How Expanding Britain’s Royal Navy Can Drive a Truly Global Britain
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that the UK is an island nation. Throughout its history, this fact has allowed Britain to mostly ignore the chaos of European land warfare, occasionally despatching expeditionary forces against the French, Germans, Dutch and Spanish when things got a little too hot or when it needs to prevent a continental European hegemon from emerging – perhaps Britain’s oldest and most consistent foreign policy.
With no ability for European land armies to march into London, the UK had no need to maintain an army to match the massive land forces on the continent. Instead, it could focus all its military might at sea, more so than the other European empires of France, Portugal, and Spain, who still had to divert resources to their land armies. Britain was free to look beyond its own continent, using its massive navy to trade, defend and deter its enemies whilst forming the largest empire in history.
Fast forward into the Cold War era, and even without an empire to defend, the UK still maintained a formidable naval capacity throughout the cold war. In the 1960’s, the Royal Navy floated more than 220 warships, including 8 carriers, over 150 frigates and destroyers, over 50 submarines, two amphibious landing craft and around 14 cruisers. By the end of the 1980s, however, that size had shrunk to around 120, with just a few active carriers, over 60 frigates and destroyers, over 40 submarines and no more cruisers. In 2023, the UK fleet size sits at just 65 warships, or just 39 if we exclude green water coastal patrol ships. That includes 2 supercarriers, 18 destroyers and frigates, 10 submarines (including the nuclear deterrent) and two amphibious assault ships (and still no cruisers).
Notwithstanding the decrease in size, our modern warships including Elizabeth class supercarriers, Type 45 destroyers and upcoming Type 26 frigates are undoubtably world class pieces of equipment. Our Astute class submarines are equally world class and perhaps the world’s best. We can rely on critical alliances such as NATO, AUKUS, the Tempest triad and Five Eyes to act as force multipliers that expand our capabilities. The problem is not our equipment, our ingenuity, our capability nor our diplomacy. It is our capacity.
Britain’s ever-shrinking fleet size is not an accident, it is and always has been a political choice, usually determined by economic conditions. Now in 2023, with Britain’s fleet over 70% smaller than it was during the Falklands war, and with the government suddenly finding hundreds of billions of pounds over the course of the pandemic, it is difficult to suggest anything except that when it comes to sea power, our weakness is a political decision.
As we concluded earlier, Britain is and will likely continue to be an island. On this island, there is an ongoing and heated debate over plans to cut the British Army to under 80,000 troops, with worries it will reduce the capability of our land based forces. Yet whether we have 50,000 or 200,000 soldiers is irrelevant if we do not have the naval capability to deploy them anywhere, at any time, whenever we choose. To do this, we need more ships.
Britain must build more warships
As of 2023, Britain does not have enough surface vessels to simultaneously meet its NATO requirements, patrol seas around Britain and its Overseas Territories, protect crucial sea lanes in the Gulf and Indo-Pacific, and deploy one – let alone two – supercarriers without assistance from allied navies. In peacetime, this is merely embarrassing. During times of war however, such as conflicts involving Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia or China, this is a crippling vulnerability that poses a list of very difficult questions that successive Governments have been ignoring.
Glancing over the already over-stretched maintenance capacity of our shipyards, are we completely certain that we can count on escort ships from Scandinavia, France or the US to be available to escort British supercarriers on an expedition? During times of conflict, will the capacity of our allies to provide escort ships not be diminished by more direct threats to their own security at sea?
If they cannot support us, from where will Royal Navy redeploy the required escort destroyers, submarines, and frigates instead? From joint NATO patrols? That could equally undermine defences elsewhere, such as in the Baltic, as well as souring relations with NATO and JEF allies and potentially diminishing trust in British security agreements elsewhere. From our overseas territories? This takes time and would leave places like the Falklands and the Gulf more vulnerable. From British home waters? We would leave ourselves more open to attack and more vulnerable to sabotage of the Nord Stream variety.
Returning to naval maintenance capabilities and in the context of a historically small fleet, are we sure that Britain can repair and maintain all its ships quickly and efficiently, to ensure it does not become victim to attrition in times of conflict? Do we have enough available dockyards, crews and spare parts? Does the UK have enough steel plants and coking furnaces to supply the required steel to maintain and expand a navy during war time? If we do not, and we must import it from somewhere, we must ask again, from where will we redeploy remaining ships to ensure our supplies arrive safely, without being stopped or impeded by rogue states? What about the other 99% of the UK seaborne supply chain that nearly 70,000,000 people depend on to eat, to keep the lights on and to prosper?
The goal: Have capacity to deploy two fully-loaded carrier strike groups simultaneously whilst maintaining all current naval defence commitments – without allied assistance.
To provide a credible answer to those questions, Britain must increase the size of its surface fleet. Even more so, it must bring online new dockyards, renovate disused ones, expand existing ones, increase its maintenance capabilities, increase stockpiles of spare parts and onshore or ‘friend-shore’ critical parts of its shipbuilding supply chains where possible. Yes, this would be expensive, but it would simultaneously drive growth across the UK as supply chains across Britain rise to the challenge. If this gap in capability is perceived as the genuine security threat that it is, then borrowing tens of billions to fix it may not feel like much of a sacrifice in the long run.
Britain’s medium-long term goal should be to have enough ships to deploy and fully escort both of its fully equipped supercarriers, simultaneously, without help from our allies. This will allow it to fight two conflicts simultaneously, which would prove a powerful deterrence to China, Russia and Iran, as well as against any attack on UK territories or British-flagged commercial vessels . At the same time, it must also have enough available ships remaining to fulfil all NATO requirements, patrol its home seas, patrol key supply lines, protect overseas territories and have ships left over for expeditions and to cover for scheduled maintenance.
This would likely require a doubling in the overall fleet size of the Royal Navy, prioritising frigates and destroyers alongside submarines, with added focus on merchant vessels and auxiliary ships. In the short term, extending the life of the aging Type 23 frigates could help fill some gaps whilst the Type 26’s start to come online, but this requires an increase in maintenance capacity. Therefore, the government’s first priority should be to increase shipyard capacity across the UK, by opening new dockyards, training new dock workers, strengthening supply chains and building stockpiles of parts, in order to prepare for operating a larger fleet.
Most notably, the industrial and economic growth a naval expansion of this kind could drive would predominantly be felt in poorer areas of the UK, industrial areas that were most hit by the effects of decades of globalisation and offshoring, such as the North of England, South Wales, parts of Scotland and most crucially, Northern Ireland. Building on the success of the recent UK-European agreement on the Northern Ireland border, a massive increase in its already reviving shipbuilding industry would be both symbolic and would drive growth in the Northern Irish economy. It would be an engine to power the governments so called ‘levelling up’ plan to boost growth and prosperity in areas outside of London.
We cannot forget that Britain is an island and a maritime power. There will be no ‘global Britain’ without a global navy to project it. Our weakness is a political choice, and it requires a political choice to fix it. Yet the opportunity cost of doing nothing pales in comparison to the benefits of acting now, especially in light of China’s massive naval expansion over the last decade and what that means for security in the Indo-Pacific.
Put under serious pressure, at its current size the Royal Navy is not capable of exerting continuous, overwhelming nor consistent force when and where it is required around the globe, without sacrificing security in other areas. Should a future conflict arise, it will be forced to make sacrifices and Britain will bear the associated costs, with the government finding its hands are tied as it adapts to painful realities on the ground. Which, ironically, has been the story of the Royal Navy over the last six decades.