 15-20 years of experience and training to carry out – which in turn means you need to be able to think a long time ahead in  how you manage the pool of people with these skills.

Being able to generate a warship crew requires career managers to work together to create a plot of people, across a wide range of specialisations, ranks and rates and put them to work in a way that is sustainable. Plucking an experienced Chief Petty Officer from one sea draft, and then straight into another to support a global deployment may sound an easy fix, but if that then causes said SNCO to resign as she hasn’t seen her family for the best part of two years, and knows this heralds two -three more years of the same, then you’ve lost in the short and medium term.

It is an incredible complicated business to generate and sustain crews for frontline ships, balancing off the operational needs of the force, with the career development needs of the individual and striking a balance between deployment and rest. The RN needs to be able to strike this in a way that meets the needs of the front line, both now and in five years time – a premature loss today will be felt for years to come, due to the lack of direct entry recruitment.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

With so little ‘fat’ in the system to draw on, particularly in the skilled trades, people need to be freed up soon to start attending training courses (and ‘train the trainer’ courses) learn how to operate the equipment and be ready to sail their ships as planned.

As the RN looks to build up its new force of ships, it has to decide what is more important – is it keeping the existing ships at sea, or drawing them down slightly, freeing up people and cash to invest in the next generation, and ensure people can get the new fleet ready to operate as planned?

There is no easy answer to this question, but it could be the case that over the next few years, difficult decisions are taken that, to grow the Royal Navy in the 2030s, short term hits are taken now to make this possible. Selling this to a sceptical public and specialist audience will prove challenging, but without fundamental changes to how the RN recruits and trains people, it is hard to see what else can be done.

The biggest challenge in growing the Royal Navy is not money, but people. The force of 30,000 people today is intended to support a fleet roughly the size of the one we have now. To grow the escort force by a further five escorts (roughly in line with current statements) out to around 24 hulls means finding a further five ships companies both now, and for the long term.

This means increasing by about 25% the number of people able to go to sea, often in some very specialist areas, and then sustain this for the long term. The problem is that these people don’t currently exist, and it will take many years to recruit and train them.

For example, to generate a further five ships companies means five sets of Mechanical Engineering ratings to ensure the ship can steam. Lets say the base figure (for example) is 40 ratings per ship for the department – this means to double the Type 31 order requires finding, in rough handfuls another 200 ME ratings, just to crew these ships.

In turn this means raising entry numbers now to recruit them, on the assumption of recruiting enough people to be in the Service for the next 30 years to support these additional five hulls. If you start looking at the numbers required to recruit and retain, then you realise that you’ve added a very significant challenge to recruiting, and the training pipeline for many years to come. It will also impact across a wide range of other areas too, such as training courses, accommodation and associated areas.

The bottom line is that growing a fleet is a lot more than just finding the money to buy more ships – its about significantly altering how that force is recruited, operates and trains for decades to come -and this can be both challenging and expensive.

A better question to ask when talking about growing the Royal Navy is not ‘how many ships does it need’ but ‘how does it recruit and retain the people it needs to deliver this’ – a much more complicated question to answer.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

It feels as if the Royal Navy is actually in a very interesting place – it is on the verge of gaining a wide range of very capable new ships across a range of classes, but it needs the space to bring them into service and ensure they work as planned.

 If you take a longer term view, what is higher risk – paying off a ship now (for example some of the older Type 23s) at the ends of their lives, and at a point where we have a reasonable understanding both of the threat and how to counter it, and freeing up the people and funds to bring new ships into service – or is it better to run these ships onto the bitter end, ensuring availability for sea, but reducing the ability to bring the Type 26 and 31 into service fully worked up and ready for operations – causing a possible operational gap at a time when we have a much less clear understanding of the threat and risks we may face?

On balance, taking risk against a known threat now is safer than banking it against a hypothetical risk we cannot easily understand in years to come. But this means less ships in service now – an unpalatable outcome for many.

The final area to examine from the report is the concerns it raises on ship building strategies in the UK and the continued delay to placing orders for new shipping. On this front, Humphrey absolutely agrees with those who have concerns on the fact that UK ship building seems to be focused on strategy, not delivery – it is much easier to order a new strategy to be written than it is to commit funding and resources to order a ship to be built.

What is clear is that despite several reports into UK military shipbuilding in the last few years, all of which conclude roughly the same thing (namely order to sustain the skills base on a sustainable basis), there seems to be little sign of the reports findings being applied.

Of particular concern is that there seems to be strategies recommending action, five yearly strategic reviews looking at often vastly different ways of coping with defence, and annual planning rounds aimed at solving in year financial problems, not long-term strategic challenges.

The result has been a somewhat challenging outcome whereby UK military shipbuilding seems to have a significant feast ahead of it, but there is little sign of a coherent strategy being applied. The simple fact that 16 years after it was first identified that the RFA needed new stores ships to support the carrier strike capability, none have yet been ordered is little short of a national disgrace.

While stores ships and support vessels rarely occupy the same glamour and attention as front line escorts, they are, if anything, far more vital. For years the key differentiator between the Royal Navy and many others was the investment in a network of stores ships and tankers able to keep the force at sea indefinitely.

Due to a combination of resource pressures, crew shortfalls and other factors, the RFA, which nominally had three store ships on its charge, now only has one (RFA FORT VICTORIA), proving the decision to scrap the FORT GEORGE as a result of the 2010 SDSR was, at best, a very short sighted financial savings gain with significant long term pain – one that made sense under the assumption of reduced carrier ops in the 2010s, but which assumed that replacements would probably be here by now when they were needed.

The result is that with the decision to sell the two older FORT class to Egypt, the Royal Navy now has only one ship capable of carrying ammunition for the Carrier Strike Group, and she is thirty years old.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The continued delay in placing the order for new ships would, if subject to an inquiry, almost certainly find many years of evidence which would show well meaning intentions to defer as an in year measure, or slip the programme two years to solve a funding gap in another year. It would show decision making which made perfect sense from financial management perspective, and in doing so, tell a story of how seeking to get the right answer in the short term, has potentially had catastrophic long term consequences for the RN as a result.

The real risk is that the FORT VICTORIA represents a single point of failure, and if a crisis emerges when she is in refit, then the UK is reliant on allies to provide the stores and ammunition for the carrier. Given how few nations have AORs, this is potentially going to leave the UK in a very serious situation, and threatens to reduce the status of the RN to little more than a very capable continental coastal navy.

It is depressing to have to write this, but the saga of the FSS seems to have been so easily avoidable – yet as we enter 2022, 16 years after the replacement was first identified as a need, no orders have been placed, and any new build ships seem realistically at least a decade away from entering service.

There is a real risk here that without urgent action, by the end of the 2020s, the Royal Navy will have ceased to be a genuinely ocean going navy, due to the lack of modern support stores and supply ships capable of sustaining the fleet indefinitely. It would be an enormously sad irony if having sacrificed so much to pay for a global carrier strike capability, the RN found itself unable to deploy globally because of the loss to its support chain.

Despite this grim outlook, we must try to focus on the positives. The 2010s have proven to be a challenging time for the RN, yet as it powers through the 2020s, it has two different escort classes under construction, and plans for an exciting range of new vessels in the 2030s and 40s – there is a very positive outlook ahead, but to deliver this is reliant on securing the right investment in people and infrastructure to make it happen.

The outlook is bright, but to grow the fleet later requires spending on people and places now – whether this is the right answer to decision makers who may prefer ships at sea now remains to be seen.

On this thoughtful note, it is the ideal time to conclude this article and return to the wrapping of Christmas presents. Have a very happy, restful and merry Christmas.