Don't Panic! Reasons For Royal Navy Carrier Optimism

 

If you believe some of the more hysterical defence reports recently, HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH has returned to port with propellor issues for emergency repairs, prompting the Royal Navy to send ‘plastic warships’ (P2000s) to sea in her place to take part in Exercise Cold Response, alongside the carrier HMS PRINCE OF WALES. By any reasonable measure the RN has plummeted to yet another nadir after years of relentless cuts. But is this a reasonable assessment of the situation?

What has happened is far less dramatic, despite Daily Mail reporting suggesting that the ship returned to port, which was an outright lie, as she had never left port in the first place, engineers have reportedly identified issues with the propellor shaft on the QE. A decision was taken late in the day to delay sailing and have the potential fault looked at and fixed rather than let the ship sail and potentially experience issues while deployed. This is not an easy call to make – to cancel the sailing of your fleet flagship after announcing her departure is always going to make for uncomfortable coverage. This is magnified in the social media age when every departure and arrival get huge attention online and news spreads globally in seconds.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2021

It is a truth not universally acknowledged that warships are phenomenally complex and rely on advanced technology and equipment to work properly. This equipment can, and does, go wrong on a surprisingly regular basis for many different reasons. It could be due a repair, or a refit for new parts to be fitted. It could be that a fitting has come loose that needs to be fixed, or that something totally unforeseen has happened that requires attention. Every navy in the world has experienced these problems, with ships developing problems that require attention before sailing. If you look back through history there will be hundreds, if not thousands of incidents that have occurred in the Royal Navy alone, just since WW2, when sailing was delayed due to the discovery of a fault that needed fixing. The inevitable reality of being a sea going navy is that things break down if you use them, and the easiest way to avoid this is not to go to sea. As noted, every navy on the planet has been in this position. This is not unique to the Royal Navy.

The people that made this decision will have done so based on balancing off risk, noting what could go wrong if the ship was at sea and the impact on the wider programme if things went wrong, versus the short-term cost of doing local repair work and fixing the problem. This isn’t an easy call to make because it could be entirely possible that the risk would never manifest while deployed, but equally if it went wrong at a crucial stage (for example during flying ops), then the impact could be disastrous. The people making this judgement call have had to look at a tactical issue and make a decision that has both operational and strategic ramifications (e.g. replacement on the exercise and the reduced likelihood that a UK CV will be able to relieve USS EISENHOWER in the Red Sea). This is a genuinely tough call to make. On balance it was almost certainly the right one. Can you imagine the impact if the decision was taken to accept the risk, sail on and then it went wrong in the middle of the Red Sea, while under attack from Houthi missiles? That would be a less than optimal time for the MEO to discuss the risk register with the CO…

In terms of the impact on the exercise, its limited. There will be a short delay while HMS PRINCE OF WALES prepares for sea, and then it will continue as before. There will, of course, be an impact on the programme for PWLS, which hasn’t been publicly shared yet, but it will not impact on the UK involvement in the exercise. This serves as a reminder of several things – firstly the value of having more than one carrier in service at a time – as the French have often found out, crises seem to happen when their carrier is in dry dock.  Its also questionable if a similar situation had occurred 20 years ago whether the RN would have been able to cope, as with the different maintenance routines and use of the three INVINCIBLE class, it’s entirely possible that there would not have been a carrier available for sea in the same time frame.

Secondly, the value of having two carriers able to go to sea in the fixed wing role, and swap at short notice. The real positive news story here is the testament to the training and flexibility of Royal Navy and RAF personnel who will quickly be able to adapt to a new plan and find themselves operating the most advanced fast jet in the world, at sea and without prior notice, and do so seamlessly. This is a good news story in demonstrating the flexibility of both the carrier force and the people who support it.

If you look at the wider plan for the carriers this year, its unlikely to have a major operational impact. QE was due to hand over at some point to PWLS as the fleet flagship and prepare for planned maintenance. In this case, she may be at sea less, but there is unlikely to be a significant disruption to her medium-term programme. Its likely that for some time the QE will be less active anyway – this situation merely brings that forward by a few weeks, so there is no major impact on operations.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2021

This case is interesting as it highlights the growing void between routine naval operations and social media expectations. Speak to anyone in the RN and the general sense is ‘meh, ships break’ – this is very much a business-as-usual situation where something has gone wrong, it will be fixed, and the RN has successfully come up with a Plan B. It is very much a ‘nothing burger’. But in the eyes of the social media commentary, you’d think the RN had been humiliated in the eyes of the world, that this is a legacy of a lack of defence spending and also that no other navy has ever had any technical problems, ever. In their eyes this is a very British debacle. It poses an interesting question about how to manage expectations – the RN and MOD are rightly proud of talking up a ships capability and do a good job of communicating how and when she will sail. When things go wrong, the public, who do not necessarily understand the complexities of ensuring that an aircraft carrier is safe to go to sea, and who don’t understand why an issue has (in their eyes) only just been spotted after months alongside, feel that this isn’t good enough.

There is a challenge too in the public perception of how these ships operate. People wrongly assume they have spent long periods alongside doing nothing, when in reality both vessels have been engaged in busy deployments and exercises – last year for instance both ships globally deployed on trials and operations in the Baltic and USA. Just because they do not go to sea in an operational way that previous carriers did doesn’t make them ‘harbour queens’. In fact, an analysis of time alongside versus at sea of previous carriers would probably show similar levels of operational activity. That perception is hard to challenge though because the constant stream of social media imagery of the ships alongside and tracking of every harbour entry/exit makes it hard to see the bigger picture of their operational programme. Perhaps the challenge is to work out how to communicate to the public that things do break, that this is normal, but that the RN isn’t failing when this happens. Trying to get the MOD to agree to a social media campaign about the armed forces which doesn’t sound like it contains nothing but the lyrics to the song ‘Everything Is Awesome’ may be hard to do. This incident perhaps proves the need to communicate both uplifting messages, but also candid honesty about the state of the armed forces too.

More widely its also interesting to see how twisted the reporting has become of the exercise. As noted, the Mail implied that the ship had gone to sea and returned – putting out an article which was factually wrong and utterly misleading to the public. If you look at the Mail and Sky News, they’re reporting that the RN is sending a ‘plastic warship’ to the exercise as the P2000 force sorties north to Norway. Its being implicitly tied to the carrier situation, implying that this is somehow linked – but in reality, it is not. In fact the RN put out a press release on 11 January talking about this planned deployment, which got very little news coverage. Its only chance that the ships sailed today, giving the perfect chance to fuse verbatim the words of a near month old press release with the suggestion that these ships are the replacement.  The P2000 deployment to Norway is a key part of the work being done by the Coastal Forces squadron to practise littoral operations and carry out missions done by their predecessors in WW2. Its an exciting opportunity for the ships and crews to take a vessel into the Arctic Circle – from the authors perspective, having fond memories of time onboard one of the participating ships from his URNU days, the idea of sailing into an arctic winter on one is a very ‘brave and courageous’ decision in Whitehall parlance!  

Overall, this is a situation which has become newsworthy for all the wrong reasons. There are many things to be concerned about with the state of the modern British military, as the recent House of Commons Defence Committee report in to resilience highlighted. This small technical issue is not one of them. People see this as evidence of the woes of the Royal Navy, not an advert for its strengths. Yet in being able to reassign participation from QUEEN ELIZABETH to PRINCE OF WALES, the RN is reminding the world that it is one of a tiny number of nations that operates multiple carriers, that it has people with the training and flexibility to shift focus at short notice and that resilience and redundancy means the show can, and will, go on.