Does It Make Sense to Pay Off Frigates and LPDs? Possibly...

 

In an ‘inspired’ leak that seems to fit the Yes Minister definition of a ‘Confidential Security Briefing’, the Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Royal Navy is to pay off two Type 23 frigates, HMS ARGYLL and WESTMINSTER early in order to find crew for the Type 26 frigates. Assuming this is true, this means that since 2010 the Royal Navy escort fleet will have been cut by 40%. Meanwhile the Times is reporting that the Royal Navy will mothball both LPD’s and no longer have an active amphibious assault ship command platform. This represents a 100% cut to the active assault ship force. The reasons given in both cases seem to boil down to the line that this is about providing sailors to crew the Type 26 frigate. It doesn’t seem to be linked to the rumoured huge budgetary challenges facing the MOD this financial year, which could equally be responsible for this decision.

There are different ways that this information can be interpreted depending on how you look at it. For starters we need to ask the question, why these two ships? The Type 23 force is elderly, with the ships intended for an original 18-year life span, worked hard in the North Atlantic and replaced quickly. They have all been extended in service for up to twice their original design life, while repeated delays to order the Type 26 has meant they are working far harder, and far longer than ever anticipated.

These are ships designed 40 years ago, with the original Type 23 design dating back to the early 1980s. It is no exaggeration to say that there is almost certainly no one left in active regular service who was serving when the Type 23 design was first conceived. This means the design reflects the 1980s equipment and capabilities and standards – be it in the structure of the messes (large mess decks for junior sailors) or the internal wiring and machinery. While still capable, be in no doubt that these are elderly ships with all the many challenges that this brings.  To make up for the many and varied delays to the Type 26, the RN has funded life extension work to the force for some years, fitting new missiles, guns and sonar equipment over time. The modern Type 23 is a far cry from its original design in equipment and capability, but it is still at its heart a 1980s warship.

WESTMINSTER had gone into refit in 2022 to begin the process of extending her life out to the late 2020s. The refit for WESTMINSTER would have cost around £100m to provide a further 4-5 years of service. while HMS ARGYLL had undergone the life extension process which would have seen a planned decommissioning in the late 2020s (the precise dates are not clear anymore due to the ‘odd’ MOD decision to currently no longer provide this information on the grounds of operational security).

The LPD force by contrast is in a different position. The two ships ALBION and BULWARK were built to replace the venerable FEARLESS class in the mid 2000s. For most of their career one has been in reserve while the other has been active, the same pattern as occurred with FEARLESS and INTREPID, where the latter spent years in increasingly poor state in reserve. The timing for this decision makes sense operationally as ALBION has come to the end of her commission and was due to pay off into reserve, while BULWARK is still being regenerated in refit and hasn’t yet gone to sea. It would be possible to put both ships in reserve and free up a reasonable amount of sailors in the process.

The question is what is the impact on the fleet itself? Currently the RN probably has a requirement for 19 escort ships – ‘probably’ is used as the MOD has refused to provide a statement on target force numbers in the two most recent Defence Reviews, so this is an assessment based on the 2015 Defence Review. That we have to rely on a near decade old defence review to guess how many escorts the RN plans to have speaks volumes for the manner in which the MOD engages with the taxpayer.

Of those 19 ships, currently there are only 17 in service – 11 Type 23 frigates and 6 Type 45 destroyers. Two Type 23 frigates were paid off early as a savings measure under the 2021 Defence Review. There is a stated desire to grow the force, with 8 Type 26 and 5 Type 31 frigates under construction or on contract at present, which if delivered in full would leave to an RN of 19 escorts again in about 7-9 years’ time. Beyond this there is an assumption that the so-called ‘Type 32’ would be built to grow the escort fleet into the early 20s, although nothing formal has ever been stated or committed to.

In the short term the loss of both ships is unlikely to cause significant pain to the fleet. ARGYLL is the general patrol version of the Type 23, with scaled back capabilities and used for more generic patrol duties in usually lower risk areas. WESTMINSTER is an ASW hull, but will not have been programmed for any activity until at least the mid-2020s anyway due to her refit, so in terms of operational ships at sea, this loss won’t be felt until then. ARGYLLs loss will depend on her programme, but it will be felt in terms of one less hull able to carry out general purpose patrol work in areas where a RIVER class is not sufficient.

The bigger risk is likely to be for HMS LANCASTER and IRON DUKE, as they will be the last of the ‘GP’ Type 23 frigates and an orphan sub type. The RN historically rarely keeps orphan units running for long due to the higher costs of keeping them going, much like HMS SHEFFIELD and COVENTRY were quickly disposed of in the early 2000s when the other Batch 2 Type 22s were paid off under the 1998 SDR. It would seem a safe bet that if these two go, LANCASTER will be paid off when she returns home from the Gulf in the next year or two.

The real risk to this decision is not in the next couple of years, but in the mid-late 2020s. The loss of these hulls now, materially fragile as they may be and elderly as they are reducing the mass of ships that can be relied on if the Type 31 is late. At the moment the theory is that these ships will be replaced by the Type 31, while the Type 26 will replace the 7 ASW variants. If this happens as planned, and Type 31 delivers then we can breathe a sigh of relief as highly capable new ships start to enter the water, complete trials and can be programmed for fleet time within the next 3-4 years. If there is a delay though then the RN has run out of road and will find itself covering a period of gaps for several years where there is neither a T23 or a T31 able to meet the tasking requirement. This is where the pain will be felt – fewer hulls meaning fewer chances either to operationally use ships or do trips that may be good for morale (e.g. West Indies Guardship).

The impact of the LPDs going into reserve is harder to judge. Both ships are command platforms first, optimised to fill a role of landing a Brigade sized force as part of a wider amphibious group, reflecting the doctrine of the mid 2000s which saw the UK acquire both these ships and four LSDs for use in the amphibious space as well as an LPH. For a brief period in the mid – late 2000s the UK had the worlds second most capable amphibious force after the USA. Today though changing views on the feasibility of amphibious operations and the reality that the UK (and allies) do not see a future in which throwing marines over a beach from a landing ship is a likely outcome means the LPDs were increasingly in search of a relevant role that justified their crew and costs. The RN has long seen them as less relevant to the sort of amphibious operations that it sees the Royal Marines doing (small raiding forces versus D-Day style landings). In paying them both off into reserve, the RN loses one ship at sea, but in terms of operational impact, it will be fairly limited. But when added to the wider pattern of loss of the LPH without replacement, and the fact that only one, potentially two BAY class will be available for amphibious roles, it will leave the UK with less amphibious capability than Australia, France or the Netherlands.

UK MOD © Crown copyright

People will ask why these ships cannot be put into mothballs and held in reserve if needed. That’s a reasonable question, but sadly the answer is that it makes no sense to do so. Putting ships into reserve properly is an expensive and time-consuming process involving refits, regular maintenance and assigning of crews to make sure the ships can be brought out when needed. There is an excellent file in the National Archives as part of the Options for Change collection which showed that the RN seriously looked at this as an option in the early 1990s to maintain escort numbers, but the detailed analysis proved that it was an extremely costly option that would save very little money and would be a real challenge to deliver properly working ships in a crisis – the file looked at a report analysing reactivating the Type 81s in the Falklands War which highlighted how inefficient it would be.

The challenge is that these ships need a lot of work to keep them safe for use at sea. WESTMINSTER will not be in any state to go into reserve without a major refit to put back all the equipment that was ripped off her in preparation for a refit. Spending money on a ship refit only for the ship never to go to sea again isn’t ideal during a public spending squeeze. If you look at the images regularly posted of MONMOUTH and MONTROSE rotting out on the trots in Portsmouth, you’ll see how quickly material decay sets in, and how ships left out without regular TLC decay. Just look at the appalling material state of HMS BRISTOL, now awaiting the scrapyard, and how quickly she has decayed far beyond the point of no return. The painful truth is that putting these ships into mothballs would save little and would be a false economy, for they would quickly become little more than floating piles of scrap.

For the LPD’s both are likely to be maintained in reserve requiring both crew and support. This means in theory they could be pulled out of mothballs, but as the efforts to bring BULWARK out and regenerate her have shown, this is a lengthy process that will take months if not years to do. In reality even if maintained in reserve, it will essentially be for show only as it is impossible to envisage any circumstances where these ships sail under the White Ensign again – this is to all intents the end of the road for the LPD in Royal Navy service.

One aspect of the story that caused Humphrey to raise his eyebrows quizzically was the confident assertion from the source that the crews would be diverted onto the Type 26. This is, to put it politely, an exercise in spinning the truth akin to suggesting the Norman invasion was merely a setback for the Anglo-Saxons… There is no doubt that the RN has a clear plan on how to migrate crews off each paying off ship and then redistribute people across the fleet to generate a crew for the new ships. It’s been in the business of doing this sort of resource management for centuries.

But HMS GLASGOW is unlikely to enter sea trials or fleet service for several years yet, meaning that she doesn’t need a full ships company now. Also, HMS WESTMINSTER is to all intents a ‘dead ship’ having not been to sea since 2022 and is effectively a hulk. There is no real ships company to disband and more pertinently, there would have been no need to generate a ships company for a couple of years till she started to emerge from refit. The only crew being freed up immediately would be those from ARGYLL while drafters and appointers would be freed of worrying about how to find a crew in due course for WESTMINSTER. To put it politely, it is a work of fiction by the source to suggest that paying these ships off is essential for the Royal Navy to crew Type 26 now, because the Type 26 isn’t yet ready for a crew.

There is no doubt that the RN is in deeply challenging waters when it comes to people numbers. Recent reports indicating both recruitment challenges and an increase in unplanned outflow point to the fact that the workforce is struggling to meet the demands placed on it. Its not possible to quickly fix this issue either, for no matter how many people join, it will still take 10-15 years to get the right numbers of properly trained, qualified and experienced senior rates and officers into the roles where shortfalls are occurring. This is a problem that will take decades to properly fix. The challenge is that this shortfall of people seems to sum up the RN experience since WW2 – namely an inability to properly manage the workforce strategically, a failure to retain skilled people and a shortfall of crews leading to too many ships being paid off early due to lack of people to sail them.

This may sound harsh but at times the author does question whether the RN really should use the strapline about ‘world class people management’ that it throws around a lot. A cynic would argue that the story of the RN since 1945 is one of avoidable decline due to a failure of the Admiralty to properly manage the workforce or consider genuinely radical changes to doing business. When you look at the way that so much of the career plot, management and approach to doing business is often so unchanged, one wonders whether people are banging their heads on the desk and shouting ‘why does this keep happening to us if we keep doing what we’ve always done’. Given we’re likely about to see paying off of roughly 10% of the surface escort fleet due in part to a failure to recruit and retain the right people, has the time not come to actually be radical and try new things given that the current system has, in the eyes of some, been systematically destroying the RN from the inside for almost 80 years?   

This may sound blunt and harsh but there is an element of truth to the fact that if the RN recognises it has a people retention problem, particularly for highly skilled technical trades, (as has been the case since the 1940s) then perhaps the problem is not the people, but the system and how it employs them? Has the time come to actually think outside the box and try something new, rather than keep doing what they’ve always done and wonder if eventually the workforce will stop leaving? There is a risk that in the public eye the responsibility for the decline of the Royal Navy in pure numbers terms owes much to anyone but the Royal Navy. The usual answer on social media is to blame the politicians, or the contractors or the Treasury – but there is a reluctance to ask if the problem lies closer to home.  

Speaking to friends serving in the regular RN at a variety of ranks and rates, the author is struck by the growing sense of despondency that so many of them feel at the moment. Many people who would be described as ‘lifers’ in a previous generation are now actively applying for jobs outside – they’ve had enough. Their sense at the mid level is that they’re in an organisation that feels in terminal decline and that there is no chance of their being able to arrest this change or be empowered to deliver it. As one serving friend bluntly put it, ‘we’ve spent our entire careers being told about this bright future ahead of us in the RN, if we get past this temporary blip. The problem is the bright future has never materialised’. There is both sadness and resignation in this statement, a sense that they no longer believe the statements issued about the great future ahead when all around them they see ships being scrapped and financial pressures biting. It must be hard to stay positive when throughout your career you’ve been told by seniors that the Royal Navy is a growing navy, only to see it get smaller year on year. Why stay when the organisation seems set to collapse? Learning through the media that the RN sees paying off two escorts and two capital ships as the only way to secure crew for ships that have been in the build programme for, literally, decades, indicates just how badly things are going.

UK MOD © Crown copyright

Is it really as bad as it all seems to some? Its genuinely hard to tell. There is an argument to be made that the RN is actually coming to the end of a challenging period and that we’ll shortly see new escorts, support ships, submarines and autonomous vessels enter service. There is also a good case to be made that the nature of escort ships is changing and that we are on the cusp of a move to a very different way of operating as autonomous vessels take much greater prominence – the days of needing large, crewed ships at sea may soon pass as robotic technology and drones take on many different roles. Within 20—30 years the RN may well look a massively different force, where crewed surface ships are few but the platforms, sensors, intelligence and firepower provided by the autonomous force are far greater than we have now. Is it better to embrace these changes and make the most of them, or hold back and cling to the familiar?

It is also fair to say that the RN is not alone in having older ships that are money pits. Look at the US Navy which is desperate to rid itself of the legacy Aegis cruisers that are now very old and incredibly fragile. The USN would dearly love to free up resources to spend on new technology and other platforms, but politics have made this far harder than it should be. There will be other NATO navies also looking on at the future and realising that significant shifts are required, but lacking in the certainty of how and when to make this transition. There is an opportunity here for the RN to be a genuine global leader, embracing both the change and the opportunities for influence (and technology export opportunities) that this provides.

If we look to the RN of the mid 2020s then objectively in some quarters it is in good shape. The arrival of both carriers is to be welcomed, while the new TIDE tankers are also hugely useful. The SSN force is slowly regenerating and more A boats are coming on line while the return of VANGUARD will hopefully ease pressure on the SSBN force. The Mine Warfare force is in transition and will soon look radically different, but will also be far more effective than before with new technology taking ‘the (wo)man out the minefield’. The escort fleet too has a bright future with Type 26 and 31 having the potential to be game changers. But  the RN needs to get them in service soon and ensure they work – the arrival of HMS VENTURER & GLASGOW as sea going vessels will not, of itself, ease these challenges for she will need to do extensive first of class trials and be ready for use. The remaining escort fleet of likely 14 escorts (6 Type 45s and 7-8 Type 23s, assuming LANCASTER and/or IRON DUKE pays off too) will be worked very hard, and the risk is that this causes even more people to leave.

Some will probably suggest that the carrier should be paid off to cover the crew shortfalls, but this is misleading. The carrier crew complement is vastly different to the T23 and wouldn’t solve the problems of finding crew. It is easy to forget that while on paper the RN is about 30,000 strong, only half of these are general service personnel, the rest being submariners, Royal Marines or Fleet Air Arm. The carrier is a vital part of the future force and to lose this to keep a pair of elderly escort ships and an LPD at sea seems a poor trade. But equally it is easy to understand why people feel concerned that the RN seems to have bet the farm on getting two carriers and in the process shrunk by a quarter in the same timeframe.

To understand the scale of the change the RN has seen in recent years, it is worth comparing and contrasting the size of the active Royal Navy today if these cuts are applied versus 15 years ago in 2009. This rough figure does not include ships in build or on trials in either year. In very rough numbers the Royal Navy and RFA of today is roughly a quarter smaller than it was 15 years ago. This is very rough ‘wikipedia’ reporting so should be seen as a broad headmark rather than highly detailed analysis.

 

Ship Type	2009 Active	2024 Active	Approx % Change
SSBN	4	4	+0%
SSN	8	5	-30%
Carriers	2	2	+0%
LPD	2	0	-100%
LPH	1	0	-100%
Destroyers	8	6	-25%
Frigates	17	9	-45%
OPVs	3	8	+150%
MCMVs	16	9	-45%
Survey Ships	6	3	-50%
Inshore Patrol Vessels	18	18	+0%
RFA LSD(A)	4	3	-25%
RFA Store Ships	4	1	-75%
RFA Tankers	9	6	-30%
RFA Repair Ship	1	0	-100%
RFA Aviation Training	1	1	+0
RFA MCMV Support	0	1	+100%
RFA Cable Support	0	1	+100%
TOTAL	104	77	-23%

 

When you look at numbers like this, it is easy to understand why many may feel concerned about the state and capability of the fleet – particularly given that many of the ships listed in 2009 are still in service, without replacement today, including all of the frigates. Also many of them are not active – for example 2 of the RFA’s 6 tankers are in reserve and have no chance of ever going to sea again.

RN Task group 1977

In 1980 it is said that during the infamous (but surprisingly pragmatic and sensible) Nott Review, when the RN was looking at cutting itself from 65 to 50 escorts, at least one Admiral said that this would not be Navy he’d want his son to serve in. Today the fleet is roughly 75% smaller than this, and yet the RN continues to shrink in size and capability. It is genuinely hard to decide whether to be optimistic or more pessimistic about what this news means for the RN. Deleting a pair of elderly frigates in poor condition to save money and free up crew in due course rather than throw good after bad is probably a good thing, but it will not solve short term challenges. The risk is that if the MOD’s parlous financial position continues to worsen while staffing challenges worsen, then things could get even worse. If the personnel position improves and recruiting delivers more staff to the front line while retention challenges ease, then this could be a passing phase with light at the end of the tunnel. On balance this set of decisions is probably the right ‘least painful’ decision the RN could take but coming on the back of pressures across the fleet, one is left with the sense that good news is desperately overdue to show when the RN has finally turned the corner of decline to embrace a very different future ahead.  

When you look at a photo of the Springtrain deployment of 1977-78 and realise that in one photo it shows more seagoing frigates, tankers and store ships than the Royal Navy and RFA have available right now in just one photo, you realise how grim things look. While it is easy for outsiders to blame the Politicians for taking decisions, they can only act on the options presented to them by the military. These options are drawn up by military officers and staffed through the military chain of command. That the RN feels it needs to pay ships off to solve people and financial issues should be seen, at its heart, as an outcome caused by the Royal Navy and its failure to sort its people management out and not a politically inspired choice of spite taken by Ministers. The decline and fall of the Royal Navy was ultimately caused by the Royal Navy personnel who developed and presented these options as credible. That we are in this position is due to plenty of good people doing the best they could with a bad hand, but we cannot evade the fact that this is self-inflicted harm caused by a failure to recruit and retain people – a problem that has not changed since 1945.