Joel Hetherington is a Senior Parliamentary Researcher and defence and foreign policy adviser, with a postgraduate dissertation on sea power and maritime strategy.
I remember watching, with admiration and, yes, I admit, a hint of envy, as President Macron stood at Île Longue and unveiled the Invincible class: France’s next generation of ballistic missile submarine. The tricolour behind the hull framed Macron as La Marseillaise rang out a cappella, and for a moment the theatre of it said something Britain hasn’t managed to say convincingly in years: here is a state that still takes its own defence seriously, and knows exactly what an unstable world now demands of it.
In today’s strategic context the gap in ambition and assessment of reality is no longer forgivable. Successive governments have not prioritised defence but this government’s flippant approach, despite the threats we face being blindingly obvious, is genuinely dangerous.
We know defence spending must increase; there is no question about that. However, I would suggest there is another question facing this government that is partly driven by a consistent lack of attention on defence but also the development of threats we face. Is it time to pivot our posture to focus on what we can control, what we can realistically develop our capacity and capability to affect and where the immediate danger lies? Is it time to develop an armed forces, and in particular a Royal Navy, that can deliver for our allies in NATO and do it well?
Britain is at something close to an inflection point in its global defence posture, whether or not this government is willing to say so out loud.
For two decades we have clung to the idea that Britain can maintain a meaningful, persistent military presence in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific simultaneously. This has fed into ‘Global Britain’ which is in principle a great idea, and something we can achieve and build on in a soft power sense. However when we talk about hard power, this means being everywhere, or being able to project power everywhere, with intensity. That idea was already stretched thin. It is now unattainable and our allies and our adversaries both know it.
They know it because we have shown them. In March, HMS Dragon, one of the most capable air-defence destroyers in the world, armed with a Sea Viper system that can put eight missiles in the air inside ten seconds, was deployed to the eastern Mediterranean after an Iranian strike on RAF Akrotiri, at the tail end of a crisis in which the White House had justifiably criticised Britain for responding too slowly. The strike itself landed before Britain had even agreed to let allies use the base for the wider campaign against Iran; in the days that followed, reinforcements arrived from across NATO including Greek frigates and jets, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German ships, while our own destroyer did not leave Portsmouth until a week after its deployment was announced.
Within a month of being put to sea, Dragon was pulled into port for what the Ministry of Defence called a ‘routine logistics stop’.
The whole episode provides a compact illustration of the gap between the posture Britain claims or aspires to have, compared to what it can realistically achieve today. This is what happens when a country tries to sustain a global hard power presence without the foundation to do so.
This is the same underlying pathology, incidentally, as our ability to deploy a carrier strike group. Britain’s problem was never building an aircraft carrier; it was screening one. The Royal Navy’s entire surface escort fleet of six Type 45 destroyers and five Type 23 frigates, eleven hulls in total, is smaller than the escort forces Italy, India, Japan or South Korea can call on, and now sits roughly level with Spain’s, although more capable than all of these, of course. Naval analysts estimate that, at best, Britain could assemble six or seven destroyers and frigates around a single carrier today, depending on maintenance and crew availability, against the 43 Royal Navy ships, carriers, submarines, destroyers and frigates alike that were sent to retake the Falklands in 1982.
HMS Dragon is one of only six Type 45s in existence; in a genuine crisis, that same handful of hulls would also be the ones asked to screen a carrier strike group against missile and air attack and defend NATO’s northern flank all at once. A navy that cannot always keep one destroyer’s freshwater system working through a routine deployment is not a navy that can generate its own carrier escort, let alone independently sustain one in the Euro-Atlantic while also projecting into the Indo-Pacific. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make Britain look global. It makes Britain look unserious, to friends and adversaries alike, at exactly the moment both are watching closely. The remedy is not a bigger fleet spread more thinly across two oceans. This is realistically unattainable, particularly from a cost and economic standpoint. Instead, it is a smaller number of reliable and capable ships, put honestly to the one purpose they were always meant to serve.
That purpose is, in truth, what sea power has always been for. Long before anyone spoke of ‘global reach’ as a virtue in itself, the Royal Navy’s purpose in European waters was to secure the sea lines of communication everything else depends on: the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap through which Russian submarines must pass to threaten the Atlantic, the trade routes that keep Britain and its allies fed and supplied, the reinforcement corridors NATO would need to move forces across the Atlantic in a crisis, and now the critical national infrastructure on the North Sea bed that our country relies on. Russian activity around undersea cables in the North Atlantic this past year suggests that mission is becoming more urgent, not less, and nobody else can do it for us. The United States, already drawing down its own troop presence in Europe, will not hold the GIUK gap on our behalf indefinitely. Australia and Japan do not need British ships in the South China Sea to make their case to Beijing; NATO’s eastern and northern flanks need a Britain that shows up, reliably, with real mass, where our presence is structurally necessary rather than merely welcome.
None of this means abandoning alliances beyond Europe, and it is not an argument for retreat. G-CAP and AUKUS are excellent examples of the impact we can have in the Indo-Pacific through ‘smart power’ without hard power assets in the region. This approach is about having honesty as to where British naval power can actually be decisive rather than symbolic, and building a fleet that is funded, crewed and sustained and capable of doing that one job properly. NATO’s own generals have reportedly warned that Russia could be ready to test Alliance resolve within a few years, while Europe’s own rearmament isn’t expected to be ready until the mid-2030s.
That gap will not be closed by keeping a token presence in two oceans. It will be closed, if it is closed at all, by finally matching ambition to reality in the one theatre where Britain’s contribution genuinely cannot be replaced.
Joel Hetherington is a Senior Parliamentary Researcher and defence and foreign policy adviser, with a postgraduate dissertation on sea power and maritime strategy.
I remember watching, with admiration and, yes, I admit, a hint of envy, as President Macron stood at Île Longue and unveiled the Invincible class: France’s next generation of ballistic missile submarine. The tricolour behind the hull framed Macron as La Marseillaise rang out a cappella, and for a moment the theatre of it said something Britain hasn’t managed to say convincingly in years: here is a state that still takes its own defence seriously, and knows exactly what an unstable world now demands of it.
In today’s strategic context the gap in ambition and assessment of reality is no longer forgivable. Successive governments have not prioritised defence but this government’s flippant approach, despite the threats we face being blindingly obvious, is genuinely dangerous.
We know defence spending must increase; there is no question about that. However, I would suggest there is another question facing this government that is partly driven by a consistent lack of attention on defence but also the development of threats we face. Is it time to pivot our posture to focus on what we can control, what we can realistically develop our capacity and capability to affect and where the immediate danger lies? Is it time to develop an armed forces, and in particular a Royal Navy, that can deliver for our allies in NATO and do it well?
Britain is at something close to an inflection point in its global defence posture, whether or not this government is willing to say so out loud.
For two decades we have clung to the idea that Britain can maintain a meaningful, persistent military presence in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific simultaneously. This has fed into ‘Global Britain’ which is in principle a great idea, and something we can achieve and build on in a soft power sense. However when we talk about hard power, this means being everywhere, or being able to project power everywhere, with intensity. That idea was already stretched thin. It is now unattainable and our allies and our adversaries both know it.
They know it because we have shown them. In March, HMS Dragon, one of the most capable air-defence destroyers in the world, armed with a Sea Viper system that can put eight missiles in the air inside ten seconds, was deployed to the eastern Mediterranean after an Iranian strike on RAF Akrotiri, at the tail end of a crisis in which the White House had justifiably criticised Britain for responding too slowly. The strike itself landed before Britain had even agreed to let allies use the base for the wider campaign against Iran; in the days that followed, reinforcements arrived from across NATO including Greek frigates and jets, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German ships, while our own destroyer did not leave Portsmouth until a week after its deployment was announced.
Within a month of being put to sea, Dragon was pulled into port for what the Ministry of Defence called a ‘routine logistics stop’.
The whole episode provides a compact illustration of the gap between the posture Britain claims or aspires to have, compared to what it can realistically achieve today. This is what happens when a country tries to sustain a global hard power presence without the foundation to do so.
This is the same underlying pathology, incidentally, as our ability to deploy a carrier strike group. Britain’s problem was never building an aircraft carrier; it was screening one. The Royal Navy’s entire surface escort fleet of six Type 45 destroyers and five Type 23 frigates, eleven hulls in total, is smaller than the escort forces Italy, India, Japan or South Korea can call on, and now sits roughly level with Spain’s, although more capable than all of these, of course. Naval analysts estimate that, at best, Britain could assemble six or seven destroyers and frigates around a single carrier today, depending on maintenance and crew availability, against the 43 Royal Navy ships, carriers, submarines, destroyers and frigates alike that were sent to retake the Falklands in 1982.
HMS Dragon is one of only six Type 45s in existence; in a genuine crisis, that same handful of hulls would also be the ones asked to screen a carrier strike group against missile and air attack and defend NATO’s northern flank all at once. A navy that cannot always keep one destroyer’s freshwater system working through a routine deployment is not a navy that can generate its own carrier escort, let alone independently sustain one in the Euro-Atlantic while also projecting into the Indo-Pacific. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make Britain look global. It makes Britain look unserious, to friends and adversaries alike, at exactly the moment both are watching closely. The remedy is not a bigger fleet spread more thinly across two oceans. This is realistically unattainable, particularly from a cost and economic standpoint. Instead, it is a smaller number of reliable and capable ships, put honestly to the one purpose they were always meant to serve.
That purpose is, in truth, what sea power has always been for. Long before anyone spoke of ‘global reach’ as a virtue in itself, the Royal Navy’s purpose in European waters was to secure the sea lines of communication everything else depends on: the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap through which Russian submarines must pass to threaten the Atlantic, the trade routes that keep Britain and its allies fed and supplied, the reinforcement corridors NATO would need to move forces across the Atlantic in a crisis, and now the critical national infrastructure on the North Sea bed that our country relies on. Russian activity around undersea cables in the North Atlantic this past year suggests that mission is becoming more urgent, not less, and nobody else can do it for us. The United States, already drawing down its own troop presence in Europe, will not hold the GIUK gap on our behalf indefinitely. Australia and Japan do not need British ships in the South China Sea to make their case to Beijing; NATO’s eastern and northern flanks need a Britain that shows up, reliably, with real mass, where our presence is structurally necessary rather than merely welcome.
None of this means abandoning alliances beyond Europe, and it is not an argument for retreat. G-CAP and AUKUS are excellent examples of the impact we can have in the Indo-Pacific through ‘smart power’ without hard power assets in the region. This approach is about having honesty as to where British naval power can actually be decisive rather than symbolic, and building a fleet that is funded, crewed and sustained and capable of doing that one job properly. NATO’s own generals have reportedly warned that Russia could be ready to test Alliance resolve within a few years, while Europe’s own rearmament isn’t expected to be ready until the mid-2030s.
That gap will not be closed by keeping a token presence in two oceans. It will be closed, if it is closed at all, by finally matching ambition to reality in the one theatre where Britain’s contribution genuinely cannot be replaced.