For navies to succeed on operations they need two things: balance and mass. Balance to give them a spread of capabilities to respond to circumstances as they develop, and mass to provide the resilience to endure and sustain, even in the event of losses.
Across the spread of capabilities a blue water navy needs, one of the key ones is the ability to move large groups of people and equipment from sea to shore, or the other way – in peacetime for disaster relief and in wartime to make amphibious assaults and evacuations. It’s annoying, therefore, that the Royal Navy has just been forced to accept the loss of its ships most capable of doing these tasks just two weeks before the collapse of the regime in Syria. Such a capability would have been very useful to have available this weekend.
But on 20 November this year, the Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey, announced the retirement of HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, the Royal Navy’s two Landing Platform Docks (LPDs), saying, “… this includes the retirement of ageing equipment as we transition to new capabilities and make our Armed Forces fit for the future.”
I remarked at the time that scrapping old to make way for new is fine as long as ‘the new’ arrives. If it doesn’t, and you keep doing this, you end up with no ships.
It is also not the first time a spreadsheet-derived announcement has been exposed as unwise shortly afterwards by world events.
HMS Ark Royal, one of our previous aircraft carriers (technically a ‘through-deck cruiser’) was culled as part of the Defence Review of 2010. This was the review where anyone not involved in counter-insurgency in Iraq or Afghanistan got hammered. It came as a surprise to everyone, including the ship’s company at the time, when the 2016 decommissioning date was suddenly moved to 2011. Defence Secretary Liam Fox said then that it was “part of difficult but necessary measures to reshape the armed forces for the future.” Sound familiar?
Ark Royal was duly decommissioned on 11 March 2011. On 19 March 2011 – one week later – the UK began military operations in Libya under Operation Ellamy, enforcing a UN-mandated no-fly zone and conducting airstrikes. The British contribution to this was provided by the RAF using Typhoon and Tornado jets flying in across the entire Mediterranean – or in no few cases, all the way from the UK. This meant that our jets spent nearly all their time in the air going to or from Libya rather than doing something useful, and necessitated vast amounts of expensive air-to-air refuelling.
Ark, and her Harrier GR9s (also just scrapped at that point), would have provided an excellent alternative just off the coast and at a fraction of the complexity and cost. To be clear, this is not me advocating for carrier-borne aviation over airbases – we should be able to do both. Back to balance and mass. It won’t have escaped some memories that the amphibious helicopter ship HMS Ocean was able to provide some useful airpower over Libya using Apache attack helicopters. Then Ocean was decommissioned without replacement in 2018.
For navies to succeed on operations they need two things: balance and mass. Balance to give them a spread of capabilities to respond to circumstances as they develop, and mass to provide the resilience to endure and sustain, even in the event of losses.
Across the spread of capabilities a blue water navy needs, one of the key ones is the ability to move large groups of people and equipment from sea to shore, or the other way – in peacetime for disaster relief and in wartime to make amphibious assaults and evacuations. It’s annoying, therefore, that the Royal Navy has just been forced to accept the loss of its ships most capable of doing these tasks just two weeks before the collapse of the regime in Syria. Such a capability would have been very useful to have available this weekend.
But on 20 November this year, the Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey, announced the retirement of HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, the Royal Navy’s two Landing Platform Docks (LPDs), saying, “… this includes the retirement of ageing equipment as we transition to new capabilities and make our Armed Forces fit for the future.”
I remarked at the time that scrapping old to make way for new is fine as long as ‘the new’ arrives. If it doesn’t, and you keep doing this, you end up with no ships.
It is also not the first time a spreadsheet-derived announcement has been exposed as unwise shortly afterwards by world events.
HMS Ark Royal, one of our previous aircraft carriers (technically a ‘through-deck cruiser’) was culled as part of the Defence Review of 2010. This was the review where anyone not involved in counter-insurgency in Iraq or Afghanistan got hammered. It came as a surprise to everyone, including the ship’s company at the time, when the 2016 decommissioning date was suddenly moved to 2011. Defence Secretary Liam Fox said then that it was “part of difficult but necessary measures to reshape the armed forces for the future.” Sound familiar?
Ark Royal was duly decommissioned on 11 March 2011. On 19 March 2011 – one week later – the UK began military operations in Libya under Operation Ellamy, enforcing a UN-mandated no-fly zone and conducting airstrikes. The British contribution to this was provided by the RAF using Typhoon and Tornado jets flying in across the entire Mediterranean – or in no few cases, all the way from the UK. This meant that our jets spent nearly all their time in the air going to or from Libya rather than doing something useful, and necessitated vast amounts of expensive air-to-air refuelling.
Ark, and her Harrier GR9s (also just scrapped at that point), would have provided an excellent alternative just off the coast and at a fraction of the complexity and cost. To be clear, this is not me advocating for carrier-borne aviation over airbases – we should be able to do both. Back to balance and mass. It won’t have escaped some memories that the amphibious helicopter ship HMS Ocean was able to provide some useful airpower over Libya using Apache attack helicopters. Then Ocean was decommissioned without replacement in 2018.