For many decades, the Royal Navy’s
thinking and therefore its shipbuilding has remained unchanged. We have had capital ships: aircraft carriers, helicopter carriers and amphibious platforms. We’ve also had frigates and destroyers (the backbone)
to hunt submarines and provide area air defence – but more often than not to look like a warship and do warship type influence operations. Then there were an array of smaller ships for charting and patrolling the oceans and hunting both mines and maritime crooks such as fish thieves. Finally there are two types of
nuclear powered submarines: attack boats and the strategic deterrent.
But when you look at what we want from our navy now and the resources that are available to do it, no matter how much of a traditionalist you are, it is impossible to see how this model is sustainable. For navies to function across the huge range of tasks they need to undertake they need both balance and mass. The current Royal Navy has good balance from diplomacy to fighting but is woefully short on mass. You don’t need to be a maritime historian to know how that ends when the shooting starts. I will leave the Royal Fleet Auxiliary out of it for this article as I’ve written about them recently.
Focusing on surface vessels, there are three broad types of ships that we now need to consider adding to the traditional mix outlined above. Actually, we don’t need to consider it, we need to do it. These are ships taken up from trade, medium sized low- or un-crewed vessels and autonomous small craft and weapons.
Ships taken up from trade include vessels like
HMS Stirling Castle (mine warfare), RFA
Proteus and HMS
Scott (surveillance) and HMS
Protector (ice patrol). These are ships built to a commercial specification that the Navy then leases or buys for use on operations. They are not fighting ships; their lack of self-defence systems, watertight integrity and machinery plants do not permit it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have tremendous utility. It’s a truism of navies that they spend more of their time setting the conditions to avoid fighting than actually fighting – this is where these ships sit. And given how hard it is to fund and sustain the high end stuff, we need to get better at buying and running them.
Autonomous vessels can be split into two: those
that are large enough to operate on their own and those that need support from a mother ship. I’m going to focus on the former although one only needs a cursory knowledge of this subject to know that for both, the rate at which we are progressing in this field, and the rate at which we need to, are wildly different.
As is so often the case, enter the US and their recently announced Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) programme. This is a fascinating programme that is set to move from concept to prototype to delivery in less than two years, the kind of pace that would make traditional ship manufacturers weep. It is still some way short of Ukraine’s ability to build new systems but it’s fast for a peacetime programme.
The three models have been outlined with how many containers they can carry seemingly determining their size. The largest will take “four or more” ISO containers, the middle one takes two of the same and the smallest, one half-size container.
Endurance for the larger one is around the 60 day mark “without crew intervention”. Here I have a query because in a ship roughly 60m long and with a 3m draft, unless you’re going everywhere at two knots, then this is a stretch but I’ll leave it for now. The larger two also have optional crewing options. In the real world they’ll probably have people aboard a lot of the time, as security guards if nothing else, but the people will tend to get off once the risk level goes up.
What these low- or un-crewed MASC ships will be used for is less clear at this stage, but from the work the US is doing on containerised weapons systems, and the way one of the models has its drive train configured, it looks as though they will be focussed on anti-air capabilities (traditionally conducted by destroyers) and anti-submarine (frigate).
On this subject, I do find myself disagreeing with doctrine purists who always want to see ships being built in response to a carefully crafted master strategy. In reality, the things you are going to want your ships to do haven’t changed at either the soft or hard power end of the continuum for a long time. Diplomacy, disaster relief, freedom of navigation, littoral operations, strike, anti-submarine and air operations remain constant no matter how potential adversaries develop methods to try to deny them. This is the eternal cat and mouse of weapons development with the only certainty being that if you wait too long for the perfect kit, or because your system is slow, or because you don’t have any cash, you will fall behind. In other words, just build them, the rest will follow.
From a UK perspective there are at least four uses for ships like this that are blindingly obvious. There will be others. Missile defence is one and would work equally well in far blue water or around the UK. It would be far better to have a dozen of these ships with containerised
SM-6 interceptors (this has been trialled by the US) than hugely expensive systems ashore that can only do one job – or just one or two exquisite destroyers with large crews in 15 or 20 years’ time. The containerised data links and ability to transmit a radar picture to these vessels exist now. If we insist on full-fat destroyers with 100+ missile tubes they will cost billions apiece and we will never have enough. We should instead conceive our destroyers as flotilla leaders for MASC-type vessels with containerised weapons to bulk up our firepower.
Likewise with anti-submarine warfare (ASW) in the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap and beyond, low- or un-crewed ships with containerised kit could be vital. Anyone who has spent a life at sea gets nervous when tech companies start talking about deploying small short-range systems from mother ships for ASW because it is so often conducted in conditions where just walking around the ship is a challenge, much less deploying and recovering smaller craft. These larger MASC vessels avoid that problem. Another solution would be to deploy one-shot small systems: we already do this with sonobuoys. If it’s cheap and numerous enough, this will work.
A flotilla of medium autonomous ships with
an exquisite Type 26 frigate somewhere in the vicinity running the show starts sounding a lot like balance and mass. A single Type 26, no matter how lovely, does not. And there are companies like Ocean Infinity who have already built medium sized autonomous ships. Defence should allocate resources to allow the Royal Navy to buy them now.
Caveats do come to mind on unmanned ships: enemies will probably be much more willing to attack or sink them than manned ones, or even board and seize them. Certainly the bigger types need to be optionally crewed. It will probably often be worthwhile to have a highly skilled maintenance troubleshooter or two aboard, or an experienced bridge watchstander for crowded waters. But they won’t always be needed, and there will certainly be no need for the large numbers of semi-skilled maintainers, sensor and weapon operators, cooks, administrators etc that make up most of today’s warship crews.
There is also of course the risk that unmanned ships might be hacked – though this is also becoming a risk with manned systems.
Very little of this discussion is new: the Strategic Defence Review refers to much of it and Naval plans talk about uncrewed sloops (the Type 92) but that’s the point – they’re being discussed. We need to take a leaf out of the US playbook and just buy it.
The Royal Navy has some excellent kit and people but is so short on both that its
deterrent effect has been eroded. This is a quick and relatively cheap way out of this hole. Let’s see if the US, whose macro fleet issues are similar – albeit much scaled up – can do any better.
www.telegraph.co.uk