No worries
It just a while for me to find the book it was in. My mind was playing tricks as it wasn't actually the one I thought it was in.
HMS EAGLE in the Falklands
- Thread starter flasheart
- Start date
No worries
It just a while for me to find the book it was in. My mind was playing tricks as it wasn't actually the one I thought it was in.
Captain Oblivious
Banned
Yep. Somebody at secreprojects forums recently found tantalizing bits using Google books.
Adapt and Overcome
Though the Soviet Union didn’t finally meet its end until Christmas 1991 it had been obvious even years earlier that the end was nigh and there was no road to recovery. With the overthrow of communist regimes in Europe and the retreat and accelerating decline of the Soviet Union, from about 1989 many Western leaders had started talking about a so called “Peace Dividend”. With the Cold War for all intents and purposes over and the end of show credits playing in the USSR western nations began to look towards implementing significant cuts in their defence expenditure.
The United States was looking at withdrawing down its significant presence in Europe. On the continent the iron curtain had been well and truly pulled down and European nations were no longer living in fear of Soviet tank armies storming across the Inner German Border. The various Groups of Soviet Forces (Germany, Northern, Central, Southern) that had intimidated Western Europe for decades now found themselves isolated in unwelcoming foreign lands and were desperate to get back to Russia as soon as possible leaving a wake of empty military bases and abandoned equipment in their wake. European nations began to withdraw their forces from the former frontlines in Germany. Throughout Europe many nations no longer needing to maintain large military establishments began to abolish compulsory military service and chose instead to become professional volunteer forces. In the newly reunified Germany, the Bundeswehr which had absorbed the Nationale Volksarmee (the armed forces of the now non-existent East Germany) found itself one of the most heavily armed nations on earth with close to 600,000 men and masses of vehicles, aircraft and hardware. However, with East Germany and the Warsaw Pact now but a footnote in history the Bundeswehr which had throughout its entire existence geared and trained itself solely to take on the East found itself without an enemy or a purpose. It didn’t take long for the cuts to set in as manpower shrunk by hundreds of thousands and masses of Soviet origin hardware deemed surplus to requirements and disposed of. With some notable exceptions such as the MIG-29’s and a select few personnel there was no place for the former NVA in the reunified Germany and the once mighty force met its end not on the battlefield but through budget cuts and absorption.
Britain’s response to the money saving opportunity offered by the so called Peace Dividend was to conduct a new defence review starting in 1990.
A defence review usually occurs usually every decade or so (there being no fixed frequency) with the last one having occurred in 1983 in the aftermath of the Falklands Conflict. In theory what happens is the review works out what threats the UK is likely to face and what commitments the armed forces will likely need to meet over the next decade or so and how best to counter those threats and meet those needs. This then leads on to how the Armed Forces should be structured and equipped in order to meet the requirements identified which in turn leads on into the details of what equipment needs to be procured, what restructuring and reorientations need to take place and what is no longer required. Finally this leads into how much money will be needed to pay for everything and how budgets will be redistributed.
The 1983 Defence Review had been unique in that it had been one of the few reviews where this process had been followed and where requirement had dictated budget and procurement.
Most of the time what actually happened was that a review would be conducted in response to a reduction in defence spending and the process would be followed in reverse with newly reduced budgets dictating what threats the armed forces could actually afford to meet and equipment and manpower disposed of on the basis of what was affordable rather than what was needed. The Defence Reviews carried out in 1981 and earlier in 1966 were prime examples of this with the 1966 review especially having far reaching consequences for the armed forces and Royal Navy in particular. The worst effects of the 1981 review had fortunately been cancelled out by the Falklands Conflict and the 1983 review which had been carried out as a result of the lessons learnt in the Falklands.
From the outset everyone knew that the 1990 review would be no different. Like most western nations the UK had for years focused on defending Western Europe from the threat posed by the Eastern Bloc. Granted the UK had been involved in plenty of conflicts such as Operation Banner in Northern Ireland, the Falklands Conflict and various bushfire wars around the former British Empire in recent decades but in the grand scheme of things these had been sideshows and distractions from the main focus in Europe and the North Atlantic.
Thus, when the military threat from the East had evaporated the British Armed Forces had found themselves without their previous primary purpose. All of a sudden it was extremely difficult for the armed forces to justify the numerous expensive high technology equipment programmes which were intended to fight an enemy that no longer existed and impossible to justify keeping the British Army of the Rhine at anything near its present size when it was now protecting Germany from nothing. The government and treasury had been quick to exploit this. The 1990 review had been due to report in November of 1990 and had it gone ahead by all accounts would have imposed utterly brutal cuts upon the Armed Forces. One Civil Servant who had been involved in the review that would come to be known as one of the great what ifs of British military history years later described it as mere salami slicing on a massive scale. He explained that by this he meant that the review paid next to no attention to the likely threats and taskings that the Armed Forces would face in the future and was simply an exercise in working out how and where money could be saved.
Fortunately for the Armed Forces much like the still imprisoned General Galtieri had saved them from John Nott’s 1981 Defence Review by invading the Falklands and allowing them to demonstrate their worth in another far flung part of the world another despot was about to unwittingly save them from the effects of another brutal review.
In August of 1990 motivated by a longstanding territorial dispute and disputes over debts accumulated during the bloody 8 year war with neighbouring Iran Iraq invaded and occupied the tiny nation of Kuwait.
Iraq had always claimed that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that its independence was as a result of unjust intervention by British imperialists. Following the Iraq Iran war Iraq’s economy was in a shambles and struggling with a heavy debt burden accumulated during the conflict and in desperate need of oil revenues to rebuild and pay off debts. This led to diplomatic conflict with Kuwait whom Iraq accused of oil overproduction thus driving down the price and hurting Iraq’s ability to rebuild. This had led to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to decide to invade and annex Kuwait.
When they had taken the decision to invade and occupy the Falkland Islands the Argentine Military Junta had sought to unite an increasingly fractured population around a popular patriotic cause and thus preserve their grip on power. It is possible the Saddam Hussein had been at least partially attempting to do the same by annexing Kuwait. The Iraq Iran war had started in 1980 when Saddam Hussein had attempted to invade and annex the western Iranian province of Khuzestan taking advantage of the political chaos in Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution and of the fact that the Iranian armed forces had been severely weakened by purges of its personnel in inability to source spare parts or sophisticated munitions for its western made equipment due to sanctions.
Unfortunately for Saddam the war hadn’t gone well and had devolved into an 8 year long struggle that had left both sides back where they started and resulted more than 1 million casualties.
Following the failure to achieve decisive victory or anything even remotely resembling it during the war with Iran and the hardships and losses suffered in the process tensions existed within Iraq. Therefore, knowing that Kuwait would likely be a quick and easy win Saddam may have seen invasion as a way to restore confidence in within the armed forces and his regime and unite the Iraqi people around him to see off any internal threats.
The rest of the world and the United States in particular were outraged by this blatant act of aggression and disregard for international law. Even worse was the perceived threat to the worlds oil supplies ad the economic effects of the sharp rise in oil prices.
The worry was that Saddam having taken Kuwait may decide to push on into Saudi Arabia in order to establish Iraq as the regional superpower. The present situation was unacceptable to the rest of the world and clearly could not be allowed to get worse.
This resulted in a response on two fronts. The first was through diplomatic means in the form of sanctions against Iraq. The second was the military option.
Over the course of the following 6 months in what would become known as Operation Desert Shield a massive military build up took place in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf as the United States along with the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Egypt France and other nations assembled a force close to one million men strong. Diplomatic efforts had continued during this build up there comes a point where a build up for an operation develops a nearly unstoppable momentum of its own. This momentum makes military conflict more likely the longer its allowed to go on for. Saddam’s refusal to withdraw from Kuwait merely sealed the deal.
Therefore, in the early hours of the 17th of January 1991 the coalition began what would become a 42 day long air campaign against the Iraqi’s. Within a week total air dominance had been achieved and the campaign began to switch to attacking Iraqi forces on the ground in preparation for the coalition ground offensive that would soon come. The Iraqi air force was shattered as a fighting force with 36 aircraft downed in air to air combat, more than 100 destroyed on the ground. Seeing it as their only hope for survival more than 100 Iraqi aircraft fled to the territory of their recent enemy Iran. The Iranians were quite pleased with this turn of events as chose to regard the aircraft as a form of compensation for the aircraft the had lost at the hands of the Iraqi air force. Saddam’s hope that they would merely impound the aircraft and airmen and soon return them was found to be one of many terrible miscalculations.
The air campaign was merely the prelude to the ground phase of the war. The operation code named Desert Storm (also commonly known as the 100 hour campaign) aimed to isolate and then destroy Iraqi forces in Kuwait by advancing into southern Iraq and encircling them before finally clearing them out.
At the start of the campaign Saddam Hussein had bombastically proclaimed that the mother of all battles had begun. 100 hours later western commentators were proclaiming Desert Storm to be one a one sided massacre.
The Iraqi army had been utterly crushed and swept aside. Both Iraqi and coalition commanders had severely over estimated the Iraq forces ability and willingness to resist. It was notable that the only reason why Saddam Hussein had not been forced out of power by the coalition advance was not because of any ability of his forces to fight off the invaders but because having achieved what they had set out to do in liberating Kuwait and removing the threat to Saudi Arabia the coalition had decided against pushing on towards Bagdad for their own political reasons.
The conflict was also notable for having taken place right at the end of the Cold War meaning that coalition forces were made up of men who had been trained and equipped to fight the Soviets and the Iraqi forces were equipped with the same kind of Soviet made hardware that they would have faced in the war in Europe that had never happened.
The commander of the British Forces in what became known as the Gulf War Lt General Peter de la Billiere (who had been the Director SAS during the Falklands Campaign) later remarked that the Gulf War had presented the British and American militaries with the opportunity to finally fight the kind of war that they had spent so many decades and so much money preparing for without having the inconvenience of a descent enemy.
The poor performance of the Iraqi forces and in particular their equipment had shocked many. In particular Iraq’s Soviet made tanks such as the T72 had been found to be almost completely useless when faced with the superior American Abrams and British Challenger’s.
One significant consequence of this was a dramatic change in direction for China’s Peoples Liberation Army. Up until this point the PLA had followed the doctrine of quantity over quality and based most of their doctrine on the belief that enough numbers could overwhelm any opponent no matter how much more advanced, they were. The PLA had actually considered the Iraqi forces to be significantly more technologically advanced and better trained than they were. The almost overnight destruction of the Iraqi armed forces had come as a terrible shock to the PLA and been cause for reflection and soul searching as they realised their beliefs and assumptions had been literally blown apart. If the Iraqi’s had been little more than a speed bump for the Americans then they would probably cut through the PLA as if it wasn’t even there. The result was a complete change in direction as the PLA decided that they would need to become a high technology force while retaining their numerical superiority.
Britain had played a major part in the Gulf War with its contribution being named Operation Granby. With no need to counter the Soviets any more the UK had been able to deploy almost 55,000 men to the Gulf.
The British Army’s contribution had come in the form of the reinforced 1st Armoured division. The Division had added yet another battle honour to its proud history taking part in the gigantic armoured “left hook” which had outflanked the Iraqis and pushed into Kuwait. The still new and state of the art Challenger MBT’s supported by Warrior IFV’s had easily cut through the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions opposing them destroying well over 300 enemy vehicles for hardly any losses of their own. One Challenger had written itself into the record books when it had destroyed an Iraqi tank by landing a hit on it at a distance of 3 miles.
During the Falklands Campaign the RAF had been somewhat perceived as playing second fiddle to the RN and Army. In the aftermath of that conflict the RAF had often found itself the butt of jokes from members of the RN, Army and RM about having to remind everyone that they were also there. The RAF’s most visible contribution had been the Black Buck Vulcan bombing missions which had set records for the longest bombing mission in history (subsequently broken by the USAF in the Gulf War). Since then commentators had debated whether Black Buck was carried out for reasons of military necessity or as a way for the RAF to prove its worth.
In the Gulf War however the RAF arguably made up Britain’s most significant contribution to the coalition deploying hundreds of aircraft of multiple types fulfilling every role imaginable. Tornado GR1’s proved very effective in putting Iraqi air bases out of action by destroying runways while the Jaguar had also been a success in its ground attack and close support role. C130 Hercules transport aircraft once again provided a vital air bridge with the UK, Nimrod MPA’s patrolled the seas and even provided SIGINT and ELINT capability and Chinook and Puma transport helicopter played a vital role in supporting British and coalition ground forces.
Even the Buccaneers had one last hurrah supporting other RAF aircraft by carrying laser targeting pods for precision guided munitions and carrying out their own strikes. After a career spanning nearly 30 years that was now coming to its end many serving and former RAF and FAA men were delighted that the type got to go out with a bang.
Tornado F3 interceptors were also deployed to the Gulf by the RAF but despite flying hundreds of sorties never encountered the opportunity to engage any enemy aircraft. One glaring omission from Operation Granby’s air order of battle was the Phantom. The type was showing its age by this point and it was felt that with all of the other aircraft being deployed to theatre the capability that Phantom’s would bring wouldn’t really justify the effort required to deploy and support them.
Britain’s brand new Hornet’s on the other hand would have been an excellent addition to the order of battle. However, the type was still in the extremely early stages of entering service and both the RAF and FAA were yet to stand up their first squadrons and were still at least a year and a half away from being ready to deploy. Both the RAF and FAA did however pay very close attention to the performance of the USN’s and USMC’s F/A-18 Hornets during the Gulf War.
The air force that Britain had deployed to the Gulf was a very different beast to the one that had taken part in the Falklands. Older aircraft types had been retired and replaced with new cutting edge types such as the Tornado and even more significant the RAF had this time been able to arrive in force.
The Royal Navy on the other hand found its role in the Gulf War very different from the central role it had played in the Falklands. The state of the RN at the time and the nature of the conflict meant that it played a much more limited role in the Gulf War supporting the primarily US Navy coalition naval forces.
The Royal Navy during the Gulf War had two areas of operation the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean. Within the Persian Gulf itself the RN’s most valuable contribution in terms of capability were the 6 HUNT class mine counter measure vessels that cleared the costal waters around Kuwait to allow larger vessels to close with the coast to provide naval gunfire support. The RN also contributed frigates and destroyers as escorts for the vast armada that the US Navy deployed which grew to include no less than 6 carrier battle groups. In one notable incident HMS GLOUCESTER used her Sea Dart SAM’s to destroy a pair of Iraqi Silkworm SSM’s that had been launched against the battleship USS MISSOURI which thanks to RN mine clearing efforts had closed with the coast and had been using her 16 inch guns to conduct devastatingly effective shore bombardments.
In another notable action the Iraqi Navy was virtually wiped out when it was attacked by Sea Skua armed Lynx helicopters that had been launched by RN frigates and destroyers that had been covering the RN MCMV force as it went about its vital work.
The timing of the Gulf War caught the RN in a slightly awkward position in terms of the make up of the fleet. HMS EAGLE had been decommissioned in 1986 and gone to the scrappers 2 years later and the future HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH was still years away from delivery meaning that in terms of carriers the RN only had its pair of INVINCIBLE class light VSTOL carriers and one of those was undergoing a refit at the time.
The RN had deployed a battlegroup based on HMS INDOMITABLE to the eastern Mediterranean. The Sea Harrier’s that made up her air group were fine aircraft and a massive improvement upon the earlier models that her sister HMS INVINCIBLE had carried during the Falklands campaign. However given that the Iraqi air force at the start of the conflict at least operated advanced and fast aircraft such as the MIG-29 and MIG-25 it was felt that there would be little sense in putting Sea Harriers into harms away against these aircraft when the USN’s F-14D’s and F/A-18’s would be a much better match. Therefore, the INDOMITABLE battlegroup had remained in the Eastern Med for two reasons. One was to protect the coalition sea lines of communication which went through the Suez canal and across the Mediterranean into the Atlantic.
The other was in case of a widening of the conflict. Saddam Hussein had launched a large number of Scud ballistic missiles at Israel in an attempt to provoke them into becoming involved in the conflict. If this had come to pass it was unknown how the Arab nations that made up a significant proportion of the coalition and in particular Syria would react. Therefore, it was considered sensible to keep a carrier in the Mediterranean to guard against all possibilities. In the end Israeli intervention/retaliation was only averted through a massive diplomatic effort and the diversion of coalition air and special forces assets to locating and destroying Iraqi Scud missile units.
HMS INDOMITABLE wasn’t the only INVINCIBLE class aircraft carrier to take part in the conflict. The Royal Australian Navy had deployed a number of ships to the Persian Gulf including the aircraft carrier HMAS AUSTRALIA which had begun its life as HMS ILLUSTRIOUS. The AUSTRALIA had carried an air group consisting of American manufactured AV-8B Harrier II’s and Sea King helicopters including a number of Sea King ASaC MK 7 AEW helicopters. The RAN AV-8B’s had operated alongside their USMC counterparts operating from the LPH’s USS TARAWA and USS NASSAU and had proven themselves to be a extremely welcome addition by the USMC effortlessly slotting in with the so called “Gator Navy”. The strike carrier role played by HMAS AUSTRALIA stood in stark contrast to the less visible role played by HMS INDOMITABLE far away from the action.
When it had become clear in August of 1990 that Britain was likely to become involved in a major conflict in the Gulf the decision had been quietly made to pause the then ongoing Defence Review. Politically it would have looked pretty bad for the government if it found itself releasing a review imposing brutal cuts upon the armed forces while they might potentially be involved in a high intensity (and potentially high casualty) shooting war. At the time of this decision there hadn’t really been any clear idea of when to carry on again beyond “when this thing in the Gulf was over”. Ongoing operations in the Gulf meant that unfinished review was pushed to the back of everyone’s minds as the senior officers and civil servants writing it found themselves busy dealing with more pressing concerns. It wasn’t until March 1991 that consideration was given to continuing with the review. However much like what had occurred in the aftermath of the Falklands the Armed Forces and MOD insisted that to pick up the review so soon after the end of hostilities would be unsound as they would be conducting their own studies into the conduct and performance of the armed forces during the Gulf Campaign.
Given the length of time that it would take to undertake these studies and mindful of the potential game changing effects of their findings as had happened as a result of the Falklands Conflict the Secretary of State for Defence Tom King was persuaded by the argument that it would be better to abandon the paused 1990 review and start afresh.
A new review was therefore initiated in August of 1991 and delivered its findings in February of 1992.
The 1992 review which became known simply as the Strategic Defence Review or SDR took place against a very different backdrop compared to the 1990 review. It was felt that the Gulf War had demonstrated the kind of operations that the Armed Forces would be likely to conduct going forward. For decades the armed forces had been pivoted towards fighting set piece battles in continental Europe. Their main objective in effect had been one of providing deterrence both conventional and nuclear while still maintaining some capacity for what had been described as out of area operations arising from emerging situations such as the Falklands and Northern Ireland.
The review stated that the armed forces focus should now be on rapid reaction due to the more unpredictable and uncertain nature of the post Cold War world and power projection and overseas intervention.
The Gulf War was used as an example of the kind of overseas intervention in response to a suddenly appearing situation that the armed forces should be reconfigured to respond to. The review did however note that it had taken a months long build up to deliver sufficient forces into the Gulf theatre before combat operations could begin and this had only been possible largely due to the cooperation of the enemy (who had very thoughtfully not lifted a finger to do anything that might hinder or prevent this build up and merely waited until the coalition was ready to begin hostilities on its terms). Therefore, a need had been identified for the ability to mobilise, deploy and sustain significant forces much more quickly.
Despite all of these positive sounds statements the treasury hadn’t just gone away and were still going to get their pounds of flesh from the defence budget.
The phrase “leaner but meaner” was often used in conjunction with the report which read as follows:
ROYAL NAVY
Manpower
Aircraft Carriers
FRIGATES & DESTROYER’s
ROYAL AIR FORCE
BRITISH ARMY
Out of all the services the British Army could quite legitimately claim to have suffered the worst at the hands of the review. More than 30,000 men would be made redundant leaving its strength at 118,000. Deports and other facilities would be closed with the land sold off to raise cash. The British Army of the Rhine in Germany would see its strength cut by nearly 60% and would itself be renamed British Forces Germany.
The aim was to create a smaller but better equipped and more versatile army. One senior officer involved in the review explained that the aim was to transform the army from one that killed a man by repeatedly hitting him with a sledge hammer to one that killed him by cutting his throat with a scalpel in just one movement. In terms of equipment programmes there would be some good news.
There was even an attempt to force the two most senior and prestigious regiments in the British Army the Lifeguards and the Blues and Royals into a sort of shotgun wedding to form a single composite regiment. However, many powerful, influential and well connected men have passed through their ranks and officers messes meaning that eventually this particular proposal was dropped. Some serving and former members of the Blues and Royals had even pushed for the regiment to be deamalgamated and returned to its pre 1969 state of being two separate regiments. The Royal Horse Guards who had originally been formed in 1650 and the Royal Dragoons who had existed since 1661.
The United States was looking at withdrawing down its significant presence in Europe. On the continent the iron curtain had been well and truly pulled down and European nations were no longer living in fear of Soviet tank armies storming across the Inner German Border. The various Groups of Soviet Forces (Germany, Northern, Central, Southern) that had intimidated Western Europe for decades now found themselves isolated in unwelcoming foreign lands and were desperate to get back to Russia as soon as possible leaving a wake of empty military bases and abandoned equipment in their wake. European nations began to withdraw their forces from the former frontlines in Germany. Throughout Europe many nations no longer needing to maintain large military establishments began to abolish compulsory military service and chose instead to become professional volunteer forces. In the newly reunified Germany, the Bundeswehr which had absorbed the Nationale Volksarmee (the armed forces of the now non-existent East Germany) found itself one of the most heavily armed nations on earth with close to 600,000 men and masses of vehicles, aircraft and hardware. However, with East Germany and the Warsaw Pact now but a footnote in history the Bundeswehr which had throughout its entire existence geared and trained itself solely to take on the East found itself without an enemy or a purpose. It didn’t take long for the cuts to set in as manpower shrunk by hundreds of thousands and masses of Soviet origin hardware deemed surplus to requirements and disposed of. With some notable exceptions such as the MIG-29’s and a select few personnel there was no place for the former NVA in the reunified Germany and the once mighty force met its end not on the battlefield but through budget cuts and absorption.
Britain’s response to the money saving opportunity offered by the so called Peace Dividend was to conduct a new defence review starting in 1990.
A defence review usually occurs usually every decade or so (there being no fixed frequency) with the last one having occurred in 1983 in the aftermath of the Falklands Conflict. In theory what happens is the review works out what threats the UK is likely to face and what commitments the armed forces will likely need to meet over the next decade or so and how best to counter those threats and meet those needs. This then leads on to how the Armed Forces should be structured and equipped in order to meet the requirements identified which in turn leads on into the details of what equipment needs to be procured, what restructuring and reorientations need to take place and what is no longer required. Finally this leads into how much money will be needed to pay for everything and how budgets will be redistributed.
The 1983 Defence Review had been unique in that it had been one of the few reviews where this process had been followed and where requirement had dictated budget and procurement.
Most of the time what actually happened was that a review would be conducted in response to a reduction in defence spending and the process would be followed in reverse with newly reduced budgets dictating what threats the armed forces could actually afford to meet and equipment and manpower disposed of on the basis of what was affordable rather than what was needed. The Defence Reviews carried out in 1981 and earlier in 1966 were prime examples of this with the 1966 review especially having far reaching consequences for the armed forces and Royal Navy in particular. The worst effects of the 1981 review had fortunately been cancelled out by the Falklands Conflict and the 1983 review which had been carried out as a result of the lessons learnt in the Falklands.
From the outset everyone knew that the 1990 review would be no different. Like most western nations the UK had for years focused on defending Western Europe from the threat posed by the Eastern Bloc. Granted the UK had been involved in plenty of conflicts such as Operation Banner in Northern Ireland, the Falklands Conflict and various bushfire wars around the former British Empire in recent decades but in the grand scheme of things these had been sideshows and distractions from the main focus in Europe and the North Atlantic.
Thus, when the military threat from the East had evaporated the British Armed Forces had found themselves without their previous primary purpose. All of a sudden it was extremely difficult for the armed forces to justify the numerous expensive high technology equipment programmes which were intended to fight an enemy that no longer existed and impossible to justify keeping the British Army of the Rhine at anything near its present size when it was now protecting Germany from nothing. The government and treasury had been quick to exploit this. The 1990 review had been due to report in November of 1990 and had it gone ahead by all accounts would have imposed utterly brutal cuts upon the Armed Forces. One Civil Servant who had been involved in the review that would come to be known as one of the great what ifs of British military history years later described it as mere salami slicing on a massive scale. He explained that by this he meant that the review paid next to no attention to the likely threats and taskings that the Armed Forces would face in the future and was simply an exercise in working out how and where money could be saved.
Fortunately for the Armed Forces much like the still imprisoned General Galtieri had saved them from John Nott’s 1981 Defence Review by invading the Falklands and allowing them to demonstrate their worth in another far flung part of the world another despot was about to unwittingly save them from the effects of another brutal review.
In August of 1990 motivated by a longstanding territorial dispute and disputes over debts accumulated during the bloody 8 year war with neighbouring Iran Iraq invaded and occupied the tiny nation of Kuwait.
Iraq had always claimed that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that its independence was as a result of unjust intervention by British imperialists. Following the Iraq Iran war Iraq’s economy was in a shambles and struggling with a heavy debt burden accumulated during the conflict and in desperate need of oil revenues to rebuild and pay off debts. This led to diplomatic conflict with Kuwait whom Iraq accused of oil overproduction thus driving down the price and hurting Iraq’s ability to rebuild. This had led to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to decide to invade and annex Kuwait.
When they had taken the decision to invade and occupy the Falkland Islands the Argentine Military Junta had sought to unite an increasingly fractured population around a popular patriotic cause and thus preserve their grip on power. It is possible the Saddam Hussein had been at least partially attempting to do the same by annexing Kuwait. The Iraq Iran war had started in 1980 when Saddam Hussein had attempted to invade and annex the western Iranian province of Khuzestan taking advantage of the political chaos in Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution and of the fact that the Iranian armed forces had been severely weakened by purges of its personnel in inability to source spare parts or sophisticated munitions for its western made equipment due to sanctions.
Unfortunately for Saddam the war hadn’t gone well and had devolved into an 8 year long struggle that had left both sides back where they started and resulted more than 1 million casualties.
Following the failure to achieve decisive victory or anything even remotely resembling it during the war with Iran and the hardships and losses suffered in the process tensions existed within Iraq. Therefore, knowing that Kuwait would likely be a quick and easy win Saddam may have seen invasion as a way to restore confidence in within the armed forces and his regime and unite the Iraqi people around him to see off any internal threats.
The rest of the world and the United States in particular were outraged by this blatant act of aggression and disregard for international law. Even worse was the perceived threat to the worlds oil supplies ad the economic effects of the sharp rise in oil prices.
The worry was that Saddam having taken Kuwait may decide to push on into Saudi Arabia in order to establish Iraq as the regional superpower. The present situation was unacceptable to the rest of the world and clearly could not be allowed to get worse.
This resulted in a response on two fronts. The first was through diplomatic means in the form of sanctions against Iraq. The second was the military option.
Over the course of the following 6 months in what would become known as Operation Desert Shield a massive military build up took place in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf as the United States along with the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Egypt France and other nations assembled a force close to one million men strong. Diplomatic efforts had continued during this build up there comes a point where a build up for an operation develops a nearly unstoppable momentum of its own. This momentum makes military conflict more likely the longer its allowed to go on for. Saddam’s refusal to withdraw from Kuwait merely sealed the deal.
Therefore, in the early hours of the 17th of January 1991 the coalition began what would become a 42 day long air campaign against the Iraqi’s. Within a week total air dominance had been achieved and the campaign began to switch to attacking Iraqi forces on the ground in preparation for the coalition ground offensive that would soon come. The Iraqi air force was shattered as a fighting force with 36 aircraft downed in air to air combat, more than 100 destroyed on the ground. Seeing it as their only hope for survival more than 100 Iraqi aircraft fled to the territory of their recent enemy Iran. The Iranians were quite pleased with this turn of events as chose to regard the aircraft as a form of compensation for the aircraft the had lost at the hands of the Iraqi air force. Saddam’s hope that they would merely impound the aircraft and airmen and soon return them was found to be one of many terrible miscalculations.
The air campaign was merely the prelude to the ground phase of the war. The operation code named Desert Storm (also commonly known as the 100 hour campaign) aimed to isolate and then destroy Iraqi forces in Kuwait by advancing into southern Iraq and encircling them before finally clearing them out.
At the start of the campaign Saddam Hussein had bombastically proclaimed that the mother of all battles had begun. 100 hours later western commentators were proclaiming Desert Storm to be one a one sided massacre.
The Iraqi army had been utterly crushed and swept aside. Both Iraqi and coalition commanders had severely over estimated the Iraq forces ability and willingness to resist. It was notable that the only reason why Saddam Hussein had not been forced out of power by the coalition advance was not because of any ability of his forces to fight off the invaders but because having achieved what they had set out to do in liberating Kuwait and removing the threat to Saudi Arabia the coalition had decided against pushing on towards Bagdad for their own political reasons.
The conflict was also notable for having taken place right at the end of the Cold War meaning that coalition forces were made up of men who had been trained and equipped to fight the Soviets and the Iraqi forces were equipped with the same kind of Soviet made hardware that they would have faced in the war in Europe that had never happened.
The commander of the British Forces in what became known as the Gulf War Lt General Peter de la Billiere (who had been the Director SAS during the Falklands Campaign) later remarked that the Gulf War had presented the British and American militaries with the opportunity to finally fight the kind of war that they had spent so many decades and so much money preparing for without having the inconvenience of a descent enemy.
The poor performance of the Iraqi forces and in particular their equipment had shocked many. In particular Iraq’s Soviet made tanks such as the T72 had been found to be almost completely useless when faced with the superior American Abrams and British Challenger’s.
One significant consequence of this was a dramatic change in direction for China’s Peoples Liberation Army. Up until this point the PLA had followed the doctrine of quantity over quality and based most of their doctrine on the belief that enough numbers could overwhelm any opponent no matter how much more advanced, they were. The PLA had actually considered the Iraqi forces to be significantly more technologically advanced and better trained than they were. The almost overnight destruction of the Iraqi armed forces had come as a terrible shock to the PLA and been cause for reflection and soul searching as they realised their beliefs and assumptions had been literally blown apart. If the Iraqi’s had been little more than a speed bump for the Americans then they would probably cut through the PLA as if it wasn’t even there. The result was a complete change in direction as the PLA decided that they would need to become a high technology force while retaining their numerical superiority.
Britain had played a major part in the Gulf War with its contribution being named Operation Granby. With no need to counter the Soviets any more the UK had been able to deploy almost 55,000 men to the Gulf.
The British Army’s contribution had come in the form of the reinforced 1st Armoured division. The Division had added yet another battle honour to its proud history taking part in the gigantic armoured “left hook” which had outflanked the Iraqis and pushed into Kuwait. The still new and state of the art Challenger MBT’s supported by Warrior IFV’s had easily cut through the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions opposing them destroying well over 300 enemy vehicles for hardly any losses of their own. One Challenger had written itself into the record books when it had destroyed an Iraqi tank by landing a hit on it at a distance of 3 miles.
During the Falklands Campaign the RAF had been somewhat perceived as playing second fiddle to the RN and Army. In the aftermath of that conflict the RAF had often found itself the butt of jokes from members of the RN, Army and RM about having to remind everyone that they were also there. The RAF’s most visible contribution had been the Black Buck Vulcan bombing missions which had set records for the longest bombing mission in history (subsequently broken by the USAF in the Gulf War). Since then commentators had debated whether Black Buck was carried out for reasons of military necessity or as a way for the RAF to prove its worth.
In the Gulf War however the RAF arguably made up Britain’s most significant contribution to the coalition deploying hundreds of aircraft of multiple types fulfilling every role imaginable. Tornado GR1’s proved very effective in putting Iraqi air bases out of action by destroying runways while the Jaguar had also been a success in its ground attack and close support role. C130 Hercules transport aircraft once again provided a vital air bridge with the UK, Nimrod MPA’s patrolled the seas and even provided SIGINT and ELINT capability and Chinook and Puma transport helicopter played a vital role in supporting British and coalition ground forces.
Even the Buccaneers had one last hurrah supporting other RAF aircraft by carrying laser targeting pods for precision guided munitions and carrying out their own strikes. After a career spanning nearly 30 years that was now coming to its end many serving and former RAF and FAA men were delighted that the type got to go out with a bang.
Tornado F3 interceptors were also deployed to the Gulf by the RAF but despite flying hundreds of sorties never encountered the opportunity to engage any enemy aircraft. One glaring omission from Operation Granby’s air order of battle was the Phantom. The type was showing its age by this point and it was felt that with all of the other aircraft being deployed to theatre the capability that Phantom’s would bring wouldn’t really justify the effort required to deploy and support them.
Britain’s brand new Hornet’s on the other hand would have been an excellent addition to the order of battle. However, the type was still in the extremely early stages of entering service and both the RAF and FAA were yet to stand up their first squadrons and were still at least a year and a half away from being ready to deploy. Both the RAF and FAA did however pay very close attention to the performance of the USN’s and USMC’s F/A-18 Hornets during the Gulf War.
The air force that Britain had deployed to the Gulf was a very different beast to the one that had taken part in the Falklands. Older aircraft types had been retired and replaced with new cutting edge types such as the Tornado and even more significant the RAF had this time been able to arrive in force.
The Royal Navy on the other hand found its role in the Gulf War very different from the central role it had played in the Falklands. The state of the RN at the time and the nature of the conflict meant that it played a much more limited role in the Gulf War supporting the primarily US Navy coalition naval forces.
The Royal Navy during the Gulf War had two areas of operation the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean. Within the Persian Gulf itself the RN’s most valuable contribution in terms of capability were the 6 HUNT class mine counter measure vessels that cleared the costal waters around Kuwait to allow larger vessels to close with the coast to provide naval gunfire support. The RN also contributed frigates and destroyers as escorts for the vast armada that the US Navy deployed which grew to include no less than 6 carrier battle groups. In one notable incident HMS GLOUCESTER used her Sea Dart SAM’s to destroy a pair of Iraqi Silkworm SSM’s that had been launched against the battleship USS MISSOURI which thanks to RN mine clearing efforts had closed with the coast and had been using her 16 inch guns to conduct devastatingly effective shore bombardments.
In another notable action the Iraqi Navy was virtually wiped out when it was attacked by Sea Skua armed Lynx helicopters that had been launched by RN frigates and destroyers that had been covering the RN MCMV force as it went about its vital work.
The timing of the Gulf War caught the RN in a slightly awkward position in terms of the make up of the fleet. HMS EAGLE had been decommissioned in 1986 and gone to the scrappers 2 years later and the future HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH was still years away from delivery meaning that in terms of carriers the RN only had its pair of INVINCIBLE class light VSTOL carriers and one of those was undergoing a refit at the time.
The RN had deployed a battlegroup based on HMS INDOMITABLE to the eastern Mediterranean. The Sea Harrier’s that made up her air group were fine aircraft and a massive improvement upon the earlier models that her sister HMS INVINCIBLE had carried during the Falklands campaign. However given that the Iraqi air force at the start of the conflict at least operated advanced and fast aircraft such as the MIG-29 and MIG-25 it was felt that there would be little sense in putting Sea Harriers into harms away against these aircraft when the USN’s F-14D’s and F/A-18’s would be a much better match. Therefore, the INDOMITABLE battlegroup had remained in the Eastern Med for two reasons. One was to protect the coalition sea lines of communication which went through the Suez canal and across the Mediterranean into the Atlantic.
The other was in case of a widening of the conflict. Saddam Hussein had launched a large number of Scud ballistic missiles at Israel in an attempt to provoke them into becoming involved in the conflict. If this had come to pass it was unknown how the Arab nations that made up a significant proportion of the coalition and in particular Syria would react. Therefore, it was considered sensible to keep a carrier in the Mediterranean to guard against all possibilities. In the end Israeli intervention/retaliation was only averted through a massive diplomatic effort and the diversion of coalition air and special forces assets to locating and destroying Iraqi Scud missile units.
HMS INDOMITABLE wasn’t the only INVINCIBLE class aircraft carrier to take part in the conflict. The Royal Australian Navy had deployed a number of ships to the Persian Gulf including the aircraft carrier HMAS AUSTRALIA which had begun its life as HMS ILLUSTRIOUS. The AUSTRALIA had carried an air group consisting of American manufactured AV-8B Harrier II’s and Sea King helicopters including a number of Sea King ASaC MK 7 AEW helicopters. The RAN AV-8B’s had operated alongside their USMC counterparts operating from the LPH’s USS TARAWA and USS NASSAU and had proven themselves to be a extremely welcome addition by the USMC effortlessly slotting in with the so called “Gator Navy”. The strike carrier role played by HMAS AUSTRALIA stood in stark contrast to the less visible role played by HMS INDOMITABLE far away from the action.
When it had become clear in August of 1990 that Britain was likely to become involved in a major conflict in the Gulf the decision had been quietly made to pause the then ongoing Defence Review. Politically it would have looked pretty bad for the government if it found itself releasing a review imposing brutal cuts upon the armed forces while they might potentially be involved in a high intensity (and potentially high casualty) shooting war. At the time of this decision there hadn’t really been any clear idea of when to carry on again beyond “when this thing in the Gulf was over”. Ongoing operations in the Gulf meant that unfinished review was pushed to the back of everyone’s minds as the senior officers and civil servants writing it found themselves busy dealing with more pressing concerns. It wasn’t until March 1991 that consideration was given to continuing with the review. However much like what had occurred in the aftermath of the Falklands the Armed Forces and MOD insisted that to pick up the review so soon after the end of hostilities would be unsound as they would be conducting their own studies into the conduct and performance of the armed forces during the Gulf Campaign.
Given the length of time that it would take to undertake these studies and mindful of the potential game changing effects of their findings as had happened as a result of the Falklands Conflict the Secretary of State for Defence Tom King was persuaded by the argument that it would be better to abandon the paused 1990 review and start afresh.
A new review was therefore initiated in August of 1991 and delivered its findings in February of 1992.
The 1992 review which became known simply as the Strategic Defence Review or SDR took place against a very different backdrop compared to the 1990 review. It was felt that the Gulf War had demonstrated the kind of operations that the Armed Forces would be likely to conduct going forward. For decades the armed forces had been pivoted towards fighting set piece battles in continental Europe. Their main objective in effect had been one of providing deterrence both conventional and nuclear while still maintaining some capacity for what had been described as out of area operations arising from emerging situations such as the Falklands and Northern Ireland.
The review stated that the armed forces focus should now be on rapid reaction due to the more unpredictable and uncertain nature of the post Cold War world and power projection and overseas intervention.
The Gulf War was used as an example of the kind of overseas intervention in response to a suddenly appearing situation that the armed forces should be reconfigured to respond to. The review did however note that it had taken a months long build up to deliver sufficient forces into the Gulf theatre before combat operations could begin and this had only been possible largely due to the cooperation of the enemy (who had very thoughtfully not lifted a finger to do anything that might hinder or prevent this build up and merely waited until the coalition was ready to begin hostilities on its terms). Therefore, a need had been identified for the ability to mobilise, deploy and sustain significant forces much more quickly.
Despite all of these positive sounds statements the treasury hadn’t just gone away and were still going to get their pounds of flesh from the defence budget.
The phrase “leaner but meaner” was often used in conjunction with the report which read as follows:
ROYAL NAVY
Manpower
- The Royal Navy would incur a manpower loss of 10,000 which would reduce the service to a strength of 60,000.
- The Women’s Royal Naval Service would be disbanded and its members integrated into the regular RN which with the exception of some branches including the Royal Marines and Submarine service open recruitment to females. This would be carried out in conjunction with the disbandment and integration of the Women’s Royal Army Corps and the Women’s Royal Air Force. Officially this move was in response to changes in society and the necessity of moving with the times. While this wasn’t untrue there were other motivating factors.
In the aftermath of the Falklands War the armed forces had enjoyed a boom in recruitment. However, 8 years later the majority of those recruits had done their time and left the forces meaning that forces once again were fighting the never ending battle against manpower shortages. By opening recruitment to women, the pool of potential recruits would be doubled overnight going a long way towards alleviating manpower issues. It would take some years to build up a significant female cadre within the forces and it be a bumpy road in some areas but it was a journey that in the 1990’s was now unavoidable.
- The TRIDENT and VANGUARD class SSBN programme would continue as planned.
- The UK’s Trident SLBM and VANGUARD class SSBN programme was one of two vastly expensive megaprojects that the MOD was undertaking at the time the review was published (the other being the QE class aircraft carrier’s).
Questions had been asked about the continuing need for an expensive submarine based nuclear deterrent in the post cold war world. However there had never been any serious consideration given to anything like nuclear disarmament. The Soviet Union may have gone but their nuclear stockpiles still existed. In fact with the break up of the USSR there were now more nuclear armed states in the world than ever before and nuclear proliferation was a serious concern. By this point the Trident programme was far too advanced and far too much money had been spent to even consider cancellation.
Some thought had been given to perhaps scaling the programme. The final VANGUARD class SSBN HMS VENGEANCE wasn’t due to be laid down until 1993. Considerable savings could be achieved by not pressing ahead with this boat and some in the treasury were pressing hard for this option. In the end the Prime Minister had personally intervened to stop talk of any such nonsense. With only 3 boats it would have been impossible to maintain continuous at sea deterrence and this was not something that the PM was willing to even consider giving up. In fact much to the ire of the treasury further funds would likely have to be allocated to the programme to speed up the introduction of the VANGUARD’s owing to worsening issues with the rapidly aging RESOLUTION class SSBN’s.
- The VALIANT & CHURCHILL class SSN’s would be retired without replacement
- These 5 boats would be taken out of service as part of a general downsizing of the fleet. The boats were starting to become fairly elderly (the youngest HMS COURAGEOUS being 22 years old) and increasingly obsolete and expensive to maintain. In the post Cold War World without having to counter the once formidable Soviet submarine force there was going to be less demand for expensive SSN’s.
This did however raise the issue of how to dispose of nuclear powered vessels. In true government style the review made no mention of this and the can would be repeatedly licked down the road while the boats slowly rusted in a basin in Devonport Dockyard.
- A new class of SSN would be ordered to replace the SWIFTSURE class
- Previously a new class of SSN’s had been planned as a follow on to the TRAFALGAR class boats under the auspices of the SSN20 project to replace the VALIANT and CHURCHILL class. This project had been cancelled when VSEL had been awarded the contract to build the future HMS EAGLE which alongside the ongoing VANGUARD class building programme meant that Barrow which was the only yard capable of building nuclear powered vessels simply had no room for another project. With HMS EAGLE along with the second boat of the Vanguard class HMS VICTORIOUS due to launch in 1993 space would become available to start working on new boats. A new set of design studies would be undertaken with cost control being a key priority. The intention would be to build upon the still very recent TRAFALGAR class to produce an evolved design or “Batch 2” for reasons controlling costs and technical risk. This project would for now be known as the Batch 2 Trafalgar Class or B2TC.
- The remaining OBERON class SSK’s would be withdrawn from service as soon as possible.
- These boats were getting very old and were now obsolete. Decommissioning the entire class would free up the significant sums it was costing to run them and would free up a significant amount of manpower for reassignment to other boats or in many cases redundancy.
- The UPHOLDER class SSK Programme would be capped at 4 boats
- This one had caused many headaches and less than pleasant exchanges between the MOD and Cammel Laird. The original plan had been to build 12 boats in 3 batches of 4. Batch 3 hadn’t been ordered yet so cancelling that was simple enough. Of the first batch of four two were already in service with the other two due to join the fleet within the next year. Batch 2 had been the problem seeing as the first 2 of these boats were already under construction. The contract for these boats included a cancellation cause meaning that the MOD would have to compensate Cammel Laird for the money they had already spent so far on building HMS UNDAUNTED and HMS UNBEATEN. Worse still though the order for the second pair of batch 2 boats (which would have been named HMS UPROAR and HMS UNRIVALLED) had not yet been placed the letters of intent had been signed meaning that Cammel Laird had already been preparing to begin construction. Cammel Laird were now threatening to take the MOD to court over what they felt to be a violation of an agreement which had left them out of pocket.
Fortunately, it was at this point that the MOD’s attempts to market the UPHOLDER class had paid off and help had come from the Royal Canadian Navy. Following the abandonment of the unrealistic CANADA class SSN project the Canadians had been looking for a new class of SSK to replace their OBERON class boats. A deal had been struck with the Canadian’s whereby the contract for the Batch 2 UPHOLDERR class would be amended to have the boats completed to Canadian specifications. As soon as the each boat was handed over to the Royal Navy as per contract it would be immediately (on the same day) sold to the Canadian’s who would make down payments well in advance (non refundable in case anyone on the other side of the pond was tempted to change their minds). - The RN’s four UPHOLDER class SSK’s would be based at HMS Dolphin in Gosport where they would be used for specialised work that the larger SSN’s were less suited for such as shallow water operations, SF insertion, surveillance and so on. RCN submarines would also temporarily be based at Gosport while the Canadian crews were trained by the RN on their new boats.
- The Tomahawk TLAM would be procured for the RN’s SSN and SSK fleet.
- The British had been extremely impressed with the performance and capability provided by the submarine launched TLAM during the Gulf War. It had been decided to procure this missile as it was judged to be a relatively cheap way of significantly boosting the potency of the Submarine Service.
Aircraft Carriers
- The CV-90 Programme would continue as planned
- Along with the Trident programme this was one of the most expensive defence projects currently underway and one that the Treasury had been desperate to scale back. The first ship HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH was already in the water and simply to far along to cancel.
The second ship of the class HMS EAGLE was about 18 months behind her sister in terms of build progression and was the obvious candidate for being axed. The ship had been laid down in 1988 and was now only a year away from being launched. Had the defence review gone ahead in 1990 as originally planned it is likely that EAGLE would have been cancelled. However, by 1992 the ship was far along enough that cancelling her would politically be a PR catastrophe to say nothing of the money wasted. Other possibilities had been explored such as selling or laying up one of the ships but these options had been considered unviable for practical and political reasons. Therefore, both ships would enter service and actually fitted quite well into the MOD’s vision of power projection and overseas intervention.
- HMS INDOMITABLE would be decommissioned
- HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH was now reaching the point where her ships company would soon start to be assembled. In order to free up the necessary manpower it had been decided to withdraw one of the INVINCIBLE class slightly earlier than planned. HMS INVINCIBLE had recently completed a refit and was in a better condition than her sister and so she would be retained in service until the QE reached her initial operating capability at which point, she would be withdrawn with her crew going to HMS EAGLE.
The early withdrawal of INDOMITABLE would have the knock on effects of saving the money it would have cost to operate her for her planned final years and allow some of the Sea Harrier squadrons to begin converting onto the Hornet FGR2.
The INDOMITABLE and ultimately INVINCIBLE would be disposed of by sale with India, Brazil and Australia being identified as the most promising candidates. Since the deal to sell them the former HMS HERMES had fallen through the British Government gently trying to woo the Indian Navy into taking on one of the Invincible’s when they became available. Australia already operated and INVINCIBLE class carrier and especially in the wake of the performance of HMAS AUSTRALIA in the Gulf War it was hoped that they might be interested in taking on a second of the class. If not to operate then perhaps as a source of spare parts to support the AUSTRALIA.
- A new class of Amphibious Assault ship would be built to replace the FEARLESS class LPD’s
- HMS FEARLESS and HMS INTREPID were now approaching 30 years old. Being one of the few remaining steam powered vessels in the RN they were increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain and in dire need of replacement. To this end a new pair of Amphibious Warfare vessels would be built. Various design concepts had already been studied. The RN had been without a dedicated LPH since the retirement of HMS HERMES and some had been pushing for a new ship to fill this role. The options put forward were to either convert one of the INVINCIBLE class to an LPH configuration when it was no longer required as a carrier or to build a completely new ship based on the INVINCIBLE class design. The first option had been discarded as it was felt that a converted INVINCIBLE wouldn’t really be able to provide a capacity for a meaningful embarked military force. The second option had been rejected out of hand seeing as the money and manpower to build and operate a completely new class of large ship wouldn’t be forthcoming.
The new ships would be a combined LPH/LPD type of vessel. Initial artists impressions showed a ship that outwardly looked like a large LPH with plenty of helicopter carrying capacity but also equipped with a large well deck and vehicle deck. These ships would be at least as big as an INVINCIBLE class ship and most likely reach anywhere between 25 and 30 thousand tons. However, with the capability they would offer and the fact that thanks to advances in automation and the less complicated nature of the ship the crew size could be kept reasonably modest they were felt to be good value for money.
FRIGATES & DESTROYER’s
- HMS BRISTOL would be withdrawn from service
- Ships that are the only example of their class are always disproportionally expensive to operate and maintain. HMS BRISTOL was a large ship with a large crew and lots of unique systems. Therefore, the decision made been made to retire her as a cost and manpower saving measure.
- HMS ANTRIM would be withdrawn from service
- The COUNTY class destroyer HMS ANTRIM had suffered heavy damage during the Falklands conflict and had been rebuilt as a training ship and since spent most of her time conducting training cruises for the officer cadets at Britannia Royal Naval College. Given the ships age and tightening budgets decommissioning her had been an easy decision.
- The UK would partake in the HORIZON class programme
- The UK had originally been a member of the multinational NATO Frigate Replacement for the 90’s (NFR90) project which had fallen apart owing to each nations incompatible differing requirements. The UK would therefore team up with France and Italy to design a new type of air warfare destroyer with which the UK intended to replace the TYPE 42 destroyer.
- The TYPE 21 Frigates would be withdrawn from service without replacement
- This one was purely down to cost cutting and manpower reductions resulting from planned redundancies. Equipped with Exocet SSM’s, a 4.5 inch gun and Phalanx CWIS these ships were ok for general patrol work but not much more that could justify their retention. Of the eight ships originally built two HMS ANTELOPE and HMS ARDENT had been sunk by air attack at the battle of San Carlos during the Falklands. Already Pakistan had all but agreed to purchase the remaining six vessels.
- Some consideration had been given to retiring the first four TYPE 22 frigates as they were felt likely to have some resale value. However, given the demand for escorts for the QUEEN ELIZABETH class carrier battle groups it was felt unwise to let go of these still very capable ASW frigates and so this idea had been abandoned.
- The TYPE 23 Frigate programme would be cut back to 18 ships
- Originally this programme had been expected to somewhere between 18 to 25 ships to replace the LEANDER class. Budget cuts had dictated that once the minimum planned level of 18 had been reached that would be it. Already the TYPE 23 was attracting considerable interest from abroad with Chile having announced their desire to purchase two vessels and Singapore expressing a strong interest.
So far 3 vessels were in service with the Royal Navy with seven more in various stages of construction and others expected to follow at a rate of about two vessels per year.
- Decommissioning of the remaining LEANDER Class FRIGATES was to be accelerated
- This was in order to achieve some sort term cost savings to appease the treasury as the decommissioned vessels would be a source of spare parts for those remaining in service while relieving pressure on manpower.
- A second batch of seven SANDOWN Class MCM vessels would be ordered.
- The final 2 of the planned 6 FORT II class Replenishment Oilers would not be built
ROYAL AIR FORCE
- RAF GUTERSLOH & RAF WILDENRATH would be closed down
- As part of a general scaling down of British forces in Germany the RAF would be closing two of its four air bases in the country. RAF Wildenrath had been intended to become the base for the RAF’s Hornet force in Germany. These plans would now be abandoned and all RAF Hornet FGR1’s would be based within the UK.
- RAF FINNIGLEY in the UK would be closed down
- The RAF would incur a manpower reduction of 15,000 reducing its strength to 72,000.
- The remaining Buccaneer’s would be withdrawn from service
- The 60+ Buccaneer strike aircraft still in service were reaching the end of their lives and with a general downsizing of the RAF would be withdrawn immediately without a direct aircraft for aircraft replacement.
- The remaining HARRIER GR3’s would be withdrawn and production of the HARRIER GR5/7 curtailed
- At the time of the review just over 60 older Harrier GR3’s remained in service while More than 100 newer Harrier’s were in service or build split between the GR5 which was itself being upgraded to GR7 standard. The decision to remove the GR3 and stop production of the newer Harrier variants would effectively halve the force.
- The Number of Nimrod MPA’s in service would be reduced
- Activity from the formerly Soviet Submarine fleet had declined massively with hundreds of boats laid up and the Russian Navy barely able to keep SSBN’s at sea on deterrent patrol (In 1992 to 1993 not one Russian SSBN patrol would be carried out). Therefore, the opportunity had been seized to make a small reduction in the MPA fleet. Of the 36 Nimrod’s currently in service the 6 with the most hours on their logs would be withdrawn from their squadrons and gradually ripped apart in their new role as sources of spare parts for the aircraft that remained flying.
- 60 Hornet FGR2’s would be procured as a replacement for the Jaguar
- This was the one bit of good news for the RAF. They had been very pleased with the Hornet FGR1’s they had already received and had decided to procure the two seat FGR2 which was geared more towards ground attack to replace the Buccaneer and then ultimately the Jaguar. The review had stated that there would be no replacement for the Buccaneer’s. The RAF already had 120 FGR1’s on order and had wanted another 100 FGR2’s the realities of the new financial climate however had seen this slashed to only 60 which would replace the Jaguar on a less than one for one basis.
- The Tornado GR1 would be upgraded
- The Tornado GR1 had given a good account of itself in the Gulf and had been approaching the point where it was due for a midlife upgrade anyway. The new GR4 variant would enhance the Tornado’s capabilities and incorporate lessons leant in the Gulf. The flipside of this was that out of 200 Tornado GR1’s originally produced only 170 would receive the upgrade with the remainder eventually withdrawn from service.
- £350 million would be spent on laser guided munitions and target designators
- With a sever reduction in combat air power strength it was important to make the best use possible of the remaining aircraft. The Gulf War had demonstrated the value and usefulness of precision guided munitions and convinced the RAF to replace its entire bomb stock with PCM’s Overall stocks of munitions however would be reduced with a number of munitions storage facilities emptied and closed down. The large quantity of munitions expended in the Gulf had helped considerably with the issue of safe disposal.
BRITISH ARMY
Out of all the services the British Army could quite legitimately claim to have suffered the worst at the hands of the review. More than 30,000 men would be made redundant leaving its strength at 118,000. Deports and other facilities would be closed with the land sold off to raise cash. The British Army of the Rhine in Germany would see its strength cut by nearly 60% and would itself be renamed British Forces Germany.
The aim was to create a smaller but better equipped and more versatile army. One senior officer involved in the review explained that the aim was to transform the army from one that killed a man by repeatedly hitting him with a sledge hammer to one that killed him by cutting his throat with a scalpel in just one movement. In terms of equipment programmes there would be some good news.
- While it had achieved phenomenal kill ratios in the Gulf the Challenger MBT had shown that it had plenty of limitations and issues. Therefore it would be replaced by a completely new and superior MBT (albeit at a reduced number)
- The British Army would procure the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter having seen US Army Apache’s in action in Iraq noting how vastly superior they were to their own TOW equipped Lynx MK7’s.
- New and modern small arms and other individual bits of kit such as body armour, boots and bergens would be procured.
There was even an attempt to force the two most senior and prestigious regiments in the British Army the Lifeguards and the Blues and Royals into a sort of shotgun wedding to form a single composite regiment. However, many powerful, influential and well connected men have passed through their ranks and officers messes meaning that eventually this particular proposal was dropped. Some serving and former members of the Blues and Royals had even pushed for the regiment to be deamalgamated and returned to its pre 1969 state of being two separate regiments. The Royal Horse Guards who had originally been formed in 1650 and the Royal Dragoons who had existed since 1661.
Oh, this is very good news for the shipbuilders. We'll see if the Type 23 buy for the RN remains at 18, but the interest from Singapore (La Fayette OTL) and Chile (1 surplus Type 22, three surplus Type 23, and four surplus Dutch frigates OTL) is very promising. 12 frigates (Type 23s don't match up well to a Heemskerck's AAW capabilities) on top of the eighteen Type 23s should be able to keep the shipyards busy until the new destroyer starts building.
Last edited:
While I still cringe at the mere mention of "Upholder" or "Victoria", it seems like the issues in our timeline are hopefully dealt with. Hopefully there is no dillydallying with allowing the ships effective rot at the pier. As much as I distrust Vickers and their export obsession, there's not much else out there.
Immensely enjoying this excellent timeline, been following it since the summer but I think this is my first post.
Especially since they got to build 4 more Upholders than otl and the RCN won't be getting submarines that spent the better part of a half decade in the reserve fleet. Also healthier shipyards means the RN will be paying less for each major overhaul and new hull so it probably spends the same amount of money on its ships(or close enough) as otl while having a larger fleet.
Hmmm I wonder where the 30 non upgraded RAF Hornets went? They were either used as spare parts farms or sold to another nation at a bargain price although getting the US to sign off on that would probably be a bit tricky.Also it looks like HMS Dolphin will be around for at least a bit longer than otl.
I'm guessing Bristol will replace Antrim as the training ship since she's still around in otl doing so (albeit as a static vessel) after she replaced HMS Kent aka Antrim's sister ship in the role
Last edited:
I am happy that Canada did not wait until the subs were rusting when they were bought and brought in to service. I wonder if Canada might buy some of the Batch 3 Boats?
The OP states that the Batch 3 boats were cancelled. I can't see any obvious reason why Canada would look to buying more than four since they're direct replacements for the RCN's four Oberon's and the cold war has just ended so there's no obvious threat to justify expanding the fleet.
The Consequences of War
12th October 2013, HMS DARING, 50 miles off the coast of New South Wales Australia, 2100 Local Time
After a very long day which had followed on from an extremely busy week the Commanding Officer of the TYPE 45 destroyer HMS DARING was finally alone in his cabin where he had decided to allow himself to relax for a bit. Since departing Sydney Harbour early that morning which had involved everyone getting out of bed at an obscenely early hour DARING had been making here way north up the west coast of Australia.
The CO having only had sleep occasionally in the last week had spent most of the day trying to hide how tired he really was. His actual activities had consisted of carefully planning the next phase of the deployment, running a length firefighting exercise to blow the cobwebs out seeing as some members of the ships company may have become slightly to relaxed during their week long stop over in Sydney and allowed standards to slip and overseeing the ships transit out of Sydney Harbour and through some rather busy waters out into the open sea.
Finally in the early hours of the evening he had been able to write up Captain’s night orders and briefed the Ops Officer and Officer of the Watch as to what he wanted done overnight along with the usual instruction that he was to be woken immediately if anything were to happen during the night. This was a formality more than anything though. By this stage in the deployment all of the watch officers were now much more experienced than they had already been and would be able to deal with anything and would probably wake the XO and Ops Officer first if they were unsure about something. Plus, the ship would be transiting a fairly quiet area of water where it was unlikely that anything would happen that would require his personal attention.
His cabin was equipped with two screens including one right by his bed that displayed the current radar and navigational plot so he was constantly kept up to date with the current situation and was usually aware of events even before he had been informed by the Officer of the Watch.
The CO had left the bridge slightly earlier than usual informing the XO that he was going to attend to the pile of paperwork that had been growing on his desk over the past week while he had been far too busy to deal with it. Rather than proceeding to his cabin however he had decided to first go for a walk around the ship. As CO he naturally spent most of his time either on the bridge, in the Operations Room or in his cabin asleep or attending to administrative duties. As his cabin was in the forward part of the superstructure sandwiched between the bridge above and the Ops room below it was fairly easy for him to become isolated from what was going on aboard the rest of the ship. Therefore, whenever he got the opportunity, he would take a walk around the ship both to be seen by the ships company and to enable him to get a feel for their mood. Usually he would use the excuse of dropping in on the ships laundry shack to have a friendly chat with the ships Chinese Laundryman (though in practise on most ships the laundrymen were Nepalese ex Gurkhas) who being a civilian would quite happily share a brew and have a friendly chat with the CO in a way that none of the officers or ratings would be brave enough to do. DARING’s laundryman was an ex Gurkha and Falklands veteran who had taken part in the famous charge up Mount William during the battle of Tumbledown. He proudly kept his kukri knife (which he claimed to have used during that bloody night) on display in the laundry shack and was greatly respected, liked and perhaps somewhat feared by the ships company most of whom weren’t even born when the Falklands War had occurred.
This wasn’t the real reason for the CO’s visits though. The laundry Shack was located right at the stern of the ship where most of the Junior Rates and Senior Rates messes, dining halls and recreation spaces were located giving him a good opportunity to see the state of these areas and speak to members of the ships company. He usually timed these informal tours of the ship to coincide with mealtimes when the junior rates would usually line up in the passageway outside the galley. As he went passed the CO asked them a few questions along the lines of did they have fun in Sydney? And were they all rested and ready to get back to it?
Of course the crew would always say yes or whatever they thought the Captain wanted to hear with a slight look of terror in their eyes. The CO had been around long enough to know that if there were any grievances no one would say it directly to his face unless it was something serious in which case, he would probably already have been aware of it. Very occasionally as on this occasion the CO would pay a visit to the galley to see the state of the food being served. As Captain he ate alone in his cabin and had his own designated chef and food supply which was naturally better than whatever was served to everyone else. However, he knew from long experience how important food was to morale and efficiency and if he felt it was necessary wasn’t above having a quiet word with the Chief Caterer about the need to pick up standards in the galley. Recently he’d had to personally stamp on a suggestion from the logistics officer about serving cold fresh fruit of breakfast instead of the traditional full English. The CO had pointed out that crewmen who had been on watch all night including those on sentry duty who would have spent at least 6 hours standing outside freezing and being rained on and now had a full working day ahead of them would probably feel more satisfied and motivated with sausage and bacon rolls rather than a piece of cold grapefruit.
It was for reasons like this that the CO was quite well thought of by the ships company who perceived him as having their welfare at heart.
The CO wasn’t the only one who carried out these little informal walk rounds of the ship though. The XO didn’t even need an excuse to do the same thing. He would tour all parts of the ship checking the state of the ships cleanliness and hygiene of living areas and paying particular attention to the state of the CBRNDC equipment and lockers that were located all over the ship and was known to pick a locker at random and order a snap contents inventory despite the locker in questions having often been inventoried only days or even hours before. Whereas the CO might stop someone for a friendly chat the XO had a habit of randomly grabbing someone and pointing a set of breathing apparatus and ordering them to don it while he timed them to see if they could do it within the 2 minutes required by navy regulations.
Damage control and fire fighting in the Royal Navy had come on a very long way since the Falklands War.
Retiring to his cabin the CO had eaten dinner and then tried to make a start on the mountain of paperwork on his desk but found his enthusiasm for doing so failing him. He knew what most of it would be anyway. The usual routine stuff padded out by reports he would be expected to write regarding his ships recent visit to Australia and a few disciplinary cases resulting from that visit. Knowing that it would take him hours to wade through it all the CO had decided to just leave it until tomorrow and rest for now. Rather than retiring straight to his sleeping cabin despite being rather tired the CO had instead poured himself a glass of the brandy he’d been working through since leaving Portsmouth and allowed himself some time to think about things.
HMS DARING was now 4 months into a 9 month global deployment that involved a circumnavigation of the globe. The purpose of this deployment was “Defence Engagement” which really meant flying the flag around the world. In particular the Royal Navy was keen for DARING to make her presence felt in the Far East and Pacific where British warships had been a rarity in recent years due to the fleet mostly being committed to supporting ongoing operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as the increasing need to conduct counter piracy operations off the coast of Somalia.
DARING had left her homeport of Portsmouth in early June as part of a battlegroup made up of the aircraft carrier HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH accompanied by DARING and her sister HMS DIAMOND, the frigates HMS SUFFOLK, HMS RICHMOND and HMS GRAFTON and the RFA’s WAVE KNIGHT and FORT CHARLOTTE. Since the early 2000’s the Royal Navy had been in the habit of sending a carrier battlegroup across the Atlantic on a short deployment to the US east coast to exercise with US Navy carrier battlegroups. The training benefit from these deployments for both the ships companies and in particular aircrews of both nations was felt to more than justify the expense involved and was the reason why these deployments still continued in the wake of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review which had inflicted murderous cuts to the Defence budget. There had occasionally been years where the RN hadn’t carried out these carrier training deployments for operational reasons, most notably in 2003 where the carriers had been committed to supporting operations in Iraq.
In return the USN had a routine of every year deploying either a carrier battle group or amphibious strike group to UK waters to train with the RN. USN commanders in particular were always extremely pleased to have RN trainers from the RN’s FOST organisation onboard their ships and were almost evangelical about the benefits of FOST’s legendarily tough and intensive training exercises.
The French Navy also sometimes joined in with these exercises when they were held on the UK side of the Atlantic. The previous year had been one such year and the Marine Nationale had committed a battlegroup built around the 42,000 ton nuclear powered aircraft carrier CHARLES DE GAULLE.
DARING’s CO remembered attending a reception aboard the DE GAULLE last year when she had paid a visit to Portsmouth last year following the annual RN/USN exercise on this side of the pond. He remembered going up to the flight deck and seeing HMS EAGLE which was berthed just ahead and remembering the feeling of pride and slight smugness as the 62,000 ton flagship of the Royal Navy seemingly effortlessly dwarfed the French visitor. He had chatted with a group of French officers who had toured the EAGLE and been very impressed by what they had seen. He had occasionally picked up on a sense of regret within the French Navy that they had walked away from the potential joint aircraft carrier programme with the British back in the 1980’s when what had then been known as the CVF-90 project was still in development and pressed ahead with what had become the CHARLES DE GAULLE class.
Still the CO thought most joint projects that involved the UK working with the French generally failed. His own ship DARING had been born out of the HORIZON class project jointly developed between the UK, France and Italy. The UK had withdrawn from the project owing to differences in requirements with the UK feeling they needed a ship that was larger and thus more expensive than what the French and Italians had been willing to pay for. The result had been the TYPE 45 destroyer of which DARING was the first example of what would soon be a class of 12 ships replacing the elderly and obsolete TYPE 42’s.
The CHARLES DE GAULLE had had a rather difficult and protracted birth. Launched in 1994 (the same year that the RN’s QUEEN ELIZABETH had entered service) the French hadn’t been able to commission her until 2001 owing to a never ending series of delays caused by technical problems, financial constraints and design flaws that were often only identified during construction. Some French officers (once they’d had enough wine) would occasionally lament that they had spent the same amount of money as the British but taken a lot longer and ended up with an inferior ship. Part of the reason for the smaller French carriers costing just as much as their larger British counterparts was due to the more expensive but in some ways more useful nuclear powerplant. That and the need to rectify endless technical and design issues often at great expense. The reactor and its associated systems had been the cause of its fair share of these problems.
Still the French ship did have something that the invited officers had been both envious and jealous of. Most notably of all the fact that CHARLES DE GAULLE had a system to pump wine around the ship meaning wine on tap in every compartment. Good wine as well!
Also was the fact that whereas sailors in the RN were fed with whatever the MOD could obtain on a budget of £1.50 per head per day the Marine Nationale being a French organisation had French chefs serving French standard cuisine aboard its ships.
After crossing the Atlantic while conducting aircrew training HMS DARING and the QUEEN ELIZABETH battlegroup had put into the gigantic US Navy base at Norfolk Virginia for a few days before commencing the exercises. It was always interesting to see HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH which generally dominated Portsmouth and pretty much any other port she called at with just her sheer size being dwarfed by the gigantic US Navy NIMITZ class super carriers.
The exercises themselves had lasted for about 2 and a half weeks and mainly consisted of the RN and USN carrier battle groups going head to head against each other before combining into one fleet and working together while fending off various types of threat and carrying out various missions. The Americans were known to hold the capabilities of the TYPE 45 in high regard owing to its powerful and long ranged radars. They would often insist that a TYPE 45 be assigned to their team for the RN vs USN phase of the exercises as they felt the RN would have an unfair advantage otherwise. US carrier battlegroups in the Gulf would often put in requests for RN TYPE 45’s operating in the region to be assigned to their battlegroups before entering the high threat waters of the Persian Gulf. Exercises like the one that DARING was partaking in were key to maintaining this seamless working relationship. As part of these exercises personnel exchanges between British and American ships were common and a lot of aircraft crossdecking took place between the QUEEN ELIZABETH and the USS JOHN C STENNIS.
Being an air warfare destroyer HMS DARING’s CO had naturally been focused mostly on the air warfare serials. The USAF occasionally decided to partake in these exercises which added an interesting dimension as it allowed for the RN’s Hornet pilots to undertake dissimilar air to air combat training and was particularly useful for the Ops Room crews as the USAF operated different aircraft and in a different manner compared to the USN aircraft they were used to working with.
Another interesting part of the exercise had been the ASW element. HMS DARING being primarily intended for air warfare had a limited ASW capability compared to the TYPE 23’s which were equipped with sophisticated towed array sonars. However, DARING was carrying a Merlin ASW helicopter for this deployment which gave her some undersea bite. As usual the USN had provided a number of SSN’s this time two LOS ANGELES class and one of the newer VIRGINIA class. The objective for the surface units was always the same. Either staying alive while the submarines tried to sink them or staying alive while they went after the submarines.
The most interesting ASW serials were always the ones that involved the SSK. The Royal Canadian Navy operated a fleet of 4 British built UPHOLDER class SSK’s which in RCN service were known as the VICTORIA class. Three of these boats were based at the RCN dockyard in Halifax and were frequently seen further south off the east coast of the US working with the USN. The US Navy took the threat of quiet diesel submarines very seriously as they considered their most likely naval opponents to be nations like Iran, North Korea and China who all operated SSK’s of varying quality. Therefore, they would often pay for the Canadians to deploy one of their boats south so they could practise ASW drills against boats that they felt were close equivalents to the KILO class SSK’s that they considered their most likely opponents. For this exercise the Royal Canadian Navy had sent down the HMCS WINDSOR. The Royal Navy had an inbuilt advantage compared to the Americans which usually enabled them to do very well compared to their USN counterparts.
The RN still operated 4 UPHOLDER class SSK’s which were almost identical to their Canadian sister boats and were frequently used to provide the exact same kind of training that the USN payed a lot of money for. This meant that RN commanders were generally already familiar with the class and had some experience with them. Better still Canadian submarine commanders were still trained by the Royal Navy on the legendarily difficult Submarine Command Course more commonly known as “Perisher”. This meant that the commander of the HMCS WINDSOR would drive his boat in a manner identical to his RN counterparts and in such a way that the RN surface ship commanders were already familiar with.
Once the exercises had been concluded the QUEEN ELIZABETH and her escorts had headed north to make a port visit to Halifax before heading back to the UK while DARING had detached from the group to continue with her deployment.
She had stopped off at Mayport in Florida to refuel, take on stores, carry out a bit of maintenance and give the crew a run ashore before heading into the Caribbean on the way to the Panama Canal. Though there hadn’t been time in the ships programme for any port visits (refuelling were carried out via RAS with the RFA that was kept permanently deployed to the area) there had been enough leeway in the ships programme to allow DARING to go to anchor off of a small tropical island to give the ships company the opportunity to get off the ship for a bit and spend the day lying on a tropical beach with beer and a BBQ while plenty of footage was being captured for the RN’s next recruitment campaign. The warm waters of the Caribbean were an annoying but unfortunately well known mechanical problem began to do its best to make life difficult. The Batch 1 TYPE 45 destroyers had an unfortunate problem within their propulsion system intercoolers which often struggled to cope with warm water conditions. This would often result in partial or sometimes even total electrical blackouts onboard.
Being the first of her class and now 6 years old DARING had been the ship that had discovered this issue. The result had been a redesign of the propulsion systems for the 6 ships of the Batch 2 TYPE 45’s to hopefully eliminate this issue.
The first Batch 2 ship HMS DECOY had arrived in Portsmouth the week before DARING’s departure. As well as the improved machinery and propulsion system the Batch 2’s carried a number of other upgrades compared to their older sisters. By the time HMS DARING returned to Portsmouth early next year the second of the Batch 2’s HMS DEMON would be there.
Once through the Caribbean and having transited the Panama Canal DARING had made 5 day stop over at the US Navy base in San Diego before undertaking the more than two and a half thousand mile trip to Pearl Harbour in Hawaii where the CO began to feel a sense of Déjà vu as seemingly every time the ship stopped he would find himself in a routine of hosting cocktail parties onboard for local dignitaries and US Navy admirals, giving tours of his ship, the usual planning exercises with local USN units. Occasionally he would be able to go ashore to relax and enjoy himself but nowhere near as much as the rest of the ships company did. As well as the heavy workload that he endured as Captain this he would often find himself having to deal with the fallout for the members of the ships company enjoying themselves too much while ashore. He had long since lost count of the amount of times he had had to deal with angry foreign policemen and taxi drivers over the course of his career. Like most RN captains deep down privately his main concern was always to deal with the offender himself and prevent anyone back in the UK finding out who didn’t need to. He wasn’t going to be the next captain with the words “international incident” on his record just because some idiot didn’t know when to stop or decided that he fancied a ride in a police car.
There was even a phrase within the RN called “out pin” which described runs ashore where ships company’s who had been at sea for too long would essentially become a drunken mob and enjoy themselves a little bit too much at the expense of the unfortunate port that had agreed to host them in a way that would put most football hooligans to shame. “Out Pins” usually resulted in things such as diplomatic protests, RN members being arrested, RN warships no longer being welcome in that particular port and detrimental effects on the Captains career prospects. For this reason, while trouble amongst his ships company ashore was rare DARING’s CO always came down hard on offenders.
From Hawaii DARING had made her way down towards New Zealand which hadn’t seen a visit by an RN ship in as long as anyone could remember before a few days later sailing in company with the Royal New Zealand Navy frigate HMNZS TE MANA to Sydney for perhaps the most high profile part of the deployment.
October 2013 marked the 100th anniversary of the first Royal Australian Navy fleet’s entry into Sydney harbour. A date that was generally regarded as the birth of the modern RAN despite it having actually been formed 2 years before in 1911 under British RN control.
To mark the occasion the Australians were hosting a week long international fleet review in Sydney Harbour with ships from all over the world participating.
The Royal Navy being the forefathers of the Aussies and feeling perceiving themselves as being held in quite high regard by the rest of the world naturally felt the need to make their presence felt. Therefore, the RN had decided to send one of its newest and most advanced ships that just so happened would already be on that side of the world to fly the flag for Britain and remind the Aussies of just how their navy came into being.
The Australians when sending the formal invitation to the UK to participate in the review had actually requested that they sent a TYPE 45 destroyer. Back in the early 2000’s the RAN had embarked on a programme to procure a new class of modern air warfare destroyers. As with most RAN ships these destroyers would be a modified foreign design and built under license in Australia. Various competing designs had been put forward including the USN’s ARLEIGH BURKE. In the end it had come down to a close run off between two preferred designs. Those being Spain’s 5,800 ton ALVARO DE BAZAN class and Britain’s TYPE 45.
The main selling point of the Spanish design was that it was equipped with the Aegis Combat System that would make the Australian ships interoperable with USN ships. The TYPE 45 design however was felt to be more capable as an air defence vessel and more suited to the sort of long distance individual deployments that the RAN was beginning to undertake. The deciding factor had come down to simple cost. With 12 ships already on order for the Royal Navy and strong interest from the Saudi’s the cost for each ship was lower than the Spanish design. Better still the TYPE 45’s builders BAE Systems already had a significant presence in Australia and would be able to comparatively easily build the ships in their yard in Victoria. The Australian TYPE 45’s known locally as the HOBART class were an extensively modified design and considered essentially a subclass of the RN’s TYPE 45’s.
The decision to go with the TYPE 45 instead of the ALVARO DE BAZAN had been somewhat controversial within the Australian Government. Therefore during her visit to Sydney and in the days before she had even arrived HMS DARING had hosted Australian government and military visitors onboard for tours and capability demonstrations to try and help win over some of the detractors and to enable the RAN to show the Australian public what their navy had to look forward to. To further this aim DARING had been opened to visitors during her visit with members of public allowed to tour the ships hangar and upper decks. Thousands had taken the chance to visit and the event was generally felt to have been a PR success for the RN and diplomatic triumph for the British Government.
The first Australian TYPE 45 HMAS HOBART had begun construction a year previously and was due to enter service with the RAN in 2017.
Being the hosts of the event, the Royal Australian Navy had naturally been present in force with a number of frigates of both the PERTH and ANZAC class being present along with a number of smaller patrol boats and one of their COLLINS class SSK’s. The biggest Australian ship present was the elderly INVINCIBLE class light aircraft carrier HMAS AUSTRALIA which many decades before had gone under the name HMS ILLUSTRIOUS. DARING’s CO had been invited to an event held in the AUSTRALIA’s hangar which had proven to be both enjoyable and fascinating. Back in the 1990’s when he had been a mere officer cadet at Britannia Royal Naval College, he had undertaken his Initial Fleet Time aboard HMS INVINCIBLE in what had been one of her last voyages before she had left RN service. Being aboard a foreign owned sister ship to the one he was familiar with had been quite interesting as while the basic layout of the ship was familiar there were a great many clear and subtle differences between the Australian ship and the ship he remembered.
The AUSTRALIA was now 31 years old and along with her AV-8B Harriers was showing her age and her operational capability was declining.
To replace the AUSTRALIA and its rather elderly amphibious fleet the RAN was building a new class of what it described as amphibious assault aircraft carriers. These 28,000 ton ships were essentially a hybrid of light aircraft carrier and amphibious assault ship equipped with both a ski jump for VSTOL aircraft operations and a well deck for landing craft. It was an interesting concept that hadn’t really been tried before in this way and DARING’s CO suspected that the RAN would end up with a class of ship that was a jack of all trades but the master of none. As in a ship that could operate effectively as a Harrier equipped light aircraft carrier or a helicopter carrying LPH but not as both at the same time.
The CANBERRA class as they were to be known were locally constructed versions of Spain’s JUAN CARLOS I light aircraft carrier and the first ship HMAS CANBERRA was due to enter service the following year.
When the light aircraft carrier ARA VEINTICINCO DE MAYO had been destroyed by the much larger fleet carrier HMS EAGLE during the Battle of the Falkland Islands many analysts and defence planners around the world had come to the conclusion that light aircraft carriers were completely inferior to their full sized counterparts and were little more than a very expensive way to get a lot of your own men killed. The consensus being that aircraft carriers were only worth building if you were going to build a full sized and full cost vessel. This type of thinking had been a major factor in the RN’s decision to abandon the INVINCIBLE class light carriers in favour of the much larger QUEEN ELIZABETH class and in the Soviets deciding to build the aborted ULYANOVSK.
Spain had found itself in the awkward position of already having a light aircraft carrier under construction at the time and well past the point where she could have realistically been suspended or modified or enlarged. The 16,000 ton PRINCIPE DE ASTURIAS had been launched exactly 20 days after the larger DE MAYO had been almost effortlessly destroyed by the British. The Spanish navy had found itself lumbered with a ship was considered to be something of a floating joke and not even a proper light carrier. The Spanish themselves hadn’t really considered the ship to be of much value as a fixed wing carrier and had operated the ship as a primarily helicopter carrying ASW platform with a limited number of AV-8B Harriers onboard for strike missions. The ships perceived lack of air defence capability had resulted in her never straying to far from waters where she could be given air cover by land based aircraft and having a remarkably unexciting career. When the effects of the global recession had begun to be felt in Spain the Spanish navy had been all to eager to get rid of the ship so they could focus on the new JUAN CARLOS I.
A while back it had been reported that Thailand (represented at the Sydney fleet review by the British designed patrol ship HTMS KRABI) had been interested in purchasing the PRINCIPE DE ASTURAIS from the Spanish or even purchasing a new build that would be a cut down version of what was already an extremely small carrier. This interest had come from the Thai government and seemed to be mostly about the prestige of owning a carrier. The Royal Thai Navy were the ones who had quashed this ambition pointing out that Thailand had no real need for a carrier especially not a joke one that would be utterly worthless as a fighting unit and the navy didn’t have the budget to operate the ship or aircraft effectively.
HMAS AUSTRALIA wasn’t the only ex Royal Navy INVINCIBLE class aircraft carrier in the world. When they had been retired from the Royal Navy in 1992 and 1996 respectively HMS INDOMITABLE and HMS INVINCIBLE had been put up for sale along with the FAA’s fleet of Sea Harriers and had been purchased by the Indian Navy where they continued to serve as the INS VIRRAT and INS VIKRAMADITYA replacing the ancient MAJESTIC class INS VIKRANT which had been withdrawn some years previously.
The Indian Navy was represented in Sydney by the INS SHIVALIK.
Originally the Indian’s had intended to purchase the former HMS HERMES and refit her to operate Sea Harriers. However, that deal had fallen through in the mid 1980’s due to the inability of Indian Government bureaucracy to make even the smallest of decisions at the time. This had left the Indian Navy with an aging and obsolete WWII era carrier. When the Royal Navy had decommissioned the INDOMITABLE a few years later the ship had been offered for sale to INDIA. The Indian Navy leapt at the opportunity to take on the modern and still fairly young ship that came with an air group thrown in. However once again Indian Government bureaucracy had made this purchase difficult.
British – Indian relations had been somewhat strained as a result of Britain selling a number of warships to the Pakistani Navy. The ships in question were the 6 TYPE 21 frigates that the RN had disposed if in the early 1990’s which now served with Pakistan as the TARIQ class and were represented in Sydney Harbour by the PNS TIPPU SULTAN. The thing that had really upset the Indian’s though was Pakistan’s purchase of 3 UPHOLDER class SSK’s that the British had built in Birkenhead taking some of the build slots that were originally meant to be for the RN’s cancelled Batch 3 of the class (Canada having purchased Batch 2). The sale of modern weapons to their mortal enemies had generated a fair bit of anger amongst some within the Indian Government towards the British.
For the British offering the Indians first bid on the former INDOMITABLE had been a way of trying to patch things up.
Some within the Indian government had advocated spurning the British offer and instead purchasing the Russian’s modified KIEV class ADMIRAL GORSHKOV pointing out that this ship was STOBAR capable unlike the British offer. An Indian Navy delegation had actually travelled up to Russia and inspected the GORSHKOV and were horrified with what they had found. The GORSHKOV had been intended to be a flight trials and training ship for the Soviet Navy in preparation for the planned ULYANOVSK class nuclear powered super carriers and had had only a very short career before the Soviet Navy had become the Russian Navy. The new Russian navy hadn’t felt that it had the need for or budget to operate the ship. A serious gearbox fire had crippled the ship leaving her in need of serious repairs. Not having the money or will to do this the Russians had taken the ship out of service and laid her up and hadn’t spent a single Rouble on any kind of maintenance, repair or preservation meaning that the ship had deteriorated rapidly. The Indian naval delegation had stated that it would be completely indefendable to spend the vast sums of money that it would take to restore and refit the ship in the face of the much cheaper British option.
The Indian’s had been very satisfied with their purchase meaning that when the former HMS INVINCIBLE had come up for sale they had seen off strong interest from Brazil to purchase the ship allowing them to form a second carrier battlegroup.
Like the HMAS AUSTRALIA the INS VIRRAT and INS VIKRAMADITYA were becoming fairly elderly. In fact, only the VIRRAT (Indomitable) was still active with the older and much more worn VIKRAMADITYA (Invincible) being used as a source of spare parts to keep her sister going. The Indians had embarked upon the “Indigenous Aircraft Carrier” programme to replace the ships with an Indian build CATOBAR fleet carrier. However, that programme had yet to lay down or even finalise the design of the new carrier meaning that the first ship would not enter service until the early 2020’s at the earliest.
The former ADMIRA GORSHKOV had in recent years found herself back in the spot light. In 2010 a Chinese businessman had approached the Russians offering to purchase the decrepit for scrap. Its unclear if the Russian’s took him at face value (The other KIEV class ships had been scrapped in China after all) or were at least suspicious of the businessman’s likely motives and either approved of them or simply didn’t care as long as he way paying. The GORSHKOV had been towed from its berth in Severodvinsk where she had been laid up virtually abandoned for close to 20 years and towed to Dalian Shipyard in Liaoning province in China. Western intelligence agencies had kept a close eye on the ship and were naturally suspicious of China’s intentions. Whatever they were doing to the ship they were not scrapping it. Satellite photos were currently showing the ship in a drydock covered in scaffolding with a great amount of activity taking place onboard. It was well known that the Peoples Liberation Army Navy had for years been trying to develop an aircraft carrier fleet of its own and had made numerous attempts to buy such a ship second hand. The ex Soviet Kiev class ships and former RAN carrier HMAS MELBOURNE had ended up in China being scrapped very slowly. It was obvious that the Chinese had been forensically dissecting these ships to learn what they could about how an aircraft carrier was put together. They had even made an attempt at purchasing the half completed soviet supercarrier ULYANOVSK. This attempt had been scuppered owing to the ship being completely unseaworthy and China not having the capability at the time to complete the nuclear powered monster. It was generally believed by western intelligence agencies that China was already or would soon begin constructing their first aircraft carrier.
The question remained about what they were doing with the GORSHKOV. They obviously weren’t dismantling the ship and it was considered extremely unlikely that they would attempt to repair the decrepit hulk and bring it into service. Western intelligence sources and the Indian Navy report from years ago all stated that the ship was a complete write off owing to being in extremely poor condition. The Russian’s were known to have considered the ship impossible to be made operational again.
Whatever the Chinese were doing with her it was attracting a lot of attention from intelligence agencies. Attention that might perhaps be better spent looking for the first Chinese aircraft carrier that was highly likely to already be under construction somewhere.
Singapore had sent two ships of the Republic of Singapore navy to take part in the review. The largest of these two ships was the RSS ENDURANCE the lead ship of her class of 6,500 ton LPD’s. The smaller ship was the FORMIDABLE class frigate RSS INTREPID. The FORMIDABLE class were modified TYPE 23 frigates. When Singapore had set out to build a new class of frigates Britain had seen off some stiff competition from France who had been offering their LA FAYETTE stealth frigate. The first two ships of this six strong class had been built by Yarrow in the UK with the other four constructed under licence in Singapore. As with the RAN’s HOBART variant of the TYPE 45 the FORMIDABLE class were different enough from their British predecessors that they could be almost considered a separate class from the British vessels.
The RSS INTREPID wasn’t the only TYPE 23 frigate present. The Chilean Navy had sent the ALMIRANTE LYNCH which together with her sister ALMIRANTE COCHRANE had represented the first export orders for British escort vessels since the Argentine Navy had purchased a pair of TYPE 42 destroyers (which had later been sunk by the nation that had built them).
The Chilean Navy contained traditionally had a large number of British built ships within its fleet. At present as well as a pair of TYPE 23’s Chile possessed a pair of British built UPHOLDER class SSK’s and a pair of ex RN TYPE 22 frigates. Chile had only recently retired the last of the LEANDER class frigates and COUNTY class destroyers that they had second hand from the Royal Navy.
As well as warships there were a number of other vessels present for the review including a number of tall ships. One of these was the Brazilian Navy’s full rigged CISNE BRANCO. For reasons which members of the Royal Navy had never really been able to fully understand many navy’s around the world insisted on keeping large sailing vessels for training their personnel. The British had never really been able to understand the reason for doing this as in their opinion surely officer cadets would benefit more from time spent aboard actual operational warships. If as they suspected it was all really about prestige then the RN could point to the fact that they still had the 255 year old 100 gun ship of the line HMS VICTORY in their fleet which they considered a damned sight more impressive than any of these foreign vessels.
The Brazilian Navy was another navy that traditionally had a significant proportion of British ships within their fleet. Currently their fleet was largely made up of the 3,800 ton British built NITEROI class frigates and four ex RN TYPE 22 frigates. The TYPE 22’s were the former Batch 1 ships of the class which included the Falklands veterans HMS BROADSWORD (Now GREENHALGH) and HMS BRILLIANT (Now DODSWORTH).
Brazil had showed an interest in acquiring one of the INVINCIBLE class aircraft carriers when the RN was disposing of them during the 1990’s to replace their WWII era Colossus class NAeL MINAS GERAIS (formerly HMS VENGEANCE).
strong competition from INDIA and the perception within Brazil that a CATOBAR carrier would always be superior to a VSTOL configured ship had seen the Brazilian Navy instead turn to France.
The French Navy had at the time been in the process of disposing of their CLEMENCEAU class aircraft carriers in preparation for the introduction of the CHARLES DE GAULLE. Brazil had purchased the French carrier FOCH and commissioned her into their own fleet as the Nae SAO PAULO. While they had acquired what they considered to be a large and impressive ship the Brazilians had overlooked the fact that to operate it they needed a larger and more impressive budget than they possessed. The ship being over four decades old didn’t help things. Since entering service with the Brazilian Navy the SAO PAULO had spent more time alongside undergoing maintenance and repairs than she had at sea in a situation much like the RN had experienced in the 1970s with HMS ARK ROYAL.
The limited budget available to the Brazilian Navy also meant that they had really struggled to put together a full air group for their carrier. New build aircraft were extremely limited in choice and far to expensive. Even the second hand market for carrier capable aircraft was limited. The Americans had offered Brazil second hand F/A-18 Hornets but the Brazilians had been forced to turn them down after realising that these aircraft would likely be too expensive to operate in any meaningful number. In the end they had gone for ex USN A4 Skyhawks retrieved from the US’s vast aircraft boneyard in Arizona. The A4 was much cheaper to operate and virtually 10 a penny meaning that the Brazilians had been able to obtain a respectable number. The downside of going down this route was that the A4 was already very old, obsolete and of very limited value. Aware of this the Brazilian Navy had been attempting to purchase Super Etendard strike aircraft from the French to strengthen SAO PAULO’s air group. For various reasons this had yet to come to fruition.
DARING’s CO’s thoughts now turned to the next stage of her deployment. At the moment the ship was making her way up the Australian Coast on her way to her next stop at Singapore. The British government had wanted the ship to visit SINGAPORE for a defence engagement visit to demonstrate the UK’s continuing commitment to the Five Powers Defence Arrangements which had been called into question owing to the lengthy absence of RN warships in the region.
After that the future was uncertain. The original and still officially current plan was for DARING to head across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf. However, the CO had been warned that there was now a possibility that his ship may be diverted North to help enforce sanctions on North Korea resulting from yet another provocation of some type. If it was to be the northern option then it would most likely involve visits to Japan and South Korea and working alongside those countries’ navies. The CO had always been impressed with the Japanese Maritime Self Defence force and how they always had a fleet of large cutting edge and relatively young ships at all times. During Fleet Reviews it was customary for commanding officers to invite the commanders of other ships aboard for a curtesy visit and the CO had been very impressed by the Japanese destroyer ATAGO which was like a USN ARLEIGH BURKE on steroids.
If as he was ordered to proceed westwards across the Indian Ocean as he thought he most likely would be then DARING would most likely be linking up with the French Carrier battlegroup in the Area built around their new nuclear powered ship RICHELIEU. Given the nightmare that the CHARLES DE GAULLE project had been the CO had never quite understood why the French had decided to press ahead with a second ship of the class. He knew that many within the French Navy had been very much against the idea and hadn’t been happy with the sacrifices that had had to be made to pay for the ship. Perhaps the French felt that they still needed a two carrier navy, perhaps it was a result of French domestic politics or maybe it was a case of keeping up with the neighbours (being the RN’s pair of supercarriers) or most likely a combination of all these factors. RICHELIEU was an enlarged and improved version of CHARLES DE GAULLE with a displacement of 50,000 tons compared to her older sisters 42,000 tons. Mercifully the technical issues and mistakes that had plagued the DE GAULLE’s construction seemed to have been ironed out of the RICHELIEU’s design and construction and the new French flagship had commissioned in 2011.
The RICHELIEU was currently operating in the Arabian Sea providing carrier based air support to ongoing operations in Afghanistan. Since 2007 when things in Afghanistan had started to really heat up Britain, France and the US had cycled their carriers through deployments to the region to ensure that there was always at least one and on occasion two carriers on station at all times to provide air support. The RICHELIEU was currently the carrier on station and was to be relieved by HMS EAGLE in the coming weeks. The USS DWIGHT D EISENHOWER was currently operating in the Persian Gulf and the USS NIMITZ was currently in the Mediterranean on her way home.
When she eventually arrived in the Gulf region HMS DARING’s current operational plan called for her to spend 2 months in the area conducting duties and taskings such as freedom of navigation passages through the Straits of Hormuz, maritime security operations in the Persian Gulf (winding up the Iranians), visits to Dubai and Bahrain and counterpiracy/anti smuggling duties in the waters off Somalia before heading for the Suez canal and ultimately home. However as often happened the CO reckoned that these plans would most likely be scrubbed as soon as he got there and his ship retasked to join HMS EAGLE’s battlegroup.
Before retiring to his sleeping cabin, the CO thought briefly about one other noteworthy ship that had been present in Sydney Harbour. The Argentine Navy sail training ship ARA LIBERTAD.
It could be argued that even 30 years later the Argentine armed forces still hadn’t recovered from their mauling in the Falklands War.
The Argentine Navy had suffered grievously during the conflict with the bulk of its fleet being destroyed. This had included an aircraft carrier, a cruiser, two modern and one elderly destroyers, 3 modern frigates, one modern and one older submarine, the majority of the navy’s aircraft and well over one thousand men. Since then the navy had been struggling to rebuild. Fortunately, at the time of the conflict Argentina had a number of ships under construction both at home and abroad which the navy had in later years used to rebuild its fleet virtually from scratch.
The Argentine navy now consisted of 2 TR-1700 class SSK’s, 4 ALMIRANTE BROWN class destroyers and 6 ESPORA class corvettes giving the Argentinians a respectable order of battle on paper. Looks however can be very deceiving.
Something that had hurt the Argentine Navy just as much as the loss of its ships had been the high proportion of its personnel that had perished including the majority of its ship command qualified officers.
The effects of this loss of experience had been crippling with knock on effects lasting decades. In fact many of the new ships had been unable to enter service with the Argentine Navy for some years as they were unable to assemble a competent crew to man them.
The ships in Argentina’s fleet now had an average age of 30 years old and thus were becoming more demanding in terms of maintenance which lead on to the biggest and most enduring problem for the Argentine armed forces.
Given the unpopularity of the military in Argentina owing to memories of the atrocities committed by the Military Government, the Dirty War and their poor showing in the Falklands war funding for defence had been a long way from being a priority for successive Argentine post war democratic civilian governments. A problem not helped by the fact that Argentina was nearly always broke anyway.
This meant that for the navy there was no money for things like maintenance, fuel and ammunition meaning that its ships these days very rarely if ever put to sea. This had massively exacerbated the problems with trying to rebuild a base of experience as there were hardly any opportunities for personnel to undertake even the most basic level of sea training and many crucial skills had simply died out. For example, none of the ALMIRANTE BROWN class destroyers had been able to put to sea in over a year owing to vital engine maintenance not being carried out due to a lack of funds to purchase the necessary parts and all of the class’s ordinance being expired anyway. The Argentine submarine force over the past two years had accumulated a grand total of barely a week submerged across both boats.
The reason why the Argentines had despatched the ARA LIBERTAD to Sydney was as a sailing ship with few moving parts compared to the warships, she was just about the only operational ship the Argentines had left.
The Argentine Air Force had come out of the Falklands War in an even worse state than the navy having been utterly mauled by the British losing almost its entire fast jet fleet and many other aircraft on top of the virtual obliteration of the naval air arm.
The war had left them with an odd mixture of whichever Mirage’s, Daggers and Skyhawks had survived the conflict representing barely a squadrons or two’s worth of serviceable aircraft. Even more so than the navy the air force had been hurt by its personnel casualties losing the vast majority of its aircrew and fast jet crews in particular. Those who had survived had often been so traumatised by their experiences over San Carlos Bay (which the Argentines had nicknamed Death Valley) that they were unable to fly again.
Attempts to rebuild the air force had been spectacularly unsuccessful. Every attempt to procure badly needed new combat aircraft had been scuppered by a lack of funds and interference from the British who even all these years later to prevent the Argentines from procuring any equipment that could be even a remote threat to the Falklands. New aircraft were beyond what the Argentine Air Force could afford on its tiny budget and attempts to buy second hand Mirages from France and Spain had been thwarted by the British who had leaned heavily on these countries not to sell to Argentina. In one case it was widely rumoured that a deal with Israel to purchase 22 surplus Dagger’s had been scuppered when the British had suddenly turned up before the deal was formalised and outbid the Argentines and then apparently forgotten to take delivery of the aircraft. Whatever the truth the one hard fact was that Argentina had not been able to purchase these aircraft.
Argentina’s only successful aircraft purchase in the years after the Falklands War had been a purchase of 36 refurbished former USN Skyhawks purchased from the US in 1990. Despite being close allies with the American’s the British had made strong protests regarding the deal. However, these aircraft had already been fairly old with many hours on their airframes when Argentina had purchased them. Like Argentina’s ships her aircraft were massively handicapped by the grossly insufficient maintenance and training budget and by 2013 it was believed that less than 10 of the Skyhawks were still in an airworthy condition.
It was telling that the 2010 SDSR had significantly scaled back the British military presence on the Falkland Islands as a cost saving measure due to a lack of any realistic threat from Argentina.
A few years previously DARING’s CO had been the XO aboard the survey ship HMS ECHO during a 6 month deployment to the Falklands to conduct oceanographic surveys of the area and conduct patrols of the waters around the Islands.
The Falkland Islands were a very different place from what they had been in 1982. The population had almost doubled and the economy had boomed as a result of having a large British military presence on the islands based at RAF STANLEY, a thriving tourist trade with cruise ships regularly visiting the area and the discovery of vast offshore fields infrastructure being built on the islands to exploit them.
Though the War was now decades in the past it was still very much a fact of everyday life for the islanders. Vast swathes of land were no go areas due to the risks from unexploded ordinance and uncharted minefields. Efforts to make these areas safe had dwindled away to almost nothing in recent years as there were more pressing needs for British bomb disposal units in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During ECHO’s deployment DARING’s CO had spent plenty of time ashore undertaking the various Falkland Battlefield tours. He had visited the battlefield at Mount Tumble down which was still scarred by bomb and shell craters and littered with the debris of war such as abandoned equipment and thousands upon thousands of rusted bullet and shell casings. There was the wreckage of a Buccaneer that had crashed into the side of a mountain during a night sortie. The remains of the platoon of Panhard Armoured Cars outside Port Stanley that had surrendered to 2 PARA on the last day of the war. As well as a British military cemetery there were numerous Argentine military cemeteries and memorials around the islands as the Argentine government had repeatedly refused offers of repatriation of their war dead by claiming that they were already buried in Argentine territory.
One of ECHO’s primary tasks during her deployment was to survey the wreaks that lay in San Carlos water. Highly detailed sonar scans had been made of the wreaks of HMS ARDENT, HMS ANTELOPE and HMS ARGONAUT along with the remains of a landing craft that had been strafed by attacking Argentine aircraft and the crashed remnants of numerous Argentine aircraft that had been shot out of the sky during their bombing runs. San Carlos bay was off limits to all civilian vessels as the whole site was essentially one large war grave and there was plenty of unexploded ordinance on the seabed from Argentine bombs that had failed to detonate and British SAM’s that hadn’t acquired a target. Divers had been sent down to each of the British wreaks where they had placed a white ensign on the remains of the bridge. Service a service of remembrance had been held aboard ECHO with wreaths of poppies being thrown into the sea.
Ashore at San Carlos one again finds the remnants of war such as the numerous fox holes and trenches dug by the PARA’s and Marines. The area is littered with abandoned and wreaked equipment which had lain undisturbed for decades such as an Argentine aircraft that had crashed int the terrain and the various bits of rubbish and equipment that the British had simply left behind. The two most obvious sites of interest are the former helicopter operating base and prisoner holding facility which had not been completely dismantled as the British had only taken what they felt could be used again and had left everything else behind. The location where prisoners had been kept was still marked by the reels of rusted barbed wire and stockades that had been left behind. As well as two simple hillside memorials that commemorated the British and Argentine dead there was a third rather unusual memorial in an unassuming and obviously long abandoned structure near the shore line. Originally a refrigeration plant the structure had last seen human habitation during the Falklands war and if one could get high enough up the adjacent slope they would be able to see an indication as to what this buildings purpose had been in the form of a now very faded red cross painted on the roof. The building had been used by the British as a field hospital and had been nicknamed the red and green life machine. It was famous for being perhaps the first military hospital in history where everyone who had been admitted had survived. Inside in a room that had been used as an operating theatre was a memorial plaque not to men who had died but to the men who had survived and the doctors and medics who had saved them.
One of ECHO’s other taskings had been to survey the wreak of the TYPE 42 destroyer HMS GLASGOW located to the east of the Falklands which had been sunk by an Exocet missile on the 6th of May 1982. The ghostly sonar images of the decades old wreak of a TYPE 42 destroyer almost identical to the one’s that could still be found in Portsmouth Harbour had unnerved DARING’s CO somewhat and got him thinking about what had been and what might have been if things had been a little different.
After a very long day which had followed on from an extremely busy week the Commanding Officer of the TYPE 45 destroyer HMS DARING was finally alone in his cabin where he had decided to allow himself to relax for a bit. Since departing Sydney Harbour early that morning which had involved everyone getting out of bed at an obscenely early hour DARING had been making here way north up the west coast of Australia.
The CO having only had sleep occasionally in the last week had spent most of the day trying to hide how tired he really was. His actual activities had consisted of carefully planning the next phase of the deployment, running a length firefighting exercise to blow the cobwebs out seeing as some members of the ships company may have become slightly to relaxed during their week long stop over in Sydney and allowed standards to slip and overseeing the ships transit out of Sydney Harbour and through some rather busy waters out into the open sea.
Finally in the early hours of the evening he had been able to write up Captain’s night orders and briefed the Ops Officer and Officer of the Watch as to what he wanted done overnight along with the usual instruction that he was to be woken immediately if anything were to happen during the night. This was a formality more than anything though. By this stage in the deployment all of the watch officers were now much more experienced than they had already been and would be able to deal with anything and would probably wake the XO and Ops Officer first if they were unsure about something. Plus, the ship would be transiting a fairly quiet area of water where it was unlikely that anything would happen that would require his personal attention.
His cabin was equipped with two screens including one right by his bed that displayed the current radar and navigational plot so he was constantly kept up to date with the current situation and was usually aware of events even before he had been informed by the Officer of the Watch.
The CO had left the bridge slightly earlier than usual informing the XO that he was going to attend to the pile of paperwork that had been growing on his desk over the past week while he had been far too busy to deal with it. Rather than proceeding to his cabin however he had decided to first go for a walk around the ship. As CO he naturally spent most of his time either on the bridge, in the Operations Room or in his cabin asleep or attending to administrative duties. As his cabin was in the forward part of the superstructure sandwiched between the bridge above and the Ops room below it was fairly easy for him to become isolated from what was going on aboard the rest of the ship. Therefore, whenever he got the opportunity, he would take a walk around the ship both to be seen by the ships company and to enable him to get a feel for their mood. Usually he would use the excuse of dropping in on the ships laundry shack to have a friendly chat with the ships Chinese Laundryman (though in practise on most ships the laundrymen were Nepalese ex Gurkhas) who being a civilian would quite happily share a brew and have a friendly chat with the CO in a way that none of the officers or ratings would be brave enough to do. DARING’s laundryman was an ex Gurkha and Falklands veteran who had taken part in the famous charge up Mount William during the battle of Tumbledown. He proudly kept his kukri knife (which he claimed to have used during that bloody night) on display in the laundry shack and was greatly respected, liked and perhaps somewhat feared by the ships company most of whom weren’t even born when the Falklands War had occurred.
This wasn’t the real reason for the CO’s visits though. The laundry Shack was located right at the stern of the ship where most of the Junior Rates and Senior Rates messes, dining halls and recreation spaces were located giving him a good opportunity to see the state of these areas and speak to members of the ships company. He usually timed these informal tours of the ship to coincide with mealtimes when the junior rates would usually line up in the passageway outside the galley. As he went passed the CO asked them a few questions along the lines of did they have fun in Sydney? And were they all rested and ready to get back to it?
Of course the crew would always say yes or whatever they thought the Captain wanted to hear with a slight look of terror in their eyes. The CO had been around long enough to know that if there were any grievances no one would say it directly to his face unless it was something serious in which case, he would probably already have been aware of it. Very occasionally as on this occasion the CO would pay a visit to the galley to see the state of the food being served. As Captain he ate alone in his cabin and had his own designated chef and food supply which was naturally better than whatever was served to everyone else. However, he knew from long experience how important food was to morale and efficiency and if he felt it was necessary wasn’t above having a quiet word with the Chief Caterer about the need to pick up standards in the galley. Recently he’d had to personally stamp on a suggestion from the logistics officer about serving cold fresh fruit of breakfast instead of the traditional full English. The CO had pointed out that crewmen who had been on watch all night including those on sentry duty who would have spent at least 6 hours standing outside freezing and being rained on and now had a full working day ahead of them would probably feel more satisfied and motivated with sausage and bacon rolls rather than a piece of cold grapefruit.
It was for reasons like this that the CO was quite well thought of by the ships company who perceived him as having their welfare at heart.
The CO wasn’t the only one who carried out these little informal walk rounds of the ship though. The XO didn’t even need an excuse to do the same thing. He would tour all parts of the ship checking the state of the ships cleanliness and hygiene of living areas and paying particular attention to the state of the CBRNDC equipment and lockers that were located all over the ship and was known to pick a locker at random and order a snap contents inventory despite the locker in questions having often been inventoried only days or even hours before. Whereas the CO might stop someone for a friendly chat the XO had a habit of randomly grabbing someone and pointing a set of breathing apparatus and ordering them to don it while he timed them to see if they could do it within the 2 minutes required by navy regulations.
Damage control and fire fighting in the Royal Navy had come on a very long way since the Falklands War.
Retiring to his cabin the CO had eaten dinner and then tried to make a start on the mountain of paperwork on his desk but found his enthusiasm for doing so failing him. He knew what most of it would be anyway. The usual routine stuff padded out by reports he would be expected to write regarding his ships recent visit to Australia and a few disciplinary cases resulting from that visit. Knowing that it would take him hours to wade through it all the CO had decided to just leave it until tomorrow and rest for now. Rather than retiring straight to his sleeping cabin despite being rather tired the CO had instead poured himself a glass of the brandy he’d been working through since leaving Portsmouth and allowed himself some time to think about things.
HMS DARING was now 4 months into a 9 month global deployment that involved a circumnavigation of the globe. The purpose of this deployment was “Defence Engagement” which really meant flying the flag around the world. In particular the Royal Navy was keen for DARING to make her presence felt in the Far East and Pacific where British warships had been a rarity in recent years due to the fleet mostly being committed to supporting ongoing operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as the increasing need to conduct counter piracy operations off the coast of Somalia.
DARING had left her homeport of Portsmouth in early June as part of a battlegroup made up of the aircraft carrier HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH accompanied by DARING and her sister HMS DIAMOND, the frigates HMS SUFFOLK, HMS RICHMOND and HMS GRAFTON and the RFA’s WAVE KNIGHT and FORT CHARLOTTE. Since the early 2000’s the Royal Navy had been in the habit of sending a carrier battlegroup across the Atlantic on a short deployment to the US east coast to exercise with US Navy carrier battlegroups. The training benefit from these deployments for both the ships companies and in particular aircrews of both nations was felt to more than justify the expense involved and was the reason why these deployments still continued in the wake of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review which had inflicted murderous cuts to the Defence budget. There had occasionally been years where the RN hadn’t carried out these carrier training deployments for operational reasons, most notably in 2003 where the carriers had been committed to supporting operations in Iraq.
In return the USN had a routine of every year deploying either a carrier battle group or amphibious strike group to UK waters to train with the RN. USN commanders in particular were always extremely pleased to have RN trainers from the RN’s FOST organisation onboard their ships and were almost evangelical about the benefits of FOST’s legendarily tough and intensive training exercises.
The French Navy also sometimes joined in with these exercises when they were held on the UK side of the Atlantic. The previous year had been one such year and the Marine Nationale had committed a battlegroup built around the 42,000 ton nuclear powered aircraft carrier CHARLES DE GAULLE.
DARING’s CO remembered attending a reception aboard the DE GAULLE last year when she had paid a visit to Portsmouth last year following the annual RN/USN exercise on this side of the pond. He remembered going up to the flight deck and seeing HMS EAGLE which was berthed just ahead and remembering the feeling of pride and slight smugness as the 62,000 ton flagship of the Royal Navy seemingly effortlessly dwarfed the French visitor. He had chatted with a group of French officers who had toured the EAGLE and been very impressed by what they had seen. He had occasionally picked up on a sense of regret within the French Navy that they had walked away from the potential joint aircraft carrier programme with the British back in the 1980’s when what had then been known as the CVF-90 project was still in development and pressed ahead with what had become the CHARLES DE GAULLE class.
Still the CO thought most joint projects that involved the UK working with the French generally failed. His own ship DARING had been born out of the HORIZON class project jointly developed between the UK, France and Italy. The UK had withdrawn from the project owing to differences in requirements with the UK feeling they needed a ship that was larger and thus more expensive than what the French and Italians had been willing to pay for. The result had been the TYPE 45 destroyer of which DARING was the first example of what would soon be a class of 12 ships replacing the elderly and obsolete TYPE 42’s.
The CHARLES DE GAULLE had had a rather difficult and protracted birth. Launched in 1994 (the same year that the RN’s QUEEN ELIZABETH had entered service) the French hadn’t been able to commission her until 2001 owing to a never ending series of delays caused by technical problems, financial constraints and design flaws that were often only identified during construction. Some French officers (once they’d had enough wine) would occasionally lament that they had spent the same amount of money as the British but taken a lot longer and ended up with an inferior ship. Part of the reason for the smaller French carriers costing just as much as their larger British counterparts was due to the more expensive but in some ways more useful nuclear powerplant. That and the need to rectify endless technical and design issues often at great expense. The reactor and its associated systems had been the cause of its fair share of these problems.
Still the French ship did have something that the invited officers had been both envious and jealous of. Most notably of all the fact that CHARLES DE GAULLE had a system to pump wine around the ship meaning wine on tap in every compartment. Good wine as well!
Also was the fact that whereas sailors in the RN were fed with whatever the MOD could obtain on a budget of £1.50 per head per day the Marine Nationale being a French organisation had French chefs serving French standard cuisine aboard its ships.
After crossing the Atlantic while conducting aircrew training HMS DARING and the QUEEN ELIZABETH battlegroup had put into the gigantic US Navy base at Norfolk Virginia for a few days before commencing the exercises. It was always interesting to see HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH which generally dominated Portsmouth and pretty much any other port she called at with just her sheer size being dwarfed by the gigantic US Navy NIMITZ class super carriers.
The exercises themselves had lasted for about 2 and a half weeks and mainly consisted of the RN and USN carrier battle groups going head to head against each other before combining into one fleet and working together while fending off various types of threat and carrying out various missions. The Americans were known to hold the capabilities of the TYPE 45 in high regard owing to its powerful and long ranged radars. They would often insist that a TYPE 45 be assigned to their team for the RN vs USN phase of the exercises as they felt the RN would have an unfair advantage otherwise. US carrier battlegroups in the Gulf would often put in requests for RN TYPE 45’s operating in the region to be assigned to their battlegroups before entering the high threat waters of the Persian Gulf. Exercises like the one that DARING was partaking in were key to maintaining this seamless working relationship. As part of these exercises personnel exchanges between British and American ships were common and a lot of aircraft crossdecking took place between the QUEEN ELIZABETH and the USS JOHN C STENNIS.
Being an air warfare destroyer HMS DARING’s CO had naturally been focused mostly on the air warfare serials. The USAF occasionally decided to partake in these exercises which added an interesting dimension as it allowed for the RN’s Hornet pilots to undertake dissimilar air to air combat training and was particularly useful for the Ops Room crews as the USAF operated different aircraft and in a different manner compared to the USN aircraft they were used to working with.
Another interesting part of the exercise had been the ASW element. HMS DARING being primarily intended for air warfare had a limited ASW capability compared to the TYPE 23’s which were equipped with sophisticated towed array sonars. However, DARING was carrying a Merlin ASW helicopter for this deployment which gave her some undersea bite. As usual the USN had provided a number of SSN’s this time two LOS ANGELES class and one of the newer VIRGINIA class. The objective for the surface units was always the same. Either staying alive while the submarines tried to sink them or staying alive while they went after the submarines.
The most interesting ASW serials were always the ones that involved the SSK. The Royal Canadian Navy operated a fleet of 4 British built UPHOLDER class SSK’s which in RCN service were known as the VICTORIA class. Three of these boats were based at the RCN dockyard in Halifax and were frequently seen further south off the east coast of the US working with the USN. The US Navy took the threat of quiet diesel submarines very seriously as they considered their most likely naval opponents to be nations like Iran, North Korea and China who all operated SSK’s of varying quality. Therefore, they would often pay for the Canadians to deploy one of their boats south so they could practise ASW drills against boats that they felt were close equivalents to the KILO class SSK’s that they considered their most likely opponents. For this exercise the Royal Canadian Navy had sent down the HMCS WINDSOR. The Royal Navy had an inbuilt advantage compared to the Americans which usually enabled them to do very well compared to their USN counterparts.
The RN still operated 4 UPHOLDER class SSK’s which were almost identical to their Canadian sister boats and were frequently used to provide the exact same kind of training that the USN payed a lot of money for. This meant that RN commanders were generally already familiar with the class and had some experience with them. Better still Canadian submarine commanders were still trained by the Royal Navy on the legendarily difficult Submarine Command Course more commonly known as “Perisher”. This meant that the commander of the HMCS WINDSOR would drive his boat in a manner identical to his RN counterparts and in such a way that the RN surface ship commanders were already familiar with.
Once the exercises had been concluded the QUEEN ELIZABETH and her escorts had headed north to make a port visit to Halifax before heading back to the UK while DARING had detached from the group to continue with her deployment.
She had stopped off at Mayport in Florida to refuel, take on stores, carry out a bit of maintenance and give the crew a run ashore before heading into the Caribbean on the way to the Panama Canal. Though there hadn’t been time in the ships programme for any port visits (refuelling were carried out via RAS with the RFA that was kept permanently deployed to the area) there had been enough leeway in the ships programme to allow DARING to go to anchor off of a small tropical island to give the ships company the opportunity to get off the ship for a bit and spend the day lying on a tropical beach with beer and a BBQ while plenty of footage was being captured for the RN’s next recruitment campaign. The warm waters of the Caribbean were an annoying but unfortunately well known mechanical problem began to do its best to make life difficult. The Batch 1 TYPE 45 destroyers had an unfortunate problem within their propulsion system intercoolers which often struggled to cope with warm water conditions. This would often result in partial or sometimes even total electrical blackouts onboard.
Being the first of her class and now 6 years old DARING had been the ship that had discovered this issue. The result had been a redesign of the propulsion systems for the 6 ships of the Batch 2 TYPE 45’s to hopefully eliminate this issue.
The first Batch 2 ship HMS DECOY had arrived in Portsmouth the week before DARING’s departure. As well as the improved machinery and propulsion system the Batch 2’s carried a number of other upgrades compared to their older sisters. By the time HMS DARING returned to Portsmouth early next year the second of the Batch 2’s HMS DEMON would be there.
Once through the Caribbean and having transited the Panama Canal DARING had made 5 day stop over at the US Navy base in San Diego before undertaking the more than two and a half thousand mile trip to Pearl Harbour in Hawaii where the CO began to feel a sense of Déjà vu as seemingly every time the ship stopped he would find himself in a routine of hosting cocktail parties onboard for local dignitaries and US Navy admirals, giving tours of his ship, the usual planning exercises with local USN units. Occasionally he would be able to go ashore to relax and enjoy himself but nowhere near as much as the rest of the ships company did. As well as the heavy workload that he endured as Captain this he would often find himself having to deal with the fallout for the members of the ships company enjoying themselves too much while ashore. He had long since lost count of the amount of times he had had to deal with angry foreign policemen and taxi drivers over the course of his career. Like most RN captains deep down privately his main concern was always to deal with the offender himself and prevent anyone back in the UK finding out who didn’t need to. He wasn’t going to be the next captain with the words “international incident” on his record just because some idiot didn’t know when to stop or decided that he fancied a ride in a police car.
There was even a phrase within the RN called “out pin” which described runs ashore where ships company’s who had been at sea for too long would essentially become a drunken mob and enjoy themselves a little bit too much at the expense of the unfortunate port that had agreed to host them in a way that would put most football hooligans to shame. “Out Pins” usually resulted in things such as diplomatic protests, RN members being arrested, RN warships no longer being welcome in that particular port and detrimental effects on the Captains career prospects. For this reason, while trouble amongst his ships company ashore was rare DARING’s CO always came down hard on offenders.
From Hawaii DARING had made her way down towards New Zealand which hadn’t seen a visit by an RN ship in as long as anyone could remember before a few days later sailing in company with the Royal New Zealand Navy frigate HMNZS TE MANA to Sydney for perhaps the most high profile part of the deployment.
October 2013 marked the 100th anniversary of the first Royal Australian Navy fleet’s entry into Sydney harbour. A date that was generally regarded as the birth of the modern RAN despite it having actually been formed 2 years before in 1911 under British RN control.
To mark the occasion the Australians were hosting a week long international fleet review in Sydney Harbour with ships from all over the world participating.
The Royal Navy being the forefathers of the Aussies and feeling perceiving themselves as being held in quite high regard by the rest of the world naturally felt the need to make their presence felt. Therefore, the RN had decided to send one of its newest and most advanced ships that just so happened would already be on that side of the world to fly the flag for Britain and remind the Aussies of just how their navy came into being.
The Australians when sending the formal invitation to the UK to participate in the review had actually requested that they sent a TYPE 45 destroyer. Back in the early 2000’s the RAN had embarked on a programme to procure a new class of modern air warfare destroyers. As with most RAN ships these destroyers would be a modified foreign design and built under license in Australia. Various competing designs had been put forward including the USN’s ARLEIGH BURKE. In the end it had come down to a close run off between two preferred designs. Those being Spain’s 5,800 ton ALVARO DE BAZAN class and Britain’s TYPE 45.
The main selling point of the Spanish design was that it was equipped with the Aegis Combat System that would make the Australian ships interoperable with USN ships. The TYPE 45 design however was felt to be more capable as an air defence vessel and more suited to the sort of long distance individual deployments that the RAN was beginning to undertake. The deciding factor had come down to simple cost. With 12 ships already on order for the Royal Navy and strong interest from the Saudi’s the cost for each ship was lower than the Spanish design. Better still the TYPE 45’s builders BAE Systems already had a significant presence in Australia and would be able to comparatively easily build the ships in their yard in Victoria. The Australian TYPE 45’s known locally as the HOBART class were an extensively modified design and considered essentially a subclass of the RN’s TYPE 45’s.
The decision to go with the TYPE 45 instead of the ALVARO DE BAZAN had been somewhat controversial within the Australian Government. Therefore during her visit to Sydney and in the days before she had even arrived HMS DARING had hosted Australian government and military visitors onboard for tours and capability demonstrations to try and help win over some of the detractors and to enable the RAN to show the Australian public what their navy had to look forward to. To further this aim DARING had been opened to visitors during her visit with members of public allowed to tour the ships hangar and upper decks. Thousands had taken the chance to visit and the event was generally felt to have been a PR success for the RN and diplomatic triumph for the British Government.
The first Australian TYPE 45 HMAS HOBART had begun construction a year previously and was due to enter service with the RAN in 2017.
Being the hosts of the event, the Royal Australian Navy had naturally been present in force with a number of frigates of both the PERTH and ANZAC class being present along with a number of smaller patrol boats and one of their COLLINS class SSK’s. The biggest Australian ship present was the elderly INVINCIBLE class light aircraft carrier HMAS AUSTRALIA which many decades before had gone under the name HMS ILLUSTRIOUS. DARING’s CO had been invited to an event held in the AUSTRALIA’s hangar which had proven to be both enjoyable and fascinating. Back in the 1990’s when he had been a mere officer cadet at Britannia Royal Naval College, he had undertaken his Initial Fleet Time aboard HMS INVINCIBLE in what had been one of her last voyages before she had left RN service. Being aboard a foreign owned sister ship to the one he was familiar with had been quite interesting as while the basic layout of the ship was familiar there were a great many clear and subtle differences between the Australian ship and the ship he remembered.
The AUSTRALIA was now 31 years old and along with her AV-8B Harriers was showing her age and her operational capability was declining.
To replace the AUSTRALIA and its rather elderly amphibious fleet the RAN was building a new class of what it described as amphibious assault aircraft carriers. These 28,000 ton ships were essentially a hybrid of light aircraft carrier and amphibious assault ship equipped with both a ski jump for VSTOL aircraft operations and a well deck for landing craft. It was an interesting concept that hadn’t really been tried before in this way and DARING’s CO suspected that the RAN would end up with a class of ship that was a jack of all trades but the master of none. As in a ship that could operate effectively as a Harrier equipped light aircraft carrier or a helicopter carrying LPH but not as both at the same time.
The CANBERRA class as they were to be known were locally constructed versions of Spain’s JUAN CARLOS I light aircraft carrier and the first ship HMAS CANBERRA was due to enter service the following year.
When the light aircraft carrier ARA VEINTICINCO DE MAYO had been destroyed by the much larger fleet carrier HMS EAGLE during the Battle of the Falkland Islands many analysts and defence planners around the world had come to the conclusion that light aircraft carriers were completely inferior to their full sized counterparts and were little more than a very expensive way to get a lot of your own men killed. The consensus being that aircraft carriers were only worth building if you were going to build a full sized and full cost vessel. This type of thinking had been a major factor in the RN’s decision to abandon the INVINCIBLE class light carriers in favour of the much larger QUEEN ELIZABETH class and in the Soviets deciding to build the aborted ULYANOVSK.
Spain had found itself in the awkward position of already having a light aircraft carrier under construction at the time and well past the point where she could have realistically been suspended or modified or enlarged. The 16,000 ton PRINCIPE DE ASTURIAS had been launched exactly 20 days after the larger DE MAYO had been almost effortlessly destroyed by the British. The Spanish navy had found itself lumbered with a ship was considered to be something of a floating joke and not even a proper light carrier. The Spanish themselves hadn’t really considered the ship to be of much value as a fixed wing carrier and had operated the ship as a primarily helicopter carrying ASW platform with a limited number of AV-8B Harriers onboard for strike missions. The ships perceived lack of air defence capability had resulted in her never straying to far from waters where she could be given air cover by land based aircraft and having a remarkably unexciting career. When the effects of the global recession had begun to be felt in Spain the Spanish navy had been all to eager to get rid of the ship so they could focus on the new JUAN CARLOS I.
A while back it had been reported that Thailand (represented at the Sydney fleet review by the British designed patrol ship HTMS KRABI) had been interested in purchasing the PRINCIPE DE ASTURAIS from the Spanish or even purchasing a new build that would be a cut down version of what was already an extremely small carrier. This interest had come from the Thai government and seemed to be mostly about the prestige of owning a carrier. The Royal Thai Navy were the ones who had quashed this ambition pointing out that Thailand had no real need for a carrier especially not a joke one that would be utterly worthless as a fighting unit and the navy didn’t have the budget to operate the ship or aircraft effectively.
HMAS AUSTRALIA wasn’t the only ex Royal Navy INVINCIBLE class aircraft carrier in the world. When they had been retired from the Royal Navy in 1992 and 1996 respectively HMS INDOMITABLE and HMS INVINCIBLE had been put up for sale along with the FAA’s fleet of Sea Harriers and had been purchased by the Indian Navy where they continued to serve as the INS VIRRAT and INS VIKRAMADITYA replacing the ancient MAJESTIC class INS VIKRANT which had been withdrawn some years previously.
The Indian Navy was represented in Sydney by the INS SHIVALIK.
Originally the Indian’s had intended to purchase the former HMS HERMES and refit her to operate Sea Harriers. However, that deal had fallen through in the mid 1980’s due to the inability of Indian Government bureaucracy to make even the smallest of decisions at the time. This had left the Indian Navy with an aging and obsolete WWII era carrier. When the Royal Navy had decommissioned the INDOMITABLE a few years later the ship had been offered for sale to INDIA. The Indian Navy leapt at the opportunity to take on the modern and still fairly young ship that came with an air group thrown in. However once again Indian Government bureaucracy had made this purchase difficult.
British – Indian relations had been somewhat strained as a result of Britain selling a number of warships to the Pakistani Navy. The ships in question were the 6 TYPE 21 frigates that the RN had disposed if in the early 1990’s which now served with Pakistan as the TARIQ class and were represented in Sydney Harbour by the PNS TIPPU SULTAN. The thing that had really upset the Indian’s though was Pakistan’s purchase of 3 UPHOLDER class SSK’s that the British had built in Birkenhead taking some of the build slots that were originally meant to be for the RN’s cancelled Batch 3 of the class (Canada having purchased Batch 2). The sale of modern weapons to their mortal enemies had generated a fair bit of anger amongst some within the Indian Government towards the British.
For the British offering the Indians first bid on the former INDOMITABLE had been a way of trying to patch things up.
Some within the Indian government had advocated spurning the British offer and instead purchasing the Russian’s modified KIEV class ADMIRAL GORSHKOV pointing out that this ship was STOBAR capable unlike the British offer. An Indian Navy delegation had actually travelled up to Russia and inspected the GORSHKOV and were horrified with what they had found. The GORSHKOV had been intended to be a flight trials and training ship for the Soviet Navy in preparation for the planned ULYANOVSK class nuclear powered super carriers and had had only a very short career before the Soviet Navy had become the Russian Navy. The new Russian navy hadn’t felt that it had the need for or budget to operate the ship. A serious gearbox fire had crippled the ship leaving her in need of serious repairs. Not having the money or will to do this the Russians had taken the ship out of service and laid her up and hadn’t spent a single Rouble on any kind of maintenance, repair or preservation meaning that the ship had deteriorated rapidly. The Indian naval delegation had stated that it would be completely indefendable to spend the vast sums of money that it would take to restore and refit the ship in the face of the much cheaper British option.
The Indian’s had been very satisfied with their purchase meaning that when the former HMS INVINCIBLE had come up for sale they had seen off strong interest from Brazil to purchase the ship allowing them to form a second carrier battlegroup.
Like the HMAS AUSTRALIA the INS VIRRAT and INS VIKRAMADITYA were becoming fairly elderly. In fact, only the VIRRAT (Indomitable) was still active with the older and much more worn VIKRAMADITYA (Invincible) being used as a source of spare parts to keep her sister going. The Indians had embarked upon the “Indigenous Aircraft Carrier” programme to replace the ships with an Indian build CATOBAR fleet carrier. However, that programme had yet to lay down or even finalise the design of the new carrier meaning that the first ship would not enter service until the early 2020’s at the earliest.
The former ADMIRA GORSHKOV had in recent years found herself back in the spot light. In 2010 a Chinese businessman had approached the Russians offering to purchase the decrepit for scrap. Its unclear if the Russian’s took him at face value (The other KIEV class ships had been scrapped in China after all) or were at least suspicious of the businessman’s likely motives and either approved of them or simply didn’t care as long as he way paying. The GORSHKOV had been towed from its berth in Severodvinsk where she had been laid up virtually abandoned for close to 20 years and towed to Dalian Shipyard in Liaoning province in China. Western intelligence agencies had kept a close eye on the ship and were naturally suspicious of China’s intentions. Whatever they were doing to the ship they were not scrapping it. Satellite photos were currently showing the ship in a drydock covered in scaffolding with a great amount of activity taking place onboard. It was well known that the Peoples Liberation Army Navy had for years been trying to develop an aircraft carrier fleet of its own and had made numerous attempts to buy such a ship second hand. The ex Soviet Kiev class ships and former RAN carrier HMAS MELBOURNE had ended up in China being scrapped very slowly. It was obvious that the Chinese had been forensically dissecting these ships to learn what they could about how an aircraft carrier was put together. They had even made an attempt at purchasing the half completed soviet supercarrier ULYANOVSK. This attempt had been scuppered owing to the ship being completely unseaworthy and China not having the capability at the time to complete the nuclear powered monster. It was generally believed by western intelligence agencies that China was already or would soon begin constructing their first aircraft carrier.
The question remained about what they were doing with the GORSHKOV. They obviously weren’t dismantling the ship and it was considered extremely unlikely that they would attempt to repair the decrepit hulk and bring it into service. Western intelligence sources and the Indian Navy report from years ago all stated that the ship was a complete write off owing to being in extremely poor condition. The Russian’s were known to have considered the ship impossible to be made operational again.
Whatever the Chinese were doing with her it was attracting a lot of attention from intelligence agencies. Attention that might perhaps be better spent looking for the first Chinese aircraft carrier that was highly likely to already be under construction somewhere.
Singapore had sent two ships of the Republic of Singapore navy to take part in the review. The largest of these two ships was the RSS ENDURANCE the lead ship of her class of 6,500 ton LPD’s. The smaller ship was the FORMIDABLE class frigate RSS INTREPID. The FORMIDABLE class were modified TYPE 23 frigates. When Singapore had set out to build a new class of frigates Britain had seen off some stiff competition from France who had been offering their LA FAYETTE stealth frigate. The first two ships of this six strong class had been built by Yarrow in the UK with the other four constructed under licence in Singapore. As with the RAN’s HOBART variant of the TYPE 45 the FORMIDABLE class were different enough from their British predecessors that they could be almost considered a separate class from the British vessels.
The RSS INTREPID wasn’t the only TYPE 23 frigate present. The Chilean Navy had sent the ALMIRANTE LYNCH which together with her sister ALMIRANTE COCHRANE had represented the first export orders for British escort vessels since the Argentine Navy had purchased a pair of TYPE 42 destroyers (which had later been sunk by the nation that had built them).
The Chilean Navy contained traditionally had a large number of British built ships within its fleet. At present as well as a pair of TYPE 23’s Chile possessed a pair of British built UPHOLDER class SSK’s and a pair of ex RN TYPE 22 frigates. Chile had only recently retired the last of the LEANDER class frigates and COUNTY class destroyers that they had second hand from the Royal Navy.
As well as warships there were a number of other vessels present for the review including a number of tall ships. One of these was the Brazilian Navy’s full rigged CISNE BRANCO. For reasons which members of the Royal Navy had never really been able to fully understand many navy’s around the world insisted on keeping large sailing vessels for training their personnel. The British had never really been able to understand the reason for doing this as in their opinion surely officer cadets would benefit more from time spent aboard actual operational warships. If as they suspected it was all really about prestige then the RN could point to the fact that they still had the 255 year old 100 gun ship of the line HMS VICTORY in their fleet which they considered a damned sight more impressive than any of these foreign vessels.
The Brazilian Navy was another navy that traditionally had a significant proportion of British ships within their fleet. Currently their fleet was largely made up of the 3,800 ton British built NITEROI class frigates and four ex RN TYPE 22 frigates. The TYPE 22’s were the former Batch 1 ships of the class which included the Falklands veterans HMS BROADSWORD (Now GREENHALGH) and HMS BRILLIANT (Now DODSWORTH).
Brazil had showed an interest in acquiring one of the INVINCIBLE class aircraft carriers when the RN was disposing of them during the 1990’s to replace their WWII era Colossus class NAeL MINAS GERAIS (formerly HMS VENGEANCE).
strong competition from INDIA and the perception within Brazil that a CATOBAR carrier would always be superior to a VSTOL configured ship had seen the Brazilian Navy instead turn to France.
The French Navy had at the time been in the process of disposing of their CLEMENCEAU class aircraft carriers in preparation for the introduction of the CHARLES DE GAULLE. Brazil had purchased the French carrier FOCH and commissioned her into their own fleet as the Nae SAO PAULO. While they had acquired what they considered to be a large and impressive ship the Brazilians had overlooked the fact that to operate it they needed a larger and more impressive budget than they possessed. The ship being over four decades old didn’t help things. Since entering service with the Brazilian Navy the SAO PAULO had spent more time alongside undergoing maintenance and repairs than she had at sea in a situation much like the RN had experienced in the 1970s with HMS ARK ROYAL.
The limited budget available to the Brazilian Navy also meant that they had really struggled to put together a full air group for their carrier. New build aircraft were extremely limited in choice and far to expensive. Even the second hand market for carrier capable aircraft was limited. The Americans had offered Brazil second hand F/A-18 Hornets but the Brazilians had been forced to turn them down after realising that these aircraft would likely be too expensive to operate in any meaningful number. In the end they had gone for ex USN A4 Skyhawks retrieved from the US’s vast aircraft boneyard in Arizona. The A4 was much cheaper to operate and virtually 10 a penny meaning that the Brazilians had been able to obtain a respectable number. The downside of going down this route was that the A4 was already very old, obsolete and of very limited value. Aware of this the Brazilian Navy had been attempting to purchase Super Etendard strike aircraft from the French to strengthen SAO PAULO’s air group. For various reasons this had yet to come to fruition.
DARING’s CO’s thoughts now turned to the next stage of her deployment. At the moment the ship was making her way up the Australian Coast on her way to her next stop at Singapore. The British government had wanted the ship to visit SINGAPORE for a defence engagement visit to demonstrate the UK’s continuing commitment to the Five Powers Defence Arrangements which had been called into question owing to the lengthy absence of RN warships in the region.
After that the future was uncertain. The original and still officially current plan was for DARING to head across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf. However, the CO had been warned that there was now a possibility that his ship may be diverted North to help enforce sanctions on North Korea resulting from yet another provocation of some type. If it was to be the northern option then it would most likely involve visits to Japan and South Korea and working alongside those countries’ navies. The CO had always been impressed with the Japanese Maritime Self Defence force and how they always had a fleet of large cutting edge and relatively young ships at all times. During Fleet Reviews it was customary for commanding officers to invite the commanders of other ships aboard for a curtesy visit and the CO had been very impressed by the Japanese destroyer ATAGO which was like a USN ARLEIGH BURKE on steroids.
If as he was ordered to proceed westwards across the Indian Ocean as he thought he most likely would be then DARING would most likely be linking up with the French Carrier battlegroup in the Area built around their new nuclear powered ship RICHELIEU. Given the nightmare that the CHARLES DE GAULLE project had been the CO had never quite understood why the French had decided to press ahead with a second ship of the class. He knew that many within the French Navy had been very much against the idea and hadn’t been happy with the sacrifices that had had to be made to pay for the ship. Perhaps the French felt that they still needed a two carrier navy, perhaps it was a result of French domestic politics or maybe it was a case of keeping up with the neighbours (being the RN’s pair of supercarriers) or most likely a combination of all these factors. RICHELIEU was an enlarged and improved version of CHARLES DE GAULLE with a displacement of 50,000 tons compared to her older sisters 42,000 tons. Mercifully the technical issues and mistakes that had plagued the DE GAULLE’s construction seemed to have been ironed out of the RICHELIEU’s design and construction and the new French flagship had commissioned in 2011.
The RICHELIEU was currently operating in the Arabian Sea providing carrier based air support to ongoing operations in Afghanistan. Since 2007 when things in Afghanistan had started to really heat up Britain, France and the US had cycled their carriers through deployments to the region to ensure that there was always at least one and on occasion two carriers on station at all times to provide air support. The RICHELIEU was currently the carrier on station and was to be relieved by HMS EAGLE in the coming weeks. The USS DWIGHT D EISENHOWER was currently operating in the Persian Gulf and the USS NIMITZ was currently in the Mediterranean on her way home.
When she eventually arrived in the Gulf region HMS DARING’s current operational plan called for her to spend 2 months in the area conducting duties and taskings such as freedom of navigation passages through the Straits of Hormuz, maritime security operations in the Persian Gulf (winding up the Iranians), visits to Dubai and Bahrain and counterpiracy/anti smuggling duties in the waters off Somalia before heading for the Suez canal and ultimately home. However as often happened the CO reckoned that these plans would most likely be scrubbed as soon as he got there and his ship retasked to join HMS EAGLE’s battlegroup.
Before retiring to his sleeping cabin, the CO thought briefly about one other noteworthy ship that had been present in Sydney Harbour. The Argentine Navy sail training ship ARA LIBERTAD.
It could be argued that even 30 years later the Argentine armed forces still hadn’t recovered from their mauling in the Falklands War.
The Argentine Navy had suffered grievously during the conflict with the bulk of its fleet being destroyed. This had included an aircraft carrier, a cruiser, two modern and one elderly destroyers, 3 modern frigates, one modern and one older submarine, the majority of the navy’s aircraft and well over one thousand men. Since then the navy had been struggling to rebuild. Fortunately, at the time of the conflict Argentina had a number of ships under construction both at home and abroad which the navy had in later years used to rebuild its fleet virtually from scratch.
The Argentine navy now consisted of 2 TR-1700 class SSK’s, 4 ALMIRANTE BROWN class destroyers and 6 ESPORA class corvettes giving the Argentinians a respectable order of battle on paper. Looks however can be very deceiving.
Something that had hurt the Argentine Navy just as much as the loss of its ships had been the high proportion of its personnel that had perished including the majority of its ship command qualified officers.
The effects of this loss of experience had been crippling with knock on effects lasting decades. In fact many of the new ships had been unable to enter service with the Argentine Navy for some years as they were unable to assemble a competent crew to man them.
The ships in Argentina’s fleet now had an average age of 30 years old and thus were becoming more demanding in terms of maintenance which lead on to the biggest and most enduring problem for the Argentine armed forces.
Given the unpopularity of the military in Argentina owing to memories of the atrocities committed by the Military Government, the Dirty War and their poor showing in the Falklands war funding for defence had been a long way from being a priority for successive Argentine post war democratic civilian governments. A problem not helped by the fact that Argentina was nearly always broke anyway.
This meant that for the navy there was no money for things like maintenance, fuel and ammunition meaning that its ships these days very rarely if ever put to sea. This had massively exacerbated the problems with trying to rebuild a base of experience as there were hardly any opportunities for personnel to undertake even the most basic level of sea training and many crucial skills had simply died out. For example, none of the ALMIRANTE BROWN class destroyers had been able to put to sea in over a year owing to vital engine maintenance not being carried out due to a lack of funds to purchase the necessary parts and all of the class’s ordinance being expired anyway. The Argentine submarine force over the past two years had accumulated a grand total of barely a week submerged across both boats.
The reason why the Argentines had despatched the ARA LIBERTAD to Sydney was as a sailing ship with few moving parts compared to the warships, she was just about the only operational ship the Argentines had left.
The Argentine Air Force had come out of the Falklands War in an even worse state than the navy having been utterly mauled by the British losing almost its entire fast jet fleet and many other aircraft on top of the virtual obliteration of the naval air arm.
The war had left them with an odd mixture of whichever Mirage’s, Daggers and Skyhawks had survived the conflict representing barely a squadrons or two’s worth of serviceable aircraft. Even more so than the navy the air force had been hurt by its personnel casualties losing the vast majority of its aircrew and fast jet crews in particular. Those who had survived had often been so traumatised by their experiences over San Carlos Bay (which the Argentines had nicknamed Death Valley) that they were unable to fly again.
Attempts to rebuild the air force had been spectacularly unsuccessful. Every attempt to procure badly needed new combat aircraft had been scuppered by a lack of funds and interference from the British who even all these years later to prevent the Argentines from procuring any equipment that could be even a remote threat to the Falklands. New aircraft were beyond what the Argentine Air Force could afford on its tiny budget and attempts to buy second hand Mirages from France and Spain had been thwarted by the British who had leaned heavily on these countries not to sell to Argentina. In one case it was widely rumoured that a deal with Israel to purchase 22 surplus Dagger’s had been scuppered when the British had suddenly turned up before the deal was formalised and outbid the Argentines and then apparently forgotten to take delivery of the aircraft. Whatever the truth the one hard fact was that Argentina had not been able to purchase these aircraft.
Argentina’s only successful aircraft purchase in the years after the Falklands War had been a purchase of 36 refurbished former USN Skyhawks purchased from the US in 1990. Despite being close allies with the American’s the British had made strong protests regarding the deal. However, these aircraft had already been fairly old with many hours on their airframes when Argentina had purchased them. Like Argentina’s ships her aircraft were massively handicapped by the grossly insufficient maintenance and training budget and by 2013 it was believed that less than 10 of the Skyhawks were still in an airworthy condition.
It was telling that the 2010 SDSR had significantly scaled back the British military presence on the Falkland Islands as a cost saving measure due to a lack of any realistic threat from Argentina.
A few years previously DARING’s CO had been the XO aboard the survey ship HMS ECHO during a 6 month deployment to the Falklands to conduct oceanographic surveys of the area and conduct patrols of the waters around the Islands.
The Falkland Islands were a very different place from what they had been in 1982. The population had almost doubled and the economy had boomed as a result of having a large British military presence on the islands based at RAF STANLEY, a thriving tourist trade with cruise ships regularly visiting the area and the discovery of vast offshore fields infrastructure being built on the islands to exploit them.
Though the War was now decades in the past it was still very much a fact of everyday life for the islanders. Vast swathes of land were no go areas due to the risks from unexploded ordinance and uncharted minefields. Efforts to make these areas safe had dwindled away to almost nothing in recent years as there were more pressing needs for British bomb disposal units in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During ECHO’s deployment DARING’s CO had spent plenty of time ashore undertaking the various Falkland Battlefield tours. He had visited the battlefield at Mount Tumble down which was still scarred by bomb and shell craters and littered with the debris of war such as abandoned equipment and thousands upon thousands of rusted bullet and shell casings. There was the wreckage of a Buccaneer that had crashed into the side of a mountain during a night sortie. The remains of the platoon of Panhard Armoured Cars outside Port Stanley that had surrendered to 2 PARA on the last day of the war. As well as a British military cemetery there were numerous Argentine military cemeteries and memorials around the islands as the Argentine government had repeatedly refused offers of repatriation of their war dead by claiming that they were already buried in Argentine territory.
One of ECHO’s primary tasks during her deployment was to survey the wreaks that lay in San Carlos water. Highly detailed sonar scans had been made of the wreaks of HMS ARDENT, HMS ANTELOPE and HMS ARGONAUT along with the remains of a landing craft that had been strafed by attacking Argentine aircraft and the crashed remnants of numerous Argentine aircraft that had been shot out of the sky during their bombing runs. San Carlos bay was off limits to all civilian vessels as the whole site was essentially one large war grave and there was plenty of unexploded ordinance on the seabed from Argentine bombs that had failed to detonate and British SAM’s that hadn’t acquired a target. Divers had been sent down to each of the British wreaks where they had placed a white ensign on the remains of the bridge. Service a service of remembrance had been held aboard ECHO with wreaths of poppies being thrown into the sea.
Ashore at San Carlos one again finds the remnants of war such as the numerous fox holes and trenches dug by the PARA’s and Marines. The area is littered with abandoned and wreaked equipment which had lain undisturbed for decades such as an Argentine aircraft that had crashed int the terrain and the various bits of rubbish and equipment that the British had simply left behind. The two most obvious sites of interest are the former helicopter operating base and prisoner holding facility which had not been completely dismantled as the British had only taken what they felt could be used again and had left everything else behind. The location where prisoners had been kept was still marked by the reels of rusted barbed wire and stockades that had been left behind. As well as two simple hillside memorials that commemorated the British and Argentine dead there was a third rather unusual memorial in an unassuming and obviously long abandoned structure near the shore line. Originally a refrigeration plant the structure had last seen human habitation during the Falklands war and if one could get high enough up the adjacent slope they would be able to see an indication as to what this buildings purpose had been in the form of a now very faded red cross painted on the roof. The building had been used by the British as a field hospital and had been nicknamed the red and green life machine. It was famous for being perhaps the first military hospital in history where everyone who had been admitted had survived. Inside in a room that had been used as an operating theatre was a memorial plaque not to men who had died but to the men who had survived and the doctors and medics who had saved them.
One of ECHO’s other taskings had been to survey the wreak of the TYPE 42 destroyer HMS GLASGOW located to the east of the Falklands which had been sunk by an Exocet missile on the 6th of May 1982. The ghostly sonar images of the decades old wreak of a TYPE 42 destroyer almost identical to the one’s that could still be found in Portsmouth Harbour had unnerved DARING’s CO somewhat and got him thinking about what had been and what might have been if things had been a little different.
Welp I suspect that a lot of those British submarine orders came at the expense of German ones. Also have the Upholders been refited with AIP?
Will we see a little peek at what the surface fleet of the RCN is going to be? Or are we just stuck with what we had in our timeline?
SsgtC
Banned
@flasheart what does Naval Aviation look like in this timeline? Is the FAA still flying their legacy Hornets or are they upgrading to Super Hornets? What about the USN? Were more F-14Ds purchased, or did Cheney still gut the program? And are Tomcats still flying from the USN decks or have they gone to an all Hornet air wing?
The cuts inflicted by the 2010 SDSR can't have been that murderous if the RN is still getting 12 Type 45's.
I wonder what's happened with the F-35 ITTL. If the UK doesn't have a requirement for a STOVL variant then I wonder if there'll be a significant desire to simplify development and ditch the STOVL variant quite early on in the programme.
I wonder what's happened with the F-35 ITTL. If the UK doesn't have a requirement for a STOVL variant then I wonder if there'll be a significant desire to simplify development and ditch the STOVL variant quite early on in the programme.
No chance , the marines will fight tooth and nail for it. Remember they reguard carriers just as aircraft ferries till they can get a forward airbase set up and they need STOL for that at least.
This doesn't mean their STOL aircraft needs to be stealth, supersonic and part of the same design with the F-16 replacement while STOL did not get the publicity from Falklands as well. But still we have not seen how aircraft development after the early 1980s has been altered TTL thanks to the British going for Hornet. If Typhoon died at birth which I find likely, then the British were probably starting around 1988 their own Tornado replacement program, likely based on P.125 to keep their industry going and Rafale became Eurofighter (with probable separate French and German versions). And we don't know what was happening in the US, either who won the A-12 program or what happened to it, are we certain it was the same flying dorito and that it died on schedule?
Err not quite sure where you are coming from, USMC's need for (V/)STOL is firmly developed and not at all affected by the Falklands, they love their Harriers. The drivers for the JSF program to deliver variants of one plane for the USAF, USN and USMC are unchanged by TTL, As the marines want a Harrier replacement , you will get a F-35B even if it is not quite the same as OTL. What the British buy is not relevant to that decision, however the UK going it alone is out on cost grounds so any UK program(s) will be a joint one(s) with US or European involvement.
SsgtC
Banned
Considering that the ATL RAF and FAA already have F/A-18 Hornets, this aircraft is kinda pointless/superfluous