Sea Control - Sea Control 471 - British Coastal Forces with Andrew Young

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

Links1. (Re)Learning Old Tricks: The Royal Navy’s Coastal Forces Squadron, by Richard Skelton and Andrew Young, RUSI, July 6, 2023.   2. Sea Control 421 - Uncommon Courage: Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War 2 with Julia Jones, CIMSEC, March 23, 2023.3. Sea Control 458 - Destroyer Diplomacy with Dr. Jayne Friend, CIMSEC, August 31, 2023.4. Sea Control 421 - Uncommon Courage: Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War 2 with Julia Jones, CIMSEC, March 23, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Andy Young to discuss British Coastal Forces. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie. Here at SimSec, we aim to further the international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. You'll probably enjoy our new series on notes to the new CNO. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication.

And with that, Kimber's Mountain. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Andrew Young, and we're going to discuss his article, co-written with Richard Skelton, relearning old tricks the royal navy's coastal forces squadron so andy welcome aboard could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background please uh certainly um thank you for having me i've really been looking forward to this um so i'm a former royal navy training management officer uh which means i've had opportunity to work across the whole of the

royal navy um at all levels from recruits for sea lord uh currently i work with the royal navy Strategic Studies Centre, which is the Navy's internal think tank. And away from all of that, I'm a first year PhD candidate at King's College London's Lawton Naval History Unit. Was any of that time spent at FOST? So officially worked for FOST under the Naval Education and Training Services Group, where we went out and we assured education and training for the vessels which were deployed, which for me was primarily the hydrographic survey, meteorological, the four deployed offshore patrol vessels and the Falkland Islands guard ship and the Antarctic patrol vessel.

Did you also have a ridiculous British title like N432 Alpha Decimal 3 Special DeFost? No, no. Mine was literally net ops seven. There were supposedly seven of us, but there were only five in place at the time. Disappointing. Disappointing. But as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. Andy, we'll go back in time now to World War Two. What is the Royal Navy? What did the Royal Navy use its coastal forces for during World War Two? um so primarily during the second world war the royal navy had taken on the lessons that it learned in the first world war uh where it first really experimented with having coastal

motorboats and the idea behind it was that a coastal force or a coastal motorboat flotilla can really close with an enemy coastline in an a2ad infested world primarily mines and shore batteries, radar-controlled shore batteries, in ways that larger surface vessels can't. And this was used to great effect in the First World War and in the Russian Civil War, where in fact the Royal Navy managed to get some of its coastal motorboats into the Caspian Sea, which is rather reminiscent of our own Royal Navy and US Navy shenanigans on the Great Lakes in the early 19th century. But anyway, come 1939, and it was recognized, again, that coastal forces would be a significant force multiplier for the Royal Navy, both in a defensive and offensive role.

Why? Well, because these are small, fast, and for want of a better word, agile ships that sport relatively heavy armament, certainly capable of disabling, if not sinking, destroys or cruises, if Handel correct me. And the coastal flotillas had a really important role in the close blockade of the channel. So harassing enemy shipping, dominating the channel in North Sea and doing that either through aggressive patrolling or supporting mine laying efforts. Interestingly, one of the tactics developed by the Royal Navy in this period was the use of captain class frigates as coastal forces control frigates. basically it has sent some mothership for a squadron of motor gun or motor torpedo boats and a precursor to more modern distributed maritime operations by the war's end there are circa 25 000 personnel in coastal forces flotillas with some 2000 craft and these account for almost 400 enemy vessels of all kind they are involved in everything from as i said

those harassing uh and aggressive patrolling tactics to the insertion of commando forces into axis occupied areas the disruption of uh japanese amphibious warfare um operations in the far east um and uh some some also supporting uh some of our larger operations so d-day for example was screened to its flanks by large numbers of our coastal coastal forces flotillas to really keep the the german navy out of the fight uh whilst whilst d-day went ahead so we'll pause here real quickly for the listeners if you want to hear a little bit more about coastal forces and what those vessels were used for sea control 421 uncommon courage with julia jones covering her book on that subject so why did coastal forces fall out of favor during the cold war it's an

interesting one because i from a personal perspective i see it as down for three principal reasons and the first part of that is it's the advent of the nuclear and missile age which meant the tactics and techniques of war at sea were going through this as some people said through a transformation basically we are coming on to a into a more standoff over the horizon posture being able to to strike the enemy long before you're going to be able to see them And thus the idea of getting in close and launching relatively short range munitions against a ship that vastly outranged and out-missiled you was almost unthinkable. Now, one could argue that this was premature when you consider the Israeli and Sri Lankan experience in the Cold War period, where both navies initially followed the UK example of building ocean-going forces, only then to recapitalize their coastal flitters when faced by an enemy who doesn't play by the same rules. And when you're actually operating in inshore waters, the brown spaces Milan Vigo talks about.

secondly and relatedly you've got the scope of the battle to come um so the royal navy in the cold war was focused quite rightly on the battle in the gi uk gap the greenland iceland uk gap this was something that that had preoccupied the royal navy when you consider that its longest running operation in the second world war was that uh that battle in the atlantic so this is going to be an anti-submarine battle it's not going to be a surface contest The coastal forces would have very limited utility should the Soviet Navy try to break out into the North Atlantic, either through the GIUK or out of the Baltic and up into the North Sea. In either case, it was argued quite cogently at the time that land and sea based air would provide the better option for defeating surface combatants. um and hunting the subsurface threat could also be done from these from the concrete battleship

or the or the carrier that's stationed quite quite far down threat um away from green and ice in the uk then the fleet was dominated by its amphibious mission so you saw particularly in the first few decades of the of the uh cold war uh the three commander brigades stationed out in the far east then uh coming closer to home into the middle east but it was there as a quick reaction force and this was something that had never really happened for the royal navy before amphibiosity was not a royal navy task um but maybe that's a conversation for another day finally it came down to resource um and that's in terms of men materiel and cash so the uk defense budget uh come the 1950s was entering a period of relative decline one could argue we've never

really left that and this was pretty typical for the British exchequer. Every time for the last 300 years we fought a war, we've seen costs go up through the roof and afterwards the Royal Navy and the British Defence Establishment is scaled back quite hard. So the RN was effectively given a choice. It could have the high-end blue water fleet that is the hallmark of a major navy or focus on doing things closer to home. Now this went in hand for those first two points really and looking at that type of battle that was going to be fought, the threat was no longer in the Channel or North Sea or the Western approaches, but had been pushed further away to the north and further east away from UK shores.

Therefore, a more focused fleet was required. The UK could not afford to devote the time, money, personnel and material to maintaining large coastal flotillas for what was seen as discretionary tasks for home defence and whose operational utility, as it currently stood then, was largely confined to small wars in the Middle and Far East in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And that was a mission that was really discounted after the 1968 retreat from east of Suez. So initially, the Royal Navy retained some coastal capability, predominantly as harbour or inshore patrol boats, particularly for the overseas stations. but more and more those tasks were given over to local reserve or auxiliary units and eventually Coastal Forces was wrapped up in 1968

with only the inshore mine sweeps retained for a short period and even those were disposed of by the 70s. The vestiges of Coastal Forces was retained in the purchase of the Archer Class P2000s in the 80s but these were tenders so they're unarmed and are used primarily or were used primarily as navigational training vessels with university Royal Naval Units. So why did the squadron come back in 2020 and what sort of assets are assigned? So in 2020, you've got a new situation that's arising with the Royal Navy in some respects, but you've really got to go back to the 1980s and the purchase of the Archer-class P-2000s.

And they were purchased primarily as a number of tenders for insured navigation work. They're well designed for that designated purpose, that inshore navigational and ship handling. They displace about 53 tons. They have a shallow draft of about just shy of two meters. And they're just shy of 21 meters long, which means that they are very small, very capable vessels. And as I say, they're tenders. They're not actually able to be described as these larger THOS aircraft, et cetera, or patrol craft. um we purchased 16 of them 14 which essentially go to uh university royal naval units um and two

are initially part of an overseas squadron based in cyprus um and they're pooting about doing training for for university students uh for seaman officers who can't get enough uh sea time they need to go and freshen up on their inshore training um and ship handling training as well for officers to watch. In 2014, the Royal Navy decided that they needed a better avenue for bringing on a new generation of seaman officers. So the Small Vessel Command Initiative delinked the P2000s from the ERNUs. This is in part to increase the command opportunity for junior warfare officers, but also recognition that other branches of the RN could undertake the ERNU, that university or naval unit command role further by delinking the two the rn could get more

availability out of the vessels without impacting other activities earlier activities so this is a win-win what were they using them for primarily as op4 um so mimicking the the fast attack craft swarms that we were seeing coming out of places like iran for ships during workup deployment to the middle east and gulf regions um the first patrol boat squadron as it then was was expanded in 2019 and was rebranded coastal forces squadron with the intent to create an operationally viable flotilla of inshore patrol vessels with a mandate to explore and experiment new doctrine so it was really this confluence of things where we recognized we didn't have enough training we need to get more out of the holes that we had and we had this these readily available assets

there, which could link the two together. I'm going to go off script a little bit here with the next question here. And if you can't respond, just tell me and we'll move along. But as I've watched the deployment of HMS Tamar, HMS Fay, and then heard some of the responses to your earlier questions here, have any of the uses of these smaller vessels and what you found them suited for caused any sort of internal discussion about rethinking naval diplomacy, just because the smaller vessels actually tend to be, in my opinion, more effective at the naval diplomacy piece because you are bridge wing to bridge wing with a lot of the partner nations that we're visiting. Whereas if you show up with something like a Darien-class vessel, you are looking down,

like literally and figuratively kind of looking down at the people that you're working with here from, like, I mean, that thing looks like a battleship compared to a patrol vessel. Whereas that patrol vessel again you're looking straight across it at the other captain eye to eye and it's it's just easier to connect that way it is very much a if you and i go back as a historian i go back to the 18th and 19th centuries um there are certain things you can do with a lighter touch on the tiller as it were and with with sending a vessel that's less less of a status symbol than you can do sometimes with with the major warships and the major major vessels sometimes you do need that major vessel for example one of the one of the type 45s transiting through

international waters off crimea that sends a very clear message but as you say if you want to be going in and doing navigational training opening up partnerships with uh with host nations if you want to have that light touch get them over have a talk have a really do the soft diplomacy option then yes having something which isn't as imposing isn't quite so much of a brute well it's the hammer and nail you've got to have that that swiss swiss army knife toolkit and these vessels okay they're not going to be um up threat during a peer-on-peer competition but that's not their job unless you're going to go down the Israeli route and that littoral fast attack craft route and you are going to upgun them and you're going to put something on them that can cause serious damage.

But at that person-to-person level, there's so much more that can be done by taking on board a few of the, for example, the Omanis or even the Yemeni Coast Guard when we were still operating and still training them onto a smaller vessel and just going, look, these are the basics. Let's get these right before we teach you how to kick down doors in other parlance. Yeah. And there's an entire other discussion to be had that we could probably spend a separate 45 minutes on about the value of upgunning some of these vessels to do some of the things where we could actually then go and learn from some of these nations that are operating smaller combatants but uh what has coastal forces accomplished since it was reconstituted back

in 2020 i know you've touched on some bits and pieces of this and i mentioned tomorrow but if you have anything else yeah so in some respects we've got to de-link from what uh the the river uh the batch two river class uh offshore patrol vessels are doing out in the pacific and also in the in the mediterranean and in the atlantic um and the caribbean so though because those are going to be are persistently for deployed vessels platforms and doing that that soft gen diplomacy piece flying the flag and and building relationships one of the things that we're looking at with or the the uh coastal forces squadron are doing is starting to build relationships with partners closer to home now the first sort of 18 months of uh of of uh coastal

forces being stood up was of course during the pandemic so not much happened um in it was them finding their feet but that gave them time to actually set the organization in place and do that that backroom stuff that needs to happen for any organization especially a new organization to be to be put on a secure footing so that's not to denigrate that and say that nothing happened a lot happened behind the scenes but the first real impact that they had coastal forces squadron had and the first mission set they were given as an operational entity was for op isotrope now op isotrope uh was the rn contribution to dealing with small boats crossing the channel and if we take the politics out of that away from it for a minute because there are significant politics

around that mission um this was a successful demonstration of what the squadron could do and and could achieve it we brought together six of or they brought together six of 14 vessels um stationed them in a harbor which they wouldn't normally operate out of on the south coast they rotated their crews through so they kept the hulls going and they just rotated the crews through um uh through that up and normal duties and in a hark back to those coastal forces control frigates they were guided to intercept by hms7 an offshore patrol vessel um so it was really this coordination of a number of holes to escort uh the the small boats in make sure that they the boats themselves weren't in danger of loss of life at sea um and then acting in a command

and control and that forward sensor piece which which we'll talk about in a bit now following the success of that operation and the proof of concept the squadron undertook a deployment to Norway where they operated alongside their Norwegian counterparts in the Arctic Circle this was the longest deployment of the P2000s in their history without being permanently assigned or stationed to a region so the other the the other longest really was out to Cyprus to take on duties there. But what this significantly showcased was actually what the vessels could do as they are today. Recognizing that they have significant limitations, they could fulfill about 70% of the Norwegian CB-90 mission set, including insertion of reconnaissance and

commando forces, acting as an advanced ISR platform, and posing dilemmas for an adversary by popping up rather unexpectedly on your radar when you're looking somewhere else. So you combine that with what they've been experimenting with in terms of their own doctrine, and they've been going back to the 1940s to get that doctrine, but also looking at what people like the Norwegians are doing, what the Israelis have done in the past, et cetera, et cetera. And they've been experimenting themselves as motherships for UAV and uncrewed surface vessels and as towed array platforms for albeit smaller anti-submarine warfare mission sets so there are

some significant limitations to the vessels not just down to the fact that they are 40 years old now and these are 1980s vessels designed for training so they're reduced in size they're less than 21 meters they're venerable internally with their electric electrical and mechanical fits and wiring their engine fit is not ideal they can go up to circa 45 knots if they've got the right engines they've got a great plastic hull it's a planing hull so they have the capability there but they also have a lack of organic offensive and defensive suites and typically they're fitted for but not with an erlikon and gpmg mounts um they've got p very poor uh electronic warfare fit as it as standard but but again we've got to go back to what they were designed for and the same

with their comms fits i mean so all of these things would need to be overcome they are actually looking at what comes after the p2000s because of this this venerability in in the platform and significant work has to be done to bring them up to scratch for the kind of operations envisioned in the future and to meet their full potential. I think this is a great reason for them to look back at what was done during the Second World War. And again, I would refer you back to Uncommon Courage with Julia Jones. And I think one of the major lessons for me from reading that book was because I was very skeptical about some of the platforms that the U.S. was using. But the lesson from that book is in any sort of great power conflict,

anything that floats, you can find a use for. If it floats, you will find a use for it. So all the things that you described, particularly what they're doing up in and around the fjords there in Norway, is it going to decide the conflict? No. Is it going to help? Unquestionably. But what's the benefit of investing in smaller units like this?

I know we've covered a lot of this already, but if you have anything to add, please do. Is the Royal Navy moving to do that? Sounds like the answer to that second part is yes. Yes, I would say definitively yes. Okay, I've covered a lot about the physical element. The reality is that what coastal forces offer is much more in the conceptual and moral component of fighting power. um they're an adjunct physically for all the reasons that you've just said they're not going to be battle winning enough themselves but they do do have scope which i'll come to in a second

bit but primarily i see it as being a breeding ground for operationally sound tactically savvy and most importantly aggressive commanders there is a reason why um in history all the Royal Navy's greatest admiral starting out commanding small vessels tasked with dominating patrolling and securing brown water environments. You look at Anson, you look at Hawke, Howe, Nelson all the way through to Cunningham. Every single one of them started off in inshore squadrons of some variety or other. That is significant. So coastal forces really require its personnel to be judicious in the use of force to accept risk and exercise mission command and in many respects and going back to what you were alluding to earlier it's about having sound diplomatic judgment

when cooperating with civil authorities and allies and you have to be on top of this as a junior lieutenant that is not something you can effectively train from the bridge of a warship like a like a type 45 a frigate a destroyer and even less so on one of the on one of the principal uh uh platforms like a carrier or an amphibious ship you just don't get that and i'm thinking about that that training piece you've also got to look at people like commodore mike clap who was commander amphibious task group down in the falklands um i cannot think of a man who was better suited to being the commander of the amphibious task group than mike clap because there was he as a junior officer on a ton class mine sweep doing coastal forces activities in the far

east in the 60s um running marines and gherkas and others on amphibious uh patrols up into up up into indonesia and the the whole borneo confrontation piece it's a great breeding ground for that so but i could wax lyrical on that i'll leave that the second bit as i alluded to is the distributed sensor command kill chain that they offer that greatly increases your own fleet's opportunities to fight move survive and concurrently a distributed attritable agile character of the squadron means that adversaries have to work very hard to find strike um and and really to discern from the plethora of potential tasks or potential targets rather, the actual versus the perceived. It's a great deception measure apart from anything else.

And by offering that on a plate, you're swamping the enemy's decision-making processes and systems. They have to prioritize, you don't. You can expand the threat envelope and hopefully that means we can force the enemy to engage early on our terms um however you also have to recognize that this this this is a plan of a best case scenario and no no plan survives um and you are going to take losses but for hopefully you take losses of these types of assets with few personnel little um material outlay and material costs rather than than than taking the losses back in the back in the main fleet and then finally there's a piece that we don't talk about but we really should and that is visibility having a blue water fleet as the hallmark of peer conflict

capability but it does mean that nobody sees it not the enemy not our own citizenry and there's a morale effect to this and you think about the French navy being under close blockade in Brest during the 18th and 19th century knowing that they could put out and deal with these small inshore craft like the coastal forces squadron but oh by the way those things are backed up from over the horizon but it's the pressure that these guys put on you which which is a massively deleterious effect to your own morale. At home and conversely the RN does 90% of its activity out of sight of land and from just three ports Plymouth, Portsmouth and the Clyde. The coastal forces squadron is embedded in coastal communities they are visible and they're in ports that

would not normally see a naval presence now you cannot put a price on that on a country that is maritime in in character if not in nature um and that offers a means for us really to reconnect with civil society and that is so important when we're now in an era where uh protection of inshore and offshore facilities where infrastructure that runs under the seabed and over the sea etc. And sovereignty really matters to the civil populace. And that means ubiquity has to be in there somewhere. These things can be ubiquitous, even if it's only transient. Well, I'll circle back on a couple of things you said there. First of all, as someone whose own early command platform was decommissioned last year, with no real ostensible replacement for

young aggressive lieutenant lieutenant commander types i i cannot stress the the need for but the early command is a is an area for growth for young aggressive officers that was a it's a personal hobby horse and uh it's as multiple mentors told me is like the best way to learn to command is command early command often on the third point that you mentioned here with the presence in the other cities so we we had interviewed Dr. Jane Friend previously on an article she'd done on destroyer diplomacy about the use of Royal Navy destroyers I want to say in the early 1900s kind of and in the interwar period to connect the Royal Navy with the UK populace but with the size of modern destroyers you can no longer reach many of the ports that these vessels were going to

but these smaller vessels you can steam them up most of the rivers that you have and reach actually quite far inland uh if you want to show the country its navy so i think that's a good point um if you're gonna permit me to shift gears here though you have one final question i want to talk about the royal navy strategic studies center so what sort of work does the center do what's your mission there um so we're relatively new again like the coastal forces squadron we only stood up in 2019 and i've only been with them since december uh december 2022 um but we're the navy's internal think tank we're not an educational establishment we don't do education although we we tap into think tanks and academia and others and our basis really is to to challenge

naval thought um and progress it um at our core we exist to better inform thinking on naval matters amongst the naval staff um and to do that we produce thought pieces on topics of interest give them readouts from conferences writing their policy and strategy documents as well as undertaking longer research themed topics and producing primers for for them to go away and think about um we also seek to link back into academia and give them the practitioner focus and the and and uh that perspective and act as a convening forum uh to cross the divide because practice informs theory and theory informs practice you've got to get the whole lot going together um which is which is something which has been lacking certainly in the uk for for a few

years. From my perspective, we do all of that best really by challenging orthodoxy, certainly orthodoxy at the heart of our assumptions. And what I mean by that is you go back to the foundational principles. We are very good in militaries at piling up concepts and terms and dogma on top of what is really the enduring nature of war and saying, oh, look at this, hasn't hasn't more transformed well actually has it really um and i think and linking it back to coastal forces there we are every time we turn the wheel when it when it comes to to uh peer competition at some point we always come back to the brown water and milan vigo puts it puts it very well when he talks about that you you come back to these foundational points on the nature

of maritime war the seat of purpose is on land so i've never uh i've never argued otherwise but unfortunately that's all that we have time for today um andy i'm looking forward to see what else you and the center uh push out and i'm sure we'll bring you and some of your colleagues back in the future here but i'd like to thank my guest andrew young where can we find you online what are working on next uh so you can find me on wavel room um i do quite a bit work for them um over at the ron united services institute if you if you uh search for andy young or andrew young you'll come up with quite a few things um i've got two book chapters out with u.s military publications uh so on contested shores through marine corps university press and armies in retreat through

army university press and uh the next few months are going to be spent getting dug into thomas Small Molyneux and the Birth of Amphibious Doctrine in the UK. I look forward to reading and we'll bring you back. Maybe we'll have Walker do that one since you're used to collaborating with him so much. But thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon

© transcript Emily Beynon