THE ROYAL NAVY: STARK WARNING OVER STATE OF ROYAL NAVY

"YOU WILL FIND BLOOD ON THE FLOOR"
Admiral Lord Boyce, speaking during a Defence debate in the UK's House of Lords.

POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT FRANCIS BEAUFORT REPORTS ON SOME NAVY-RELATED STORIES MAKING AN IMPACT, INCLUDING NOT ONLY THE HOUSE OF LORDS BROADSIDE BY LORD BOYCE, BUT ALSO THE LEAKING OF AN INTERNAL MoD REPORT ON THE STATE OF THE ROYAL NAVY. IT MADE FOR BLEAK READING. THE REPORT TOLD UK DEFENCE SECRETARY DES BROWNE THAT HIS MUCH-VAUNTED SHINY NEW SHIPS AND CAPABILITIES COULD NOT MAKE UP FOR THE SERIOUS DAMAGE ALREADY INFLICTED ON A FLEET THAT, UNTIL LABOUR CAME TO POWER, WAS THE SECOND MOST POWERFUL IN THE WORLD AFTER THE US NAVY. IT WAS NOT WHAT THE DEFENCE SECRETARY WANTED TO HEAR…

Admirals were in revolt last month (Nov) over the state of the Royal Navy, with former First Sea Lord and Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Lord Boyce unleashing a blistering broadside during a House of Lords debate. Mike Boyce was CDS during the Iraq War of 2003, and has therefore witnessed first-hand the appetite of politicians for involvement in wars without necessarily being willing to resource the UK Armed Forces properly. During the Lords debate, the former submariner referred to the current Labour Government as “sitting at various international top tables.” He continued: “They have been especially pleased to bask in the glow of the fine reputation of our Armed Forces as they have engaged over the past 10 years in levels of activity that far exceed defence planning assumptions.

But I am afraid that the merciless trading on the goodwill and professionalism of our soldiers, sailors and airmen has not been matched by anything remotely approaching the same level of commitment by the Government in cash or in kind.” Lord Boyce was keen to puncture the smug assertion by defence ministers that spending on the Armed Forces today - the much quoted ‘real terms’ increase - adds up to an investment commensurate with commitments and meeting future threats. “The so-called year-on-year increases that the Government continue to boast about have first to be measured against the initial underfunding of the defence aspirations set out in the Strategic Defence Review [1998],” said Lord Boyce. “It is an absolute fact that none of the year-on-year increases has closed that initial gap, let alone provided for the concomitant rise needed to match the soaring levels of activity which are taking a matching toll on man and machine. As for the derisory Comprehensive Spending Review settlement that defence was given in July, let us examine the detail of that 1.5 per cent budget increase that the Government were so pleased to announce.” Lord Boyce criticised the Government’s intention to fund the Trident replacement out of the 1.5 per cent increase.

“This really does display a cynical observance of the promise made by the then Prime Minister [Tony Blair] that the cost of the Trident replacement would, ‘not be at the expense of the conventional capabilities that our armed forces need’.” Lord Boyce suggested the Government is being economic with the truth: “The fact is that the smoke and mirrors work of the Government, and in particular the Treasury, actually means that the core defence programme has had no effective budget rise at all. If one could cut to the truth, which is a really challenging task, we would find that it is in fact negative, especially if one extracts the £550 million to be spent on slum accommodation that should have been replaced years ago. This negative budget is why, if you go to the Ministry of Defence today, you will find blood on the floor as the system slashes the defence programme to meet what is a desperate funding situation. You will find - I know this - measures being examined to cut the future equipment programme, as well as reducing the present front line and its support. I fear in particular for the Royal Navy, where already the destroyer/frigate force level has haemorrhaged to 25 from the required 32 set out in the Strategic Defence Review of nine years ago. It seems that further reductions are likely, and these on a fleet that is still damaged by the savage moratorium on fleet support that was instigated by this Government a couple of years ago and from which, although lifted earlier this year, it will take at least a decade to recover, if at all.”

Lord Boyce delivered a stinging indictment of the much-vaunted ability of fewer, but more high-tech, warships being able to do more, so enabling the slashing of the frigate and destroyer numbers in 2004’s follow-on to SDR. “Network-enabled capability and force reduction certainly do not apply in the maritime domain,” explained Lord Boyce. “...where I remain to be convinced that the Ministry of Defence has woken up to the fact that a ship cannot be in two places at the same time, and that the importance of presence, which is so fundamental to conflict prevention, demands more and not fewer hulls.” Lord Boyce rebutted the frequent claim by the Ministry of Defence that it is implementing a massive renewal programme for the Royal Navy.

“This Government have ordered only eight warships since 1997, of which only four were destroyers and frigates. In the same period, 57 ships have been disposed of, of which 13 were destroyers and frigates, the workhorses of the fleet. Some of those disposed of were in fact younger than the ships they replaced.

I believe that the destroyer/frigate level is far too low to meet the challenges of the long-term.” He voiced concern that the Daring Class (Type 45) programme will end at just six ships, asking if the Future Surface Combatant (FSC) will be brought into service to replace the Type 23 frigates as they begin to show their age over the next decade. Lord Boyce also attacked the hollowing out of the UK’s Armed Forces’ capabilities, with some units being robbed of equipment to maintain those on the front line, so further eroding Defence capability and flexibility.  He claimed this has created a situation where troops cannot train for operations, because the kit they need to do so has been diverted elsewhere.

“The additional danger into which this puts our Armed Forces is entirely down to a shortage of cash, a shortage that could easily be remedied if the Government was so minded.” Most worrying of all for Lord Boyce was the inability to prepare for tomorrow’s wars and crises. He told the Lords: “I hope that there is recognition of the need to think beyond a hand-to-mouth policy, which is where we are today. Let me, for example, dwell on the sea. It remains the way by which the world conducts most of its trade; it is the only undisputed access to areas of strategic interest that can be guaranteed; and it remains crucial to the United Kingdom’s economic vitality and ability to protect our interests. Early crisis management cannot depend on host nation support and over-flying rights, and maritime forces are likely to be the principal way to apply decisive influence and force in any early stages of a crisis. However, I suspect that with the overall shortage of money for defence, there is a danger of the Navy being raided to pay for today’s land-centric operations.”
Lord Boyce concluded his contribution by landing a truly telling series of blows on the Government of former Chancellor of the Exchequer, now Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and also on Defence Secretary, and current Scottish Secretary, Des Browne.
“The message is clear: The Government, especially the Treasury, still have a completely peacetime mentality,” said Lord Boyce. “For all the Government’s platitudes about commitment and caring for our Armed Forces, the visible sign of this is conspicuous by its absence when we see a budget that so inadequately resources our Armed Forces’ levels of activity. Certainly commitment is starkly absent when we see the appointment of Ministers who are not devoted solely to their task, as shown by the double hatting of the Secretary of State... I make absolutely no apology for raising this subject again; it is very serious. It is seen as an insult by our sailors, soldiers and airmen on the front line - I know because I often have reason to speak to them - and it is certainly a demonstration of the disinterest and, some might say, contempt that the Prime Minister and his Government have for our Armed Forces. It shows an appalling lack of judgment at a time when our people are being killed and maimed. It is not for nothing that the Chief of the General Staff [the head of the Army] has said that his people feel undervalued. They really do deserve far better from the Government.”
Baroness Taylor responded for the Government and felt compelled to remind the Lords that the Comprehensive Spending Review settlement is 1.5 per cent ‘real terms’.

“I mention it because I need to point out that this is the longest period of sustained real-terms growth in planned defence expenditure since the 1980s. That is no mean achievement and something that we should not dismiss. Noble Lords may want us to spend more but they must recognise that there has been a very significant increase in the recent past. This new spending allows us to proceed with two new aircraft carriers.” She addressed the issue of long-term versus short-term needs: “That is why we are looking hard at our longer-term needs, with things that we are going to buy such as the Astute Class submarines and the Type 45 destroyers. There are problems and pressures in certain areas that we wish we could avoid and that we have taken action to do what we can about.”
It was a very smooth response from the Minister, but it did not satisfy either Lord Boyce or other Admirals, looking on from outside the Palace of Westminster. Admiral Sir Jock Slater, another recent First Sea Lord, stated in a letter to the Daily Telegraph: “Due to a deplorable lack of funds, we are being forced to mortgage our future responsibilities to pay for today’s short-term needs. Key tasks that make a vital contribution to conventional deterrence, maritime security, coercion and political influence are routinely compromised and our preparations for what may lie ahead leave much to be desired.”

Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Sir James Jungius, who was ACNS in the early 1970s, threw his weight into the debate in a letter to The Times : “The Government assures us the Defence budget is adequate. If that is so, how is it that the Navy has no air defence aircraft and its ships are going to sea with weapon systems out of action for lack of support?”

The fact that there is a dogfight going on within the Ministry of Defence over a shortfall in funding may have been behind comments by the current First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, in a national newspaper interview and also some passages in a speech he gave to a Navy Club Trafalgar Night dinner. Admiral Band told The Times he feared there would be further cuts in the Navy, adding: “We’ll execute the Government’s orders - with the usual caveats - but if the trends are confirmed, then it appears we are facing some pretty hard choices.” Admiral Band stressed the crucial need for frigates in order to maintain a global presence and safeguard the UK and its interests. He seemed to criticise the short-termism of the Government, which had initiated the Type 45 programme originally intending to order 12 ships, but had achieved little by way of savings by only ordering half that number. “...the cost of the overheads is based on ordering 12 of the destroyers and the overheads are still there,” he was reported as saying by The Times.
A few weeks earlier, in his Trafalgar Night dinner speech, Admiral Band paid tribute to enhanced capabilities being introduced into the RN by new warships. However, he revealed: “We will have some hard decisions to make in procurement as the programme simply does not have sufficient resources to fund all the equipment required. The budget settlement is insufficient. Undoubtedly, there will be a need to run on platforms longer than we would want and we may lose some too. I don’t doubt there will be more wildly exaggerated headlines as plans develop and reach the public domain. And we still need to develop a Future Surface Combat vessel as our basic workhorse and we will need to think very carefully about what we require - we can’t afford a late gold-plated solution for today’s problems that requires adapting for tomorrow’s threats.”

In late November discontent grew so great, someone within the Ministry of Defence leaked an internal report on the state of the Royal Navy to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. It laid bare the severe damage inflicted by a Government that a decade ago seemed to be getting Defence right. The Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (ACNS), Rear Admiral Alan Massey, wrote the report at the behest of Defence Secretary Des Browne, who was possibly keen to trot out the ‘smaller but more capable’ phrase to undermine critics of defence cuts.

However, Rear Admiral Massey’s report - allegedly entitled ‘Royal Navy Utility Today Compared With 20 Years Ago’ - did just the opposite: It provided more ammunition for those who believe the current UK Government has badly mismanaged the Royal Navy and Defence of the Realm in general. The report stated: “The current material state of the fleet is not good; the Royal Navy would be challenged to mount a medium-scale operation...against a technologically capable adversary.”
Furthermore, the report allegedly told Des Browne a lack of funds is ‘eroding’ Navy capabilities, the Fleet’s remaining fighting ships are getting long in the tooth and are too few and that Anti-Submarine Warfare capability is now below ‘prudent minimum level of both quality and quantity’.

Most damningly the report also stated: ‘Our diluted worldwide presence inevitably makes it harder to maintain influence in key areas of interest across the globe and has thereby reduced the Royal Navy’s overall strategic effect.’
The Ministry of Defence refused to comment on the leaked report, other than a spokesman pointing out: ‘The Government values the Royal Navy greatly and has invested billions of pounds in new Type 45s, Astute submarines and Trident submarines, and has made the decision to order two new carriers.”
It is interesting to note two things about this reaction, published in the Daily Telegraph: The Vanguard Class (Trident) missile submarines were ordered by Mrs Thatcher’s government (in the teeth of bitter Labour opposition) and no confirmed order for the carriers has actually yet been placed.

This magazine has on several occasions in the past laid the accusation of a Scottish-bias at the feet of the current UK administration; especially when it comes to ensuring lucrative shipbuilding and refitting contracts are awarded to Scotland. It is no secret that Labour has its electoral powerbase in Scotland (including the seats of several ministers, including Brown and Browne).
It was therefore fascinating to see our justifiably cynical observations echoed by another former Chief of Defence Staff, this time the Army’s General Lord Guthrie. He claimed in a commentary published in the Daily Telegraph that, while serving as Chancellor, Gordon Brown was ‘the only senior cabinet minister who avoided coming to the Ministry of Defence to be briefed on our problems.’ Furthermore, Lord Guthrie claimed, Brown only paid the MoD a visit ‘to talk about the future of Rosyth dockyard’.  Lord Guthrie said the dockyard is in Brown’s constituency, which it isn’t. However, the well-being of the dockyard - one of Scotland’s last remaining major engineering sites - is of great concern to Fife Council and indeed has great totemic and economic importance for Scotland as a whole. There are undoubtedly workers from Rosyth living in the Brown constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. Any damage to Rosyth would seriously damage Labour’s powerbase, hence Brown’s keen interest.

Of course the future carrier programme is key to Rosyth’s future, as the Fife dockyard is where the massive vessels will be assembled and, probably, to all intents and purposes, will operate from. The through-life policy of firms that build ships, maintaining them during their careers, puts Rosyth in the frame to play host to the vessels for a large proportion of their service lives (despite them being nominally base-ported at Portsmouth). Babcock’s purchase of Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth (the previous home base for the Navy’s ‘big’ carriers of the 1960s and 1970s) does indicate a south coast English port may well be in the running to maintain the new ships. Of course the carrier programme has many enemies in a cash-strapped Defence community, not least within the Army. It sees a major equipment programme (for thousands of new armoured vehicles) under threat due to lack of funds and it looks at the billions in the future carrier budget with covetous eyes. Late last month the Conservative Party obtained a leaked e-mail in which it was claimed the order for the carriers was about to be postponed, due to the squeeze on the Defence budget. According to the e-mail, allegedly written by a senior officer serving in the MoD, it was only the thought that 400 apprentice jobs at Rosyth might be under threat that persuaded the Ministry of Defence not to impose the postponement. The Ministry of Defence rubbished this claim, but it has that ring of desperation so characteristic of this current Government’s mismanagement of Defence. One major problem with such claims -true or otherwise - is that they establish a dangerous fiction: That the ONLY reason for the new carriers is Scottish dockyard and ship construction yard jobs. While we have in the past criticised the propensity of the current Government to shore up Scotland at the expense of England’s naval facilities, it would be a grave error for people in the UK to overlook the absolute strategic necessity of building the new carriers. They are vital to safeguarding the security of the UK and its interests around the world for the next 40 years. Not to proceed with the new carriers would be a mistake of gigantic proportions, as would a failure to invest in enough of the destroyers, frigates and submarines needed to form their Strike Groups and also carry out the RN’s many other future tasks.
Elsewhere last month Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond was reported to be extremely keen to boot the Trident nuclear deterrent submarines out if his party managed to take Scotland to independence. “England can keep 100 per cent of the Trident missiles,” said Mr Salmond in a national newspaper interview. “We could have an infinite number of Scottish army regiments in return for our share of the cost of Trident.” But perhaps the most astonishing statement over the last few weeks was that by Lord Robertson, Labour Defence Secretary from 1997 to 1999, who, speaking on BBC Radio, said that military spending should increase from 2.3 per cent to three per cent of the country’s GDP - a £25 billion per annum rise. The increase to the Ministry of Defence’s budget of 1.5 per cent a year in ‘real terms’, but this is only seventh in the Government’s list of priorities after transport, the Home Office, intelligence matters, food and rural affairs, international development, and, another black hole of government spending, the environmental transformation fund (whatever that is). Sadly, the wheels have already fallen off Gordon Brown’s administration, and he is about to be overtaken by the whirlwind sown by his predecessor. 

In commissioning the report on the state of the Royal Navy from the Senior Service’s ACNS, Des Browne clearly wanted a dossier from which he could cherry pick to support his hollow arguments. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the carriers have not yet been ordered, the SSN programme is late and over budget and the number of destroyers and frigates currently in service is pitifully low. Britain’s place in the world is deteriorating as a result. Just as seriously, after the current batch of six Type 45s there is no follow-on class of surface combatants for ten years.

And with no further submarines or surface combatants ordered, skill-fade will assert itself again at the construction yards in Scotland and Barrow, while Devonport, Rosyth and Portsmouth will also wither as they fight for refit work on a decreasing number of warships in the current fleet. Defence costs will rocket in the future, as they have done in the past, as yard managers try desperately to revive skills carelessly discarded and only re-acquired after massive new investment (and errors).

What a pickle.
For the Opposition, it has been like shooting fish in a barrel. The Conservative Shadow Defence Secretary unleashed a salvo of cutting comments in response to both the leaked ACNS report on the state of the Navy and also the near-cancellation of the future carriers.
“We have come all the way from Lord Nelson to a part-time defence secretary, with the consequence that the Royal Navy now finds itself in the most degenerated state in which it has ever been,” Dr Liam Fox observed caustically. “Labour has done what none of this country’s enemies have been able to do: Bring the Navy to its knees.”
Dr Fox also said: “Not content with cutting the Royal Navy to the bone, it now appears that Labour has secretly considered scrapping the centre-piece of our future naval defence and only backed down to save Gordon Brown’s blushes. This would not only be a devastating blow to the Navy itself, but would be a breach of every promise they have made since the Strategic Defence Review of 1998.”

The Type 22 frigate HMS Cornwall on her most recent deployment to the Gulf, in the spring of 2007. The incident in which 15 of her sailors and marines were taken hostage by Iranian Revolutionary Guard opened a whole can of worms about training and operational procedures in high-threat areas. Meanwhile, due to yet another Defence spending squeeze in the UK at the end of 2007, it looked like Cornwall and her three other sister ships might be axed from the Fleet, despite being among its most potent surface vessels.

Photo: US Navy.

HMS Portland coming alongside in New Orleans during a deployment to the west Atlantic in 2007. Portland and 12 other Duke Class (Type 23) frigates form the backbone of a DD/FF force that is too small to handle the RN’s many global taskings.

Photo: US Navy.