Britain's Future Navy

Nick Childs

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781473823242
• eBook ISBN: 9781781599204
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

What kind of Royal Navy does Britain need now? The 21st century promises to be one of huge uncertainties and challenges for the senior service. Does Britain have the right naval strategy to cope with emerging threats (does it have a naval strategy at all, and should it?) and, if so, does the Navy have the right ships and enough of them to implement it? Given the time taken to introduce changes and develop new systems, policy makers, naval chiefs, and designers are confronted with 50-year decisions. But future choices are likely to be clouded by economic uncertainties produced by the current crisis, which could have implications for decades. Nick Childs looks at the changing strategic environment (including ever greater maritime trade and the growth of other navies such as China, India, South Korea, revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East). He asks what Britain's role in the world could or should be—is she still interventionist? (Libya says 'yes'). If so, should our forces be designed purely to work with US, UN or Western European forces? What are the options for a naval strategy? The author then considers what kind of navy would be needed to support such options. What kind of ships are needed and how many? What of aircraft carriers and the nuclear option? What are the technological developments affecting current and future warship design projects? Is the new Type 45 destroyer what is needed and worth the cost? Given the depths to which the RN has shrunk in terms of numbers, public profile, and strength relative to its peers, this probably is a critical period in terms of determining the RNs future.

CHAPTER ONE

Troubled Waters

It turned out to be something of a long goodbye for HMS Ark Royal, the fifth ship of the Royal Navy to bear that ‘illustrious’ name. It was late in the evening of 18 October 2010 when news began to leak out of her shock early disposal as part of the new coalition government’s defence and security review, the SDSR. The news was to be unveiled officially the following day. The manner of the leak certainly angered the top brass in the Navy. Neither the ship’s commanding officer nor her crew had been warned that they were about to make news, or why.

A few weeks later, at the end of November, in the choppy, dark waters of the North Sea, under slate-grey skies filled with icy, driving rain, Harrier jets had leapt off Ark Royal’s flight deck for the very last time, kicking up great clouds of spray in the process. Indeed, it would, according to the SDSR plan, be the last time British Harriers would ever operate from any British carrier.

And a few days after that bit of history, on 3 December, Ark Royal would emerge from an obscuring, freezing mist to make her own last, sad entry into Portsmouth harbour.There would be further ceremonials to mark her passing. Her final, formal decommissioning on 11 March 2011 would take place almost unnoticed, as the world was gripped by international events elsewhere – the convulsions of a developing civil war in Libya, and the dawning horror of an unfolding combined natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami across the globe in Japan.

The committed navalists were quick to point out that an aircraft carrier might have come in handy amid all the talk at the time of no-fly zones and limited intervention in Libya.And in the Japanese disaster, of course, one of the first responses of the United States was to send an aircraft carrier as a floating base for relief operations.

Whatever the validity or otherwise of these observations, Ark Royal’s departure had a greater significance than just another big warship with a famous name falling victim to the latest in a long succession of post-Second-World-War defence reviews. Her withdrawal and that of the Harriers that she could operate removed a major pillar on which the Royal Navy had been building for the future. With that pillar taken away, can the core of the Navy’s vision still be achieved?

The official line was that this was a temporary arrangement. Against the background of the new government’s determination to cut the public deficit – its overriding strategic priority – the Navy would give up what was an admittedly by now limited current capability in return for a renewed commitment to a much greater capability in the future. Indeed, the big new replacement carriers that are under construction, and would continue their prolonged and painful journey towards final completion as a result of the SDSR, offer the prospect of a transforming capability.

But the gap in that capability between Ark Royal’s demise and the arrival of a new, fully-functioning carrier, would – under the SDSR plan – be a huge one. Potentially a yawning ten years. So what some defended as a rational trade-off others decried as foolhardy and an absurd gamble. It would, by common consent, be an enormous undertaking to resurrect such a complex and demanding set of skills and expertise after such a long time. It has not been attempted before. Maybe it cannot be done. Many were convinced that it will never happen.

With the arguable exception of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) support ship Fort George, Ark Royal was physically the biggest casualty of the SDSR, while the Harriers were the most iconic, and their joint departures with no immediate replacements its most hotly-contested outcome. It hardly helped the government’s presentation of the case for this set of decisions that they would result in the first of the huge new carriers – for which so many claims had been made about their potential – sailing for her first three years in service with no jets aboard. Indeed, she might never operate fixed-wing aircraft at all. Sceptical commentators and unhappy retired naval officers muttered about the latest British naval invention, the non-aircraft-carrying aircraft carrier. And only one of the giant new ships would be kept operational.

Ark Royal herself was the product of a previous upheaval in the Royal Navy’s fortunes. At 20,500 tons, she was the youngest of the three revolutionary Invincible-class small aircraft carriers which entered service between 1980 and 1985. With a naval version of the even more revolutionary vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) Harrier aircraft, the Sea Harrier, and another brilliantly simple British invention, the ski-jump ramp at the forward end of the ships’ flight decks to aid rolling take-offs, they kept the art of fixed-wing flying at sea alive in the Royal Navy for more than a quarter of a century. Otherwise it would have died in 1978 with the retirement of the last of the Navy’s traditional large Fleet carriers, the previous Ark Royal, at 50,786 tons a real heavyweight compared to her younger namesake.

Whatever one’s view of the current condition of the Royal Navy, it has arrived at it via a rather tortuous course over the past few decades. In that time, it has had to reinvent itself more than once, and on some occasions more painfully than at others. Of course, it entered the Second World War as still the pre-eminent world navy. It emerged from it as very much the junior partner of the US Navy. But that difficult transition was overshadowed and greatly influenced by the nation’s own diminished economic standing and overall struggle to find its new place in the world. On top of all that, the Navy had to contend with the advent of air power and the establishment from the early part of the twentieth century of a new and enduring British continental commitment of military power, something that the country had striven to avoid previously through careful diplomacy and the balancing of power in Europe. Both of these developments impinged on the Navy’s position as the ultimate bastion of national defence, and inevitably drew away resources.

As if that were not enough, the inauguration of the Cold War would present another challenge. For much of it, the nightmare scenario was of short, sharp nuclear devastation. That raised questions about where the traditional and often slow-moving levers of sea power would fit into Western defence. The Navy was haunted by the judgement expressed most famously (or notoriously) in the 1957 defence review authored by Duncan Sandys, that ‘the role of naval forces in total war is somewhat uncertain’.¹

If there was a silver lining to that particular mushroom cloud, it was that the Royal Navy – and indeed navies generally – would prove themselves to be uniquely useful in a succession of limited conflicts or ‘brushfires’ that broke out during this period. There was also the particular British requirement to engineer as dignified a withdrawal as possible from its dwindling colonial commitments. Here again there was plenty for the Navy to do, at least for the time being, and especially as the number of British overseas bases declined. It helped that some of the Navy’s most prized possessions, its aircraft carriers, would demonstrate their particular value in these different scenarios. Its carrier force played a significant part in the UN-backed campaign in Korea in the early 1950s. Even the 1956 Suez crisis, while politically so calamitous, underscored the military utility of the country’s naval power, not least again its carrier aviation and amphibious forces. In 1961, the carrier HMS Victorious and other naval vessels rushed to the waters off Kuwait when that newly-independent nation was threatened by neighbouring Iraq.

All this helped to burnish the Navy’s image, and perhaps even reassure the public that Britain remained a country of weight and influence. Reality, of course, belied that comforting image. In so many ways the country and the Navy were falling behind. Throughout this time, the Royal Navy remained indisputably the most significant Western navy after that of the United States, and still the third most powerful in the world. And yet it had fallen so far below the US Navy. Moreover, it was already being seriously overshadowed by its main potential adversary, the Soviet Navy.

In 1967, Jane’s Fighting Ships listed the strength of the US Navy fleet at seventeen large aircraft carriers, including the first nuclear-powered one (the USS Enterprise), twenty other support and helicopter carriers, eighty ballistic missile and other nuclear-powered submarines, more than 120 conventionally-powered ones (SSKs), four battleships, thirty-seven cruisers, and nearly 400 destroyers and frigates. That was more than 600 major warships in all. Total manpower stood at nearly 750,000.

In the same publication, the Soviet Navy’s strength was recorded at fifty nuclear-powered submarines, 350 conventionally-powered ones, twenty cruisers, and 220 destroyers, escorts, and small frigates. Total personnel numbered virtually half a million. What was more, this fleet’s years of most profound expansion and transformation lay ahead.

The Royal Navy, in contrast, had a mixed bag of five aircraft carriers of varying and in some cases marginal capability. Its first clutch of three nuclear-powered submarines had been built. There were forty-three other conventionally-powered ones, three cruisers, and more than ninety destroyers and frigates. Personnel strength stood at just over 100,000. But more devastating than these bare statistics was the blow that had been inflicted on the Navy the year before, which struck at the heart of its vision of itself at this time.

In the face of harsh economic realities, the then Labour government had decided to impose a strict cap on defence spending. The RAF was the first to feel the real pain, with the cancellation of its cherished, iconic TSR2 strike aircraft in 1965. However, it received a promise of fifty US-designed F-111 supersonic swing-wing bombers as a consolation.

But that was not enough. And now firmly in the line of fire was the Navy’s dream of a new generation of big aircraft carriers, the first of which carried the designation CVA-01. What ensued was an inter-service battle between the Navy and RAF which has become legendary, and has left scars that still linger in some hearts and minds. At its core was the issue of whether the two services could share the right to project British air power around the world, and whether the country could afford for them to do so.

The Navy was outmanoeuvred in the corridors of Whitehall. In February 1966, CVA-01 was cancelled, and with it all the Navy’s hopes of a new generation of big carriers were also dashed. The current carriers would be phased out. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, and the Navy Minister, Christopher Mayhew, resigned. There was naval outrage and recrimination. Members of the Fleet Air Arm felt desperately let down, even betrayed. But the cards were always stacked against the Navy and its carriers. It was not that the RAF’s rival ‘island-hopping’ strategy for covering the globe really convinced either the politicians or the civil service. It was, in the end, that the amount of money the new carriers represented was just too tempting a saving to ignore. The inclinations of the then Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, and large swathes of Whitehall seemed to be against them, although the Navy was given ample opportunity to make its case.

The rationale for cancellation, never accepted in naval circles, was that the carriers were essential only for a narrow set of military scenarios with which the country could dispense – the landing or withdrawal of troops against a sophisticated opposition beyond the range of land bases, and without the help of allies. Indeed, it was decided that they only really made sense in the Far East, but maintaining a credible carrier force at that distance was deemed by ministers to be beyond the nation’s means.

But the country’s economic woes continued. And the RAF’s triumph did not last long. The F-111s soon went too as the government faced up to a decision that it had fought to avoid or delay, which was that the country had to withdraw from a permanent military presence ‘East of Suez’.

The succession of blows leading up to the East of Suez moment forced a difficult change of course on the Navy. It had to recast itself from being primarily an independent, oceangoing force charged with maintaining a protective umbrella over the country’s steadily-declining colonial footprint. The accelerated imperial retreat now imposed on Britain meant that the Navy had to refocus on a core mission closer to home, derived from the country’s membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as the principal anti-submarine warfare (ASW) support for the United States to counter the Soviet maritime threat in the eastern Atlantic.

There was one piece of good fortune for the Navy at this time. It was that NATO chose to switch from a strategy that no longer seemed credible – a massive nuclear ‘trip-wire’ response to a Soviet attack – to a policy of ‘flexible response’. That at least implied the prospect of a more prolonged military build-up and confrontation that would require transatlantic reinforcements, and therefore a key naval dimension.

Despite the painful contractions, this was still an age when the services were able to shape themselves for their core functions in such a way that they retained a residual ability to act farther afield and beyond their narrower NATO missions. And that is exactly what the Navy did, albeit not without a struggle. With not a little ingenuity and deft political footwork that had eluded it earlier, it created a new fleet based around a new concept.

This was the birth of the Invincible-class carriers. For a time, they were dubbed ‘through-deck cruisers’ to try to throw suspicious ministers, air marshals, and civil servants off the scent. But that did not really fool anyone, and most saw them for what they were – a new form of mini-carrier. Also, they were designed primarily to operate helicopters. But always in the minds of at least the more ambitious – and one might also say far-sighted – admirals was the thought that they could be launching pads for V/STOL aircraft, ironically a concept that many in the Navy had disdained while it still had full-size carriers.

The Navy in the end managed – just – to get its way. It was helped by the fact that the difficulties of providing adequate air cover for the Fleet from land bases, even in the NATO context close to home, became quickly apparent. It got its new mini-carriers as the centrepieces of new formations, the ASW task groups, to perform its primary role. But these ships, plus a new generation of destroyers and frigates, and the RFA support train that the Navy was able to sustain, all meant that the Navy still had a significant residual ability to roam the further oceans independently when required. And, despite the East of Suez decision, it made a point of continuing to practise how to do that on a regular basis, by initiating ‘out-of-area’ group deployments beyond NATO’s boundaries of responsibility to ‘show the flag’.

Thus, by imagination and initiative, and some luck, the post-1966 Navy was able to mitigate much of the impact of what had been a traumatic moment in its modern history. But it would take the better part of a decade for the enforced change of course to take full effect. And barely had the Navy’s new concept started to take concrete shape, and its new generation of warships started to arrive, than another crisis hit. It was 1981. The backdrop again was economic recession. The government was a new Conservative one this time under Margaret Thatcher, determined to rein in government spending. And, after a less-than-co-operative stance from her first Defence Secretary, Francis Pym, Thatcher appointed a new one, John Nott.

As the government grappled with strained defence commitments, the trouble for the Navy was that there were no cast-iron treaty commitments setting out the scale of Britain’s maritime contribution to NATO, as there were in the case of the country’s land and air forces in Europe. Numbers in the Fleet had continued to dwindle. But, at the time, its strength stood at two V/STOL carriers, including a brand new HMS Invincible, four ballistic missile submarines and a dozen other nuclear-powered submarines, sixteen conventional submarines, and more than sixty destroyers and frigates.

What turned into the Nott defence review was to rank as one of the most contentious of modern times. He concluded that the defence programme was unsustainable. The government had decided, at the highest political level, that neither the nuclear deterrent nor the British commitment to NATO’s Central Front could be seriously cut. What was then a fragile Western alliance might not take the strain.The same was true of the home defence capability. That left only one source for real savings – the maritime commitment.

As if that were not enough, John Nott took on the Navy over how it went about its business. In this, he and his aides were encouraged by what they contended was a real difference in perspective between the admirals in Whitehall and more operational senior commanders at the Fleet’s headquarters in Northwood. There would be yet another shift in focus, to give less emphasis to the surface fleet and more to submarines and long-range maritime patrol aircraft. Most notably, only two rather than three Invincible-class carriers would be kept in service, and the number of operational surface escorts would fall dramatically to forty-two, with a further eight in reserve. Thus, in the decade-and-a-half since the Healey review, the size of the operational Fleet would have been halved.

The Nott review still divides opinion. For some, it was a rare attempt genuinely to tackle a strategic conundrum, challenge conventional wisdoms, and take on entrenched service interests, only for its results to be undone by a last stirring of imperial nostalgia in the South Atlantic, the 1982 Falklands War. The Navy, in this view, was clinging on to big, prestigious surface ships which would not survive under the bombardment of the Soviet naval forces.

For much of the Navy and its supporters, John Nott’s review was an ill-informed and arrogant exercise which totally failed to understand the true value and significance of maritime power, either in the relatively narrow NATO context or more broadly. From this perspective, the Falklands War was the almost inevitable consequence of that.

The conflict arrested the decline in the size of the Fleet for a while, but it did not halt it. One of the immediate Falklands effects was that the government agreed to keep the operational escort force at fifty ships. But, by the early 1990s, when the government took its ‘peace dividend’ from the end of the Cold War, that had dwindled to ‘around forty’. In 1997, the force inherited by the new Labour government of Tony Blair stood at thirty-five destroyers and frigates.

Here was another potential watershed moment. The new administration was keen to be seen to be throwing off unpopular political baggage from the past, and that included the image of being soft on and even hostile to the business of defence.The vehicle for doing that was what became known as the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

It may not have seemed like it at the time but, with the benefit of hindsight, the SDR probably marked a modern high-point for the Royal Navy in terms of the prominence that it was accorded at the heart of British defence policy. However, if it was a victory at all for the Navy, it was a pyrrhic one.

The SDR was something of an exception in the annals of post-Second-World-War British defence reviews. Conducted at a time of relative plenty, it was initially lauded for its analysis and conclusions.

Again, there were tough choices to be made. The upheavals of the decade from the end of the Cold War in 1990 had seen the peace-dividend cut in real defence spending total some 23 per cent. It was clear that that shrinkage in spending now needed to be matched by a more fundamental readjustment of forces.

And yet, suddenly, there seemed to be an opportunity for the Royal Navy...

Table of contents

• Also by Nick Childs
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Admiral Sir Jock Slater GCB LVO DL
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE - Troubled Waters
• CHAPTER TWO - Britain, the Navy, and the World
• CHAPTER THREE - What are Navies For?
• CHAPTER FOUR - A Maritime Century?
• CHAPTER FIVE - New Ship Shapes and Technology Horizons
• CHAPTER SIX - The Carrier Question
• CHAPTER SEVEN - The Nuclear Equation
• CHAPTER EIGHT - The Tale of the Type 45
• CHAPTER NINE - Defining a Frigate
• CHAPTER TEN - The Balance of the Fleet
• CHAPTER ELEVEN - A British Maritime Case
• CHAPTER TWELVE - In Line Ahead
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index