HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the UK’s two state of the art aircraft carriers, is due to steam out of Portsmouth naval base on Sunday to become the naval centrepiece of one of Nato’s biggest military exercises since the end of the cold war.
The flagship is expected to be escorted by at least one British frigate. But after years of budget cuts the once-powerful Royal Navy will need its allies to provide many of the additional vessels needed to form a carrier strike group — in particular a key logistics ship.
In one of the latest signs of Britain’s struggles to remain a top-tier military power, the 34-year-old RFA Fort Victoria, which is the last so-called solid support ship left in the fleet, remains laid up for repairs, despite a recent refit.
The failure to ensure that the UK’s two, multibillion pound carriers had this logistics support was symbolic of the Royal Navy’s threadbare state, serving and former officers and military analysts said.
“There is a dissonance between the UK’s military ambitions and its capabilities,” Sir Richard Barrons, former head of Britain’s armed forces, said. “The risk is that we get drawn into a conflict and can’t sustain our presence, and this exposes a strategic weakness.”
Those risks have increased given tensions with Russia in the Black Sea, the potential for conflict in the Taiwan Strait and the threat to global shipping in the Red Sea.
Last month, UK defence secretary Grant Shapps warned that the western world was in a “prewar” phase and needed to prepare for conflicts involving China, Russia, North Korea and Iran within five years.
Yet Britain’s ability to respond to maritime threats has exposed the limitations of the Royal Navy, in the same way that the war in Ukraine revealed the constraints facing many western land armies.
“Both forces face similar issues — especially when it comes to sustaining operations, which they haven’t had to do for decades,” said Nick Childs, senior fellow for naval forces at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank.
Critics have pointed to the deployment of just one destroyer, HMS Diamond, to the Red Sea rather than a carrier, as the US has done, as further evidence of those problems.
In a recent interview with The House magazine, armed forces minister James Heappey suggested one of the carriers could still be used to replace the US one.
Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy at King’s College London, said the UK could deploy two carriers simultaneously “if it shuffled people around and padded out the auxiliary ships it needs with allied help . . . But that would pile pressure on the military structure. It would also reduce options to address other national security issues — and allies might not always have sufficient spare capacity to help.”
Admiral Sir Ben Key, head of the Royal Navy, conceded that his service’s situation was “challenging” when he appeared before the House of Commons defence select committee late last year.
There are three main problems, according to officials and analysts: the UK’s shrunken and ageing fleet; growing staff shortages; and rising wear and tear on the service as demands on it increase.
In 1998, the UK had three small aircraft carriers and an escort fleet of 23 frigates and 12 destroyers and the same number of attack submarines.
It is now down to just 11 ageing frigates — two of which are reportedly set to be decommissioned — six destroyers and half a dozen attack submarines, also known as hunter-killers. Even so, only half the escort fleet can be deployed quickly, Key said.
Furthermore, while the destroyers are relatively new, their engines have been plagued by design flaws. So far only two of them have undergone the lengthy refit needed to fix the issue with just three, including HMS Diamond, operational.
Britain’s submarine fleet — made up of four strategic boats that carry the UK’s nuclear deterrent and the six hunter-killers — has also suffered, in part due to a lack of dry dock capacity to undertake repairs.
“There is a growing gap between where the Royal Navy was, and where it is now,” said Patalano. “That gap was OK five years ago, but now — with the war in Ukraine, crisis in the Middle East and growing great power tensions between the US and China — the UK’s capacity to generate sustained naval power is looking very thin.”
It is struggling to recruit. Fresh intake to the service dropped 24 per cent year-on-year in the 12 months to September, according to the Ministry of Defence, worse than declines for the air force (14 per cent) and army (7 per cent).
The UK’s problems are not unique. The mighty US navy is also overstretched and Australia, France, Spain and Italy face similar recruitment issues.
One Royal Navy source insisted it could fulfil all its obligations “at the moment”, adding any shortfalls could be met by other Nato members. Allies still hold the service in high regard. “The British navy always likes to be first and it always turns up. Who else in Europe can do that?” asked one senior European defence official.
There are modernisation plans under way with 13 frigates on order and three new solid support ships in the works. But the transition to a new fleet is not due to be completed until the mid-2030s and “the future is arriving early”, Childs said.
The defence ministry said recruitment was a “top priority”, adding that the Royal Navy was “operating globally 24 hours a day” and the government was “investing heavily in the future of the fleet”.
Shapps, who has been in his role since August, recently praised the armed forces’ “can do attitude”, adding there had not “been a deployment that I have not been able to make when I have needed to”.
Yet continued improvisation wears out equipment and staff, and is ultimately self-defeating, military analysts warned.
“Muddling through is inspiring but when it becomes the default approach the body starts to eat itself,” said Francis Tusa, a consultant and editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter. “The worst part is if the problem is fully exposed during a shooting match — and is paid for with spilled blood.”
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