The next generation navy

Thursday, February 18, 2010

First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope sets out his priorities for the future of the Royal Navy, including the Strategic Defence Review, in an interview with Defence Management Journal editor Matthew D'Arcy

Having held sea commands including submarines HMS Orpheus and HMS Splendid, the frigate HMS London and the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope has had an impressive career, being appointed First Sea Lord in July 2009. He also benefits from holding various positions in the Ministry of Defence and NATO in between and following his sea commands.

Since becoming the professional head of the Royal Navy, he has voiced his opinions about the priorities and challenges that face defence. In an interview with the Defence Management Journal, he says that in performing their varied and highly important roles into the future, the Royal Navy and the rest of the Armed Forces must remain flexible to deliver on what is required of them long after immediate operations.

Admiral Stanhope, you have said that there is a need to plan beyond Afghanistan stating that "we live in an unpredictable world". Broadly, how can the defence community and the Royal Navy ensure they are prepared to cope with the unpredictable and unforeseen?

I should start by emphasising how important it is to first guarantee operational success in Afghanistan in order to support NATO's strategic aims there. I think that the enduring nature of our mission in Afghanistan, and Iraq before that, makes the point that events can be unpredictable. The last thing we in defence now need is a whole-scale restructuring of the Armed Forces that focuses on landlocked counterinsurgency campaigns to the exclusion of the range of other operations we could well be called upon to undertake in the next 30 to 40 years.

Defence planning needs to stay broad-brush and strategic. In preparing for the future, the key has to be maintaining a balance in the range of capabilities that the UK's Armed Forces possess and the ability to offer flexible responses. Whatever scale we will be operating at in the immediate future, we must retain the suite of military skills and capabilities that give us the greatest possible choice in how we respond, keeping the military options open and thereby offering political choices to the government.
Flexible forces are something we've always strived to preserve in defence, and they are as important as ever, but the unpredictable nature and potentially wide scope of future challenges to security mean that we have to continue to demand greater flexibility and agility from the forces that we do have.

There's a fundamentally important international dimension to all of this. Although there may possibly be circumstances where we might act alone, we have to assume that our large-scale and enduring operations will take place within coalitions, under the traditional alliance frameworks, which are vital to preserving our interoperability and especially with the United States – and, I think, increasingly within ad hoc groups of likeminded international partners, such as we have seen with counter-piracy in the Gulf of Aden. We mustn't lose sight of the many benefits of being able to operate effectively alongside or as part of multinational task groups. More widely, and just as important, the defence community needs to think about what defence and security mean for the UK in this day and age. We need to work ever more closely with the other levers of national power, the diplomatic and the economic, in protecting and promoting the UK's national interests and delivering the UK's strategic aims. I think that the next five to 10 years will be characterised by a greater emphasis on conflict prevention and a recognition that security is as much about promoting the UK's values as it is about protecting them. For that sort of activity to be successful in deterring aggression and encouraging cooperation, it needs to be underpinned by credible military force. That is why we need to retain that balance of capabilities I mentioned a moment ago – whatever else they are called upon to do, the UK's Armed Forces must make success in warfighting their benchmark.

In terms of personnel, how will the Royal Navy prepare its people in ethos, training and structure to fulfil its role into the future?

We have to get this right. The Royal Navy's ability to operate at sea, on land and in the air depends on the quality and training of our people, who are the most important factor when it comes to delivering operational success. We also need to maintain the right selection of kit, and I welcome the investment in a naval build programme for new ships and submarines – but ships and submarines, aircraft and armoured vehicles are nothing without the right people operating them. The Royal Navy Personnel Strategy sets out the approach we are taking in addressing all these issues, as well as outlining the complexity of a manning process that has to deliver high-quality, adaptable people, able to operate anywhere. For the Navy, the structure is partly driven by the size and shape of our fleet, and the imperative is firstly to get the right numbers in the right places.

That part is relatively straightforward, until you add the skills requirement. For example, a logistics rating onboard a warship will need his professional competencies as a logistician, his core maritime skills that include sea survival and firefighting, and very probably additional skills related to the billet he is filling, as part of the team that conducts under-way replenishment at sea with an auxiliary. The complexity of the operational skills we demand from all our people, regardless of their branch or rate, means that personnel strategy needs careful handling.

From my perspective, preparing for the future starts with the best possible training, and I think that the Royal Navy and Royal Marines lead the world in that. Training in the sort of professional skills I've just referred to needs to be underpinned by naval service core values from day one.

Training then needs to be reinforced by operational experience. The challenge is to balance this experience with dedicated training matched to the tempo of current operations. Clearly, my priority is to ensure that people stay safe and I am greatly assisted in meeting the training challenge by having the right people in positions of leadership at unit level – by that, I mean from leading hand and corporal upwards, all of whom play a key role in providing continuation training. I need sailors and marines who are motivated, technologically-aware and who aren't afraid to think for themselves. I want them to feel valued by the service, but not mollycoddled or spoon-fed. That means understanding what people's aspirations are, but it also means giving them pride in what they do. And we need to preserve the military covenant, looking after our people and their families, and recognising the important work they do for this country.

Looking to the future, the emphasis on technology will remain a continuing feature of operations at sea. I think it is a given that we will continue to operate within a joint construct, and particularly for the Royal Navy, a multinational framework. Our structure and training need to reflect that reality, particularly as we move to embrace cooperative working with navies from well beyond traditional alliance structures such as NATO.

What do you want to see from a Strategic Defence Review? From the Royal Navy's perspective, what does it need to address and what should be the fundamental elements?

As I said earlier, we need to ensure that the defence review is strategic in its thinking and its approach; we need to look beyond Afghanistan, both in terms of threats emanating from elsewhere and with a clear-eyed assessment of how the world will be in 40 years from now.

I hope the review will recognise the strategic realities we face by virtue of our island status and geography. Britain is a maritime power whose security and prosperity requires unimpeded maritime access and transit. As a maritime trading country, Britain requires good order at sea. The UK's national prosperity and freedoms are increasingly vulnerable to events across the globe and therefore UK domestic security, and the protection of our vital national interests, cannot be separated from the security and stability of the international system upon which we rely. The UK's National Security Strategy reminds us that the UK's wealth, health and safety are founded upon, and continue to be enhanced by, our outward-facing participation in a stable, rule-based global system.

I think that calls for two things: firstly, armed forces that are widely employable, for example, as adept at preventing conflict as at waging war; and secondly, they need to be widely deployable, able to operate across the world to protect our national interests, which are global in nature.

I think that employability and deployability are the attributes that can also determine where the balance of investment for our Armed Forces should lie. Our Armed Forces should be configured to deliver the full range of combat power but should also have the potential to protect the national interest in other ways. They should be able to be deployed globally and engage in long-term reassurance, stabilisation, training and prevention missions, and they should have the means to communicate with others and the situational awareness needed to facilitate timely decision-making. At the same time, we need to keep on developing interagency working. By that, I mean working alongside other partner nations and branches of government, for example in delivering law enforcement, humanitarian aid, or supporting better governance if we are to most
effectively protect and promote the UK's wide ranging interests. That need for interagency planning and delivery, whether nationally or as part of an international effort, is the consequence of a growing shift towards thinking in much broader terms about what security means and how it can best be delivered.

The Royal Navy already has experience of this, routinely working alongside our NATO and coalition allies, other nations and international law enforcement and Humanitarian Aid agencies worldwide. At national level, we have worked with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Revenue and Customs, Defra and DFID, but we can always do better at this and do more of it.

I think that maritime forces are delivering on those fronts. Our maritime forces are able to strike onto the land with precision using submarine-launched cruise missiles, amphibious forces and carrier-based jets. They can integrate within coalition force structures quickly and effectively. A single warship is capable of fulfilling tasks ranging up through diplomatic engagement, humanitarian assistance, sanctions enforcement and combat operations, and then back down again, either in response to a developing situation or to influence how it develops. Already inherently flexible, maritime forces can deliver land and air forces around the world and provide them with operating platforms and a sea base from which to operate. These are attributes that facilitate real choice for government in choosing how to respond to developing situations. We offer engagement without entanglement, utility and presence with small political overheads and I predict these attributes will become ever more fundamental to success as we face the defence and security challenges of the future.
For defence, introducing greater flexibility to our forces and our force structures is the optimum response to the unpredictability that characterises the operating environments of today and tomorrow. I and my fellow service chiefs are and will remain closely engaged with government throughout the review.

The wider role of the Royal Navy is crucial. Will high importance continue to be placed on areas such as antipiracy, narcotics curtailment, fisheries and trade route protection into the future?

I certainly hope so. I think that the geo-strategic realities for this country are such that all of that activity is vital if we are to protect our interests. For the United Kingdom, the scope of the maritime security we need is defined partly by our island nation's economic dependence on the globalised system of trade by sea, and partly by our strengths and vulnerabilities as an island.

From the naval perspective, we need the ability to guarantee high seas freedoms because we exploit those same freedoms in delivering operational success. But it is about more than that. Like most other nations, the UK is supplied with goods, raw materials and energy supplies on demand from across the world.

The supply chain is vulnerable to disruption by those who seek to use the sea for illegal purposes or try to deny merchant fleets the navigational freedoms upon which the global economy relies. That brings strategic risk, especially where energy supplies are concerned.

As I see it, whilst our navy needs to have the capabilities necessary to meet the ultimate security and defence needs of our nation, maritime security operations are a vital everyday role for us. They set the conditions for security and stability in the maritime environment. The object of these operations is to deny criminals the ability to use the seas for unlawful purposes, whether as a venue for an attack or the
smuggling of people, weapons, or other material.

For the UK, maritime security and the range of operations that preserve such security are non-discretionary. I want to stress the point that we are in the business of being prepared to fight and win wars; that is and must remain the benchmark for our capabilities. Important as maritime security is for setting the conditions for stability, our successes in that role ultimately depend on our credibility as a fighting force.

How long can the Royal Navy sustain all of its responsibilities including those referred to in the previous question and areas like humanitarian aid and support for overseas territories, whilst simultaneously supporting operations?

We have to deliver on those commitments at the same time as carrying out the range of other operations that fall to us, some of which you've mentioned, some of which must remain classified. We're stretched, but we are managing.

In terms of sustainability, it's not something one can express in calendar terms. The calculation is more complex than that. The issue is prioritisation and where to manage risk, taking account of the government's assessment of the relative threat to our national interests.

Your question raises the issue of 'quantity vs. quality', something the more capable navies are considering in this era of increasing security responsibilities in the maritime environment. We need sophisticated warships if we are to prevail against the sort of high-tech adversaries we may have to face in the longer term; investing in quality makes operational and strategic sense, provided that the investment can be used for tasks other than warfighting. Warships are capable of fulfilling an enormous range of tasks, quite apart from the delivery of combat power: containment, deterrence, humanitarian aid, diplomatic engagement, law enforcement at sea and so on. But, no matter how capable, no warship can be in two places at once, so there is a numbers game to consider as well. That is why we need the Future Surface Combatant: an affordable frigate replacement programme that can deliver variants able to fulfil tasks ranging from task group-level anti-submarine warfare to constabulary operations and maritime security tasking, in sufficient numbers to be as effective as possible.

My priority is to ensure that we continue to deliver on all that is asked of us, while doing everything possible to maintain core competencies in the maritime warfighting skills that we depend upon and will continue to depend upon long after Afghanistan is consigned to history. In that respect, last year's TAURUS Amphibious Task Group deployment was a great success, with submarine and amphibious warfare skills being well-tested with many partner nations en route to the Far East. We are planning something similar this year.

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This interview appears in the forthcoming edition of the Defence Management Journal.