I nearly choked when reading "The British Royal Navy Road To Salvation? Part 2" in Navy magazine.
This article is written by Jonathan Foreman and I note that the Editor of the RN's Naval Review has requested Part 1 about the state of the RN be included on their website. Note the Editor strongly agrees with Part 1 of which I don't have a copy..
I am interested In your thoughts on what is written below (which is not the entire article). I apologise for typos but am very interested on comments on the Type 26 as it relates to the future frigate programme.
"The RN's leadership does bear responsibility for the fact that British warships tend to be conceived like the Type 45 destroyer without proper consideration of financial realities (in the likelihood of severely underfunded defence budgets.
One result of this attitude is warships that are progressively stripped of their planned capabilities in order to save money during the long process of planning and construction, until their final fitness for purpose is dubious at best.
This tendency to plan new classes of ships as if money were no object, as if the fleet were still the size it was during the Falklands War is linked to a parallel failure to take into account the obvious reality that major surface combatants commissioned for a small or very small navy need to be especially versatile.
Common sense dictates that the few destroyers and frigates fielded by a mini navy should be genuine general purpose warships with a speciality, not specialist ships whose designs make minimal concessions to the reality that you don't always get to fight the enemy you want in the way you plan to.
The Type 45 air warfare destroyer is often proclaimed to be the best in the world by the RN and its cheerleaders in the British media are a case in point. They may well field the best anti aircraft and anti missile systems available to any navy. But in almost every other respect the Type 45s are inferior to contemporary competitors around the world and pathetically unforgivably vulnerable to submarine and surface threats unless escorted by other vessels.
Indeed, even if one discounts the teething problems of the Type 45's engines and the design flaw that means the Daring class ships do not produce enough electric power to run their advanced systems while on the move, the Type 45 looks troubling like a TARPUS boat, technically advanced but practically useless, or as rather as Iain Ballentine has pointed out, an analogue of the 1930s battlecruisers which proved impotent against big gunned battleships like the Bismarck.
To justify the frequently made claim that the Type 45 is superior to the latest America Arleigh Burkes and their derivatives, the RN and its media boosters necessarily imagine conflict situations in which the Type 45 will invariably always be accompanied by other vessels with appropriate capabilities., and therefore will be able to survive and win despite its inability to defend itself against other warships, submarines and shore batteries (It goes almost without saying that no other major navy and certainly no serious naval thinkers anywhere in the world outside the UK that single purpose/otherwise defenceless warships like the Type 45 are a sensible idea). In other words, the current philosophy behind the Type 45 depends on a cosy fantasy of future naval warfare.
Claims made and export expectations for the long delayed Type 26 frigate may be similarly deluded. Although its boosters claim it will be superior to France's FREMM frigates, thus negating the fact the French Navy has more ships than the RN, the FREMMS are already in service whilst the Type 26 won't be delivered until 2023 at the earliest. Moreover, its manufacturers have already found a bigger export market (Greece, Egypt, Morocco and possibly Canada and Australia) than any British warship in the last three decades, suggesting that such confidence may be misplaced.
Just the fact that British naval shipbuilding has not had a major export success since the Leander class frigates of the 1970s ought theoretically to have prompted both the RN and successive governments to consider the wisdom of reflexively buying British which in practice has meant buying from BAE systems.".
