Angry Planet - What the hell happened to Britain's Royal Navy?

Episode Date: October 11, 2016

To say the Britain's Royal Navy is legendary is probably to undersell it. There have been thousands of books - fiction and non-fiction - written about its victories during the Napoleonic wars. Its a bit much to expect any organization to keep up that kind of performance for centuries, but the Royal Navy did. That's what makes its current state so surprising. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. The question you have to ask is the ability to send one fleet or one task force to one small island once. and sustain it for probably a short amount of time, does that capability qualify you as a global naval power?

Probably not. To say the British Royal Navy is legendary is probably to undersell it. There have been thousands of books, fiction and nonfiction, written about its victories during the Napoleonic Wars alone. It's probably a bit much to expect any organization to keep up that kind of performance for centuries,

but the Royal Navy did. That's what makes its... current state is so surprising. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters.

And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. David Axe is the editor-in-chief of War is Boring, and he's also the author of an article that appeared on the Reuters' website, this fantastic article. which is what the U.S. should learn from Britain's dying Navy. It's still on the site. You should definitely come read it. David, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. So can you just sort of fill us in for people who haven't read the article?

What's the current state of the British Navy? Depleted. I mean, pick your point of comparison, but in the modern era, the Royal Navy is currently at a low point in terms of its numerical strength, and I would argue it's technological. logical edge. So historically, Britain's one of the great naval powers. When did that start to shift? So the peak of British naval power was in the Napoleonic era when the Royal Navy could project overwhelming power anywhere in the world and called upon a truly global network of bases

supporting thousands of warships manned by probably the finest combat sailors in history. So the peak was more than 200 years ago. The Royal Navy remained a dominant force through World War I and to a great extent in World War II. But, you know, the last great war, World War II was an inflection point for many aspects of British power in the world. and certainly marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire. And British naval power also took a kind of sharp downward turn during that war.

It suffered greatly, especially in the early stages of the war, from Japanese air attack and German submarine attack. But more importantly, on an industrial scale, the British simply could not keep up with, not so much with the Germans and Japanese, but with the United States. So with America's rise as the new dominant global naval power, the Royal Navy kind of receded to a second or third or fourth place, depending on how you want to measure these things. I would argue that the last great demonstration of British naval power was during the Falklands War in 1982. But after that, the decline became even more precipitous.

and in the late 90s and the early 2000s, budget cuts hit very, very hard on the British fleet, to the point where today the Royal Navy could not stage an operation even nearly the same size as it did during the Falklands War. Did they have supercarriers at any point that were similar to what the U.S. currently has out at sea? The Royal Navy pioneered many aspects of naval aviation, introducing a lot of the advancements in terms of how you build a carrier and how you operate a carrier, that the United States really took and ran with, and the Japanese early in the war as well. Today, no. Now, the Royal Navy is in the process of building two new supercarriers, but considering the overall state of the fleet, those carriers may do more harm than they do good, because they're going to suck up an enormous proportion of the fleet. resources at a time when those resources might be better spent shoring up some of the basic capabilities and basic numerical strength of the British fleet. The Royal Navy currently possesses no at-sea fixed-wing aviation capability. Budget cuts in 2010 scrapped the light carriers that the

Royal Navy had relied on since the, well, basically since the Falklands operating Harrier jump jets. So we're now in a kind of a gap where alone among the world's leading navies, the Royal Navy does not have an aircraft carrier. That's going to change, but again, it may not change for the overall benefit of the fleet. David, what are the consequences for the Royal Navy because of this, beyond just prestige? It's not so much consequences for the Royal Navy. It's consequences for the United Kingdom. there's a lot less that the Royal Navy can do now than it could just a few years ago, and certainly compared to a half century ago or 200 years ago,

Great Britain simply cannot project power the way that it could before, where as recently as, say, the 1980s, the Royal Navy had at least some presence in most of the world's oceans and seas. Today, the Royal Navy can only muster a very small number of ships for limited operations, more or less one at a time. And in doing so, in mobilizing the fleet for, say, you know, a deterrence patrol in the Black Sea, which actually is not really happening, or let's say Argentina somehow magically conjured a fleet and managed to attack the Falklands again, the Royal Navy, were it to sortie to defend the Falklands in 2016,

would have to mobilize every single ship that it possibly could and would leave British home waters completely undefended, which is problematic because the world situation has changed in such a way that the Royal Navy arguably has more that it needs to do today than it did just a few years ago. So there are some very real-world consequences that sort of are results of the British fleets decline. There have been times when Russian wars,

warships have sailed near or through British waters on route to the Atlantic, which is a, you know, a demonstration of strength that in an ideal world the British would meet in kind, but there have been occasions when the Royal Navy has not been able to respond at all or swiftly to a Russian incursion or near incursion. The British used to be big players in counter piracy, sending ships to lead flotillas of allied vows. vessels patrolling, Somalia, East African waters. Not so much anymore. The Royal Navy's more or less dropped that entire commitment in favor of other things. The permanent force that protects the Falklands is much smaller than it was before. And like I said before in the event of the unlikely

event that Argentina were to invade the Falklands again, Great Britain would really struggle to deploy, you know, anything on the scale of the fleet that sailed for the Falcons in 82. Fortunately, that is not only an unlikely scenario, but even if the Argentina were to muster some kind of force, the British could still overpower that. The question you have to ask is, is the ability to send one fleet or one task force to one small island once and sustain it for, probably. probably a short amount of time. Does that capability qualify you as a global naval power? Probably not. Is there also an impact on the technology? Are they falling behind in other ways?

So, yeah, the Royal Navy is also losing its edge technologically. There was a time when the Royal Navy was on the cutting edge of many sort of facets of naval power, attack submarines many, many decades ago, carrier aviation. More recently, key technologies such as the equipment you need for hunting submarines, the British were really good at that stuff. Not so much anymore. So you can take, for example, the Royal Navy's latest warships are the type 45 destroyers. Very large vessels armed with dozens of surface-to-air missiles and a very powerful radar. And as anti-air warships as, you know, air defenders, they're pretty, sophisticated, but they lack many of the technologies that, say, an equivalent American vessel would possess. So let's take an American cruiser, a Taekonda Roga class cruiser, older than a

type 45, but roughly equivalent. Compared to a type 45, a Taekondaroga carries more surface to air missiles, and those surface to air missiles are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles in addition to shooting down aircraft. The Royal Navy's radars and missiles are not optimized. for shooting down ballistic missiles, so they have no missile defense capability, which you're seeing more and more not only in the U.S. fleet, but in allied fleets. The type 45s have no land attack capability, so where an American Ticonderoga cruiser could launch cruise missiles against targets on land, the British would have to sail within a couple miles and hit it with their five-inch guns.

The type 45s lack a meaningful anti-ship capability, which again, an equivalent American vessel possesses several weapons that can hit an enemy ship from hundreds of miles away. So while you have in the type 45s a fairly capable air defense vessel, it lacks the flexibility, the technology to do other things at the same time. And that lack of multi-mission capability means that you're getting less utility out of a single ship. So, in fact, the number of vessels that the Royal Navy has is almost artificially inflated because those vessels can do fewer things than equivalent vessels in other fleets. Is that a matter of will or money that their equipment is so behind? I mean, it sounds like behind might be a good way of putting it.

I wouldn't say it's a lack of will within the fleet by no means. I mean, in terms of training and professionalism, the Royal Navy is still a global, standard. But certainly a lack of broader political will means there's less money. And navies are expensive. There's no way around it. So if you don't pay for it, you don't get to have one. So it's the relentless budget cuts over 20 years that have slowly transformed the Royal Navy from a truly global force to kind of at best a semi-global or maybe more accurately a regional force that struggles to defend its own waters. All right, David, so what are the lessons the American military can learn here?

Pay the bill. If you want a global fleet, if you want to dominate the oceans, if you want to project your power and if you want to lead the world at sea, then it's going to cost you. It's going to cost you probably hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And I will sit here and argue that that is worth it. There's a Navy more so than an Army or an Air Force is an effective peacetime force, where an army, under many circumstances, kind of lies around in wait for some kind of terrible thing to happen,

at which point you mobilize it and send it to take. the problem. A fleet stays busy all the time because the kinds of security threats and the kinds of demonstrations of power that a Navy routinely does happen when you're not at war. Patrolling sea lanes, intercepting smugglers, deterring pirates, showing the flag so that your allies are reassured and your enemies are afraid, responding to natural disasters. these are all things that navies do when they're not shooting at each other, and these are supremely useful things. So as a peacetime investment, a Navy is very much worth it

in ways that armies and air forces really aren't. And then to say nothing of when the crap does hit the fan and you find yourself at war, navies do different things that are still worth the investment. Specifically thinking about the war in Iraq, which Britain was an active participant in. Was the Navy a help to the United States, or did it just have to sit it out, basically? During the invasion in 2003, yes. You know, it's sad that that sort of last gasp of British naval power supported an unnecessary invasion,

an unnecessary and self-defeating invasion. But yes, the British, the Royal Navy did deploy in 2003 to support the invasion with, you know, a more significant force than it could muster today. And does that change the way the U.S. has to interact militarily with the world? I mean, was this a key ally? Yes, it was. And still is, if anything, the United Kingdom relies more on the United States as an ally and more. on its other allies today than it did just a few years ago because it lacks its own naval forces to do things that it needs to do. You know, for example, protecting nuclear ballistic missile submarines as they go out on patrol is something the Royal Navy struggles to do now.

And there was talk of sharing that responsibility with the French. And where the Royal Navy has given up its leadership role in, say, for example, counter-pirators, other NATO and UN allies have stepped up to fill that void. When it comes to the United States, I think the United States can rely less on the United Kingdom to be a kind of strong partner at sea, but the other side of the coin is that the United Kingdom needs the United States as a strong partner at sea more than ever.

You see the United States going to see more and more with the rising Navy, of the world that are kind of, in a sense, filling that void that the Royal Navy has left in its shrinking wake. So, you know, more and more you'll see South Korean, Japanese warships sailing with, say, American task forces outdoing whatever. As some of the smaller European navies add key technological advancements, you see those ships popping up in American carrier battle groups, like the Spanish are building some very capable, or have built some very capable anti-aircraft,

anti-air destroyers. The Australians are doing the same. So these niche capabilities are very useful to the United States. And you can sort of plug those ships into things that, you know, task forces that the Americans send out for various missions or carrier battle groups that sort of routinely patrol. But you see fewer and fewer British ships in those formations. So one question specifically about nuclear

nuclear missile submarines. Trident submarines have been hugely controversial in Great Britain, and the vote to leave the EU could actually have an impact on that, depending on Scotland, and where Scotland goes. But do you have an idea why it's so important for the British to have the capability in actual nuclear missile subs? Is that something that's part of the consciousness or genuinely useful? More so than very recently. So where many countries possess, many of the world's big nuclear powers, possess a triad of nuclear forces,

where they can deploy sea-based, air-based, and land-based nuclear weapons, the British only have sea-based. They've gotten rid of their other nukes. So Great Britain's sole nuclear deterrent is its nuclear ballistic missile submarines. Those are expensive vessels. The existing class, the vanguards, are aging out, and the Royal Navy needs new boomers. They're called, um, ballistic missile submarines are called boomers. London has recently signed off on a program to replace the four existing subs on a one-for-one basis in order to seamlessly maintain the at-sea deterrent. That is an enormously expensive proposition costing billions of pounds. And I think the debate over that has probably made more UK citizens aware of the importance of these vessels.

So really, and asking yourself if the United Kingdom needs boomers, needs ballistic missile submarines, really what you're asking yourself is, does the United Kingdom need nukes? Because at present, it's only option. You maintain that or you give up nuclear weapons entirely. That's an argument you can have. Unilateral disarmament would be an interesting experiment. But at present, no country is unilaterally giving up their nukes. And Great Britain is certainly in line with that thinking.

So, yeah, those ships were important. I think there was never any doubt that the Royal Navy was going to get new ballistic missile submarines, the question was how many of them would it get and how capable would they be? But the answer is now that they're going to get a one-for-one replacement for the older vessels and they should be pretty sophisticated. All right, David, earlier you pointed to budget cuts is one of the big reasons for the current state of the Royal Navy. And I'm wondering if there's a way to reform a budget and still pay the bill, as you said. And what should America look out for? Are you saying do better with the same amount of money? Correct. How do we do that?

Well, yes. So fraud, waste, and abuse are problems in probably any government agency anywhere in the world. Military is included. Navy is certainly included. I would argue, though, that the Royal Navy, its problem is not that it squanders a lot of money, you know, through totally wasteful spending. It's just that there isn't enough money. Now, you could ask the question. question of priorities. So given that you only have X amount of money to spend, how do you spend that? And leaving aside, you know, just egregious fraud and waste, I'm talking about perfectly debatable points of priorities. How do you spend that money if you know there's not more coming down the pipeline? And here I think the Royal Navy has made a mistake. And that mistake is the supercarriers.

So after this several-year gap following the retirement of the last of the Invincible Class Light carriers, the sort of Falkland War, Falklands War veterans, the Royal Navy is building two new carriers to replace the three invincibles. Actually, where they're four? Anyway, to replace the invincibles and also to replace some of the amphibious ships. So the Royal Navy is getting these two huge, 65,000 tonne displacement, slightly smaller than an American Nimitz class. conventionally powered, but gigantic. But probably by the time they enter service, the world's second largest carriers by class.

So the Royal Navy is getting two of these at enormous cost. I think the first is going to commission in 2018, Queen Elizabeth, followed by Prince of Wales a few years later. And they're built to embark fixed-wing aircraft, F-35B, stealth fighters. and these are, without a doubt, assuming production that the manufacturing wraps up without any glitches and the training and everything and integration of the F-35s goes well, assuming all that works out, and it should, these are going to be enormously capable vessels. So for all of the sudden, after years of having no carrier aviation at all, the Royal Navy will possess probably the world's second most powerful carrier fleet. after the United States, with China, France, and Russia kind of nipping at the British heels. The problem there is that these two gigantic supercarriers with their self-theirce,

are going to be the centerpieces of a very fragile and small fleet. So when you deploy a supercarrier, typically you surround it with other vessels, escorts, support vessels and it's not so much what the carrier can do it's what that entire carrier battle group can do with adequate protection you can sail it into enemy controlled seas and you know fight your way to your objective with the with enough support vessels you can keep that ship at sea for a long time with the right mix of vessels with varying capabilities a carrier battle group can even do things like respond to a hurricane or a tsunami and be an at-sea humanitarian relief airfield.

We've seen American carriers do that time after time. So you want to have a large and diverse carrier battle group to make that carrier truly useful. A carrier sailing by itself is not terribly useful. It can't sustain itself very long, and it certainly can't defend itself as well as it could with escorts. So an American battle group, an American, American. American Carrier Battle Group or French Carrier Battle Group or a Chinese carrier battle group or Russian is, well, eight, 10 vessels, often including a submarine.

And the Royal Navy will really struggle to put together a carrier battle group that large. So the Royal Navy's entire escort fleet right now, that is to say destroyers and frigates, the kind of workhors of the fleet of the fleet. In theory, numbers 19 vessels, 13 frigates and six destroyers. In reality, one of those frigates and one of those destroyers, one of each type is tied up at the pier for lack of crew or because of a mechanical malfunction. So in practice, the British escort fleet is actually 17 vessels, which is not very many, considering you can only deploy about a third of those at a time.

The other third or the other two thirds are in refit or training or on route somewhere. So you've only really got one-third of those that can fight at any given moment. So how many is that? What's one-third of 17? Five and a half? So you've got five-and-a-half escort vessels for your supercarrier. And that's assuming that you don't send escort vessels to do anything else at that time. So imagine a few years down the line the British have their supercarriers.

They could send one of them somewhere by surrounding that ship with all the other available warships in the Royal Navy. to do one thing. Now, compare that to, say, the U.S. Navy, which has 10 full-size aircraft carriers plus nine assault ships that are just slightly smaller than the British supercarriers. And the United States can deploy routinely sends several of those with escorts and support ships on frontline patrols or for air strikes on ISIS or whatever. The Chinese, when they sail their one training carrier and their building. building their own homemade, a new homemade carrier to replace that.

Anyway, when they sail that, they can surround it with a dozen escorts because they have a large and diverse fleet. Same with the Russians, to a lesser extent, the French. So the British are building a carrier force that is hollow. Actually, that metaphor is wrong. It's strong at its core because the carriers are impressive. It's weak on its periphery because it lacks the vessels to support and to protect the carriers. and considering also the enormous expense for the cost of one supercarrier and its air wing,

you could buy a dozen escort vessels. Considering the high cost and the kind of weakness in the overall organization, I'm not sure that buying two supercarriers was a great investment. The Royal Navy might have benefited from simply buying more frigates, more amphibious warfare ships, ships that won't sort of suck up the whole rest of the fleet in order to do one thing once. So was that about prestige? Is that why they chose what they chose? So yes and no. I mean, carriers are definitely prestige items. They're impressive. They possess a lot of potential combat capability. You don't always have to use in order for the ship itself to be useful. It's a deterrent. It can be a deterrent. I'm not sure that it was simply the prestige that motivated British thinking. I think it was the lengthiness.

of the planning process. You know, the politics of deciding to build a supercarrier and then the process of choosing a builder and building the ship and fitting out the ship and crewing the ship and commissioning the ship and training the crew and adding the air wing. That takes, if you're starting from scratch, which the British kind of were in this sense,

it could take 20 years. So I think when the British began planning for these carriers, way back in the late 90s, they imagined the fleet, the Royal Navy of, you know, circa 20, 2018 would be a bigger and more robust and more diverse force. It's not. So these carriers have been in the works for years, many, many years, and they're finally showing up at a time when the balance of the fleet is at a low point. So, and they will still be impressive.

They will still convey that prestige, and they will still possess greater combat capability than the light carriers they're replacing, albeit with a gap. I just worry about, you know, I think saner planners with greater foresight might have done better to buy a larger number of cheaper ships rather than pouring such an enormous proportion of the fleet's dwindling resources into two. Can I ask just one last question. Do you see what's happened to Great Britain's military as a prologue for the United States or an unlikely path for the United States to travel down? Yeah, I don't think there are any signs that that's happening. And the reasons are probably

cultural. High levels of military spending, they enjoy wide bipartisan support in the United States. So, you know, regardless of your political affiliations or your age, your assessments, sex, your class, your socioeconomic class, pretty much all Americans are in favor of a strong defense. And Americans have grown accustomed to such high levels of defense spending for so long that I don't really see that changing. In fact, at present, right now the United States is still by far the world's biggest spender when it comes to the military. And despite years of budget cuts, still, that again have resulted in a slightly smaller but still largest military budget in the world, and still despite several years of sort of post-occupation, post-Iraq and Afghanistan occupation,

although you could argue those occupations have not ended. But anyway, those cuts under the Obama administration have reached, I think, a low point, you know, reached their deepest point. the only debate now between the two major political parties is how much more should we spend? Not should we spend more? The answer, of course, there is, yes, of course we should spend more, but how much more? So I think, so let's just, let's winnow this down to the, you know, the presidential election. Regardless of who's elected in November, I think you'll see better than sustained military spending.

You'll see more military spending. So, no, I just don't think there's any near-term prospect of the United States, of the U.S. Navy following the Royal Navy's trajectory, downward trajectory. In fact, right now, the U.S. Navy is getting larger where the Royal Navy is still shrinking. So there's been, again, bipartisan campaign for about a decade now to expand the U.S. Navy. And it's working, slowly, but it's working. Well, thank you very much. fascinating conversation, and we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. Thank you for talking to us, David.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for listening to This Week's show. If you enjoyed listening to it half as much as we enjoyed producing it, then we enjoyed it twice as much. And you should probably subscribe. We also love it when you tell us what you think about the show on iTunes and Twitter. We are at war underscore college. also glad to get your ideas for future shows, so don't hesitate to send them our way.

Bore College was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Hedick. Matthew Galt co-hosts, wrangles the guests, and projects a general air of calm. The show is produced by Bethel Hobtay, who keeps us honest and in tune.