Cheap warships risk leaving us exposed to Putin's deadly Northern Fleet
This week, it was announced that the Royal Navy is to lose its dedicated air-defence destroyers. The six Type 45 class destroyers will leave service from 2038 and be replaced not by the Type 83 class destroyer – the successor promised in 2021 and then quietly sidelined – but by at least six Common Combat Vessels (CCV), the Ministry of Defence has announced.
These new crewed warships are supposed to act as command hubs for flotillas of uncrewed ships. This should not come as a surprise. The Royal Navy has signalled for years that its future lies with uncrewed systems, and the Type 83 was never promised the funding to make it real. The decision is conceptually defensible – even forward-thinking – but only if the funding matches the philosophy. The difficulty is that the cost of bringing in such new systems may be great.
The strongest argument for the change is time. A like-for-like Type 83 class destroyer would have been a large and complex warship, a decade or more from the water and hugely expensive. The CCV is a more modest vessel, comparable in size to a frigate, such as a Type 31 class, and could be at sea far sooner. That matters, because the threat is not waiting. Nato has assessed it must be ready for conflict as early as 2030. The Russian Northern Fleet, which threatens Britain from the north, is being modernised and, unlike the Black Sea Fleet, has been largely unaffected by the war.
Caroline’s mother Christine has called for an apology from the press and police over how she was treated before she died.
She made a documentary called Search for the Truth for Disney+ last year
Caroline Flack’s death has become a tragic parable about cancel culture, responsible use of social media, the intrusion of the tabloid press, the sensation of reality TV and the misunderstandings and stigmas about mental ill health, from which we were all supposed to learn and in which each of us who watched on as voyeurs was complicit.
People who have a strong chest and back may be less likely to have a heart attack, according to a new study.
Researchers said that people with strong pecs, back muscles and torso are also less likely to die within the next decade.
Experts from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) said that it is “not just about being muscly”, as the size of people’s muscles was not linked to their risk of a heart attack or early death.
It said that all kinds of exercise, and not just strength training, can improve muscle density.
It is fascinating that people’s skeletal muscle could be linked to their risk of having a heart attack. I am now personally interested in exercises like cycling, planks and pilates, which I enjoy and may have an effect on these muscles.
What are the things that you do to keep yourself healthy? Your mind might jump straight to the run you do a couple of times a week, or the choices you make about what to eat, the amount of sleep you manage to get each night or the friends who make you feel seen and heard. And you’d be right. These are all things that keep us healthy.
Millions of Britons could pay higher energy bills than they need to if they do not submit a meter reading before the price cap rises on Wednesday.
The price cap, set by the regulator Ofcom, is set to rise, affecting 5.3 million households on a standard tariff.
How much the price cap will increase from Wednesday, 1 July.
The average gas and electricity bill will jump to £1,862 a year.
There are currently 27 fixed deals available that are cheaper than July’s price cap, with average savings of £285, so act now to save yourself money. The price cap is going up, but your bills don’t have to.
People are future-proofing their homes for sustainability and to protect themselves against unpredictable energy costs
The summer’s first full Moon is lighting up skies across the country this week.
To see the Stawberry Moon, look towards the south-east after sunset. That will be after around 9.20pm on Tuesday, 30 June. The moon will track southwards through the night, setting in the south-west before sunrise on Wednesday.
Angry people on social media claim the current high temperatures are nothing special but they ignore the long-term trends
Uncrewed ships can also be risked in ways a £2bn large destroyer never could, letting a fleet fight more aggressively. To question the current plan is not to harbour nostalgia for the Type 45 (or the Type 83 that would have replaced it). Among the finest air-defence ships in the world, they have nonetheless been plagued by a propulsion system that failed in warm waters, spending too much of their lives alongside dockyards rather than at sea. Replacing them is reasonable. Doing so without a plan that has been properly costed is not.
The trouble is that a command ship has to have something to command. The CCV is the co-ordination hub, not the eyes, shield and sword. The majority of the weapons and sensors are meant to come from the uncrewed or lightly crewed vessels it controls, such as the Type 91, 92, 93 and 94 class platforms. These will provide missile and torpedo firepower, air defence, anti-submarine capabilities and advanced radars and sensors. When working alongside the Royal Navy’s new crewed platforms, such as the Type 26 and Type 31 frigates, to say nothing of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, these new naval clusters could pack a formidable hybrid punch.
But none of the new ships yet exist, and none have been costed. Nor will they be as cheap or as small as the word “drone” suggests, especially as they must operate in the cold stormy waters of the North Atlantic. To carry a worthwhile radar and a deep magazine, a hull must be large, and even an uncrewed one needs to be serviced by engineers from the nearby CCV. Buy the control ships without the large drones they are meant to direct, and the Navy will have six expensive headquarters with little firepower to project.
Even six may flatter the position. Refit and maintenance could mean only two or three are available for deployment to sea at any time, and if those few are also the nodes an entire uncrewed fleet depends on, the margin for loss or breakdown is slim. Whether six is enough is a question the Defence Investment Plan does not answer.
Nor, for all the talk of savings, is it clear that any are being made. A full CCV-led drone flotilla may cost even more than the ships it replaces, not less. That is not a reason to abandon it. A more lethal, flexible and hybrid fleet would be worth paying for, even if it costs more. But it is a reason to be honest that this is a choice about how to spend money, not a way of avoiding it.
The danger of an underfunded, new hybrid Navy is compounded by how Britain already deploys its existing assets. When a British air station in Cyprus was struck by Iranian drones in March, the Government was forced to rush a Type 45 class destroyer to the scene – using an expensive, mobile maritime asset to plug a gap that fixed, cheaper, land-based air defences should have covered. If the surface fleet is reduced to a handful of command hubs, the UK will lose the luxury of using warships as floating umbrellas. Though in truth, they should never have been forced into that role to begin with.
The danger of getting this transition wrong is compounded by a second decision in the Defence Investment Plan. The Royal Navy’s new Multi-Role Strike Ships, which were to carry their own air defences, are to give way to smaller and cheaper vessels that will rely on other warships to protect them. By upending the escort fleet and removing the assault ships’ own defences at the same time, Britain is risking a compounding crisis.
All of this points to a choice the Government has so far avoided. It can create a balanced military through significant, though affordable, spending increases, or follow Australia’s lead: commit to targeted spending increases that build a lethal, focused force, built around sea and air power and suited to an island that lives by trade. Both cost money. What does not work is a focused force arrived at by accident, the product of insufficient funding.
The Royal Navy’s vision of a new, hybrid navy is not wrong; it is a necessary leap into the future of conflict. But such a fleet will only be realised with sufficient funding, and at a scale sufficient to procure enough equipment to deter Britain’s adversaries. If the Government buys the command hubs but fails to procure in sufficient numbers the drones, missiles and torpedoes that give them teeth, this plan will not be a step forward – it will be a historic mistake. Treating naval modernisation as a cost-cutting exercise will leave the British Armed Forces even more hollowed out, transforming a maritime nation into easy prey for adversaries who understand that 21st-century weapons cannot be bought on the cheap.