4 NAVY NEWS, NOVEMBER 2010


Uncomfortable ‘The Naval Se


deck.


No more the thumbs up from the pilot, his checks complete in his cramped cockpit. No more the whine, then howl, then roar of a Pegasus engine. No th


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No more the glance up and down the deck by the Captain of the Flight Deck. No more the red flag lowered, green flag raised.


lumbering skywards up that rather awkward- looking ramp.


No more the sight of the waterfront of Portsmouth Harbour lined with tens of thousands of people wishing the godspeed.


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No more the name Ark Royal – the most famous, most iconic title bestowed on a warshwarship for the past seven decades. No more the cry ‘Zeal does not rest’. No more Harrier + Carrier, the defining image of the Royal Navy for the past ation. HMS Ark Royal, 800 Naval Air Squadron – indeed the entire Joint Force ier – hai


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No more too the cries ‘Up and at ’em’, ‘Victory through strength’. No


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No more the deeds of the Fighting 99, the raising of a sausage flag when replenishing, the stirring sight of a Type 22 slicing through the waves at 30kts. All four will pass into histor No


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No more the dull roar of the Nimrod scouring the skies and seas of these islands, assisting our submarines and frigates in the hunt for potential threats. h


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And perhaps no more the throb of Merlins and Sea Kings about to lift off from HMS Ocean or courtesy of Lusty Airways. One will be the nation’s carrier, the other will be laid up.


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Fleet Air Arm, Submarine Service, Surface Fleet, Royal Marines, Maritime Reserves, training establishments – will number just 30,000 men and women. In ten, it will total a mere 29,000. The axe of austerity – as wielded by the


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Strategic Defence and Security Review and announced in Parliament by Prime Minister David Cameron last month – has fallen.


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Jennies, Royals – from ABs to admirals, marines to generals – on the muster rolls and pay lists. In five years’ time the Naval Service –


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The passageways of Albion or Bulwark, which once echoed to the sound of men struggling under the weight of their bergens, will fall silent. No more Hoofing. Chad. Gen dit. Crdit. C mot


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But the Royal Navy is more than ‘just’ jump jets and their floating airfields. No


ve been axed.


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No more the immortal sight of a Harrier


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ND so no more the clank and clatter of chains being dragged across the flight


As Mr Cameron rose in the House to announce the key points of the review, so lower decks were cleared wherever the White Ensign fluttered. At Navy Command. Aboard HMS Somerset in the Gulf. On Portland and Manchester in the Caribbean. At RM Stonehouse. At Culdrose and Gannet. In Portsmouth Harbour aboard Ark Royal. There were ashen faces. Many were stunned.


Some were angry. Others were tearful. Tuesday October 19 2010 was the black day of the Royal Navy in this epoch. But it could have been even blacker. For pain today under the review, there is jam tomorrow. There will be two gleaming aircraft carriers, the largest ships ever to fly the White Ensign. They will launch fixed-wing fast jets, the F35 Joint Strike


aviators. There will be a shield of six Type 45 and 13


Fighter, flown by naval


first through Trident, then its successor from the late 2020s. There will be seven Astute-class submarines,


surface ships, the Type 26 ‘Global Combat Ship’, entering service from 2021. There will be a force of Sandown and Hunt- class mine warfare vessels and, from 2018, their replacements. There will be the Corps of Royal Marines under the wing of the Royal Navy as they have been since 1755. 3 Commando Brigade,


land and sea, as the Corps’ motto proudly proclaims, will remain the marines’ sword. Naval engineers will train at HMS Sultan – the plug has been pulled on a £14bn plan to shift training to St Athan. These are the silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud. In summary, the Strategic Defence and Security Review means a smaller Navy. It means a Navy which will have to curb


And no more the names of 5,000 Jacks, deployable on


the most potent Fleet boats ever built; the Silent Service has fared better than any other arm of the Royal Navy under the review. There will be a new generation of multi-role


Type 23 frigates – conjecture in the lead up to the Strategic Defence and Security Review suggested there would be but a dozen escorts. There will be a permanent nuclear deterrent,


certain tasks in favour of others. Its leaders have made it quite clear to the Government that having cut its cloth, the Senior Service cannot cover the entire ‘table’ as it did before. The Naval Service – its ships, submarines,


aircraft, vehicles, and its men and women – says its ranking admiral, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, cannot bear additional “stretches in tempo”. Put bluntly: “Fewer ships mean fewer tasks.” By far the bitterest pill to swallow is the loss


of fixed-wing carrier aviation until 2020. For a decade the curtain raised by Charles Samson, raised higher still by Reginald Warneford, Edwin Dunning, Charles Lamb, John Wellham, Jock Moffat, Robert Hampton


‘...It could have be


ADMIRAL Sir Mark Stanhope has fought the Navy’s corner in the most diffi cult defence review since the 1970s.


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He explained: “The decision to gap the carrier strike capability is without question the most challenging outcome of the SDSR for the Navy.


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“The good news is that we are going to get the carriers, and the aircraft we’re going to generate from them is a more capable variant with a longer range, greater weapon loads, and interoperable with the US.


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“But the challenge of removing the Harriers without giving me the ability to maintain a seed corn level of capability across all the skills – not just the pilots but the deck handlers, fi ghter controllers, bomb bosuns, air engineers – means we will have to regenerate this capability, not just transfer it.” Many fear that over the next ten years until the new carrier strike


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But now the business of implementing those decisions begins, he is under no illusions about how diffi cult the next few years are going to be.


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When he spoke to Navy News the day after the Strategic DSR announcement, he was in one respect a happier man because the uncertainty of the last few m


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capability arrives, the unique skills needed to operate an airfi eld at sea will wither on the vine, with disastrous consequences for the Fleet Air Arm. The First Sea Lord said: “We mustn’t let


On the day he spoke to Navy News, the Admiral had visited RAF Cottesmore to talk to 800 Naval Air Squadron, many of whom were visibly shocked after expecting a last-minute reprieve. He said: “Of course morale is low. It’s the most devastating blow across the whole of the RN. Here is a cadre of very professional people who have delivered excellence in terms of fl ying in the most challenging of environments for the last 25-30 years.


that happen, and we won’t. We now have clear government intent of the way forward, and we must match that with a programme to deliver it.”


wanted to explain to them as best I could the logic behind some of the thinking, and get them to realise that this will be a long process and they must form part of the solution to deliver this capability in future. He added: “That’s a lot to ask, but solve it


we will, solve it we must, and I need to pull forward some of these people to be able to deliver it.”


will have exchange appointments with the US and French to maintain their skills, and there are some pinch points of engineering within


Some will be embedded with the RAF, some “They are clearly hugely disappointed. I


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