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UK navy 'dangerously weak,' military institute warns

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Aug 23, IRNA -- Britain’s Navy is dangerously weak, risking the silent principles of the UK's national security unless the future fleet is restored and adequately sized, a leading military institute warned Monday.

Under-funding has left an ageing navy, fewer in number and “inadequate for the most fundamental, enduring and vital tasks”, a new article in the latest journal of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said.

The article, written by Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham and Professor Gwyn Prins, suggested that the even goods on supermarket shelves that shoppers take for granted might disappear if the government does not invest in a navy with enough vessels.

The warning comes at a time when the Ministry of Defence is facing up to 20 per cent cuts with the navy losing ships under the government’s current Strategic Defence and Security Review.

The former admiral and prominent academic from the London School of Economics argue that past underfunding and extreme financial pressures will leave the navy unable to uphold the “silent principles of national security with conventional deterrence to safeguard trade routes from pirates, terrorists or non-friendly governments.”

“No one associates the full supermarket shelves, the availability of a range of other goods and the supply of fuels to power our homes, cars and industry with the free flow of sea trade,” their article said.

“The free flow that makes globalised trade and the creation of prosperity possible depends prominently upon the presence of naval units at sea, unseen and silent and therefore easily forgotten,” they warned in presenting an alarming picture for the navy over the next ten years.

“The rate of decline in the fleet size will reach a low point of only nineteen frigates. The average age of the surface combatant ships will also rise from fifteen years in 2012 to twenty-one years in 2021.”

“Real world tasks urgently require significantly more surface combatants, of lower cost and capability. Use of the sea demands presence along the sea routes. Presence is the prerequisite for the silent deterrent messages that naval force alone can articulate,” it said.

“The ships needed to fulfil these missions must have endurance, versatility, role adaptability and number, and be cheaper. Presence demands numbers. The ability to mass and to surge a force demands numbers.”

The paper outlined that the navy urgently require at least ten new cheaper and lower capability oceangoing frigates - to complement existing Type 45 and Type 26 vessels – and be built in the next decade to preserve the 'silent deterrent'.

“Every trading nation is necessarily a maritime nation,” Blackham and Prins said, citing recent naval expansion by Australia, China, India and Japan as examples of the numbers that maritime presence demands.