It’s time to be honest with ourselves. The Royal Navy is broken
The Senior Service is being asked to do too much with too little. Something has to give
Crew of HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Tokyo International Cruise Terminal, Aug 28 Credit: RODRIGO MARIN/EPA/Shutterstock/Shutterstock Editorial
HMS Daring, the first of our six Type 45 destroyers, has been alongside now for 3000 days,
as this paper recently reported. What struck me was the Pavlovian MoD response, “we continue to meet all our operational tasking”. This upsets me a lot. For one thing, in the case of our
nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), whose predicament is worse even than that of our beleaguered destroyers, it clearly isn’t true. I’m not sure which is worse; that we
frequently have no SSNs at sea at all or that we exist in a culture that can’t admit it.
The reason I’m certain that in the case of SSNs we are not making our operational commitments is that we have a hundred thousand tons of
Carrier Strike Group on the other side of the world just now with no British submarine in attendance. This is a fail.
The planning assumptions around strike group deployments determine what escorts the carrier should have at any given time, and these will vary depending on where the carrier is. In the North Atlantic, it might be escorted by just one frigate. In the Red Sea, it will be everything we have plus some US destroyers, please.
In the Indo-Pacific I guarantee the SSN would be on the list for pretty obvious reasons, but it’s not there. And it’s not that one has been detached to work with someone else nearby at, say, three days’ notice to scuttle back. Nope, of the five we have, just one is working, and that one is back in the UK. This is not meeting either the doctrine or the operational requirements. And forget the strike group – who is doing SSN tasking around Britain now?
SSN availability is not the only nuclear-related issue we have. Our deterrent submarines are old and their replacements are very late. This and a maintenance backlog means their crews are increasingly being asked to conduct
six-month patrols. That’s six months in a steel tube, at depth, with no view and no contact home, creeping around to remain undetected and waiting for the signal they hope never comes. When the previous class of “bomber” – the R boats – were getting long in the tooth, they ran the odd patrol over three and a half months, and that was deemed “unacceptable and must never be repeated”. But here we are adding 50 days to this. Talk to any accident investigator, and they will tell you that “normalising exceptional” is a fast track to disaster.
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