Hybrid navy may be a risk – but it may also be the only choice, says former commodore

Creating a hybrid navy with an untested system is a big risk, retired Royal Navy Commodore Steve Prest has said.

"With hybrid navy, we're absolutely taking both feet off the ground and leaping into the unknown – and I don't think any other major navy is doing this in quite the same way," he told BFBS Forces News.

"Now that means it's a high-risk approach, but the First Sea Lord [General Sir Gwyn Jenkins] would argue it's the only approach because the plan we did have, the previous strategy of Type 83 destroyers, which were going to be expensive and they wouldn't arrive until the end of the 2030s and so on, weren't coming quick enough."

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The only approach?

Cdre Prest said of the now-abandoned plan to build the Type 83 warships: "We wouldn't have had the people to crew them. And in any case, we didn't have the money to do the work necessary.

"So in the absence of being able to deliver that plan, he's had to look for something else.

"And this is something else – and the best version of something else in his mind that he could come up with."

A huge risk nonetheless

"But yes, it's hugely risky," he added. "A lot of the components of this capability, a lot of the technologies necessary, exist in and of themselves.

"But they haven't been put together in this way previously and they haven't been demonstrated unequivocally to be able to deliver this overall capability in anything like the sort of scale or the manner that Navy is now seeking."

Determination to make it work

Cdre Prest said there were people he had spoken to inside the Royal Navy and the MOD who don't believe the plan would work in the way envisaged.

"Now I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but I think it's going to be harder and more challenging in some aspects than the Navy's leadership are currently admitting – at least publicly," he said.

"That's not to say it can't work and it's not to say it won't work – and believe you me they're determined that it will work."