Diplomatic Situation
Last year, some politicians and military historians were concerned that the British public might, in 2014, forget what the world went through in 1914 to 1918: the period of the Great War. Even as recently as three weeks before the publication of this article (during the Sochi Winter Olympics) it looked as if the main reminder of that pivotal time in human affairs would be the BBC's programming efforts, with both national and regional programmes on the history and background of the Great War. And the nearest a flood weary British public was getting to empathy with their ancestors in the trenches, was an acute anxiety about the supply of sandbags.
But on this weekend, the beginning of March, 2014, the rolling news channels are bringing us back to 1914 with a bump. Though the pre-recorded discussions about the possibility of another world war, based on what went wrong in 1914, all concentrate on tensions between China and Japan, the emerging diplomatic train crash is in Ukraine. A more dangerous place than a group of uninhabited islands, and from the British point of view, close to home geographically and even closer to home historically, because the Crimean War was in many ways the prototype of the Great War, with the advent in Europe of the sort of industrialised siege warfare fought at an eye-watering cost in blood and treasure that the Americans would shortly experiment with between themselves.
Although most readers will have seen glib presentations by earnest young British historians trying to prove that the Great War was Britain's fault, the truth was that Britain had spent the opening years of the twentieth century repeatedly intervening to stop war breaking out between the great powers over the Balkans, and what finally allowed it to happen was a blithe assumption by the British Cabinet that their Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, could go on doing this indefinitely, a determination on the part of Austro-Hungary to consolidate its grip on the Balkans, recently bartered for with the Ottoman Empire without the slightest reference to the people of the Balkans, and a belief on the part of the German government that 1914 was a window of opportunity to clip the wings of both the Russian and French Empires at the same time.
Although Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, is portrayed by the "Britain's fault brigade" as the cabinet member most eager for war, he only realised that war was more than faintly possible only a few days before it broke out. He was listening to Edward Grey reading out the German-approved ultimatum which Austro-Hungary had delivered to Serbia, and about twenty minutes into this document, he realised that this was the sort of demand issued by warlike kings in ancient or Biblical times, and it was more extreme than any diplomatic paper which had been published in Europe for some centuries. Serbia was being faced with a demand that she should meekly agree to stop existing, on account of an assassination carried out by a group of mostly Bosnian private citizens. Happenstance had it that a Serb fired what turned out to be the fatal shots, after Bosnians had thrown what turned out to be ineffective bombs. Austro-Hungary and Germany knew this, but their differing ambitions both required a Serbian capitulation, so that was what they demanded. By any modern standard, Bosnian and Serb grievances against Austro-Hungary seem perfectly valid, too: they didn't want to pass from one Empire to another, they wanted to be Bosnia and Serbia.
Even so, Britain could and probably would have evaded war, had Germany not decided to invade and crush Belgium, a declared neutral country, simply to shave a few days off their timetable for the invasion of France, which was one of Serbia's protecting powers. Had France and Russia not been Serbia's protecting powers, Germany would have had no interest in the Balkans at all. As it was, Serbia looked like a good pretext for a lightning war of aggression against Germany's two main European rivals.
With Serbia being a pretext for aggression in the first place, the hammer blow which landed on Belgium was completely unprovoked by anything which Belgium had done, and all that France and Russia had done to provoke war was insist, mostly through diplomatic channels rather than practical military action, that Serbia not be brutally crushed.
Though the patterns and alliances in 2014, vis a vis Ukraine, are different, the danger is very similar. Britain and America want all the parties to adhere to agreements made in 1994, and to the basic principles of international law. Russia in 2014, like Germany in 1914, has objectives which are incompatible with both and sees no reason why she shouldn't use force, the scale and brutality of which will be determined by operational convenience, as an attractive alternative to adhering to legal principles which will not give Russia what she wants. Britain and America, Germany too, are walking into the same trap as Russia and France did in 1914. They are advocating reason and high principle in the face of a great power that favours force.
Unlike Britain and America, Germany anticipated the current situation, or something approaching it, and she had a strategy. Which was to shelter the Ukraine from Russia by swiftly drawing Ukraine into the European Union. However, Germany completely sabotaged that strategy's chances of success a couple of years in advance, by making clear, with French support, that she absolutely would not countenance Turkish entry into the European Union, then or ever. Without Turkish membership and participation in EU policy making, there is little practical help or shelter which the EU can extend across the Black Sea to the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's obvious riposte to all Germany and the EU's protest and bluster over Ukraine is "you and whose army?" If the answer to that one had been "well, the Turkish army" we might have seen a new thing on Earth: a conciliatory Kremlin.
Defence Capability
It's not just the diplomatic situation which is beginning to resemble 1914. Just over a decade after the Boer war, Britain entered the Great War with an army that was pitiably small by contemporary European standards, and with the Royal Navy assumed by the cabinet to be completely capable, when in fact it tended to lack the unglamorous capacities that would be needed the most. In particular, there was only token investment in any capacity to patrol Britain's coastal waters and protect coastal shipping. Then, as in 1939, everyone assumed that the railways were the backbone of British industry, but the reality in both world wars was that London, not the North and Midlands, was Britain's most important industrial area and all the railways running into London simply couldn't keep London supplied with enough fuel, food and raw materials to fight a war. The balance of the supplies were brought in by coastal shipping and many key industrial plants were built on the Thames with their own wharfs. Newspaper printing presses had newsprint delivered directly by ship, coal, wheat and timber tended to reach London by ship rather than rail, too.
The Royal Navy had a lot of battleships and heavy cruisers, but some apparently powerful classes of battleship were largely useless in practice because there was so little difference in power between main (12") and secondary armament (9.2") that gunnery officers were unable to determine which splash was due to which battery and therefore they were helpless to correct their own fire. The biggest cruisers tended to have a small number of very big guns rather than a large number of smaller guns; coupled with the basic range-finding and gun-laying technology of the day, this made it difficult to get the range of a target by "straddling it" before it had moved far enough for any range obtained to be meaningless anyway. (A ranging salvo fires each gun in in (rapid) turn, each set to a different range. By counting which shells in the sequence go either side of the target, the gunnery officer obtained the true range and could then fire a "broadside" of shells fired almost together to actually hit the target. The Glorious class cruisers had just four huge 15" guns: in battle, they obtained few, if any, hits. In WW2, the cruiser HMS Exeter with just six 8" guns, did critical damage to the fuel system on the German Pocket Battleship Graf Spee with just two accurate hits on the only weak spot in the target's armour. The Glorious class could have been effective if the guns had been stepped down a size to allow enough of them (at least six) to be carried to get the target's range in one salvo. The "smaller" Edwardian cruisers tended towards fearsome assemblages of 9.2" guns mounted all over, and unable to all bear on the same target for effective ranging salvos and destructive broadsides. Their captains might have sneered at HMS Exeter, half their size and with just three twin turrets mounting puny 8" guns.
In the years before 1914 and the outbreak of war, the Royal Navy concentrated its creative attention and not just its money, on the biggest ships and the biggest guns. If it had been a little more flexible, a little more heedful of small things, the Battle of Jutland in 1915 might just have ended the war. As it was, enough of the German fleet returned to port more or less intact to prevent the allied blockade being extended into the Baltic, and to pose an ongoing threat to Britain's coastal towns and vital coastal shipping. The biggest single reason for the German escape was that the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet fired too many shells which missed, the second reason was that insufficient attention had been paid to the detailed design of the shells themselves, so that many of the hits obtained did only superficial damage. Jutland left the German Navy badly shaken, but it wasn't destroyed and the British taxpayer had the right to expect that it should have been.
After Jutland, the Royal Navy put more of its money into destroyers, torpedo boats, gunboats and even motor launches, because these could swiftly protect coastal towns and coastal shipping from raiding forces, as well as protecting Atlantic convoys from U-boats. By 1939 and the outbreak of WW2, the destroyers were again too few in number and the torpedo boats, gunboats and launches almost non-existent. The whole capability, including seamanship skills and tactical understanding, had to be rebuilt under constant attack from German S-boats. See Peter Scott's book, "The Battle of the Narrow Seas" if there are any copies to be had.
In the present day, the MoD has recently announced an order to build three modified (ie: 90 metres long instead of 81 metres long) River Class patrol vessels. These will not only replace the three existing 81 metre River Class vessels, it is anticipated that they will be the only Royal Navy vessels routinely patrolling UK home waters. When it comes to patrolling all the seas, Atlantic, North Sea and Irish Sea, from Guernsey to the North of Shetland, three vessels is definitely not a crowd.
The 90 metre River Class, though, is close to being the right type of vessel for the job. It is five knots faster than the older 81 metre ships, can carry a bit more in the way of troops or cargo, and larger Merlin helicopters can land on its rear deck, as well as Lynx and their "Wildcat" replacements. (Though, the Navy does not have large numbers of fully equipped naval Merlin helicopters, and the twenty-five Merlins now being transferred to the Royal Navy by the RAF are all troop/cargo aircraft without radar, sonar and serious weapons capability. If any helicopter can be found to operate from a River Class ship at all, it's likely to be an Agusta Westland Wildcat.)
The rear deck, which is for cargo and salvage as well as helicopters, is coupled with a big crane, and although this is perceived as being mainly of use in civil emergencies, the swift salvage of intelligence material from sinking ships and downed aircraft can prove pivotal in war. In WW2, not only did the capture of code books and equipment from German and Italian vessels swing the tide of naval warfare in favour of the allies for months at a time, the capture, by a German commerce raider in the Indian Ocean, of an admiralty report into the vulnerability of Malaysia and Singapore to Japanese invasion, proved invaluable to the Japanese officers planning just such an invasion and it also affected Japan's decision to go to war against Britain and the United States in the first place. But to have one ship in the right place at the right time to pull off that kind of coup, it is necessary to have more than three of them at sea.
The problem with the River Class, though, is armament. There is almost none, though the 30mm cannon is powerful in the minds of MoD spokesmen talking up the protection of the Falkland Islands by HMS Clyde. The Royal Thai Navy has an almost identical vessel fitted with a much more powerful 76.2mm gun, but a bigger gun is going to look like grotesque overkill if used on any sort of pirate or smuggler's vessel, and yet against a Russian frigate, say, a ship with a 76.2mm gun is unlikely ever to close to within effective range before being sunk by a hail of guided missiles. It would be better to keep the 30mm gun, or perhaps replace it with the 40mm CTA gun now being fitted to the Army's Warrior armoured vehicles (more effective gun, but same size mounting.) An anti-surface capability should come from the careful integration of a small number of vertical launch missile tubes into the ship's superstructure. To give the patrol vessel a chance of survival should its patrol bring an encounter a front line enemy warship, without making it look warlike and threatening as it goes about its peacetime duties.
Corvettes of about the same tonnage as the River Class patrol vessel can be equipped with up to eight launch tubes for the Exocet MM40 block 3, which would allow engagements at a survivable range of 180km or so. The new Perseus missile being procured for the Royal Navy's new type 26 Frigates, is designed to fit the same launch tube. That would allow patrol vessels in or near the UK's coastal waters, to hold seaborne threats off at quite some distance.
The River Class, as they stand, are not equipped with any sort of anti-air missile system, either. This is partly because there is no space, not necessarily for the missiles themselves, but for the target tracking system they would normally require. Variously the tracking system is a radar or optical device, it is generally big, expensive and complicated, and apart from being a potential point of system failure, target tracking systems are a source of radar or laser emissions which allow the enemy to keep track of the vessel's location as it undertakes evasive action; enemy anti-radar missiles can even home on the target tracking system and put the vessel's defences out of action very easily if they don't do worse damage.
The new Seaceptor missile is designed not to need a target tracking system onboard the launch vessel. It can be launched on the basis of a fix from a surveillance radar alone (and the 90 metre River Class can have one of those with no problem) or even a non-radar sensor, or networked data from third party sensors such as on an AWACS aircraft, another ship, or even a (naval) Merlin helicopter. Once the Seaceptor is launched, the surveillance radar (if used) can immediately cease transmissions to avoid betraying the vessel's evasive actions or attracting anti-radar weapons. It is very compact, and subjects the launch vessel to minimal rocket blast when launched. A pack of three Seaceptors will fit in the same space as a single launch tube for legacy weapons such as Seawolf or MICA, and it provides Seawolf-type precision out to similar ranges as the now obsolete Sea Dart system from the old type 42 destroyers. Fitting the new River Class Vessels with six to eight unobtrusive 3-round launch packs is a no brainer, which means that only the British Treasury is likely to object. It would transform them from sitting ducks in the event of a significant air campaign against the UK, to a threat which attacking aircraft would have to avoid.
To make the River Class vessels pose a threat to an enemy nuclear submarine, perhaps lurking with the intention of tracking and sinking Britain's nuclear deterrent submarines as they leave their bases for their patrol areas (this is a problem that's highly likely to occur at some point) what's needed is a two round launcher for the Sting Ray anti-submarine torpedo and a reasonable sonar installation, which is likely to be useful in all sorts of other ways during peacetime.
These changes (and an increase in numbers of a small and cheap vessel) would make the River Class a genuine rather than a purely symbolic protection for the UK and any shipping in its waters, and it would not greatly change their unthreatening appearance or operating costs.
The main problems with the Royal Navy's "Major Warships" such as the type 45 air defence destroyer and the forthcoming type 26 frigate or "global combat ship" are numbers and a decision not to actually fit all the equipment the type 45s were designed to carry. When the type 45 was being designed, the assumption was that twelve of them was the minimum necessary procurement, this was whittled down to eight and the Cameron government has actually capped production at six. None of them so far have been fitted with any anti-ship missiles, though the modular design allows such missiles to be fitted in more than one way and of more than one type. The excuse was that the type 45 would always be protected from surface threats by a couple of type 26 frigates. All well and good, but those were planned on the basis that somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one of them would be procured, and the Cameron government has committed to a maximum of thirteen. Which means that the type 45s cannot expect to always be escorted by a pair of type 26s, and therefore need some kind of anti-ship missile, which they were designed to carry.
The RAF's problems can be stated much more succinctly: they have the right types of aircraft in service or on the way, but have been cut much too far in terms of aircraft numbers, bases and manpower. Also, critically, there has been a change in doctrine which now states that the RAF will never have to fight from its home bases, so they don't really need any ground or air defences. In the light of current events, the most dangerous and unjustified assumption possible. The triumph of political dementia over military reality.
The army has largely conquered the age old problem of poor kit in inadequate quantities, but now, like the RAF has been cut to too small a size to protect the country against any serious European threat of the kind which is now jumping up and down on the Ukraine, secure in the knowledge that the West can and will do nothing to stop it. It also suffers an equally serious doctrinal lunacy to the RAF's "not fighting from its home bases" in the way that "reserves" are being used to compensate for the loss of tens of thousands of full-time regular soldiers.
There is no problem with having an army with a large reserve element, if the regular element is large enough to deal with small crises without needing those reserves to be mobilised. But the current doctrine is that it will now be routine, for reserves to play a part in routine deployments and the immediate response to military emergencies. This reverses the meaning of "reserve" and it's very dangerous. Reserves are part of the civil economy, the more capable reserve soldiers are, the more important their civilian jobs are likely to be. If they have to be mobilised every time the Foreign Secretary needs a show of force to back up his wise words and gentle insistence, the MoD will be constantly pulling the rug out from under the country's economic recovery, and in the case of a major military emergency, it will cause significant economic (and social) disruption before the first shot is fired.
This gives aggressive foreign powers an attractive mechanism for weakening Britain as a whole: just engineer a constant stream of low-level military confrontations and watch British industry get fed up with the constant absence of key workers.
The Royal Navy needs more than three patrol vessels, and they must be modestly but effectively armed to the point where they can protect themselves and credibly threaten aggressors and intruders. It needs to fully arm and equip its Type 45 destroyers, and the number of Type 26 frigates must be reviewed upwards a bit before shipbuilding capacity is cut to fit the low number and a higher number becomes impossible to obtain.
The RAF needs at least some increase in strength, even more urgently it needs to retain or recommission enough airbases to maintain a bit of redundancy and resilience in the face of attack, and it must be able to defend those airbases and train to operate from them whilst under attack, as it always used to do.
The British Army must retain sufficient numbers of regular troops to deal with small wars and the beginnings of large ones, without drawing on its reserves from the very outset. It must also develop an intelligent mobilisation strategy, so that when it does draw on its reserves, it doesn't shut the civil economy down in the process. This could involve the creation of a civilian reserve of retired or semi-retired skilled workers who could be tasked and perhaps even trained in advance, to help the employers of reserve soldiers keep their businesses -and the country- running during a general mobilisation.
