The Royal Navy is in a “doom loop” in which a shrinking fleet is worked ever harder, resulting in burnt-out sailors leaving the service and vessels spending long periods in maintenance, The i Paper has been told.
Military experts say the war in Iran – which has seen the UK send just one ship to the region – has exposed how the Royal Navy has been cut “beyond the bone” and is now in a “parlous state”.
There were no British ships in the Persian Gulf when America and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February and it took weeks to deploy a destroyer, HMS Dragon, to Cyprus, despite the UK’s sovereign base of Akrotiri being attacked by a drone early in the conflict.
On Tuesday, it emerged that Dragon had docked after experiencing a “minor technical issue”. The Ministry of Defence said it was a undertaking a “routine logistics stop and a short maintenance period”.
‘Extraordinary’ not to have a ship between Gibraltar and Singapore
Lord Alan West, the former head of the Royal Navy, who now sits as a Labour peer, told The i Paper: “The Royal Navy has got to a really quite parlous state, something that a number of us have been warning about over a number of years.
“To have found ourselves as the war opened up in Iran, with not a single Royal Navy warship between Gibraltar and Singapore was quite extraordinary.
“It must be the first time that’s happened for a couple of centuries I’d have thought.”
Last month, The i Paper reported how the UK had been forced to rely on a German ship to meet Nato commitments because it lacked its own vessels.
Open-source intelligence suggests that at the end of March, the UK only had one Type 45 destroyer out of six and one Type 23 frigate out of seven at sea, and only one of its five attack submarines deployed. Both the UK’s aircraft carriers were also in dock – carriers which Donald Trump had mocked as “toys”.
Tan Dhesi, the Labour MP who chairs the Defence Select Committee, said: “The [committee] has repeatedly raised concerns around the UK’s lack of mass and capabilities, and the urgent need for investment in UK defence.
“Many will have felt embarrassed at the beginning of the US-Iran war at the UK’s inability to deploy a single ship swiftly to the region.”
Mike Martin, a Liberal Democrat MP and former Army officer who sits on the committee, said the UK had “cut ourselves so beyond the bone” that “we’re now unable to carry out basic tasks”. “We effectively have a non-functional military,” he said.
HMS Prince of Wales was described as a ‘toy’ by US President Donald Trump (Photo: May Luke/ UK MoD Crown/Reuters)The current state of the Royal Navy has been blamed on a host of factors. David Blagden, associate professor of international security and strategy at the University of Exeter, said that the decline of the navy had followed a “long trajectory” from the end of the Cold War in which a “bunch of associated assumptions” were made.
“That we weren’t going to fight major naval powers again, that maritime warfare was now about power projection against weaker foes, and that the sea would basically be a kind of Western-controlled lake (where ‘Western’ was effectively shorthand for American power),” he said.
“The naval capabilities that resulted were therefore very high-end at the sorts of things they were intended for, but have become scarcer and scarcer in number, obviously, and remained pretty specialised even as numbers of ships and people shrank.”
The “shock of 9/11” led to a “pivot to expeditionary counter-insurgency warfare and ‘stabilisation’ campaigns” which “severely skewed the configuration” of the armed forces, with the Royal Navy losing out.
‘Ships uneconomical to repair’
He went on: “The navy’s decline has evidently accelerated in the last five years, with a bunch of long stored-up problems becoming more acute. The recruitment and retention situation got pretty bad. There’s obviously been all the well-publicised criticism of service accommodation, terms of service, overstretched people.”
A gap in ordering new frigates or destroyers in the 2000s and 2010s has meant that “overworked frigates laid down in the 1980s and 1990s have reportedly become so degraded that they’re uneconomical to repair,” he added.
Martin agreed that ships were being overworked. “If you have a tiny navy, and you’re fragging the ships the whole time, the amount of time they have to spend in maintenance paradoxically goes up,” he said. “We’re in a doom loop now where we’re having to kind of spend more time getting them sea-ready, because they’re spending so much time at sea.”
For West, there is a deeper root to the malaise. “Top civil servants across Whitehall and also senior Government ministers do not understand anymore the key geostrategic importance of maritime power,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, the solution starts with more money, the experts argue.
‘We must go to a war footing’
The Government has pledged to increase defence spending to 2.6 per cent of gross domestic product in 2028-29 and to hit 3 per cent in the next parliament, but West believes greater urgency is needed. “We must go to a war footing for our military and a war footing for defence industry,” he said.
While the MoD does not provide exact target numbers about how many ships it plans to have, it has previously spoken about building “up to 12” attack submarines, while the previous Conservative government spoke about increasing the surface escort fleet to more than 20 frigates and destroyers.
But West thinks the UK should have “something like 30 destroyers and frigates” and “about 15” attack submarines – “because that makes your enemy’s eyes water if they try and do something nasty”, as well as enough submarines for the nuclear deterrent.
There is also consternation at a delay in publishing the MoD’s 10-year defence investment plan.
Dhesi said: “While the Strategic Defence Review set out the long-term strategic vision for our military, the Defence Investment Plan was meant to provide the details, and its publication has been delayed several months. The lack of a public plan now runs the risk of undermining the UK’s ability to play a full and leading role in Nato.”
Defence spending is ‘inefficient’
Martin thinks that more money is a necessary but not sufficient for a naval renaissance. He believes the Government needs to “radically transform the way we do procurement” and also make it easier for investors to put money into defence firms.
Blagden said: “It’s incredible the amount of capability that the UK doesn’t get for the scale of its defence budget.
“To be sure, Britain still has capabilities that others can only aspire to, such as its nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarines, its two powerful aircraft carriers and its independent nuclear deterrent. But if you look at, say, South Korea, it manages to support a navy of over 20 attack submarines and over 30 surface escorts – despite spending less than 60 per cent of what the UK does on defence, and from an economy less than half the size.”
An MoD spokesman said: “This Government has announced the largest sustained increase in Defence spending since the end of the Cold War and an extra £5bn for defence this year alone and budgets will increase year on year in cash terms until the end of the Parliament – just as set out at the Spending Review. “Through the Strategic Defence Review we are creating a new hybrid navy by building world-class submarines and cutting-edge warships, alongside transforming our aircraft carriers and introducing new autonomous vessels to patrol the North Atlantic and beyond.” “Five Type 31 and five Type 26 frigates are in build and will join the Royal Navy fleet in the coming years, delivering a generational uplift in surface fleet capability.”
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