The sun sets on Britain's Royal Navy
Sending an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea is an act of desperate folly
In the past week, an attempt was made on the high seas to hijack a tanker, close to the Straits of Hormuz, almost certainly by Revolutionary Guards from Iran. The Government of that unhappy country use them like attack dogs in a gang fight. Semi-detached, they can be loosed like the maniacs they are when necessary: either egged on, or held back, as the occasion demands. Then the Iranian Government, with weary predictability, denies everything.
Once, such a blatant act of state-sponsored piracy would have brought down the wrath of the Royal Navy; not today. While the much trumpeted British ‘carrier strike group’ continues to head to the far east to poke a stick into the rats-nest of communist China and its 360-ship strong navy, the RN’s sole asset in the Persian Gulf is a Type 23 frigate, Montrose, based in Bahrain. It wasn’t deployed.
So deprived of fighting ships is the Royal Navy that it has had to supplement its own two escorts for the ‘strike group’ carrier, Queen Elizabeth, with two extra, one each borrowed from the Netherlands and the US. Britain’s own destroyer fleet of six is currently down to one operational. The rest are – temporarily – broken (a shocking engine sea water intake design fault is just one possibility; there are many others).
Meanwhile, the US State Department made it known this week that it thinks this bathetic British exercise in sea power would be better applied elsewhere – like in the Gulf, one imagines. The USA still has a plausible navy, unlike us.
Having abandoned Europe, the British Government is trying to play the Asia card: let’s do trade deals with countries 8,000 miles away, rather than with the world’s biggest trading block 80 miles away (actually 20, from Dover to Calais). As part of this post-Brexit posturing, the ‘strike group’ merely illuminates to the world that Britain, at a stroke, has descended from a medium size power with enhanced influence because it was in the EU, to a fast diminishing state shouting forlornly into the wind.
Incidentally, the Admiralty would have been shaken to their core, had any suggestion been made that the ‘strike group’ divert to the Gulf. Any large warship these days is prone to attack by forces quite unknown until the recent past. Just as the torpedo, the mine, and the aeroplane made battleships completely redundant by the start of WW2 so, today, swarm attack by drones or small boats, ultra-modern acoustic torpedoes, or the cruise missile have done the same for aircraft carriers. They are, literally, dinosaurs of the seas: doomed.
These huge ships may look impressive to the casual civilian eye but that size merely means they are a huge target and that they may be easily sunk. Deploying the Queen Elizabeth to the Gulf would be to risk it being sent, ignominiously, to the bottom of the sea. Even the frigate, Montrose, is highly vulnerable to these attacks. (And – so far, only feint – swarm attacks have been regularly happening to US warships in the Gulf.)
The Royal Navy has been struggling for 50 years, ever since it was tasked as the service responsible for delivering nuclear weapons, a role it never wanted, no doubt reading the writing on the wall. With the RN’s future capital ships now consigned to the deep (that is, as nuclear-missile delivering submarines), two things would surely follow.
The first was that a hitherto enthusiastic naval-minded public would literally lose sight of the Navy’s most important ships – for ever. Second, the cost of the nuclear fleet would cripple budgets for surface ships, also for ever.
At a stroke, the Royal Navy was permanently stuffed.
The Falklands War aside, historically the swansong of British naval power, the Royal Navy has fought a losing battle for half a century to retain any credibility as a significant fighting force. Ironically, it was not helped by the end of the Cold War. At least since 1945 it was able to insist on a large force of frigates, purposed to seek out Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic, in order to ensure the sea bridge between Britain and the USA would remain open if a hot war broke out.
You will be aware of the shadow of WW2 here, with memories of the Atlantic convoys and U-boat attacks. As ever, military men are doomed to fight the last war. But the hot war never came. In the interregnum, from 1990 to 2010, the role of the RN, in what was then perceived as a future of peace in Europe, was frequently questioned, along with its fleet of frigates. Slowly, it shrank in size, at one point the admirals in post outnumbering the fighting ships.
Then came the moment in 2007 when Gordon Brown decided he had to help prop up the Scottish ship-building industry, and praying that in commissioning not one but two giant aircraft carriers he would also prop up the ailing Labour Party vote in Scotland. Well, we know how well that went.
As a result, Britain got two massive white elephants, so gross it was decided at one point, during their arduous over-running build to sell one off. In inevitably, costs soared. There was a scandal of monumental proportions over which aircraft could be flown from these warships (we bought another white elephant in the grossly over-priced US F35s at an estimated £150m for each aircraft).
Then the Boris Johnson Government arrived and it all got extremely silly. As a result, we are now stuck with both carriers. But we can’t afford to own, let alone fly, the 80 F35s each could contain at full capacity (it would cost £12bn just to buy them all; you don’t want to know how much each one costs to actually fly). So utterly ridiculous is this situation that, as I write, the Queen Elizabeth, still heading east to confront the Chinese, is loaded with a lot of US Navy F35s as makeweights as we haven’t enough of our own to prevent the whole charade looking like a badly organised circus.
If the ‘strike force’ makes it through the South China Sea and back to Britain (no doubt the Government will have festivities planned for its return to Portsmouth), the master plan is then to station two RN offshore patrol vessels (designed for fishery protection) in Japan to scare the Chinese into giving up their admittedly preposterous claims in and around the South China Sea.
The Chinese are acting like gangsters (shades of Mao here, for anybody who knows their history). It is, however, worth asking how we would feel if the Chinese were to send a naval task force to patrol The Channel; Yes, just so.
Why is the British Government doing this? Can they seriously believe in a mission to ‘tilt’ the British economy to the Pacific, away from Europe? Do they think, for one moment, the sight of a small group of warships sailing close to the wind in the seas the Chinese consider their backyard (much as we see The Channel and the North Sea as ours) will do anything other than provoke a flurry of enraged headlines in the Chinese media?
Given what is known about the British prime minister, with his fantasy that he could be the 21st century Churchill, with his sloganising and bluster, it is perfectly possible to conceive that he believes both missions (the ‘tilt’, the naval adventure) will succeed.
Equally, however, given what we know of his machinations, he is cynically trying to use the naval force as a part of a smokescreen, to try to demonstrate to the gullible section of British public opinion, that Britain still somehow rules the waves. Warships at sea do look impressive; it’s their nature.
You see, he knows what is coming down the line later this year: a double whammy of a further huge surge in Covid cases, set against a smashed-up NHS; along with our own final enforcement of the trading rules we signed up to with the EU, now due to kick in on January 1st 2022 (prices will rise sharply).
It’s going to be ugly.
This Week: Tim has been enthusiastically back on his bike, cycling along the Thames and the Jubilee rivers, and trying to pretend it is summer, despite the machinations of the pesky jetstream. Currently, it is stubbornly flowing to the south of the British Isles, so we can expect the summer to continue to disappoint, with plenty of depressions in train, all of them pointed towards us. Haul out the wet weather gear!