Trump plans to rebuild the US Navy in Korean shipyards. We already know this works well
It’s time to give up trying to revive dead builders and just get some ships
09 January 2025 3:04pm GMT
Getting our warships and maritime weapons from overseas, as a reality, has been around for a long time. It’s tempting to imagine some halcyon era when we built everything ourselves and luxuriated in the security-of-supply and job creation implicit in doing so. In reality, this has rarely been the case.
As far back as the
Tudor era we occasionally acquired ships from
foreign shipyards, particularly in France, Spain and the Low Countries (modern-day Netherlands and Belgium) who were renowned for advanced shipbuilding techniques. In the
17th century we turned to Dutch expertise for certain specialised vessels and by the
18th and 19th we were making full use of our colonies. During the
Napoleonic wars, most
Royal Navy officers considered that captured French and Spanish ships were better than British-built ones – and there were certainly enough in the RN for them to know.
Likewise with weapons. In the
18th century the Swedes in particular, and the Dutch, both made excellent cannons which we used against all comers. In the
Second World War half the fleet had Swedish Bofors guns and the
Lend-Lease Act saw huge supplies of almost everything from the US. This has been followed by perhaps the meatiest weapons collaboration to date, the
Trident D5 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile. There are many other examples
: today’s Type 45 destroyers, though notionally British built, fire French-made missiles using a mostly French and Italian combat system which runs, of course, on American software.
In simplistic terms, when making these decisions there is a trade-off between organic control, security and UK jobs at one end of the spectrum vs the pace and cost benefits of buying ‘off the shelf’ at the other. The effectiveness of the ship or system should dominate the discussion but often doesn’t feature at all.
Problems occur, though, when the place on the spectrum is selected for political, not military, expedience. Here the debate gets emotional, particularly when Ministers and Admirals want different things, which of course they often do. The prospect of manufacturing jobs in Britain now, often regardless of how few and short-lived they may be, generally overrides any considerations of cost, capability and delay.
In the US this tension also exists even though in recent history they have often had the infrastructure, industrial capacity and money to go it alone.
When they have imported a design, such as the much loved Knox class (based on the Italian Lupo) and now the Constellation class (based on the French and Italian Fregate Europeenne Multi-Mission – FREMM – design), they have always built it in the US.
As an aside,
the Constellation class is a live case study in what happens if you select a foreign design and then meddle with it. It is now estimated that
85 per cent of the Constellation design is different to the FREMM,
undoing any savings in cost and time and throwing away most of the guarantees of capability and reliability. President-elect
Trump commented on it this week, saying,
“people playing around and tinkering and changing the design… they’re not smart and they take something and they make it worse for a lot more money”. Given how the Franken-FREMM is taking shape, this is actually quite polite.
Much of Trump’s interview was in
response to the Congressional Budget Office’s “analysis of the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan” which outlined the following key points:
First, the 2025 plan
increases shipbuilding costs by 46 per cent annually in real terms compared to recent averages. The CBO estimates $40 billion yearly over 30 years, 17 per cent above Navy projections, with the total budget rising from $255 billion to $340 billion by 2054.
Second,
the fleet would decrease to 283 ships by 2027 before growing to 390 by 2054 from the current 295. The Navy will buy 364 new ships, focusing on current generation and smaller vessels. Firepower will dip initially but increase as the fleet expands.
Third,
a significant increase in the size of the industrial base, especially for nuclear submarines, is required.
So: can’t afford the plan, will reduce in size and lethality in the short term, major industrial expansion is required to reverse this decline. This makes for difficult reading for two reasons. First,
it is clear the US cannot scale up its shipyards as it needs to on any reasonable time scale: it cannot even fully staff its existing yards, let alone open new ones. Second, you could change dollars and pounds and reduce the numbers (a lot) and a report on the Royal Navy would say almost the same.
Trump carries on in the same interview saying,
“We’re going to be announcing some things that are going to be very good having to do with the Navy. We need ships. We have to get ships… We may have to go to others, bid them out, and it’s okay to do that. We’ll bid them out until we get ourselves ready”.
Looking for signs as to
what he meant by ‘others’ and ‘bid them out’, many have looked to South Korea based on something he said
last November shortly after being elected. “The US shipbuilding industry needs South Korea’s help and cooperation. We are aware of Korea’s construction capabilities and should cooperate with Korea in repair and maintenance. I want to talk more specifically in this area.”
As if to show the Trump effect, just
the hint was enough to see Korean ship builders Hanwha Ocean and HJ Shipbuilding & Construction stock prices showing strong gains on the day (10 and 15 percent) while the shares of Hyundai’s shipbuilding subsidiaries and Samsung Heavy Industries increased a little (three percent).
It’s also
not clear if he was referring to warships or support vessels but either way, South Korea has pedigree.
He could certainly use them to build ships for the Military Sealift Command – the US equivalent of our Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Fleet auxiliaries aren’t as complicated to build as warships, though more so than most kinds of commercial shipping. But Korean yards have also produced some very complex warships, including ones carrying the powerful US-made Aegis combat system – the gold standard of warship technology.
Korea, as it happens, built our RFA Tide-class tankers back in 2017. At c £500 million for four ships, no one else could compete. The build wasn’t quite flawless but the
cost and time overruns were the smallest in living memory, by a very large margin. If we had placed follow-on orders for the planned Fleet Solid Support (FSS) ships right away we would have three of them at sea by now and this year’s Royal Navy carrier strike group deployment would not be dependent on a Norwegian support ship, as it is.
Instead, it was decided to award the solid support ships contract to a hybrid venture combining Spain’s Navantia – a real working shipbuilder – and Belfast’s moribund Harland & Wolff yard, which hadn’t actually built a ship for many years. This scheme has been beset with issues, not least of which has been the closure of Harland and Wolff. The end result is three ships to be in service – maybe – by 2032 at roughly the same cost per vessel as the entire
Tide class.
Jobs win over cost and delay, again.
With two new classes of frigate, the last of our attack submarines and a new class of deterrent submarine in build, the Royal Navy’s warship build programme is strong. But the
existing yards, like those of the US, are at capacity and we need the replacement destroyers (Type 83) and new amphibious ships (MRSS) as a matter of urgency. There are no firm plans for these ships yet, and
we could also do with a new batch of patrol vessels (whose value for money is hard to overstate). If these things must be built in Britain we will have an awfully long wait for them. Harland & Wolff, and the equally disastrous case of Swan Hunter and the
Bay class back in the noughties, shows us that
we cannot realistically expand our shipyards any more than America can.
Donald Trump has the right idea. We need similar thinking here: it’s time to start spending our defence money on defence, not on doomed job-creation schemes. It’s probably worth noting here that
the idea that manufacturing industry is a good way to create large numbers of jobs is very, very out of date. Consider this:
Hyundai Heavy Industries’ shipbuilding division in South Korea is the biggest shipbuilder in the world. It produces most classes of warship, including submarines, as well as huge tonnages of commercial vessels.
It has around 14,000 employees. This is actually fewer people than work in the shipbuilding divisions of BAE Systems plc, which are only capable of producing sharply limited numbers of warships and auxiliaries, very slowly and expensively.
Heavy engineering is simply no longer a jobs bonanza, not if it’s going to be competitive.
We need, like Trump, to start placing our shipbuilding orders with ‘effect’ – numbers of ships for our money, the capability of them, and arrival as soon as possible – as the priority. And as Trump has realised, that’s going to mean placing the orders in Korea or other overseas yards.
