FDR – Maritime Futures Part 2 (Another view on C2)

There is no doubt to anyone who has read my comments or my guest articles on Think Defence that I am an unabashed ‘fan boy’ of the Royal Danish Navy’s Absalon Class “flexible support ship”.

What I will attempt to do in this article is explain why I think it would make an excellent basis as an “off the shelf” design for the UK Royal Navy’s Future Surface Combatant’s “mid tier” C2 requirement.

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FDR – Maritime Major Surface Combatants (Future Surface Combatant)

The C1 and C2 concepts as defined in the FSC (Future Surface Combatant) programme make a lot of sense in the context of a cash starved Royal Navy, the study has examined each mission  and threat environments and tried to approach them with a pragmatism not seen in the Royal Navy for some time. It envisages a dual class of vessels, trading capabilities in the C2 variant for greater overall numbers, the C2 being the less capable.

The C2 concept can be likened to medium weight armoured vehicles, the US Stryker for example. Unfortunately this has produced a design with too many compromises, too lightweight to survive on a modern battlefield yet too heavy to be strategically mobile, in short, the worse of all worlds.

Is the C2 concept the same, too under equipped to be of use in a high threat environment yet too expensive to obtain in significant quantity and over specified for many of its likely missions, a compromise too far?

Possibly yes, because overall numbers would be so low the difference in cost will be marginal and therefore the expected advantages of greater numbers will simply not materialise, we all know that story.

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FDR – Maritime Major Surface Combatants (Introduction)

The escort fleet of destroyers and frigates provides the combat backbone of the Royal Navy. Whilst capabilities have certainly increased the so called ‘tyranny of distance means that however more capable the Type 42 is than the Type 45, it cannot be in two places at once. It might be obvious but worth saying anyway, ships do not deploy at the speed of aircraft, so reducing numbers has a dramatic affect on the ability of the Royal Navy to fulfil its missions.

Increasing costs and reducing budgets conspire to produce a procurement ‘death spiral’ where increasing cost means fewer can be purchased which increases costs again and so on. The Type 42‘s replacement, the Type 45 is a good example. The Type 42 was arguably too small and too ill equipped for its primary mission of air defence, its ultimate replacement is the Type 45. An all too familiar tale of acquisition blundering means that each Type 45 is in the order of a billion pounds, we have only ordered 6, replacing 14 Type 42’s

However capable they are, they can only bring this capability to bear if they are where they are needed.  Six is a dangerously low number and full 50% of the planned order.

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