Defence: what goes around comes around

By Richard North - January 28, 2024

Front page of the Sunday Telegraph (print edition) carries the lead story headed “UK warships lack missiles to take out Houthi bases”, with the sub-heading: “Underequipped Navy’s inability to strike land targets is scandal, say former top brass”.

The story is replicated online, with roughly the same headline but with the sub-heading stating: “Former defence chief brands Royal Navy missile limitations ‘a scandal and completely unsatisfactory’”.

The gist of the story is that none of the Royal Navy’s destroyers or frigates have the ability to fire missiles at targets on land, leaving the US to carry out the majority of strikes on Houthi targets with support from RAF aircraft based 1,500 miles away.

In fact, our only major warship in the region is HMS Diamond, one of the six Type 45 destroyers commissioned by the Royal Navy (and one of only three available for service), with a “British defence source” telling us that the warship had not joined retaliatory strikes on Houthi targets because it did not have “the capability to fire to land targets”.

This can hardly come as a surprise as the Type 45 is a dedicated anti-aircraft destroyer and – barring a single 4.5inch gun of 1960s vintage, with a maximum range of 17 miles – has no land attack capability.

Clearly, this is not to the liking of the Telegraph which cites a “former senior defence chief” (unnamed), who says it was scandalous that Navy ships were not currently equipped with surface-to-surface missiles.

The ex-chief goes on to say: “It’s clearly a scandal and completely unsatisfactory. This is what happens when the Royal Navy is forced to make crucial decisions which can affect capability. The UK is now having to fly RAF jets thousands of miles to do the job of what a surface-to-surface missile can do”.

He is joined by Tobias Ellwood, former chairman of the Commons defence committee, who warns that the situation was “unsustainable” and is urging defence secretary Grant Shapps to conduct an urgent review. “We can’t continue to do this with a surface fleet that’s too small and cannot fire on land at range”, says Ellwood.

CDS Admiral Sir Tony Radakin is also cited as being among the navy chiefs warning of a need to “speed up our acquisition processes” for weapons including “land attack missile systems”, which he was saying five years ago, when he was First Sea Lord.

MPs, we are also told, have complained that the absence of land attack missiles has left UK warships akin to “porcupines” – well-defended vessels with insufficient offensive capabilities.

This is a reference to the Defence Committee Report of December 2021 entitled “We’re going to need a bigger Navy” which declared: “When ships do get to sea they act like porcupines – well defended herbivores with limited offensive capabilities”, adding that: “This is a result of decisions by successive Governments to limit budgets and prioritise defensive capabilities”.

Given this latter-day condemnation of the lack of capability, it is interesting to note what the Telegraph was saying when the first of the class, HMS Daring, was launched in back in 2006. Almost 18 years to the day, we had the headline “New warship is ‘quantum leap forward’ for the Navy”.

Just so that there was no misunderstanding, the text proudly informed us that: “The most powerful frontline warship since the Second World War was launched by the Countess of Wessex yesterday, marking a resurgence of British naval ship building”.

HMS Daring, we were told – faithfully transcribing the Royal Navy press release – “will be able to track and destroy a target the size of a cricket ball travelling at more than three times the speed of sound, a ‘quantum leap’ forward in the Navy’s capabilities”.

Described in the piece as a “boat” by ex-Army officer turned defence correspondent Thomas Harding, its defensive system, combining a hugely powerful radar and missile system, had – we were informed – “left American visitors to the yard ‘shaken and shocked’, according to BAE Systems, its builders”.

An additional note told us that “in the next 10 years” – which would have brought us to 2016 – as many as eight T45s could be built at a cost of £650 million each”. In fact, due to spiralling costs, only six were built at an eventual total cost of £6.46 billion, the first “billion-pound destroyer” to join the fleet.

This, incidentally, does not include the £280 million remediation costs for the novel power plants which had the embarrassing habit of breaking down, with the result that the fleet has spent most of its career in harbour undergoing refits and repairs.

To be fair, when HMS Daring was launched, the Telegraph was far from on its own in its gushing praise for the ship. In fact, the BBC was equally useless and The Times went even further with the headline: “Navy launches deadliest and most expensive warship”

With a price tag of £605 million, we were told, the 150-metre long vessels will be the most powerful, advanced and deadly warships in the world when they come into service in 2009.

Among the battery of state-of-the-art equipment, wrote Simon Freeman, is a new Principal Anti-Air Missile System (PAAMS), which can trace and destroy hostile objects as small a cricket ball travelling at three times the speed of sound. Its range is effective over a radius of several hundred miles.

Daring’s PAAMS air defence missiles, he added, are the size of a public phone boxes, weigh two thirds as much as a small car and from launch accelerate to a speed twice that of Concorde in under 10 seconds.

Labour defence secretary John Reid was cited, saying that the launch was a proud day for the Royal Navy. “It’s a huge boost for the Royal Navy because this is the most capable, most powerful destroyer ever built in the UK”, he purred.

In terms of capabilities, the point missed was that this was a dedicated anti-aircraft fleet defence warship, with a limited anti-missile capability. There is no question that, at the time, its capabilities were state-of-the-art and, in terms of fleet protection, there is no dispute it was a “quantum leap forward” for the Royal Navy’s air defence systems.

However, as the complaints retailed by the Telegraph today volubly attest, when you have a small navy, it is extremely unwise to invest in single function ships rather than equipping with multi-role vessels. And, if this sounds like being wise after the event, this is what I wrote on 2 February 2006 in my Defence of the Realm blog:

For sure, it will have a highly advanced anti-aircraft system, based on the costly French-built PAAMS missile and British designed Samson radar, but very little else. It will have only a very limited land attack capability, mounting a 4.5inch gun, and – apart from its single helicopter – an anti-submarine capability that amounts to no more than a self-defence system, and no anti-shipping capability.

Compare and contrast with the US equivalent, the DG Arleigh Burke class, which, in addition to its perhaps not quite as effective anti-aircraft capability (with nearly double the number of missiles) has a significant land attack capability – being able to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles – an anti-shipping capability and world-beating anti-submarine warfare equipment.

And not only is it truly a formidable, multi-purpose warship, it comes in, as the Australians found, at £400 million less than the £1 billion price tag for the Type 45.

And that is the point. With the Arleigh Burke class, the US Navy saw the wisdom of producing multi-role warships, equipped with a formidable suite of weapons and systems, including Tomahawk cruise missiles and towed array sonar, all built round the world-leading Aegis Combat System.

Now in their fourth iteration, the class is still in production with 73 vessels completed. An ongoing upgrade programme ensures that the ships in  service can continue to meet all known threats.

Had it so wished, the British government could have built the Arleigh Burke class under license (as did the Australians – even though that experience was not entirely happy). But, instead, Blair’s government, obsessed with European defence integration, opted to go for a joint European project.

When that project fell apart, we were left working with the French, on a joint missile project called PAAMS – over-priced, late and with the launcher only able to handle anti-aircraft missiles. Ironically, even with the Type 45s being built, the Telegraph in 2006 was complaining that the Navy was “too weak”.

Senior Royal Navy officers, as they do, were casting “serious doubt” over Britain’s ability to make a significant naval contribution to a then proposed UN force, claiming that “drastic cuts in government spending on the navy over the past decade had severely reduced their ability to participate in major foreign operations”.

In pursuit of European integration, therefore, we ended up paying vastly more for less capability, even if the MoD is quite capable of producing that effect without the assistance of our European allies.

But when the MPs complained in 2021 that this state of affairs “is a result of decisions by successive Governments to limit budgets and prioritise defensive capabilities”, they don’t know half of it.

At least, though, the Royal Navy is up to speed on diversity and inclusion, which should have the Houthi really worried.