Feature 1 | UK NAVAL PROGRAMMES


Cuts cause further contraction in UK naval forces


Te number of surface vessels and submarines in the UK Royal Navy is falling quickly and is likely to fall further as a result of budget cuts imposed by the British government.


J


ust how much the Royal Navy has shrunk by is highlighted by referring to force projections from former years.


Te Strategic Defence Review of 1998, for example, envisaged a Royal Navy with two aircraft carriers, 32 surface combatants and 14 nuclear submarines, including four Vanguard class ballistic missile ships. Ten years ago the Royal Navy actually had three Invincible class light carriers, 31 surface combatants and 16 nuclear submarines including the four Vanguards; there were also 20 mine hunters and eight amphibious warfare vessels. At that time, the strategic emphasis was


upon expeditionary warfare and littoral operations exploiting ‘network centric’ command and, while these objectives remain they have, to a great degree, been overtaken by the need to counter terrorism. Indeed most modern armed forces seem to be shaped more towards what might have been called before the Second World War ‘colonial operations’, para-military policing outside national borders although the latest jargon term is asymmetric warfare. Te Strategic Defence & Security Review


(SDSR) of 2010 set British naval strength at two 66,000tonne Queen Elizabeth (QE) class aircraſt carriers, 19 destroyers and frigates, six amphibious warfare ships, 11 nuclear submarines (including four Vanguard Successors). Tis makes a total of 38 major vessels, together with 14 mine countermeasures vessels, but since the SDSR was published further cuts have been enforced, resulting in the rapid phase out of key assets. In March 2011, HMS Ark Royal was


rushed to the scrap yard three years early, and the Royal Air Force’s fleet of Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft soon followed, leaving the Royal Navy dependent upon its friends and allies for any form of fixed-wing air support – and certainly for training


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HMS Queen Elizabeth, seen here under construction, will not become fully operational until around the beginning of the next decade.


– until HMS Queen Elizabeth becomes fully operational around the beginning of the next decade (having hopefully been completed in 2017 with her sister ship completed in 2019).


Carrier strike capability However, the Government has suggested it might sell one of the carriers, relying upon co-operation with ‘a close ally’ (France) to provide continuous carrier-strike capability, or may operate one carrier purely as a rotary- wing platform, although no decision will be taken until the next round of defence cuts or the 2015 strategic defence and security review as it is officially described. TeArk had barely lowered its paying off


pennant when the government committed the armed forces to providing fire support for Libyan rebels and, while the FS Charles de Gaulle flew Rafales on the same mission, the UK was forced to rely on unproven Typhoons, flying out of Italian bases.


Significantly, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope,


told Parliament’s


Defence Committee that if SDSR was re-written he would have wished to retain the Royal Navy’s carrier strike capability, and that if Britain still had this capability it would have been deployed off Libya to help enforce United Nations’ Resolution 1973. Tere were also reports in May that the amphibious assault ship HMS Ocean would deploy Apache attack helicopters to support Libyan ‘civilians’. If the Treasury’s aim was to save money,


then it found itself outflanked over the Queen Elizabeths, for the previous Labour Government, which had a substantial voting commitment in the work, had agreed a contract with the Carrier Alliance which made it cheaper to build the ships than to cancel them. Te hull modules of the first-of-class are


being assembled at Rosyth while steel was cut in late May for HMS Prince of Wales.


Warship Technology July/August 2011


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