"Verify Range to Target - One Ping Only" - HMS NORTHUMBERLAND and the Russians...

 

The Royal Navy has been in the headlines this week for allegedly colliding with a Russian submarine somewhere in the North Atlantic. This moment of high drama was captured on film by the new series of the Channel 5 show ‘Warship’, now on its third season. The result has been national attention on the difficult work carried out by the ASW force, often in challenging and demanding conditions far out to sea.

The decision to invite camera crews onboard Royal Navy vessels to film Warship has proven to be an inspired decision, and one that has helped shine a light on one of the most secretive and poorly understood parts of the Service.

The threat from submarines has never gone away and the Royal Navy more than most understands recognises what threat a capable and competently operated submarine can present. Throughout the Cold War the RN specialised in hunting Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic, tracking them and trying to ensure that in wartime, the enemy would not get through to threaten the carriers, REFORGER convoys and the SSBN patrol areas.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

It is over 30 years since the Soviet threat vanished, but the Russian Navy continues to represent a credible and capable potential threat. The nature of this threat has changed over time, with the need to protect the REFORGER convoys and sea lanes replaced by a need to protect critical national infrastructure on the sea bed, and continue to protect against SSBN operations being compromised.

For many years now the stalwarts of the ASW capability have been 8 Type 23 frigates, and accompanying Merlin helicopters, working to track and monitor potentially hostile submarines as they leave Murmansk and head out. This work, clearly done as part of wider NATO collaborative activity, is critical for being able to monitor and track Russian submarines is vital for Alliance security.

The work carried out by the Type 23 force has required them to go to sea in often foul conditions, staying out on task in difficult weather to track an elusive foe. They have often seen leave periods disrupted, particularly over Christmas, when the Russian Navy seems to make a point of conducting OP DENY CHRISTMAS, and deploy submarines precisely timed to interrupt festive standdown.

These ships often disappear off, their precise locations not known and their work never publicly alluded to. Sometimes they return to baseports looking weather beaten, covered in rust or sporting a ‘blue nose’ to indicate they have been above the Arctic Circle. They cannot easily or publicly talk about what they have done or seen or heard…

Their reward is rarely recognition, but more usually snide comments by long retired dinosaurs on social media about the state of their ship and asking why the ship wasn’t painted – when it is explained that trying to do ‘paint ship’ evolutions in a Force 10 gale and heavy seas in the Arctic Circle is a somewhat risky endeavour, they usually huff and moan about ‘woke sailors who should be in the channel stopping dinghies’ or other such vile nonsense.

This is why the decision to allow film crews onboard a Type 23 is so welcome -it provides a chance to show first-hand the hard work done by these crews in often appallingly difficult conditions and the sheer professionalism needed to operate in these circumstances.

Operating at sea is not easy, and it requires everyone to draw together and make life or death decisions where if things go wrong, it can wrong very quickly. These shows excel at making the point that as a nation we ask a great deal of our sailors, many of whom are very young, and we expect them to operate and deliver to the highest standard, often barely months after leaving school.

There has been a lot of attention paid to the alleged ‘collision’ which appears to have involved the ships towed array being hit by a Russian submarine. Some have seen this as an example of mild incompetence, others have seen conspiracy (mindful of a similar incident in the 1980s involving HMS CONQUEROR stealing Soviet towed array cable).

While much of what happened is likely to remain murky, and only partially explained by what is seen on TV, there are two key things we should remember. Firstly, the sense of responsibility placed on often quite junior personnel – in a rapidly developing situation, they have found themselves in a complex set of circumstances and need to fix it themselves. There is no cavalry charging over the horizon to help.

The CO is a Commander, a mid-ranking officer in the system and on whom significant pressure has been placed – get it wrong and your ship may find itself colliding physically with a nuclear submarine, causing enormous environmental damage and likely killing many people.

At times like this we should reflect on the excellence and quality of RN training which empowers and prepares people at all ranks and rates to step up and address the challenge. With a ships company who are overwhelmingly in their early 20s, and who are regularly told on social media by their forbears that they aren’t good enough because ‘reasons’ (usually linked to less drinking and preferring exercise to inebriation), this was a good way to show that the modern sailor is every inch the person their predecessors were, and probably better.

There are two other themes that we can draw from this footage. The first is that we underestimate the threat posed from Russia at our peril. Although the CO was attacked on some social media channels for saying the Russians were capable, this seems an entirely appropriate thing to say.

Russia may be a pariah gangster state, led by a psychotic despotic thug who along with his closest cronies has spent many years enriching himself and conducting activity around the world that threatens peace and stability, and undermining International Law, but this does not mean that all of its military personnel are inept alcoholic conscripts.

The Russian Navy continues to operate capable submarines, perhaps the one area of the fleet that has enjoyed a reasonable investment, and tangible delivery of new assets since the end of the Cold War. Although much of the Russian surface fleet remains at its heart the same force that the Soviet Navy had in the 1980s, the submarine fleet has undergone modernisation.

We should be wary of assuming that they are less capable than ourselves, or less able to operate in a breathtakingly audacious manner. There is a danger both of overestimating and underestimating the likely opposition.

It is clear that Russian activity has the potential to pose a significant threat to British and allied interests and needs to be robustly countered. The threat has changed, with theoretical sea lines of communication being less important than physical subsurface lines of communication, which if disrupted would cause immense damage to the global economy and national security of many different countries.

Being able to counter Russia and deter it calls for sustained investment in very high end capabilities like advanced ASW platforms (e.g. the Type 26 frigate) and supporting assets like Maritime Patrol and intelligence collection. The risk is that this is expensive and needs to be deployed where the threat is likely to be. Delivering a ‘global Britain’ agenda and protecting carrier strike groups is equally vital, but ASW can only be in one place at a time – there are difficult choices facing policy makers over how to prioritise assets and tasking.

Another key takeaway is that the Royal Navy is showing an increased and very welcome willingness to invite film crew onboard to show what its people can do. The Warship series has now been front page news for two different seasons as a result of the activities its film crew have observed – proving there is a huge public interest in the work of the RN.

The challenge is how to cover shows like this in a way that is able to convey the hard work done by the people in the Service, while also not compromising operational security. ASW work is a particularly sensitive subject, and to permit filming to occur in this manner represents a considerably more open approach to risk taking than has perhaps been seen in the past by the MOD.

The results hopefully speak for themselves as a way of showing to an audience exactly how hard working the Royal Navy is, and how much work goes on to keep the nation safe, often in difficult and dangerous conditions.

It will be interesting to see how this series has an impact on recruitment, helping show the potential opportunities at sea in a more human way than any official recruitment brochure can. When coupled with the news that a third season of the documentary about HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH is also to be broadcast soon, we appear to be seeing some excellent film footage about the life and work of the Royal Navy.

Overall the new series of Warship seems to help show first hand the superb work done by the men and women who willingly volunteer to go to sea and do difficult and dangerous work in order to keep the nation safe. We should be thankful that such magnificent people continue to step forward on our collective behalf and go where many fear to sail.