https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...-new-frigates/
Navy has so few sailors it has to decommission ships
New frigates unable to be manned unless two existing warships are taken out of service
The Royal Navy has so few sailors it has to decommission two warships to staff its its new class of frigates, The Telegraph can reveal.
HMS Westminster, which was recently
refurbished at huge expense to the taxpayer, and HMS Argyll will be decommissioned this year. The crews will be sent to work across the new fleet of Type 26 frigates as they come into service.
It comes at a time when the Armed Forces is experiencing a significant
recruitment crisis, with the Navy having suffered a collapse in the flow of new recruits into the service.
A defence source told The Telegraph: “We will have to take manpower from one area of the Navy in order to put into a new area of the force.”
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has ordered eight Type 26 frigates. They will be the Navy’s most advanced submarine-hunting warships to date.
However,
HMS Glasgow, the first of the new Type 26s to come onboard, will not be operational until 2028 at the earliest, followed by HMS Cardiff, which is expected by the end of the decade.
The move will bring the number of frigates in Britain’s surface fleet down to just nine until the two new ships arrive.
The MoD has ordered six more Type 26 frigates but they are not expected to start arriving until the 2030s…..
A Whitehall source justified the move and said the decision allowed the military to focus on “updating the Navy into a modern, hi-tech fighting force”.
The source said: “It is always emotive when ships that have a long history of service come to the end of their working life. They and the sailors who crewed them have done the country proud. But decommissioning them is the right decision. The new Type 26 frigates will be in service before those ships can be refitted.”….
‘Dropping like flies’
Lord West, the former first sea lord, questioned why the Navy was decommissioning warships without having a new fleet ready to take over. He warned the UK’s warships were “dropping like flies”.
“We are losing operational ships, which is all very well as long as there’s no war in the next few years,” he said.
Lord West cited the Falklands war of 1982 where the UK lost two destroyers and two frigates, and a further 12 were damaged, as an example of needing a larger surface fleet. “With the number we’ve got, if we get involved in any action we are really poorly placed,” he warned.
He added: “If the Government had taken seriously the issue of frigate numbers over the last 10 years there would be sufficient to meet the requirements of trade protection in the Red Sea.”
HMS Westminster, which featured in the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, is described on the Navy’s website as having “recently returned to service after one of the longest, most comprehensive and complex revamps in her lifetime” following a 2017 refurbishment and was set to undergo another £100 million refit.
Around the same time,
HMS Argyll, the longest serving Type 23 frigate in the Navy, underwent a multi-million pound refit to return her to the front line.
After being decommissioned, the ships will either be scrapped or sold to an ally.
Last year, James Cartlidge, the defence procurement minister, insisted HMS Westminster was “part of a modernisation programme being implemented to all Type 23s that are in upkeep”, when asked in Parliament if there were plans to scrap it….
Tobias Ellwood, the former chairman of the defence select committee, said it was “baffling” to decommission two frigates at a time where the UK’s surface fleet is “massively overstretched”.
“During the Gulf War the Royal Navy boasted 51 frigates and destroyers,” Mr Ellwood said. “That number will soon fall to just 16. Yet our world is more dangerous than any time since 1945.”
He added: “The strength of today’s Royal Navy is simply inadequate to handle the ever complex threat picture that is harming our economy.”…