Articles

In the recent leaked report from the MoD on the state of the RN it was stated the "Navy is vulnerable to unexpected shocks compared with 20 years ago" Compared to the high profile issues around warships, the 'teeth' of the navy, looking at the logistic 'tail' may seem less important but without the back-up of people, equipment and facilities, no navy can put ships to sea.

The "just enough, just in time" logistic strategy adopted by modern businesses like Tescos may be very efficient but when applied to a fighting force like the RN it simply undermines its very purpose.

At the start of the 1982 Falklands crisis when Admiral Henry Leach said to Mrs Thatcher that he could "dispatch a naval task force within days" he could be confident, not only that he had just about enough warships, but that there was the infrastructure and equipment available at short notice for such an emergency.

Today the RN has precious little in reserve. In 1982 there was a small reserve fleet, ships that could be brought forward to cover gaps in the frontline. There were stockpiles of stores, spares, food and ammunition ready to be loaded into ships at short notice. There were the dockyards with thousands of skilled men able to prepare and convert warships and merchant ships and most importantly, the RN had around 80,000 trained men compared to just 31,500 today (plus 6,000 Royal Marines).

Reserve Fleet Today the RN does not maintain a reserve fleet. Ships are decommissioned quickly then flogged off to foreign navies, scrapped or sunk as targets. (For more details see the article "Warships going cheap... Flogging off the nation's assets") To save small amounts of cash, ships which are no longer required (or at least funded to remain operational) could go into reserve and at least provide vessels that would be available in an emergency or for the unexpected. (History indicates we can expect the unexpected!)

Personnel What has always made the RN considered one of the best navies in the world was the accumulated skill, experience and courage of its people. This huge body of experience and fighting spirit is being slowly eroded as more experienced people leave the service than are being recruited to replace them.

To compound the problem the RN is struggling to recruit and retain enough ratings as pay and conditions compare badly to many opportunities in civilian employment.

An ill-advised recruitment freeze from 1991-1996 in some branches of the RN created a manning 'black hole' which means there are now critical shortages of experienced personnel so most ships go to sea short of people in some departments. (An average of 12% of 'gapped' frontline posts). A sign of the desperation to recruit people is that the RN is now offering bounties of up to £1000 if you can persuade a friend to join and people who have left the service are being offered cash bonuses to re-join.

To keep manning costs down, RN ships are "lean-manned" anyway (or under-staffed, depending on how you look at it) so if the unexpected happens, such as an extended deployment or even action damage, crews will be very over-stretched. Manning levels that maybe just about adequate for predictable 'peacetime' deployments will quickly become unsustainable for the high-intensity and long periods that warfare demands.

At the very senior level there is the opposite problem. There are a whopping 33 Admirals (each earning approx £120,000 p.a.), 25 rear admirals, 221 captains and 831 commanders making the RN massively top-heavy, given the size of the current fleet. There has obviously been a lot of over-promotion but the RN is not entirely to blame as it is the government that has cut the fleet. However all this 'top-brass' costs money but apparently there is not even enough ready cash to make redundancies, which would be the sensible long-term solution. Amongst lower ranking officers morale is not improved by a 5-year promotion freeze above the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Many of today's bright young officers are likely to become frustrated and leave the service prematurely.

Dockyards In 1982, although Defence Secretary John Nott, (Mrs Thatcher's mad axe man) had begun to make cuts, there were still 4 naval dockyards employing thousands of men (some with redundancy notices in their pocket) able to quickly convert merchant ships for war. In 2008 the 3 remaining royal dockyards are a shadow of their former selves. For example, the largest dockyard, Devonport now employs less than 4,000 civilians compared with around 15,000 in 1982. (a further loss of 600 jobs at Devonport was announced on 13th February) There is no spare capacity for emergency work and if the tempo of operations increased suddenly there would be a serious shortage of the skilled engineers and technicians needed to prepare and keep ships going.

As long ago as 1988, Major William MacLennan, then commanding officer of the Royal Marines stationed at Devonport warned "a shortage of skilled marine engineers would render the Royal Navy incapable of responding to a large-scale war on short notice, as it had successfully done in 1982."

Ammunition and Equipment Cutting stores of ammunition and naval equipment is one of the easy ways the government can make stealthy defence cuts. There is little political fall-out in not ordering enough ammunition compared to decommissioning ships or closing a naval base. Complete figures for the number of missiles and torpedoes stockpiled for the RN are not available but it is safe to say the numbers the RN could draw on in an emergency would be insufficient for a sustained campaign. This problem is not confined to ammunition but the myriad of spares and electronic systems and even decoys and sensors that a warship needs in theatre. Ships routinely have to pass equipment around the fleet. As ships return from deployment they are stripped of portable or small systems which are then passed to ships that are about to deploy.

Recently the RN acquired the excellent UK-developed Ship Torpedo Defence (Sea Sentor SSTD) system, which could be fitted to every major warship and RFA. However only 16 sets were ordered, so sets will be shared depending on where vessels are being deployed. This kind of penny-pinching means if a ship is suddenly diverted to a war zone the may not be time or enough sets available and a potentially ship-saving system is missing.

This trend of under-equipping can be seen in the Type 45 destroyer programme. The Type 45s could easily carry the very useful Tomahawk precision land-attack missile but to save money they will not be fitted. They will also have no surface-to-surface missiles fitted as a cost saving measure. They are fitted 'for but not with' mounts for the Harpoon SSM.