“You’ve got this crunch period between planning to fix the frigate gap and it actually being fixed, because of the timelines for ship construction,” explains Emma Salisbury, a naval expert at the Council on Geostrategy.
“It’s a really difficult problem, because there isn’t really much you can do. Ships take as long as they take to build and, although there are some things you can do to speed things up a bit, you can’t just turn them out in a couple of weeks.
“There is going to be a period where we’ll have to do what we can with the fleet we have, while we wait for these new ships to come into service.”