We’ve eviscerated a vital Navy capability for savings smaller than a rounding error

This was not ‘sensible decisions’, it was learned helplessness

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Last Wednesday, on the same day we allowed UK missiles to be used against Russia, the Defence Secretary announced a round of defence cuts. It reminded me of action movies where the hero lays their weapon down to make it a fair fight before vanquishing the villain in a bloody yet noble manner. In real life, however, you just get stabbed.
From a Royal Naval perspective, we lost five ships to the Treasury knife. Two amphibious landing ships (HMS Albion and Bulwark – LPDs), two Wave-class tankers from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) and one Type 23 Frigate. They were all old, some were in poor repair and none had the crew to operate them. Low-hanging fruit, one might say. 
Between these ships and the helicopters and Watchkeeper drones that were deleted, Defence will save £500m over five years. This equates to 0.17 per cent of the defence budget over the same period – or as someone else calculated, 4.5 hours of NHS spending. For the sake of a rounding error, we have eviscerated our ability to conduct amphibious operations. You can talk about the changing character of warfare and so on, but stripped back, that’s what happened on Wednesday. 
Apart from the terrible timing, I can think of six ideas that reinforce the general sense of strategic incontinence created by this announcement.
First, what is the plan? We are being told to wait for the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) and all will become clear. OK, that’s fair enough. But why then are we still axing stuff as part of an in-year spending review? Shouldn’t that be part of the plan as well? It makes ‘wait for the review’ sound like a can-kicking exercise. 
Second is the utility of these different ships. Zooming in on the amphibs for one second, the line that says ‘we won’t do an opposed beach landing any more therefore they are pointless’ ignores the general utility of warships long before kinetic action. We have unarmed patrol vessels around the world today doing outstanding work. Recently two of our (unarmed) Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels returned from a global deployment that achieved a number of milestones. If we had HMS Bulwark up and running now, I guarantee she would have been of use in the Eastern Med in recent months.
The third point is connected, and is known as ‘jam tomorrow’. The idea is that just round the corner is a new type of ship that will be better in every sense. In the case of amphibiosity, the jam is the Multi-Role Support Ship (MRSS). We might get six, we might get three, they might have a hangar and a mission bay and be fast and well defended, but right now, no one knows.
Do the Royal Marines even want MRSS? The only thing we do know is that they won’t be ready for at least 10 years. What do the Corps do in the meantime, or are they next? Again, what is the plan because if there was one, an announcement confirming MRSS yesterday would have helped. But again, we must wait for the SDR for that part. In the meantime, if you keep cutting old ships to make way for new ones that then don’t come, you end up with no ships. This corrosive mindset has been in train for decades and is why we have so few working today. Seeing it in action again is depressing. 
Fourth, where is the ambition, the fight? HMS Bulwark had just had a ton of money spent on her and loads of useful hull life left. Where is the aggressive plan to recruit and retain enough people to crew her and get her back to sea? One of the Wave class tankers could have been saved but the RFA personnel situation is even more dire. Do we fix any of this or just give up and delete? The Type 23 that went admittedly would have been very hard to repair. But then so were the damaged HMS Nottingham and USS Cole, for example. It’s amazing what money and some grit can do.
Fifth, if we want any sort of strategic reserve, and every war ever says we do, then we have to learn how to pay for and maintain reserve equipment. We should shift away from the mindset that ‘alongside’ equals ‘of no use’.
Sixth and final, what sort of message have we just sent? The incoming president of the US, or our European partners, or Nato or Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) planners won’t care that this is old kit, they’ll just see a maritime nation axing hulls at a time when threats are going up. Last week Russia parked the spy ship Yantar over a communications cable in the Irish Sea and got to work. This is a direct threat to the UK and is going to happen more and more and yet we are diminishing our ability to respond to it.
Incidentally, for a long period Yantar was shadowed by HMS Cattistock, one of our outstanding minehunters that are also being axed to make way for a technological and uncrewed alternative that isn’t ready. And even when it is, when are we getting the mother ships to take all the new unmanned tech to where it’s needed? With a bit of imagination, Bulwark or a Wave Class could have done this. None of this sort of messaging or thinking is visible from the bottom row of a spreadsheet. 
Wednesday’s ‘sensible decisions’ were born of decades of rot, poor planning, Treasury-led accounting and learned helplessness. What makes it so depressing is that at the first opportunity for this government to show they recognise the shift in strategic demand and thus ditch some of the habits that have got us here, they declined. That it happened on the same day we actively increased the requirement to defend our country takes it beyond depressing and into bad joke territory. 
We can only hope that the SDR will strategise what’s required and allocate proper funding to do so. Perhaps for once, the jam tomorrow will actually materialise. Let’s see. 
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer
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