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Yes, the Royal Navy sent modified frigates and mine countermeasures vessels to the Gulf, but needed ship refits came to a virtual halt in 1981. The fleet air arm is shrinking, the amphibs need replacing, and the shipyards are desperate. One problem is muddled thinking. Another is a tight budget. Both combine to strangle the service to death.
The crisis in the Royal Navy’s surface fleet is clearly upon us. Nothing short of drastic measures will suffice if the decline is to be arrested. The figure of about 50 frigates and destroyers that Her Majesty’s Government is committed to maintain already is a purely nominal figure, designed merely to flesh out the statistics in government white papers and to provide easy answers for ministers at the dispatch box in the House of Commons. This number is being sustained only by retaining in service a number of vessels—many of them elderly—whose military value is minimal.
The basic problem is the lack of orders for new frigates. But the effects on the British surface fleet are being exacerbated by decisions resulting from the 1981 Defence Review promulgated by the then-Secretary for Defence, John Nott, who decreed an end to the practice of mid-life refits.
Whereas U. S. surface warship designs traditionally have left room for possible future equipment installations, British surface warships generally are designed around particular systems. British destroyers and frigates do not, therefore, incorporate the same growth margins as their U. S. counterparts. (The Cornwall-class Type 22 frigates, however, have grown to leave room for new equipment.)
The installation of new equipment frequently entails not only removing other equipment to compensate for extra space and weight, but also making radical structural changes to the ship. The costs of dockyard labor make structural changes expensive and by the early 1970s mid' life refits of the Batch-3 Leander-dass frigates approached the cost of a new ship. The decision to end these refits, therefore, made considerable economic sense.
Unfortunately, only half of the policy has been imple' mented. Mid-life refits have ended (although major updates are being conferred on the more important vessels), but the funding saved has not been invested in new construction. This has resulted in a significant reduction m military capability that the government has attempted to camouflage with statistics based on the number of ships m service. Those Batch-3 Leander-class frigates whose midlife refits were funded before the Nott Review now are regularly deployed to the Persian Gulf. But nobody would dream of hazarding their unmodified sisters much farther than the Isle of Wight! With the retirement of the Wasp helicopter from service, these units are fit only for training and other low-level duties.
The problems of the British surface fleet are by no means restricted to the number of modern surface escorts available. Despite the lessons learned during the Falklands Conflict, the government, acting on the recommendations
of the Nott Review, decided in 1985 to provide only two air groups for the Royal Navy’s three aircraft carriers. K is, moreover, difficult to envisage any long-term future for fixed-wing naval aviation without a replacement for the Sea Harrier, and yet there is no indication either that the development of such an aircraft is receiving serious consideration or that future funding could be secured for such a project.
Yarn
°w Scotstown recently received an order for three
The amphibious force, based on the dock landing ships ! rcpid and Fearless, is in urgent need of replacement. an°us options, including new construction and the comP ete rebuilding of the existing vessels to accommodate r°«p-carrying helicopters, are being considered. But se- Car'n§ funding for either of these alternatives in the cur- reut linancial climate will not be easy.
he government has attempted to deflect criticism by undertaking “studies” of various new projects. It also has . n to announcing invitations for shipbuilders to tender Wlth the same air of self-congratulation that previous governments reserved for announcing warship orders. These, owever, are purely political strategems, designed to take e heat out of the situation in much the same way that the announcement of a public inquiry is used to calm an agi- ed House of Commons whenever a scandal breaks, eanwhile, the Secretary for Defence is reduced to vague niuttcrings about “zero growth” and the “difficult c oices” that will have to be made, th ^ne resu*t °f delays in ordering new construction is at the few shipyards that have built surface warships for e Royal Navy are growing increasingly desperate. True,
more Duke-class Type-23 frigates and Swan Hunter may build a fourth in the future. But Yarrow has six of the seven Type-23 ship orders—the only new Royal Navy surface program on order. Unless orders are forthcoming, many skilled workers will have to be paid off. The proposed move toward competitive batch tendering, in which the shipyards submit a tender for perhaps four ships of the same type, may secure a favorable deal for the government in the short term, but the long-term effect on the shipyards could well be catastrophic. The Royal Navy does not order warships on the same scale as the U. S. Navy, and it is possible that the next British shipyard to secure a major surface ship order will be the only one to survive.
The piecemeal delays and deletions in surface ship construction inevitably will have an adverse effect on other equipment programs. British defense industry still produces virtually the full range of weapons and sensors for Royal Navy warships. Undoubtedly, the unit costs of these items will increase as they are installed in fewer and fewer surface ships. This, in turn, will increase the cost of the warships themselves, making it even less likely that they will be ordered in the required numbers.
A Question of Balance: The immediate cause of the current problems in sustaining a viable and well-balanced surface fleet is that Britain, unlike the United States and most European countries, has never had a properly defined program for building surface ships. When a particular type of warship is designed, it generally answers a specific Royal Navy requirement that includes the overall number of vessels it expects to order. This requirement, however, is not then translated into a fixed five- or ten-year program presented for parliamentary approval. Warships generally are ordered piecemeal to match the funding available in a particular year. This puts the Royal Navy at a serious disadvantage when arguing its case for funding against other major military programs whose size and schedule are clearly defined from the outset.
The Trident program is one of the major defense projects currently being funded under the British defense budget. The government has determined that four Trident submarines are the minimum acceptable for operational viability. The total program has been costed and approved and the submarines will be completed on schedule.
Modern aviation programs, such as the one to produce a European Fighter Aircraft, are increasingly multinational, and any changes in number and schedule have to be negotiated with the other countries concerned. Reducing the number of aircraft ordered by one country increases unit costs for all the countries involved. Such decisions, therefore, are not taken lightly. The very inflexibility of these major programs in Britain often is responsible for piecemeal cuts in other, less well-defined, programs. If there is a cost overrun on a large program, the temptation is to balance the books by delaying ordering a pair of £150 million frigates for another year. This now is happening with disturbing frequency.
The absence of a clearly defined program of surface ship construction makes it difficult for those who are concerned about the current situation to focus on the precise nature of the shortfall. But it is questionable whether instituting such a program would in itself resolve the current crisis, because the underlying problem is the classic one of attempting to fulfill too many defense commitments on a limited and decreasing budget.
Where, then, should the ax fall?
A Maritime Strategy? In his foreword to the 1988-89 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, Captain Richard Sharpe claims that the Royal Navy is being sacrificed to the needs of a “continental strategy” represented by the British Army of the Rhine and that the “internationalism” of the Foreign Office and the Treasury is being pursued at the expense of national priorities.
This is a popular view in certain Royal Navy circles, which tend to see the current crisis in the surface fleet in terms of traditional interservice rivalry. For Royal Navy officers of this persuasion, the Rhine Army represents a political sacred cow that cannot be tampered with because to do so would upset Britain’s European allies.
There also can be little doubt that envying glances have been cast at the U. S. Navy’s maritime strategy, which has considerable appeal to an island nation brought up on the myth of its own maritime invincibility.
But those who hold the view that Britain should adopt its own maritime strategy do not suggest that it should withdraw from the NATO alliance. It is therefore illogical to suggest that national priorities rather than internationalism should provide the rationale for U. K. defense policy- internationalism is inherent in Britain’s very membership in NATO.
In any case, the distinction made between national priorities and internationalism is false. If we continue to regard the Soviet Union as the principal threat to Britain's security, then it is clear that maintaining an international alliance with other Western European countries that feel similarly threatened becomes a national priority.
What the precise nature of each nation’s contribution to that alliance should be is, of course, open to discussion. In strategic terms, Britain’s most important contribution to NATO undoubtedly relates to its commanding position astride the sea lanes of the eastern Atlantic and its value as a staging post for aircraft and troop reinforcements from North America. Therefore, the decline in the Royal Navy’s surface fleet is of legitimate concern.
The attack on the Rhine Army by British maritime strategists, however, is difficult to justify. Given that the Soviet Union is essentially a continental land power, Britain needs a large standing army backed by a powerful ait force.
The Atlantic and Pacific oceans separate the United States from the Soviet Union. Therefore, a defense policy based on a maritime strategy is perfectly feasible for that nation. But the 20-mile strip of sea separating Britain from France no longer adequately insulates Britain from land campaigns waged on Western European soil. If Soviet air forces were encamped on airfields in France, Belgium, and Holland, there would be no question of the Royal Navy, with a handful of destroyers and frigates, being able to prevent a seaborne invasion across the English Channel- As John Nott correctly stated in his 1981 review, “the forward defence of the Federal Republic is the forward defence of Britain itself.”
The British Army of the Rhine is not important simply as a token of Britain’s commitment to the defense of Western Europe. Without a mutual agreement between NATO and the Warsaw Pact to reduce conventional forces, numbers on NATO’s Central Front are crucial, and the withdrawal of British divisions would not (and probably could not) be compensated for by an increase in the size of the continental armies. Unlike many of their European counterparts, the British troops are regular, professional soldiers, and their loss would be felt sorely. Moreover, simply withdrawing the Rhine Army from Germany t0 Salisbury Plain would save little money unless the forces themselves were disbanded. In fact, moving the British Army back home could involve the government in considerable short-term expenditures. We must, therefore, look in another direction to see where the ax should fall.
The Post-imperial Factor: Many British politicians still find it difficult to accept that Britain is no longer a world
P°Wer and can no longer furnish its own security needs wdhout assistance. The idea of sheltering beneath a nu- c ear umbrella provided by the United States is just as UnPalatable to the right wing of the Conservative Party as 11 's to the Labour left.
The Conservative right views such a posture as cowardly and demeaning. Moreover, it is inconceivable that Tain should give up its own strategic nuclear capability ^hile France retains its capabilities. Traditional political anc*. on occasions, military) rivalries between the two c°untries make it difficult for Britons to accept an inferior Huclear status.
Political machismo, however, is a poor justification for . erense policy. The French nuclear forces underpin an ^dependent French foreign policy. The very rationale for 6 French strategic forces, as conceived by President harles de Gaulle, was to enable France to distance itself f0rn U. S. foreign policy aims. France developed these Tees as it progressively withdrew from NATO and comP etely restructured its conventional forces. In particular, e French Marine Nationale, much of which had been
built for specifically NATO missions, was reconfigured to provide intervention forces that could be used to support French national interests, which extend from the West Indies to the Pacific Ocean.
French military thinking since the early 1960s has been clear, logical, and closely tailored to its foreign policy aspirations. British thinking, on the other hand, has been muddled throughout. The British nuclear forces have been “independent” in name only. Neither in a technical, political, nor military sense have they truly been independent.
Britain purchased the Polaris missile directly from the United States, where it underwent test firings using U. S. monitoring equipment. The missile would have ceased to function altogether without extensive help from U. S. industry. The British Trident missile program, it appears, will be even less independent than Polaris, because the missiles will be leased rather than purchased outright.
More seriously, the purchase of U. S. nuclear systems appears to have increased British dependence on U. S. foreign policy, to the extent that British governments have shown a marked reluctance to criticize the U. S. government openly on any issue, even where there have been fundamental disagreements regarding U. S. actions. All too often, when a genuine, two-way dialogue between the United States and its European allies would have been preferable, British advocacy of U. S. policies in European councils has fragmented the NATO position. The Franco- German political axis and the antinuclear stance of Norway and Denmark have been inevitable consequences of this fragmentation.
Nor have Britain’s strategic weapons given it a “seat at the conference table,” as successive Conservative governments have claimed. Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev may stop for lunch with Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, but he will sit down with Mr. George Bush to sign arms reduction treaties. Britain’s possession of its own independent strategic nuclear forces has merely created an additional complexity for U. S. arms negotiators, who have faced legitimate Soviet demands that the British and French weapons be counted alongside their U. S. counterparts to determine true “equivalence.”
In contrast to the French position, the strength of Britain’s commitment to NATO has never been questioned during this period. The position of so-called independent nuclear forces within the NATO framework, therefore, is a serious anomaly. If British missiles really are targeted on Moscow, as we are led to believe, then they duplicate the mission of similar U. S. systems. Moreover, the vast expenditure on the nuclear-missile submarines and on the infrastructure that supports their operations detract from other areas in which there are acknowledged weaknesses. Ten billion pounds would buy a lot of tanks, fighters, and frigates for the British armed services.
The French have suffered similar consequences from their own nuclear policies. Expenditure on the Force de Dissuasion has resulted in major delays and cancellations in conventional programs. The Marine Nationale has come out of it particularly badly, with the almost total collapse of the ambitious Plan Bleu formulated in 1972. The French have reaped considerable political benefits,
however, from their independent foreign policy, and their withdrawal from the military structure of NATO has enabled them to tailor their conventional forces to national requirements. Nobody has been able to criticize the French for not providing sufficient combat divisions to the NATO Central Front or for the shortfall in numbers of antisubmarine frigates in the North Atlantic.
The Nuclear Fallacy: In an attempt to provide a military justification for the purchase of Trident, John Nott stated in his 1981 review that “the operation of the strategic force will remain the Royal Navy’s first and most vital task for Britain’s security.” But the proposed reliance on nuclear weapons for Britain’s national defense is a further case of muddled thinking.
Prime Minister Thatcher is renowned for her preference for simple solutions to complex problems. For her, the Trident purchase makes good military and economic sense. To borrow an American phrase, Trident offers more “bang for the buck” than any other defense system. Unfortunately, this simplistic view of defense takes no account of the fundamentally different nature of nuclear weapons, which effectively prohibits their use in a wide range of scenarios.
The experience in the Falklands Conflict should have provided a classic illustration of the military and political limitations of nuclear systems. Britain’s Polaris missiles not only failed to deter the Argentinians from invading British sovereign territory in the Falklands, but their use against Argentina was never seriously contemplated.
Although the purchase of the Trident submarines has been the key platform in the present government’s defense policy, successive Conservative defense ministers have declined to define any scenario in which Trident would be used for national defense (i.e., independently of similar U. S. systems). One is forced to conclude that Trident could only conceivably be used in a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict—a conflict in which it would be superfluous— while at the same time expenditure on this system will make it impossible for Britain to meet its conventional commitments to the alliance.
Because Britain’s commitment to the European Central Front and to the European Fighter Aircraft is relatively fixed, any reductions in conventional capabilities inevitably will fall on the Royal Navy’s surface fleet. It is pure wishful thinking to claim, as the navy often has done in the past, that Trident should be regarded as a national rather than a naval program, and funded separately. Trident will be a navy system, and the navy will provide both the crews and the operational infrastructure; Trident will be a drain on navy resources and navy manpower.
National Commitments: Ironically, the Royal Navy’s conventional forces are virtually the only element in Britain s defenses capable of supporting purely national defense contingencies.
When Argentina invaded the Falklands, it was the navy’s amphibious ships in which the Marines and soldiers embarked and the navy’s carriers that provided the necessary air cover for the operation. The Royal Air Force was tied to its European airfields and was unable to intervene.
the very ships whose future had been questioned in the 1981 Nott Review. That is not to say that these ships were 'deally designed for the job they were asked to undertake. In particular, a fully fledged attack carrier with integral airborne early warning would have prevented many of the losses incurred during the campaign. But the lesson that should have been learned from the Falklands Conflict is that general-purpose naval forces have a flexibility of mis- Slon that few other military systems possess.
Ships designed primarily to provide an amphibious capability on NATO’s Northern Flank can land troops on remote islands in the South Atlantic or in the Middle East equally well. And with the advent of vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft, ships designed primarily to operate antisubmarine helicopters can acquire a limited power projection and area air defense capability. Provided one has a angar and a flat expanse of deck, such capability depends °n|y on the particular mix of aircraft carried.
. During the Falklands Conflict, frigates designed for an- hsubmarine warfare in the North Atlantic carried out fire suPport operations against shore installations. Similar vessels currently are escorting merchant shipping in the waters °f the Persian Gulf. They are being assisted in this ’’°le by mine countermeasures vessels designed to clear the aPproaches to European harbors.
Historical examples of surface ships designed for one Particular mission but compelled by circumstances to per- orm another are too numerous to recount. This inherent exibility makes surface ships a crucial element in a de- ense strategy that envisages eventualities ranging from major collaborative military operations within the framework of an alliance to independent contingency operations ln support of purely national foreign policy interests.
Conclusion: Britain’s Trident submarine program has acquired a momentum of its own, and it will take considerable political courage on the part of the present govem- meM t0 reverse decisions that are now halfway toward Implementation. It also will require considerable ingenuity ,° renegotiate contractual arrangements already entered lnto, and to find some way of using the submarines’ hulls, °ne of which is already in a relatively advanced stage of construction.
Failure to do so, however, will result in the irrevocable echne of the Royal Navy’s surface forces and a consequent inability both to fulfill Britain’s maritime commitments to NATO and to deploy forces to support national mterests outside the NATO area.
The funds released by the cancellation of the Trident program and by elimination of the longer-term expenditure necessary to keep the system in operation should be channeled into a properly defined program of surface ship construction. This program should take into account both NATO commitments and the need to provide intervention forces in the event of a “national” military contingency.
Designing and building new amphibious ships to replace the aging Fearless and Intrepid should be the first priority of such a program. The requirement ideally would be met by two dedicated dock landing ships, with a vertical assault capability provided by two helicopter support ships based on mercantile hulls similar to those proposed by British Aerospace.
The government then could turn its attention to future replacement of the Invincible-class antisubmarine carriers by larger vessels capable of embarking a more powerful and versatile air group. This would enhance the ships’ ability to deploy in hostile waters in support of the U. S. Navy’s carrier battle groups and would, at the same time, enable them to operate effectively out-of-area if required by circumstances to do so. The government also should fund the development of a successor to the Sea Harrier. Such an aircraft is not only essential for the maintenance of a genuine Royal Navy aviation capability, but also would have considerable appeal to other NATO navies that operate small carriers.
A measured and clearly defined replacement program for antisubmarine frigates and air defense destroyers currently in service should be instituted. The government needs to translate the Royal Navy’s commitments into force levels, and lay down sufficient hulls to maintain these levels. The service lives of the ships should be predetermined so that an adequate margin for future updating can be incorporated into the designs.
To stabilize the shipbuilding industry, warship ordering policy should be rationalized. One possible solution might be to have Swan Hunter build major warships and auxiliaries, Yarrow construct frigates, and Vospers build mine countermeasures vessels, leaving submarine building firmly in the hands of Vickers. Such a distribution of warship construction would enable shipyards to undertake proper forward planning and train and retain the necessary skilled labor. Such a policy also would have undoubted payoffs in terms of purchase price and quality.
Finally, the government needs to incorporate all of these measures into a carefully constructed total program that would receive the same level of priority accorded to Britain’s other major defense projects. Piecemeal allocations no longer can sustain a viable surface fleet. If the present situation continues, the surface fleet will die and the verdict must be budgetary strangulation.
Mr. Jordan, a French and Spanish teacher in Hampshire, England, has written or contributed to several books, including Soviet Warships (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1983), The Future of the Soviet Navy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986) and the upcoming Naval Institute Press publication, The Soviet Naval Threat to Europe. He is also a contributor to such defense journals as Warship, Jane's Defence Weekly, Defence, and Navy International. Mr. Jordan is a graduate of Keble College, Oxford University.