Naval capabilities
The pace of change
In the wake of the 2021 Integrated Review and the following Defence Command Paper, the Royal Navy looked set to be radically transformed in the coming years, with remotely controlled and automated systems receiving attention and investment. However, recent events – the war in Ukraine in particular – have raised questions over the timescale of this transformation, and whether or not it is in need of revisiting. Nicholas Kenny speaks with the former Royal Navy Second Sea Lord, retired Vice-Admiral Nick Hine, to fi nd out more.
I
n 1871, Helmuth von Moltke – often referred to as ‘the Elder’ to distinguish him from his nephew Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, who commanded the German Army at the outbreak of the First World War, coined the phrase: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” A bit of a mouthful, no doubt sounding better in the original German. Over time, it has been reshaped into the snappier: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
This phrase may well have come to the minds of the Russian admirals responsible for naval deployments in the Black Sea, once news came through of the sinking of the Moskva on 14 April. With just two relatively low-tech, shore-launched Neptune cruise missiles, Ukrainian forces punched through the side of the £750m heavy Russian missile cruiser. This news caught the entire naval community off guard – the Moskva was the third-largest ship in the Russian Navy, and the largest and most powerful warship to be lost in combat anywhere in the past 40 years. With all the high-tech defences and support that these kinds of ships boast specifically intended to protect them, something like this should not have happened – and yet it did.
34 A plan for the times
All of this brings us back to March 2021, when the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) released the much- awaited Integrated Review and the following Defence Command Paper, laying out its plan for the future of the British Armed Forces. For the Royal Navy, there was much to celebrate. A substantial increase in funding; the continuation of the existing construction programme including doubling investment in overall shipbuilding to £1.7bn per year; and a tilt towards a greater presence in the Indo-Pacific region, with the Royal Navy taking centre stage. Even the best laid plans, however, can fall foul of changing times. “[The Integrated Review] was a step in the right direction. But whether it was a leap in the right direction, I think, is now being tested with Ukraine,” says the former Royal Navy Second Sea Lord, retired Vice-Admiral Nick Hine. Questions have been raised over whether the plan laid out in the Integrated Review might be worth revisiting – not because the roadmap itself was necessarily flawed, but because the timescale for its implementation should now be significantly more compressed since its creation.
There are a number of reasons for that compression, but the main factor, as Hine states, was the Russian
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