Sailing for trouble

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

The Royal Navy is facing a crisis on multiple fronts due to a chronic and severe shortage of funding and cuts to various procurement projects, Commander John Muxworthy, RN CEO of the UKNDA tells Defencemanagement.com.

The Royal Navy is in danger of being severely weakened and Britain will be putting its livelihood at risk because of constant budget cuts imposed on the Fleet, a retired Navy Commander has told Defencemanagemet.com.

Commander John Muxworthy, the founder and Chief Executive of the United Kingdom National Defence Association(UKNDA) said in an interview that: "… the Royal Navy (as well as the RAF and Army) is suffering from chronic under funding and repeated cuts over the past quarter of a century to fund other governmental programmes. The three services have been reduced to fighting amongst themselves for ‘their share’ of an always inadequate Defence budget".

Having sacrificed (sold off cheaply) invaluable operational destroyers and frigates to help fund the two planned large aircraft carriers and the new Astute Class submarines has left the Navy at risk of not having enough frigates, support vessels and smaller ships to support the carriers and submarines or meet the many tasks it has throughout the world. With nearly £8bn committed to these two projects, funds for the future of the Navy are scarce at best. Where is the money now to come from for the MARS project (modernising the Royal Fleet Auxiliary) or to fund the Future Surface Combatant?

In the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR 98) the Government subscribed to an expeditionary concept so that our forces could, when required, be in a position to project power worldwide. SDR 98 declared that, for the Royal Navy to do its job, two large aircraft carriers and a flotilla of 12 state of the art Type 45 Destroyers would be required to allow the country to operate or maintain a serious military presence anywhere in the world at any given time.

But from the moment the Strategic Defence Review (SDR 98) was released, the government walked back again and again on its undertakings. Budget cuts have continued at a heightened pace since the review. Plans for the 12 Type 45 Destroyers were reduced to 8 – and it has just been confirmed that only 6 will be built – a 50% cut. The supporting force of 32 destroyers and frigates, specified as the minimum essential requirement, has progressively been reduced to its current number of 25. The MOD cannot afford to fund replacements when the remaining Type 22 and Type 23 Frigates are taken out of service, as they all will be over the next few years. By the time the Carriers are in service in 2016 (if everything goes according to present plans – which would be unusual) the support fleet could by age and wastage have been reduced to a mere 17 ships. A "Future Surface Combatant" (FSC) to replace our ageing and constantly reducing fleet of escorts is planned – but neither numbers, variants or building orders for the FSC have yet been declared.

"This neglect of our Navy by successive governments, the instrument that founded the Empire and was the world’s maritime policeman for almost two hundred years, is incredible for a country that entirely depends on the sea for its life and prosperity. Ninety per cent of all our imports come from the sea- oil, coal, goods. People seem to have forgotten that we are an island race. The sea is our lifeblood, but the Nation is suffering from ‘Sea Blindness" CEO UKNDA said.

Even with this bleak scenario at hand, Cdr Muxworthy predicted that things may still get worse. With delays occurring with almost every major defence procurement projects (delays often caused by official attempts to ‘save’ money when the annual budget is, as always, too small to meet the annual requirement) ‘economy measures’, contract changes and enforced delays almost always result in higher long-term costs. Will the carriers be delivered on time and at cost? Their planning has already taken more than ten years. Will we see even one of these carriers fully operational (!) in less than eight years time? I take leave to doubt it. And let us not forget that rarely, if ever, will we have both carriers ‘operational’ on duty and available for deployment at one and the same time. Even if full funding is provided for two entire ships’ companies and two air groups (complete sets of aircraft for each ship) it will be a rare occasion indeed to see the two ship operating together. In an ideal world the minimum number of carriers required to ensure, with any degree of confidence, two available for operations, is three. But, for the time being at least, that surely is wishful thinking.

Three years ago tight budgets forced the Navy to scrap its highly effective designed-for-purpose Sea Harrier FA2 air defence aircraft seven years before its previously planned withdrawal. To save money the fixed wing Fleet Air Arm has been emasculated and merged into a shore based largely RAF controlled ‘Harrier Force’ now equipped only with ground support types GR7 & GR9. Such aircraft are designed NOT to defend the fleet at sea but primarily to give ground support to our forces ashore. A recent documentary highlighted this weakness when it showed the aircraft (!) carrier HMS ILLUSTRIOUS progressing all the way from the UK to the Red Sea with only helicopters onboard. All of the available Harriers were in Iraq or Afghanistan. If, for the next ten years at least, the Royal Navy were to have to operate in any scenario where there might be a credible air threat from some foreign power, then unless we were to have a US aircraft carrier to protect us, our Fleet would be in mortal danger.

The Commons Defence Select committee learned in January that the Joint Strike Fighter may not be ready until at least 2018, meaning that the two new high tech carriers will be forced to continue "borrowing" RAF (Ground support) Harriers to enable the ships to fulfil their main purpose as strategic air assault ships.

Then there is the ‘construction challenge’ facing the Royal Navy and the Nation’s shrunken marine defence industry. Past years of restricted ship orders for the Navy could yet end up indirectly delaying the aircraft carrier construction programme. With years of limited and uncertain warship orders for many of the naval dockyards around the country, the nation’s shipbuilding workforce has been steadily greatly reduced. Now with the carriers on an extremely tight construction schedule, the Navy, BAE Systems and the MOD may well be hard pressed to find and hire the thousands of additional workers qualified in the essential skilled but rare ship construction trades. In turn, the work forces available for any of the remaining shipbuilding projects (MARS & FSC) may well be severely limited.

Even when the carriers do come into service the consequences of long-term lack of funding might have an adverse effect on manning these great ships. Many young officers and ratings used to get their initial training and practical experience, learning their professional ‘trade’ by serving in small ships, patrol craft and Mine warfare vessels. Young officers gained essential ’seamanship and command experience’ serving in and later commanding smaller ships. Officers and men than move to larger ships such as destroyers, assault ships or aircraft carriers taking with them those essentials - command experience, leadership and specialist skills to provide the high levels of professionalism that the complexity of modern ships and weapons ships demands. Over the last ten years collisions and groundings have occurred with distressingly increased frequency. A destroyer hit a well-charted rock in Australian waters – the verdict – inadequate seamanship expertise and previous experience. The CORNWALL incident was ascribed to lack of in depth training, experience and preparedness. The reduction in the size of the small ship fleet such as minesweepers is contributing in a less professional Navy. This reduction also – and equally importantly – means that there are but a handful of small ships or patrol craft available to defend even the coastal waters of our own country – sometimes fewer than the fingers on one hand. Nelson must be weeping.

The answer to all these problems is simple - governments must provide more money – proper funding, not just for the Navy but the entire Armed Forces. Cdr Muxworthy, although a naval officer with 32 years’ service in the Royal Navy, emphasised that the UKNDA’s purpose was:

To campaign for sufficient, appropriate and fully funded Armed Forces (all three of the Armed Forces) that the Nation needs to defend effectively this Country, its people, their security and vital interests wherever they may be.

"Ask yourself", he challenged:

"Is the world a safer place now than 25 years ago when the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force and all of our Armed Forces were twice their present size? Are the threats facing us and our national interests any less?

Do we now have sufficient; do we always have appropriate; and do we have fully funded Armed Forces? I declare to you that it the UKNDA’s answer to all of those questions is a resounding "No". The Nation is at risk and Defence is inappropriately low in the Nation’s list of priorities."

"The answer is more funding. If the government can find £100bn to bail out Northern Rock, then economic recession or not, the Government, ANY Government can, if it has the will, find money for whatever it wants it to do whenever it wants to do it. Politicians of all parties need to put our money where their mouths are when intoning their oft-quoted mantra that "defence is the first priority of the any Government". The Nation’s list of priorities is askew and needs to be rebalanced with "Defence" being afforded its logical and rightful ‘first priority’.

The UKNDA calls for defence spending to be increased sufficiently to provide our Armed Forces with the resources they need to deal with all of the many and varied challenges they are tasked to meet. Such funding must also provide the Armed Forces with some spare capacity to cope with the ‘unexpected’ – because it is always the ‘unexpected’ that the future has in store for us.

If the government continues to ignore funding requests, a larger crisis may be on the MoD’s hands in a few years. Defence funding decisions usually impact the budget within three to ten years. Many of the tough decisions being taken now over the £2bn budget shortfall will cause further strain on the defence budget in the near future.

The Navy is getting smaller and the other branches of the service are experiencing huge procurement cuts. The future is looking bleak unless something changes.