The crisis facing the Royal Navy

The new First Sea Lord will find he has few ships and a staff gripped by delusion and fear

Below a copy of my article from the Spectator on the sad state of the Royal Navy and how its biggest failing may be institutional groupthink mixed with delusion about the extent of Britain’s real power on the high seas. I hope you find it interesting.

‘I see no ships!’ Admiral Horatio Nelson

General Sir Gwyn Jenkins is stepping into the role of First Sea Lord at a difficult time, with the Royal Navy’s fleet in a sorry state.

On 22 April, Carrier Strike Group 25 (CSG25) set sail on an eight-month publicity tour, leaving British waters sparsely defended. Keir Starmer posed on the flight deck of HMS The Prince of Wales, his battleship grey hair perfectly set like a middle-aged Ken doll. He said the CSG25 shows ‘the UK’s leadership on global issues and security and defence’.

It really doesn’t.

Britain could only field one of its two carriers, one destroyer, one frigate and one attack submarine. The Royal Navy also has insufficient logistics vessels to support the deployment, with no new solid store ships expected before the end of this decade. Today, besides coastal patrol vessels, all we have to defend British shores are one seaworthy destroyer, two frigates and one attack submarine.

The Royal Navy has shrunk in the teeth of defence cuts and each new efficiency drive makes it smaller. The two Albion class landing vessels, in service for only 20 years, are laid up and negotiations about their sale to Brazil are at an advanced stage. The uplift in defence spending will mostly be swallowed by the MoD’s bloated procurement programmes, which are typically delayed and always over budget.

On 14 May, I went to the book launch for the The Royal and Russian Navies, Cooperation, Competition and Confrontation, written by Britain’s former naval attache to Moscow, Captain David Fields RN (Ret’d), and Robert Avery OBE.

It’s an excellent book that confirms that Britain has been overtaken by Russia on the high seas.

When Admiral Key was caught in flagrante, the MoD’s irrepressible publicity squad spun media coverage to focus on a possible uplift of UK defence spending to 2.65 per cent of GDP. In reality, that could easily be swallowed getting existing naval platforms seaworthy again. It won’t provide new ships any time soon.

Today, nine of the Navy’s 21 fighting ships are in dry docks and another three are undergoing maintenance. Three of the Astute Class attack subs – only launched in 2014 – have been under repair for an average of two years each and HMS Daring, ‘the world’s most advanced air defence destroyer’ has been in the dry dock since 2017. Less than half the fleet is seaworthy, and almost half of that has disappeared on a publicity, sorry, force projection deployment to Asia.

The UK could have used influence to compensate for its lack of hard power. Yet it lost its ability to do so when it cut all contact with Russia’s navy in 2014. Between 1988 and 2014, a navy-to-navy dialogue was established that included engagement by members of the Royal Family and the First Sea Lord, ships visits, joint naval exercises and exchanges between World War II veterans of the Arctic Convoys.

This was achieved despite the deep seated Russian suspicion of western motives and an unshakable paranoia that Britain is bent on her defeat, even during brief periods of detente. It happened in spite of the dead hand of Russian bureaucracy at the Ministries and Intelligence Agencies, working hard to suffocate efforts at engagement.

Russia’s refusal to accept a Royal Navy offer of assistance after the submarine Kursk sank in 2000 provides a chilling reminder of this. Yet lessons were learned and continued naval dialogue allowed the UK submarine rescue service to recover a stricken Russian submersible in the Pacific in 2005, saving its seven crew members. President Putin would later award the officers involved the Russian Order of Friendship during a visit to 10 Downing Street in October 2005..

Having served at the British Embassy in Moscow for four and a half years, The Royal and Russian Navies reminded me how, culturally, the British and Russians are so different. Russians are sentimental and prone to wild mood swings, yet unstinting in their warmth and generosity, once a personal connection is made. Vast quantities of vodka are needed to oil the wheels of dialogue.

A Royal Marines officer is hosted by a Russian Naval Infantry officer and treated like a special guest, during a rare RN ship visit to Soviet era Baltiysk. A Russian admiral gifts a senior RN officer his uniform, in the hope it might bring him luck in attaining flag status, which he later did. Meeting the great, great, great, great granddaughter of Admiral Samuel Greig from Scotland who commanded the Imperial Russian Navy during the period of Catherine the Great, had a profound and warming effect on the Russian admirals meeting her husband – the then First Sea Lord Sir Jock Slater – at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on Naval Cooperation in Moscow in 1998.

Today, the UK and Russia have no serving military attaches in their respective embassies in London and Moscow for the first time since 1941. Like the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence disinvested in training service personnel in the Russian language after the Cold War and are only now starting to rebuild. Our modern generation of seafarers are now only able to view Russians through binoculars, periscopes and gun sights. And they have more guns than us.

The Royal Navy must confront and compete with the considerable Russian naval threat to UK national security. But the decade-long lack of engagement means that they are sailing blind on how Russian doctrine and tactics have shifted in the forge of war in Ukraine.

Yet, over a 25-year period of engagement, Russia still considered the Royal Navy the world’s premier naval power, if only for its history and its sub-sea forces which include the crown jewel of Britain’s continuous at sea nuclear deterrent.

When the war ends, renewed naval engagement will play a vital role in establishing basic levels of trust, confidence and deconfliction. But that will be a challenge. Britain’s unwavering support to Ukraine has made it more hostile than ever before in Russia’s eyes. And the Royal Navy is now so small, that the Russians will wonder at the point of even talking to us.

In the genteel confines of the In and Out Club in St James Square at the book launch, I rendered a member of the MoD Policy staff red-faced with anger at this avalanche of realism. Right now, the Ministry of Defence appears to be gripped by paroxysms of delusion and fear; delusions that we are powerful, when we are not, yet fear that we can’t defend ourselves against the Russian threat.

General Jenkins has tough job on his hands. He has three priorities; injecting realism into a staff suffocated by group think, being ruthless in demanding results in terms of naval capabilities, and trying to convince the Russians and Chinese that he is even relevant.