MOD has an infrastructure challenge to protect the tip of the military spear
Defence and security blogger @PinstripedLine discussed how the MOD can balance the politics of spending money on frontline kit against making sure the infrastructure is there to support it.
The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales has returned to Portsmouth after a visit to Scotland, where she had been embarking munitions for upcoming deployments from the ammunition depot at Glen Mallan.
This may sound like a minor matter but is a great reminder of both the critical importance – and cost – of the infrastructure and support services needed to keep front-line Royal Navy warships at sea and available for operations.
If you visit Portsmouth and are lucky enough to see one of the aircraft carriers in the harbour, you are seeing the end result of a support network that stretches around the UK, at multiple sites and employing thousands of people with the shared goal of keeping these vessels able to go to sea.
When people think of the RN, they will usually conjure up images in their heads of steely grey warships ploughing through stormy seas, aircraft carriers launching jets or submarines diving, heading off on secret missions far beneath the waves.
All of this is true, but it can only happen if those vessels are properly maintained and supported at home and abroad to enable them to remain ready for war.
The cost of the carrier programme was significant (around £6bn) to deliver the ships and airwing into service, but once you have them you need to be able to support them.
How does the Royal Navy do this, and why is it so important?
The first part of the challenge is to ensure the ships have somewhere to operate from.
Even before HMS Queen Elizabeth entered Portsmouth for the first time, the RN had spent more than £100m improving the naval base, investing in improved dockside facilities, better power generation (as the ships are plugged into the mains shore power when in port), warehouses and stores facilities to provide all the necessary support for these giant vessels.
This is a huge sum of money – not far off the cost of a Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol vessel (OPV) – just to enable the carriers to be able to safely sit alongside in harbour.
Due to the flexibility of the carrier design, they can embark a significant amount of different munitions for the aircraft and helicopters they operate, from torpedoes and bombs through to air-to-air missiles.
The challenge in Portsmouth is that there is nowhere in the harbour where you can easily load an aircraft carrier with all the munitions required.
The site's main ammunition depot in Gosport can use the munitions jetty, built at a cost of £18m, to load Type 45s, but it is too small to take a carrier.
Instead, the Royal Navy chooses to use one of its munitions depots in Scotland for this.
It's not widely known that there is an extensive network of fuel and ammunition depots across Scotland, around Rosyth on the east coast, as well as throughout the west coast.
Many of these sites date back to the Second World War or the early Cold War – for instance, the fuel depot at Loch Ewe is on a site from where countless sailors set course for Murmansk as part of the Arctic convoys in WW2.
These sites were crucial throughout the Cold War, holding stores, fuel and ammunition that would have been used by Nato forces in the event of war.
Even after 1991, the sites have been kept open and in regular use, such is their value.
One of the most important sites is Glen Douglas, operated by Defence Munitions and the largest weapons storage site in western Europe.
The site is so large that it has its own rail transfer point, enabling deliveries of munitions by railway or lorry, and can store a wide range of munitions.
Based close to Loch Long, which has a jetty able to carry out munitions loading, the site at Glen Mallan was chosen to act as the main munitions loading point for the Queen Elizabeth class.
The site is ideal for this as the deep waters of Loch Long make it easier to operate and dock an aircraft carrier, while the site has been extended to enable the speedy loading of ammunition.
The cost of this work was more than £67m.
Once the ships are loaded with fuel, stores and ammunition then they can put to sea, able to carry out any mission asked of them.
The challenge though is what to do when they run short on fuel and supplies.
This is where the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) comes into play, with its force of tankers and stores ships able to provide essential support to keep warships at sea for longer, enabling operations far from home without being reliant on foreign ports.
The RFA was particularly crucial during the Falklands War in 1982, acting as the vital link that kept the Task Force at sea long enough to secure victory.
People may not realise that RFA vessels are classed as merchant ships, and crewed by civilian sailors, with all RFA crew classed and employed as MOD civil servants, and holding sponsored reservist status should they go into war zones.
There are historical and practical reasons why they are civilians, including making it easier to enter some ports.
The challenge though is that when the RFA struggles to recruit and retain crew, it impacts the Royal Navy directly.
Now RFA personnel numbers are declining as crews leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere, while those who are left have voted for strike action over concerns about a perceived lack of pay rises.
A strike went ahead last week and another is planned for September which could significantly disrupt the ability of some RFA ships to support their RN colleagues.
Additionally, the shortage of crew numbers means the RFA fleet is having to put even new tankers into reserve until sufficient trained crew can be found to operate them.
This matters because without the RFA acting as the supply chain, the Royal Navy will struggle to be a truly global navy without being tied to shore bases.
When brought together it's clear to see that to keep an aircraft carrier at sea and ready for operations requires a lot of people working across the UK, from civil servants in the naval base, to munitions workers and tug operators, to RFA crews at sea.
It requires investing hundreds of millions of pounds in infrastructure, and spending billions more on new support ships – the next generation of three RFA stores ships to support the carrier force will cost almost £2bn.
There is a huge ongoing bill attached to ensure that carriers can remain at sea but, without paying this, they will be hugely limited in their reach and capability.
This matters because as the MOD begins the next strategic defence review, it will need to consider how to make tough financial decisions to support the Armed Forces.
There will always be a strong push to preserve the frontline and spend money on ships, tanks and aircraft – after all, the more of these you have, the more lethal your military is, right?
But if you don't get the right balance between investing in front-line equipment and spending money on support services, then you'll quickly run out of spare parts, bombs and the infrastructure needed to repair things.
The Royal Navy, for example, will need to make investment decisions based around how many ships it needs, but also about investing in the support infrastructure in the naval bases to keep them at sea.
Every pound spent on infrastructure is a pound less for the frontline and new kit, but if you can't use the equipment, then it is worthless.
The MOD spends roughly 10% of its annual budget, some £5bn, on infrastructure – that's the same amount as it spends on supporting equipment in service.
This is a huge sum of money and is subject to a lot of pressure – the estate is huge and lots of sites need maintenance and repairs, while there is a push to dispose of other sites to rationalise the estate.
There will also be inevitable pressure to reduce headcount, driving down the size of the Civil Service, but this means losing highly skilled dockyard workers and munitions experts, putting more pressure on the military as a result.
The challenge that MOD planners need to resolve is getting the balance right, spending money on the frontline to ensure that they can deliver British defence policy goals, while ensuring that the various sites needed to keep this viable are kept open and invested in.
This may be politically challenging. Few people like the idea of spending scarce defence budget resources on civil servants, warehouses and repair facilities, so the MOD will need to make a compelling case that without spending in these areas, the force will be unable to deploy.
They will need to explain why the 'whole force' matters and spending on a wide range of unglamorous areas to ensure that the front-line works as planned.
After all, there is little point spending lots of money on the 'tip of the spear' if the spear shaft is rotted throughout and unable to support the spear tip – all you end up with is a piece of broken metal…
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