Frank Gardner: Navy plans reflect sea change in how wars are fought

The Royal Navy is to transform the way it operates over the next few years. Britain's six Type 45 destroyers, designed for air defence, will no longer be replaced by the planned Type 83 versions.

Instead, the Navy is to get several cheaper ships called Common Combat Vessels that will act as hubs controlling a fleet of uncrewed vessels or drones.

The change is part of the long delayed but now updated Defence Investment Plan (DIP) being announced by the government this week.

It's called hybridisation – combining traditional crew-operated weapons platforms like frigates, with fleets of uncrewed and autonomous systems.

In the Royal Navy's case, it gets to keep the frigates, which will be updated with new versions in the pipeline. But the big, powerful and expensive Type 83 destroyers, yet to be built, are now being scrapped in favour of the drones.

Drones take different shapes and sizes and these naval ones are very different from the tiny, cheap quadcopters being deployed with deadly effect on the battlefield of the Donbas.

Instead, they measure nearly 100 metres long and will be deployed in the North Atlantic to confront the threat from Russia's submarines and "research" vessels that have been taking an unhealthy interest in the vulnerable undersea cables that carry more than 90% of the UK's data, including trillions of dollars' worth of financial transactions.

The Royal Marines, part of the Royal Navy, are also being allocated around £500m for fast Commando Insertion Craft and strike drones, part of a Rapid Response Force.

The plans being announced are controversial, to say the least.

John Healey resigned as defence secretary this month in protest at what he said was the government's failure to spend enough money to properly defend Britain against the current range of threats, primarily coming from Russia.

With a reported yawning £28bn gap in Britain's defence budget and the additional £13.5bn earmarked to fill it, Healey's resignation was swiftly followed by that of Al Carns, the armed forces minister, for the same reasons.

Dan Jarvis, the minister who took on the job of defence secretary, has just spent the last two weeks "refocusing" the DIP to take on more of the lessons from Ukraine and Iran.

Ukraine's almost non-existent navy has been able to successfully drive back Russia's once-powerful Black Sea fleet away from its shores by using extraordinarily innovative drone technology both on, above and below the surface.

In the recent US-Iran conflict around the Strait of Hormuz, the main take-away lesson for defence planners is that, despite US President Donald Trump's claims of sinking all of Iran's navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have continued to threaten that vital waterway and its shipping with just a handful of cheap, easily concealable drones, launched from coastal bases.

So the changes incorporated into the newly updated DIP represent a sea change in how wars are being fought.

Bob Sawers, the managing director of corporate intelligence firm, the Audere Group, said: "This [shift] reflects a growing recognition that defence must reform if it is to acquire capabilities that can adapt at the pace of conflict.

"The real competition within the DIP is between industrial-age procurement and wartime adaptation. The winners will be those capabilities that can deliver military effect quickly, scale affordably and evolve alongside the threat."

However, there is also an even more basic question at the heart of this. Are these changes that are being announced in the DIP about extending the Navy's reach and maximising capability, as the MoD claims? Or are they simply about cost-cutting?

Tom Sharpe, a former Royal Navy Commander, said it's "cost-cutting, no doubt".

He added: "The navy plan will be a good one - dispersed lethality makes a lot of sense today".

But he warned that "there are a lot of things drones can't do and the technology and weapons required to make this work will be expensive" - adding that would cost "probably the same" as the now-cancelled Type 83 destroyer.