Too Few People for Too Many Ships? Should the RN shrink its escort fleet?

 

The Royal Navy is facing an exceptionally serious personnel crisis. Figures released through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests show that there has been a significant decline in recruits joining the RN since April this year, while voluntary outflow (e.g. people leaving earlier than planned) continues to increase. Simply put the RN is losing sailors faster than it can recruit them and unless something drastic is done to arrest this decline, then it is hard to see how the RN can function without early decommissioning of ships. What on earth has happened and is there a way to fix it?

In the last six years the RN has recruited between 2500 – 3500 (approximately) new Rating entrants into the Service (not Officers), comprising both Royal Navy and Royal Marine entrants – an average of 3000 people per year.

This year, between April and July only 372 individuals joined the Royal Navy (as in turned up and began training). This is a significant decrease from previous years, and shows no signs of being improved. The usually exceptionally well-informed blogger ‘Navy Lookout’ has indicated that for the rest of 2023 there are just 108 recruits in the pipeline to join the service at HMS RALEIGH, leaving the main training base with a 354 spare training places that will not be used. In other words, the training estate has over 75% spare capacity going unused due to a shortage of recruits.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023

What is causing this problem? The usual answer on social media is ‘Capita’, aka the company which runs the recruiting contract. The problem is more complex. There is no doubt that the RN has huge amounts of interest in people contacting the Service to enter the recruitment journey, with an average of 80 applications of interest a day being made (which with over 560 people expressing interest in a week, is almost more than the RN has managed to actually recruit since April 2023).  On any given year roughly 28 – 30,000 people express an interest in joining up. There is a roughly 90% attrition rate on the journey from sending in an email to actually entering the gates at RALEIGH – for every 10 people who fill in the first form, only one will ever go on to begin training – and that is on a good year.

The reasons why people don’t progress vary, some will realise quickly that the life is not for them. Others will enter the process but lose interest if it takes too long and competing jobs are available. Some will fail on academic grounds, not possessing the right exam certificates for the role they want. Yet more will be screened out on failing aptitude tests, closing the door to them joining certain branches or roles (e.g. pilot), while others will fail on nationality grounds (the need to hold SC clearance means some people cannot join as they will be unable to get a security clearance). The area of perhaps most concern though is the medical process.

Armed Forces medical standards are incredibly complicated and designed to make sure that those who join are able to operate globally and in a variety of situations where complex medical support may not always be available. It makes sense, for example to not permit someone with complicated medical conditions that could require surgery or ongoing treatment to join as they would be physically unable to complete elements of the training. But can this be taken too far? Some of the conditions listed seem a bit odd to be a permanent bar to military service, especially when the author knows serving personnel who’ve told him they suffer from these specific afflictions in service.

For example, if you suffer from severe headaches, regular nosebleeds, are lactose intolerant or have ‘cold injury’ you are ruled permanently unfit to join. The list is several pages long of conditions that vary from the common sense to the ‘what on earth would this be a problem for (e.g. when the author joined the URNU system, one applicant was rejected on the medical grounds that her breasts were ‘too big’).

The issue is that with a very risk averse standard to entry and a population far more open to talking about health and with a greater understanding of their health, food tolerances and lifestyles, it can be easy to be told you are unfit to join. If you take the target audience of people aged roughly 16-25, who have gone to their doctor when growing up and poorly described what was going on, or presented symptoms that could be interpreted in a range of ways by a busy GP, it can be easy to rule yourself out of the military without realising it. One note, one inaccurate diagnosis or one overreaction by parents could result in proscribing of medication that ends a career before it has even begun.

There is no room for leniency in the medical sifting process, if you told the Capita call centre at the initial sift that you have suffered from a long list of conditions, you are ruled automatically unfit. You can appeal this, and then enter the lengthy waiting game of the medical appeal, as the combination of service medical staff engage with other medical professionals to review your case. You may or may not succeed, but it can take months to complete. The author knows friends who served and left to rejoin the reserves some years later – despite being medically fit to serve previously, due to a pre-existing minor condition that they had while in service, it took over a year of medical appeals to be permitted to return to the service – the system has no willingness to be pragmatic on these issues. A quick look at comments pages on this issue will provide a long list of people who have experienced this brutal situation first hand – a very minor childhood medical issue can be the cause of years of delay.

Recently the RN has moved to bring its medical assessments ‘in house’ for ratings which means that candidates turn up at SULTAN or Caledonia to conduct a 3-day assessment of their fitness, swimming ability and medical tests. These are conducted by the RN staff, but reportedly there are significantly fewer people passing than before due to the pressures on overworked RN medical teams. Capita was able to process 200 medicals per week over an annual basis, but reports suggest that just 40 medicals have been completed ‘in house’ since August. This, coupled with the potential failure points of the wider preparation course means there are far fewer people making it through the process and starting training. The log jam appears to be predominantly medical standards, appeals and assessing suitability for service and in the desire to get the perfect medically fit recruit, there is a danger of the Service ‘bleeding out’ and dying from a lack of blood.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023

Why is this so much of an issue? Simply put, the RN needs new people all the time to replace those who are leaving. It needs to recruit just to stand still, let alone expand and this means a constant churn of new joiners entering the system. As a bottom fed organisation there is no other route to bringing in people at any other level – try suggesting ‘direct entry Chief Petty Officer’ on the internet and watch as people explode in anger. The system requires new blood today in order to be old salts in 20 years time. This is fine when your intake and outflow align and you have the right level of recruiting done now, so that in 5-10 years time you’ve got trained people at the right rank or rate to replace others. The problem is that right now outflow is a lot higher than it was expected to be, which means the RN is shrinking year on year.

Between 2022 and 2023 there has been a 6% increase in leavers across all 3 Services, with almost 1,000 more people leaving than expected compared to the previous 12 month period, while at the same time there were 16.9% fewer recruits joining (2,130 fewer people joined than in Jul 21- Jul 22). This matters because this gap will be felt in the system now for many years to come as the recruits will not hit training courses at the right time, nor promote in the usual timelines to replace their predecessors. Consequently, there is a critical situation emerging in which the trained people are leaving in ever greater numbers, while their successors are not joining due to delays in the recruiting pipeline. Effectively the Armed Forces are nearly 3,000 small than they were expected to be 12 months ago.

The full-time trained strength of the RN/RM in July 2023 was roughly 1.7% smaller (some 500 people) than it should be. This may not sound much but that it is nearly 3 ships companies worth of people missing from the Service, who were there a year ago. Career Managers are having to work out how to deliver ships, aircraft and submarine crews with 500 fewer trained bodies than they were expecting. This shortfall isn’t in isolation either – it builds on previous years unplanned departures and continues to build up a personnel deficit that will take many years to fix. There is a growing shortage of suitably trained personnel in the RN,  many of which are deeply specialist roles that require years of training and experience to fill. The result is that gapping is widespread across the RN, meaning ships are going to sea without their full complement of crew – a risk that could result in danger in peacetime if there aren’t enough crew for fire fighting or damage control efforts during an at sea incident, or in wartime to fight the ship. Those who are on board are having to work harder than ever to cover for the gaps, meaning some work will inevitably not get done, and the vital ‘down time’ isn’t happening as people work harder than ever to cover vacant posts.

The shortage of people makes itself felt too with the constant tension to support operations and getting ships to sea. There is no doubt that Ministers and the public like to see ships at sea doing naval ‘stuff’, but given the state of gapping, this can often only be done by moving people around to fix short term problems. Its one thing if you’re a new entrant, single and keen to get your career off to a good start. But if you are an experienced NCO with a young family, constant drafting to seagoing platforms will leave you exhausted and your family resentful – at times like this no amount of money will convince you to stay if the choice is your spouse or career.  The fleet relies on the goodwill of a surprisingly small cadre of people to keep going – of a force of some 30,000 people, roughly half are in the RM, Fleet Air Arm or Submarine Service, meaning the surface fleet has about 15,000 people to generate a force of (on paper) 2 carriers, 2 LPDs, 17 escorts and significant numbers of OPVs and minor war vessels as well as support shore based activities, naval base support, work in joint operations and do the wide variety of jobs needed to keep an operational navy functioning. That is not a lot of people to keep the surface fleet afloat.

If the shortfall of personnel isn’t addressed then the blunt reality is that fairly soon the RN will run out of people to send ships to sea as operational warships. To deploy and operate a ship means you need highly skilled personnel to operate across multiple parts of the ship including seaman, marine and weapon engineers, war fighters and logisticians. Without them combined, a ship may be able to put to sea, but she would be functionally and operationally close to useless. The danger facing the RN is that they are running out of serving people, they are running very short on recruits and in turn they are running out of crews to send ships to sea.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023

The authors strictly personal view is that without significant change, we are on the verge of seeing a large part of the Royal Navy effectively decommissioned due to lack of personnel to sail the ships. Without sufficient crews to operate and maintain them, there can be no realistic prospect of getting some ships to sea ever again, or regenerating others from refit. This is before you consider how to find the crews to bring the Type 26 and Type 31 into service from build, which will be an intensive task. It is hard to see the RN surviving as currently configured just because the combination of ancient Type 23s needing maintenance plus a shortfall of people means the ability to send ships to sea is reduced. It is hard to see how the RN can, on current figures, credibly plan to operate and sustain a fleet of more than a dozen escorts in total without urgent changes to the personnel situation. Given the constant rumours emanating about further in year cuts to the defence budget, it is not beyond the realm of credibility that the escort force will be reduced to 6 – 8 Type 23s and 4-6 Type 45s at varying levels of availability.

Would such a move be a bad thing? On the one hand yes, of course having a smaller navy is a bad thing if you want to do things around the world. But equally is it better to have a fleet that deploys ships at 100% crewing, without gaps and with some ‘fat’ in the system to enable them to send people on training course and take leave? A fleet of around 6-8 active escorts would mean a force capable of keeping a carrier escorted and the Towed Array Type 23 role, but everything else would be dropped. That sounds horrific, but equally that’s pretty much where the RN is now anyway – the First Sea Lord has admitted that the RN could probably get 8-9 escorts deployed in a crisis, so paying off older maintenance intensive (and expensive) Type 23s and potentially the earlier Type 45s depending on their material state may be a good move to ensure the remainder of the fleet is properly able to do its job.

What is the means to fix this? Arguably lots more money for pay rises and better quality of life improvements would help. But that argument will quickly fall foul of the Treasury and wider public sector pay deals – there is no money for a big pay rise without massive tax increases or wider internal spending cuts. More could be done to restore the ‘soft touch’ of making people feel valued. On a small level, the RN now uses an ‘app’ to tell people they’ve been promoted, rather than let the CO know the morning of the promotion signal. The result has been utter chaos as people haven’t known they’ve been promoted, and rather than being told or congratulated by people in their command chain, people have often found out by random people emailing them or even days later. What kind of ‘world class leadership’ programme makes one of the most important and meaningful days of a sailors career so utterly awful? Bringing a human touch back to leadership may be a small step to helping sailors feel valued and in turn increase retention. More widely something has to give – the more the RN keeps trying to meet tasks by breaking people, the more people will leave. Without stopping, rebooting and giving people the chance to get their life back in gear, things will only get worse.

Recruitment increases now won’t be felt for some years – realistically anyone entering HMS RALEIGH tomorrow will not be of credible trained value to the front line for 12 -18 months, and even then only in a very junior capacity.  Even then the underlying problem remains that the military is tremendously risk averse when it comes to medical standards – as noted above, the key delay seems to be sorting medicals out. While Capita are blamed for these delays, they are only adhering to the contract they have been asked to deliver – it is perhaps easier to get cross at those you cannot control, rather than ask why they are doing what you told them to do in the first place.

Perhaps the time has come to take a very hard look at medical standards and open them up considerably. They seem to reflect an expectation that every service person will go to war in the front line and not spend the bulk of their career doing very normal office work interspersed with ‘cool stuff’. Rather than ‘select out’ perhaps we should look to ‘train in’, taking recruits regardless of medical condition, if necessary running cohorts of recruiting for those with certain challenges and then finding a career for them in the Service. Some will be outraged at this idea, seeing it as an affront to the idea that all must serve in any role. But in reality the military has long had plenty of billets for those who are medically limited to deploy or where injuries sustained in service place specific constraints on their ability to serve. There are many roles that could be filled by an individual with a minor health condition that would allow a post to be completed, work to be done and the service made more effective as a result. The flip side may be that those with more limited deployability do not receive the same rate of X Factor, to compensate for the fact that they will have far more stability in their employment location.

While plenty of people will be shaking their heads here, its worth asking what’s more important. Is it having an RN full of people who are fit to an arbitrary standard, but in turn having far fewer people than needed, or in taking a more nuanced attitude to risk and identifying what work a person with a specific condition cannot do, and then employing them in other areas instead? Perhaps the simple test should be that if the RN is able to accommodate and employ someone with a health condition or injury acquired in service, then it should be able to do the same for someone looking to join from the outside.

Looking ahead perhaps the future needs to be one of an RN which is far more open to employing people regardless of health. By making clear that health is, in the main, not a bar to entry, it will be a way to increase the flow of recruits and reduce the impact of personnel shortages.  There is huge interest in military careers out there, but the more that standards are kept high, the harder it is to recruit, particularly in an age where many people are finding themselves diagnosed with something. If you are losing 90% of potential recruits each year, and running a personnel shortfall, then maybe we should ask whether the RN is the problem here or society?