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Editorial
As it was... the Queen inspects her Navy at the Coronation Review in
1953 (Mr Ray Holden)
A Day to Remember
21 June 2005
28 June 2005 will be a special day for the Royal Navy, as
part of the Battle of Trafalgar 200th anniversary celebrations, an
International Fleet Review will be held at Spithead, off
Portsmouth. With ships attending from about thirty six
countries, this will be the UK’s first fleet review for 28 years
– indeed the majority of the sailors on the attending ships
wouldn’t have been born when the Silver Jubilee Review
was held in 1977!
The French Navy's flagship FNS
Charles de Gaulle (top) and the Royal Navy's flagship
HMS Invincible, plus sister ship HMS Illustrious,
will all be at International Fleet Review. |
Hopefully the weather will be kind, and I know it will be a wonderful
day, but it’s also impossible the forget the current depressing state of
the Royal Navy as the cumulative effects of years of defence cuts,
economies and “efficiency drives” take their bitter toll. The
resulting sheer lack of ship numbers, the dangerous deficiencies, the
increasing capability gaps and many unfulfilled promises of new equipment
have become impossible to totally conceal, even with a Nelsonian blind eye
and indomitable spirit.
The Royal Navy will proudly display at Spithead only half the
number of warships, submarines and auxiliaries that it did in 1977 – about
56 compared with over 120. Even then, several of the ships on show
will decommission only days later, including the frigate HMS Grafton
after just ten years service. And the largest warship by far on
display will be the French nuclear powered aircraft carrier Charles de
Gaulle, rather ironic given the nature of the event. It’s also
perhaps a sign of the times when the official
Trafalgar 200
website illustrates the section “Royal Navy Ships
Attending” with a four year old 'artists impression' of a BAE
future carrier concept – a project which has still not even reached the
order stage, and which is now very unlikely to have the first carrier, HMS
Queen Elizabeth, in service in time for the Queen’s expected
Diamond Jubilee Review in 2012.
Some recognition of just how bad things are getting for the Royal Navy
has become apparent even in official publications. The House of Commons
Defence Committee -
Fourth Report, published March 2005, says:
“Across the Services equipment is being withdrawn over
the next two to three years, but new (and significantly more capable)
equipment in the same areas will not enter operational service until
after 2010. Some of the replacement equipment has already encountered
difficulties with its development (e.g. the Joint Strike Fighter and the
Future Carrier). The Future Capabilities proposals have been driven by a
particular vision of future operational requirements. … it may take
another decade before the capabilities to deliver those requirements are
in place. In the meantime equipment withdrawals and personnel reductions
may leave gaps in capability. Those gaps, in turn, may create risks.
Some of those risks, in our view, need not have been taken. …it appears
that the Government has decided that a specific number of commitments
can be cut, without knowing which they will be. But ships are already
being withdrawn. The commitments cannot be sustained if the ships are
not available. … The reductions in frigate and destroyer numbers are
being made now.”
It has also been very recently highlighted in the National Audit Office
report
Assessing and Reporting Military Readiness published on 15
June. I make no apologies for an extended quote:
“Against the background of the continuing likelihood
of the greatest operational demands being made of the Army and some
elements of the Royal Air Force, such as strategic lift and
reconnaissance, the Department [i.e. the Ministry of Defence] has
deliberately decided that it should take risk against the peacetime
readiness levels of some maritime forces, reducing resource allocations
for the first two years of the four year planning period 2004-05 to
2007-08 to the Director General Logistics (FLEET) organisation (part of
the Defence Logistics Organisation) by around £310 million
(approximately 10 per cent of what would normally be spent on equipment
support in those two years). This is in addition to smaller funding
reductions introduced in 2001-02 covering the four years from 2002-03 to
2005-06. This has had considerable impact upon the management of support
to the Royal Navy, and Fleet has identified the impact of reduced
funding levels on its operational capability as the top risk in its risk
register.
To mitigate the risk of the Royal Navy not being able
to provide a balanced set of capabilities to the Department’s Joint
Rapid Reaction Force during this period, should this be required, the
Department introduced a ‘Reduced Support Period’ arrangement in June
2004, aimed at making best use of capital spares and prioritising
funding for repair support. These arrangements were endorsed by the
Defence Management Board and will apply, initially, until March 2006.
Under the revised arrangements, all ships have been given either normal
support status or reduced support status. Ships with reduced support
status will, generally, only receive support for defects affecting
health and safety and environmental safety. The intention is to preserve
a core capability to deploy a medium scale task group for the Joint
Rapid Reaction Force and to ensure that priority peacetime tasks remain
supported and that non-essential activity is removed from the Royal
Navy’s programme.
The Department recognises that this mitigation action
has, itself, introduced further risks to the capability of the Royal
Navy. … The readiness of the fleet … is forecast to keep falling
during the Reduced Support Period, recovering, in a best case, from
2006-07 and in a worst case only after 2010.
Meanwhile, stealthy low level cuts continue to be made by the
government, the most recent victim being the Royal Navy's Cooperative
Engagement Capability (CEC), one heralded as being a potential force
multiplier, and thus a justification for fewer actual hulls in the water. In December 2002, Lord
Bach, then the Minister for Defence Procurement said "It is a system that
could potentially offer a very significant enhancement to the situational
awareness of our naval forces and their ability to protect themselves
against the threat posed by enemy aircraft and missiles. It ... could lead
to a revolution in our naval air defence capability. By bringing
together all the information from all the networked radar in the battlegroup
the fog-of-war is reduced and the Air Defence Commander will be presented
with a highly accurate picture of all air target movements that will
enable him to engage enemy forces quickly and efficiently."
But with a £200 million funding approval apparently required to progress the
system in to service and actually fit it to the Type 23 frigates and
eventually the Type 45 destroyers,
JDW reports that the
MOD has instead decided to defer the RN CEC Main Gate
investment decision from this year to the end
of the decade, and that the whole project is now being re-assessed and may
well be
merged in to a nebulous "joint" capability that is unlikely to be as well
suited to the RN's needs.
Finally, it perhaps goes almost without saying that there has been no
obvious progress on the critical Future Carrier
(CVF) Project since my last editorial.
Instead there’s been the usual press reports indicating serious funding
difficulties (perhaps originating from far from disinterested sources),
and its probably no co-incidence that the possibility of close
co-operation with the French re-emerged - who are seeking to build a
second aircraft carrier (PA2) during the recently
completed 100-day review of the CVF project given the potential savings.
On 6 June the Minister of State
for Defence (Mr. Adam Ingram) told the House of Commons in response to a
question: “I am sure that [the questioner] recognises the advantages of
sharing benefits with one of our allies, in terms of their needs as well
as ours. There might well be opportunities for increased build at British
shipyards. It is right that we continue to discuss this with our
French allies. They have a need, and we have a need, so let us see
if there can be some mutual benefit in this.” The French do
indeed to seem to be taking proposition seriously and on 15 June,
the French Procurement Minister François Lureau said at the
Paris Air Show : "At the end of June we will have an answer on the idea of
using the British aircraft carrier programme (CVF) for French needs … a
final decision will be made at the end of the year". As ever we can
only wait for decisions to be made and announced, but it is hard not to increasingly reach
the conclusion that the delays to CVF are primarily due to the sheer
inability of the MOD - despite the scale of cuts that have been made
elsewhere by the RN - to find all the funding necessary to proceed with
the CVF 'investment' without a French contribution, a worrying situation also affecting other vital and
urgent RN projects such as MARS.
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