The Daily Mail is expressing horror at just how few of the Royal Navy's combat vessels are actually in service.
The 'utterly dire' state of the Royal Navy fleet can be revealed today, with not one of its six attack submarines at sea.
Only nine out of 25 warships and attack – as opposed to nuclear – submarines are active or deployed.
The rest of the fleet has racked up a staggering 30 years of missed days at sea as vessels are either broken down, being modified or undergoing trials.
. . .
Retired Rear Admiral Chris Parry said last night: 'This situation is utterly dire – we haven't got enough ships to protect our aircraft carriers and we haven't got any attack submarines to protect our nuclear deterrent.'
It is understood that shortages of engineers and dry-dock facilities are exacerbating the situation.
The worst offenders in the naval fleet are assault ship HMS Bulwark and destroyer HMS Daring – which have both been inactive for more than seven years.
The submarine HMS Ambush has apparently been idle for 765 days since taking part in Nato exercises in the Arctic in 2022.
Most alarmingly, the shortage of attack submarines has apparently led to US submarines being called on to protect the UK's 'bomber' submarines.
The four 'bombers', at least one of which has to be at sea, carry this country's nuclear deterrent.
There's more at the link.
Sounds scary, doesn't it? However, the scary bit isn't how few ships are actually in service - it's the low number of ships overall. 25 vessels is a pathetic size for a Navy that was once the leading fleet in the world. It's not enough to begin fighting a serious war at sea, let alone win one. Basically, it's a defeat waiting to happen. The Royal Navy should be three to four times its present size to have even a ghost of a chance in a major war . . . but thanks to government income being wasted on welfare schemes and handouts to illegal aliens, there's no money to afford it.
The real problem is that in any given Navy, the number of ships available for deployment in peacetime is going to be approximately one-third of the total number of ships in service. Want to keep four frigates at sea? You need twelve in all. Want to keep four aircraft-carriers deployed? Again, you need twelve in all. Those ships not ready for service are undergoing short- or long-term maintenance; training new crews, for themselves and for others of their class(es); resupplying and replenishing their resources; exercising their crews to come together into an efficient, effective unit; and doing all the routine shipboard tasks that naval veterans will remember all too well. (Oh, yes - and they have to fit in liberty periods and leave for their crews, too!)
In wartime you can defer routine maintenance, if necessary, but then you have to deal with battle damage and replacing ships (and seamen) that are sunk. Thus, you may be able to keep half your ships in the combat zone at any one time, but the others will be under immense pressure to fix damage, carry out maintenance, train replacement crews, and get back in the fight.
Yes, the Royal Navy is in a dire strait, but it's not because so few ships are fit for sea right now - it's that there are so few ships in the fleet as a whole. In so many words, it's no longer a combat effective service.
Peter
19 comments:
Considering they have let millions of non-English into their country and offer them preferential treatment over natives, why does an Islamic country like Great Britian-stan even need a navy?
Maybe they could send the rest of their functional ships to Ukraine to kill more Christians.
and these guys are poking the Russians, lol
Why does the UK need more than a token Navy (or military of any kind)? They're a member of NATO...they can let the US military handle the heavy work of defending them, just like the rest of the NATO countries do.
But look at all the 'money' they've saved...
Follow Commander Salamander. While the US has more ships we are not far off from the same maintenance issues. Roughly 1/3 of our attack submarines are awaiting maintenance, but we don't have enough shipyards to keep up with all the work. The surface fleet has problems as well.
Yeah, that was the joke in the field at the offshore oil exploration company I used to work for - imagining a bunch of office drones bitching about how much money they could save if only they didn't have to spend money on those darned expensive ships.
It's all myth, legend and voodoo. There is no rhyme or reason for the mix you and the rest prefer to reality. We like to give people some time off but that used to be shore duty and back when this started our warships would spend weeks in foreign ports but all those days are dead and gone. There is zero reason to spend 6 months in the yards undergoing repairs, that's just the scam in place to try to keep some shipyards alive with navy work since they're so damned useless and inefficient and expensive that they cannot get by on commercial work.
The first thing for any service to do is to actually measure the need and the reason for being and then work to fit the need. One of the reasons warships dwindled away so quickly after WWII was the obvious lack of any need at all for them. They no longer carry our fight to the enemy and usually they just soak up resources spent better elsewhere. As long as the USSR was willing to pretend to play, so were we. They stopped pretending in 1991 but we didn't. The UK has stopped pretending a need too.Who is going to attack them now? Argentina only has to wait and England will sell them the Falklands for $10.00.
"Boomers" - not "Bombers" -- SSBNs. Anyway, the crew issues could be solved with human cloning. Mindless and willing slaves. Follow me for more solutions.
From what I understand Britain's fishing and merchant marine fleets are suffering also.
No need for Britain to kill Christians in Ukraine; Putin's got that handled.
Also, just out if curiosity, how exactly is Britain a Muslim country if less than 7% of its inhabitants worship Allah? Inquiring minds want to know?
Saw this big time in the US submarines. Very few military personnel were trained to the level of “repair at sea” anymore, and were required to use shipyards or helicopter out shipyard personnel for almost any sort of repair. Military guys were now just “operators” only, with almost no repair knowledge, and usually were not permitted to do the repairs even if they had the knowledge. Some senior enlisted saved some of the recalled 20+ year-old tech manuals for equipment to show off the level the men used to be trained to. Guys used to be expected to know a design engineering level of detail of how things worked. Now, they have almost no knowledge of what to do if something breaks that does not have a specific procedure in the book. If US enemies simply hit the shipyards, the whole fleet would grind to a halt in no time.
we haven't got any attack submarines to protect our nuclear deterrent
Probably not something to Say out loud.. That seems like the kind of thing that aSpy would get paid for.
It's a little easier to think about when you say "I need this position to be staffed 24/7. How many people do I need to hire?"
The answer is between five and six.
But the accountants and politicians look at a big piece of metal (the ship) and think "We can just have several crews and keep the ship out at sea all the time."
The article has that attitude, talking about ships that are "idle" because they're not at sea. A ship is at sea until it needs repairs that can't be done there, or until the government can't pay for it.
I suspect they *could* have slightly more ships at sea, but the government has chosen not to pay for more crews and faster repair.
I believe the German Kriegsmarine is in even worse shape. I wonder were all this peace dividend money went?
From what I remember of US doctrine SSBNs go out and hide, they have a op area but nobody not aboard knows where they are. SSNs have different tasks.
We weren't sent places we didn't go to not do things we didn't do. Never heard of a US SSN shadowing a US SSBN except for possibly training.
No problem.
Suspend their NATO membership and all rights thereof until they get their poop in a group.
If a nuclear power and island nation can't see the need for a serious navy after two world wars, let them die on the vine.
The USN isn't in much better shape.
Because their .government preferential treats Muslim invaders / immigrants over native Britons in law, law enforcement, and policy.
John in Indy
And the Daily Mail shows its ignorance of military slang. Traditionally SSBN (Ballistic Missile Submarines with Nuclear propulsion of which the UK has 4) are referred to as "Boomers" not "Bombers" as the Daily Mail has. It is possible the British slang for them is different, but seems unlikely as the name became common even early in the US Polaris sub days and the first UK SSBN of the Resolution class likely picked up the habit from there.
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