The Royal Navy Is In Crisis

For an island nation with global trading links, a powerful navy isn't a luxury; it's essential. Ours has been neglected for far too long. Now it can no longer put ships where we need them to be.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how it’s time to bring back National Service. Sadly that idea has been overtaken by events, or rather by the rapidly accelerating collapse of this country at the hands of our useless government. It isn’t National Service we need to bring back, at this point; it’s the press gang.

The Royal Navy is the proud owner of two very large and expensive aircraft carriers. Now, don’t get me wrong; I have nothing at all against those carriers. They’re actually great ships. Of course they’d be even better ships if David Cameron had gone through with converting them to catapult and arrestor - CATOBAR - configuration in 2010, instead of sticking with the rather limited ski jump system, but even as they are they’re the most capable carriers in the world outside the US Navy. Unfortunately, thanks to decades of penny-pinching by every government since 1991, right now they’re almost completely useless.

This is RFA Fort Victoria, the only support ship that can keep our aircraft carriers supplied at sea. And she can’t leave the dock, because there aren’t enough sailors.

His Majesty’s White Elephants

The carriers, the largest ships ever operated by the Royal Navy, are virtually useless for three reasons. One is that because they weren’t converted to CATOBAR only one type of aircraft can operate from them, the F-35B, and we barely have enough of those to supply half an airwing to one of the ships. If Cameron had gone ahead with converting them, instead of allowing himself to be fobbed off with BAE’s weak excuses, we could have leased or bought a fleet of much cheaper F/A-18 Super Hornets and put both carriers to sea with a full complement of 40-odd fast jets parked on each one. We could also have operated fixed-wing aircraft to do all the other things carriers need to do, like airborne early warning, anti-submarine warfare and even carrier onboard delivery, the unglamorous but vital capability to fly people and stuff to and from the carrier further and faster than a helicopter can do it. But we can’t, because the ships don’t have catapults, so the only aircraft that can fly from them are F-35Bs and helicopters.

Incidentally, since 2021 the RN has been looking at fitting lightweight catapults to the carriers alongside the ski jumps so they can at least operate the latest generation of UAV’s (“drones”). Last year the Navy went further, unveiling Project Ark Royal - a plan to convert the ships to full CATOBAR configuration. Of course this proposal depends on the government paying for it, which means it will probably never happen - but it does show what a disaster the failure to fit catapults has turned out to be.

Anyway, the second reason the carriers are borderline pointless is that we can’t escort them. The last time we operated full-sized aircraft carriers, the RN had a fleet of 59 destroyers and frigates to form the vital battle groups that surround the carrier and protect it from enemy aircraft and submarines. When HMS Queen Elizabeth entered service in 2021 that fleet had shrunk to just 19 escorts. Allowing for the facts that there will always be some - and right now it’s well over half - in refit, and some deployed on other tasks, 19 escorts isn’t enough to form one battle group. In 2021 Queen Elizabeth made a widely-publicised deployment to the Pacific, escorted by three destroyers and three frigates. To make up that battle group we had to borrow USS The Sullivans from the USA and HNLMS Evertsen from the Netherlands, because our own navy didn’t have enough ships. We also had to borrow some aircraft, so the ship wasn’t sailing around with a deck as empty as the Aldi car park at 3am on a Sunday. Of the 18 F-35Bs on board only eight were British; the other ten, and their pilots, were on loan from the United States Marine Corps. This was, to put it mildly, humiliating. Now it’s even worse; when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister in October 2022 the escort fleet had shrunk to just 18 ships. Today there are only 17 left, and one of those, HMS Westminster, is “inactive” and will never sail again. If we deployed a carrier anywhere we’d need to borrow almost all its escorts from our allies.

But we can’t deploy a carrier anyway, because of the third reason they’re not really worth having right now. As well as escorts, a carrier battle group needs replenishment ships. As big as they are, the ships don’t have infinite storage space. They need to be regularly resupplied with fuel and weapons for their aircraft, and food for their crews. That means at least one tanker (for fuel) and one solid support ship (for food, weapons and everything else) need to be part of the group.

In 2021 the UK had three solid support ships, all operated by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Now - thanks again, Tories - we have just one, the 30-year-old RFA Fort Victoria. And she can’t go anywhere, because the RFA no longer has enough seamen to man her. Without Fort Victoria the carriers can’t go anywhere, either; that’s why, when we bombed the Houthis last week, RAF Typhoons had to make a 3,000-mile round trip from Cyprus. Where were our carriers? Sat in port doing nothing, because we can’t put together a battle group for either of them.

It gets worse, in fact. The manpower crisis goes beyond the RFA, and is crippling the RN too. The Ministry of Defence has just decided to not only decommission HMS Westminster this year, but to take HMS Argyll (and both of our assault ships, which are essential for amphibious operations) out of service too. That will bring the escort fleet down to just 15 ships - after multiple promises from the Conservative government since 2010 that 19 was as low as it would go, and ship numbers would start to rise again by the mid-2020s. Unfortunately the reality is that if the RN doesn’t lose two frigates now, it won’t have any sailors to start forming the ships’ companies of the first two Type 26 frigates as they start the journey towards commissioning, with the first due to join the fleet in 2028.

The End of The Royal Navy?

Unless something changes, I don’t honestly think the RN’s escort fleet will ever grow again. Thirteen new frigates have been ordered, as a one-for-one replacement of the 13 Type 23s the Navy should have, but I can see at least four and possibly more of them being sold overseas without ever sailing under the White Ensign.

The ugly truth is that RN recruitment is catastrophic and getting worse. In 2021 recruitment into the Naval Service - the RN and Royal Marines - was already below the level needed to maintain its strength. In 2022 it fell by another 22.1%. Why? It’s hard to say. Maybe some of it’s down to young people being so wedded to their smartphones that the idea of three months at sea with no signal is unbearable to them. However, I suspect most of it stems from a mix of the MoD’s disastrous focus on wokery (the sort of people who traditionally joined the Armed Forces are unlikely to be impressed by recent recruitment campaigns) and the frankly idiotic decision to scrap a recruiting system that’s worked well for centuries and hand it over to Capita, a notoriously incompetent “outsourcing” company. Since Capita started handling applications for the Armed Forces the recruitment process, from walking into the careers office to starting training, has ballooned from three or four months to a year or more. Many potential recruits are being put off by Capita’s inefficiency; many more simply get fed up waiting and find another job.

Army recruiting in the modern age. It’s hardly the stuff heroes are made of, is it?

A lot more needs to be done to fix military recruitment - and it must be fixed, because our armed forces are too small already; we can’t afford to hand the government an excuse to cut them even further, in the shape of a recruitment crisis. Pay has to be improved. Advertising has to switch back to emphasising patriotism, adventure, elitism and rough-and-ready camaraderie instead of pathetic nonsense about selfie addicts and class clowns. Most of all, Capita has to be removed from the process. Because whatever the MoD thinks about its current recruitment strategy, something has gone very badly wrong.

When the Royal Navy sailed for the Falklands in 1982 the UK’s population was 56.3 million; the RN managed to operate three carriers, 30 submarines, 59 destroyers and frigates, and two assault ships, and had more than 66,000 regular officers and sailors. Now we have a population of 66.9 million - almost 20% larger - and yet the RN can’t recruit enough people to man two carriers, eleven submarines, 17 destroyers and frigates, and no assault ships. Our navy’s authorised regular strength today is 30,600 officers and sailors; its actual strength is below 29,000, and falling. Right now the Royal Navy is just clinging on to its place as one of the only two navies with a truly global reach, but unless its current decline is reversed it will lose that capability in five years at the most.

I don’t really believe that the government - whether it’s Sunak’s rabble of incompetents or the equally useless Labour mob that’s almost certain to take over this year - is either willing or able to fix the mess the RN is in. Unless I’m wrong about that the Royal Navy, with its awe-inspiring collection of battle honours and glorious history dating back to 1546, has only two choices left: It can start sending press gangs into our port cities once more, to bludgeon unwary mariners as they walk home from the pub and haul them aboard a warship for a new life as reluctant crewmen, or it can continue its current trajectory towards irrelevance. And for a traditionally seafaring nation like Britain, the collapse of our navy is the beginning of the end.