A Tale of Two Royal Navy's - Ambitious Expansion Vs Strategic Decline.

 

You could forgive supporters of the British Royal Navy for feeling incredibly jealous this morning as news broke of the plans to drastically increase the size of the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) surface fleet. To a cynic, it would represent a sea change from the British tradition of years of barely managed decline, cuts to force levels, stockpiles, infrastructure and shore support and an attitude that somehow less is more if you insert “world class” in front of the ship title. To see a ‘Royal’ Navy set out a clear plan for growth that will, if implemented in full result in the RAN possessing a significantly larger escort force than the RN is both exciting and depressing that the UK lacks a similar sense of aspiration and ambition. But will this really come to pass, or will this fade into a future of recriminations and half delivered goals?

The RAN commissioned a review in 2023 into the size of the surface fleet, and the response was formally published on 20 Feb 2024. In broad terms the future RAN will comprise 9 ‘tier one’ escorts made up of the Hobart class AAW destroyers and the Hunter class (Type 26) ASW frigates. These will be supported by up to 11 frigates of a lighter patrol variant for general constabulary duties, supported by up to 6 ‘optionally crewed vessels’ that will help bridge the gap as the RAN moves towards a future of more uncrewed ships at sea. This will give the RAN an escort fleet of 20 crewed major surface combatants, and 6 potentially crewed vessels.

UK MOD © Crown copyright

Coupled to this ambitious growth plan for the surface escort fleet, the RAN will continue to acquire a significant number of nuclear attack submarines, with the first nuclear engineers coming off training courses in the UK now, and it will operate the US VIRGINIA class in the short term, and the future SSN designed with the UK. In addition, plans have been put in place to produce new support ships to replace HMAS CHOULES (the BAY class LSD(A)), while work is in place to expand the capability of the existing elderly ANZAC class frigates with more strike missiles.

On paper these plans represent a stunningly ambitious goal to reinvigorate the RAN, taking it in force size terms to levels not seen in over 40 years, and except for the fixed wing carrier and SSBN component, making it arguably a larger and more capable force than t the Royal Navy. Even with 20 ships, this will still give Australia a significantly larger surface force than the Royal Navy, which is continuing to decline in size and capability, and seems set to drop to just 6 AAW destroyers and 8-10 frigates for most of the 2020s and early 2030s. It is not until the mid-2030s that (in theory) the RN will have 19 escort ships in service.

If realised in full then over the next 15-20 years the RAN will quickly move to become one of the most potent navies in the Indo-Pacific region, combining a wide range of highly capable warships, coupled with first rate personnel and access to strong support and intelligence. When you add this to the existing acquisitions for the Australian Army and RAAF, one is left with the sense that here is a nation that, unlike the UK, is not prepared institutionally to accept strategic decline as an inevitability, and which is prepared to invest and spend for the long haul in both sustaining and expanding defence capabilities. It is no exaggeration to say that on the current course and trajectory, that given the currently rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the willingness of Australia to invest in defence properly and their credible capable military, that Canberra may soon be seen in Washington as a defence partner of equal, if not greater importance and credibility than London.

But this vision depends greatly on it being delivered in full, and like all good visions there is a price to be paid ahead of time. For starters two ANZAC frigates will be decommissioned early over the next two years, leaving the force with just 9 escort ships, while the Hobart class will reportedly need to undergo significant refits in the next few years, further reducing surface fleet numbers in the short term. At the same time work on other projects has been reduced, with home-built patrol ship numbers being slashed (the ARAFURA class), while the HUNTER class has been reduced from 9 – 6 hulls. This means in the short term the RAN will get markedly smaller while it waits for replacement hulls to arrive, and it will need to do so with ever older frigates.

The real challenges to delivery are threefold – money, industry, and people. Firstly, there needs to be certainty that the long-term funding is in place to deliver this vision not just now, but for at least 15-20 years to come. This will require apolitical commitment to sustaining these plans, and being ready to bear the costs when they inevitably rise. The one certainty of defence projects is that they never get cheaper, with the HUNTER class rising significantly in cost terms being the root cause of deleting three hulls from the project. Add this large shipbuilding bill to the huge costs of the nuclear submarine programme and you realise that a lot of taxpayer’s money is committed to maritime defence investment for decades to come – will this remain politically popular and palatable for many electoral cycles ahead?

Being certain that the money is there will be vital for industry, which will need to deliver significant investments to make this credible. The Australian shipbuilding industry is reportedly struggling to make good the people and skills needed to build ships at home, hence the cancellation of the ARAFURA class project. Ensuring that there is sufficient expertise at home to build the HUNTER class and the new light frigate class, potentially at the same time, as well as aspects of the SSN programme will stretch Australian industry to the limits to deliver. Even if the political will remains, being able to find enough people and resources to construct these ships will be hard and may lead to increased reliance on foreign construction. Already the RAN is clear it will build the first batch of light frigates abroad, which may also land poorly if taxpayer dollars are spent building Australian warships in foreign yards.

Most importantly of all, this plan calls for the RAN to have enough people to crew these ships as well as put in place the wider support services needed to offer a meaningful career. There is a danger of assuming that you only need ‘X’ extra people to add as ships company, assuming the basic crew complement, multiplying it by the hulls being purchased and recruiting that many people. You need more than this to provide a margin for training, natural wastage, to staff the various support services needed (e.g. dockyards, HQs etc) and to ensure that people don’t spend their career going from sea job to sea job. Even if more modern ships need fewer crew, you still need to recruit and retain enough people to provide meaningful career paths for the many specialisations present. This means you need a path to recruit and train sufficient officers to provide 11 command qualified CO’s and XO’s, which in turn means many more officers of the watch and warfare officers. You may only need half the number of people to crew twice as many ships, but you still need to find twice as many CO’s, XO’s, MEO’s etc than you had before, and this in turn means major impacts on career management.

UK MOD © Crown copyright

The risk is that the RAN is shrinking year on year, and voluntary outflow rates are increasing, particularly of technical personnel. Those who are left are going to have to work harder than ever to fill gaps caused by others leaving, increasing pressure on their own careers, and they will need to both run on increasingly elderly platforms while introducing multiple new hull types into service. This is going to present an enormous challenge for a force of barely 15,000 people and may not be achievable without major changes to recruitment. Interestingly Australia seems to be suffering the same recruitment woes that the UK has, with the average recruiting time for soldiers being 300 days, meaning good people are being lost as they get other jobs elsewhere.

It is possible that the Australians will resort to their time-honoured tactic of ‘encouraging’ other 5-Eyes naval personnel to join up. For many years its been common to see the RAN and RNZN place recruiting adverts in Navy News (Canada less so – perhaps, come to Canada, see moose, drink moose milk’ is a less appealing recruiting pitch?). There are plenty of RN personnel who have gone ‘down under’ usually on a package of pay, allowance and pension that usually leads to residency in 3 years. The general feedback from Brits seems to be that you’ll be utterly thrashed and work hard, but you’ll be generously rewarded and treated in a way that makes you wonder why you didn’t do it years ago.  When  you look at the plummeting morale in the British military, particularly over increasingly uncompetitive pay that doesn’t compensate you adequately for being thrashed from posting to posting, with a new accommodation model that seems to have landed very badly in some quarters, as well as the opportunity to live in houses that are so poorly maintained by supremely disinterested contractors that your 2 year old child ends up in hospital, is it any wonder that many people will be likely looking with interest at their options down under?

The risk though is that this could be seen as ‘poaching’ and doesn’t solve the wider allied problem of crew shortfalls, it merely transfers a finite number of people around the various navies, rather than really expanding them. This may be a particular issue as the RAN SSN force comes online, when nuclear engineers will be in huge demand and many RN submariners may be sorely tempted to jump ship. Trying to prevent a mass exodus from one navy to another could test international relations to the limit. One has to idly wonder why, given how much better the Australian offer appears to be on paper to many British personnel that the UK doesn’t just attempt to emulate it outright and make a real effort to keep people in as it does seem to be a very attractive package.  

Given all of this, while the long-term vision is impressive, it remains to be seen if the Australians can deliver it in the timescale or numbers envisioned. The worst-case scenario is that the RAN takes pain now to deliver on a long-term future that produces promises of a growing fleet of escort ships that never quite delivers what was promised in either timelines or hull numbers. This may sound eerily familiar to supporters of the Royal Navy, burned over the last few years of increasingly hollow statements about ‘growing the RN for the first time in a generation’ which have proven to be utterly worthless.  It is hard not to see significant parallels to the RN in this scenario. A commitment to a growing surface fleet, investment in new ships and plans to bring a two-tier navy into being of both heavy and light ships really sums up every defence review since 2010, yet nearly 15 years later, the force is smaller than ever and struggling to recruit and retain people.

It is also interesting to see that the RAN is resorting to the same methods that the RN has tried to solve its crew shortages of choosing to pay hulls off (e.g. two ANZAC class) to free people up to fill billets on other ships. Given the RN has been trying this method for almost 80 years of scrapping ships when it routinely runs out of people, only to find that it hasn’t worked and it needs to scrap even more ships, one wonders when this inspired idea will work – presumably when there are no ships left to scrap, at which point there are no gaps to fill? Less cynically the challenge is going to be delivering both the current fleet and the future fleet in a way that doesn’t break people and disrupt operations and doesn’t result in the nightmare scenario of a magnificent future fleet unable to put to sea due to lack of people. This is not as far from reality as some may think – just look at the Irish Navy and its current personnel challenges.

UK MOD © Crown copyright

As a loyal supporter of the Royal Navy and eternal optimist, watching the RAN set this vision out for the future has left the author feeling rather depressed. There is no chance at all that a comparable announcement would be made in the UK for the Royal Navy. One only has to look back over the last 10-15 years of shrinking force numbers, the increasingly challenging materiel state of the force, the growing unplanned outflow of people without direct replacement and an operational plot that grows ever busier. There is no funding ever likely to be available to double the RN escort force, nor the people to crew it. The harsh reality is that the UK defence budget isn’t sufficient to meet the demands placed on it year in year out, yet further spending seems increasingly unlikely.

Looking ahead to the two nations naval future, one gets the sense that this is a defining moment in the relationship between the two Royal Navies. On the one hand Australia has set out a clear and funded path to significant expansion and capability growth that if met will result in its nearly doubling in size and capability in the coming years. On the other hand, in the UK, the MOD has refused for some years now to even publicly state its plans for the total planned size of the RN escort fleet on the desperately pathetic justification of ‘national security’, something noted by the Parliamentary Defence Select Committee as being wholly unacceptable. Australia is telling the world it is doubling its fleet size, while the MOD refuses to tell the taxpayer how many ships they plan to operate, despite such information readily being available on social media.  

The future is likely to be one where both navies operate as peer forces, a situation brought about by strategic investment in the Australian Navy and strategic decline in the Royal Navy. Both will operate an ageing frigate force, a more modern AAW force and be trying to introduce two new classes of frigate and an SSN into service in similar time frames. Both navies will see a moment in coming years when they embrace autonomous technology to shape their future force structures. Both navies will struggle with budgetary situations, industrial capability and recruiting and retaining people. In time the RAN is likely to be one of the leading naval powers in the Indo-Pacific with a clearly defined mission of maritime security to deter China and predominantly operate in its home area and friendly territories, giving it a huge area of responsibility to protect. The Royal Navy will aspire to global operations but not be resourced to deliver this and will instead continue its decline to being a regional navy with carriers and SSBNs, focusing predominantly on NATO operations rather than being the global force it used to be.  Overall the future for the RAN is considerably brighter than the RN, and if this plan is delivered, it will only be a matter of years before the RAN is bigger, and arguably more capable and operationally credible than the Royal Navy, in turn shaping Australia’s emerging position as Americas most important, and credible ally.