DR Mark Felton, a respected military historian, last week published a devastating video exposé of the Royal Navy’s doom loop at the hands of successive governments.
The ‘sell-off’ of the Navy and its suicidal crippling by ‘all must win prizes’ regardless of merit and ability. The DEI mandates appear nothing less than deliberate. It is frankly a frightening and disturbing watch, an unemotional and factual account of the non-stop assault on one of the country’s once greatest assets. One is left feeling that the generation of uni-party politicians who drove this are either treasonous — they knew what they were doing when they set out to destroy our ancient maritime defence — or irresponsible to the point of mental deficiency. Dr Felton asks whether the doom loop can be halted.
You can watch here. A summary of the programme’s transcript follows.
Dr Felton starts with an advert which caught his attention at the cinema. ‘It was shown not once, not twice, but three times in the space of about 20 minutes,’ he says. A Royal Navy recruiting ad. It was a DEI recruiting ad. While featuring a young non-white girl, of course, it also showed lots of glossy film of British warships and submarines congregated at sea, the chances of which happening today are almost nil. Behind the glossy ad is a terrible recruiting crisis which is crippling the Navy and forcing it into what experts are calling a death cycle, as he goes on to demonstrate.
He says he ‘can only assume the intention of successive British governments is to actually abolish the Royal Navy, for it can only be a deliberate policy that has created the terrible state of affairs we find today’.
He proceeds to list some of the major policy decisions taken by successive Labour and Conservative governments regarding the Royal Navy over the past 30 years, beginning with what he thinks is possibly the most serious: the frigate gap. Britain has not commissioned a single new frigate into service for almost a quarter of a century, while simultaneously getting rid of those which it possesses.
The Type 23 class of frigates originally numbered 16 vessels, which is still more than the two new classes of frigates supposed to replace them, meaning the Navy will still be smaller than it was 25 years ago.
The submarine fleet has suffered a catastrophic reduction from 22 vessels in 1997 to a truly pathetic nine today, of which few are dedicated only to carrying the ballistic missile nuclear deterrent and are not hunter-killer submarines.
The erosion of Britain’s amphibious warfare capability, he says, has been very serious and has basically disappeared.
He said: ‘If we were faced with another Falklands War type scenario, there is no way on earth the Navy could transport and put ashore that number of troops. Techniques that took 80 years to develop, now thrown away at the signing of a document. And the hilarious thing is our helicopter carrier and also one of our two assault ships have been sold to foreign navies, who can manage to find uses for them.’
More depressing statistics follow.
There are now more British frigates serving in foreign navies than in the Royal Navy.
Eight former Royal Navy frigates serve under foreign flags today, sold off cheaply by governments. Chile operates the former Type 22 frigate HMS Sheffield and three of the Type 23s — the former HMS Norfolk, Grafton and Marlborough.
Meanwhile ‘Romania has two Type 22s, the former HMS Coventry and London, and Brazil, which not only purchased our helicopter carrier HMS Ocean at a knockdown price, also has two Type 22 frigates in service — the former HMS Broadsword and Battleaxe’.
As a short-term solution, Dr Felton suggests, the government may like to explore the idea of buying back those three Type 23s which are still fully functional.
‘We now have the very interesting situation regarding one very important class of warships — the frigates, the workhorses of the fleet — of having more frigates awaiting scrapping than actually serving with the fleet,’ he observes.
His catalogue of attrition follows.
‘The Royal Navy officially has seven Type 23 frigates in service, which is an appallingly low number by itself — but it doesn’t really. It has just five. It was announced that HMS Iron Duke had been quietly withdrawn from service due to personnel shortages and mechanical problems. This was despite the taxpayer having funded a full refit of this vessel between 2019 and 2023 at a cost of a staggering £103million.
‘Iron Duke actually briefly went to sea in 2023, monitoring Russian warships passing through the English Channel, then deployed to the Baltic, managing 16 months of service post-refit before being withdrawn. A huge waste of British taxpayers’ money. She has now been stripped of her weapons and systems and will undoubtedly join her former sister ships, the ex-HMS Westminster, Argyll, Montrose and Northumberland, that are currently sitting in Fareham Creek in Portsmouth, awaiting disposal, likely by scrapping.
‘And what of the Type 23s’ replacements? Britain is currently building 13 new frigates in two classes. The first Type 26 class frigate, Glasgow, is currently fitting out at Scotstoun and will begin her sea trials later this year. She is due to enter service in 2027 — allegedly. Her sisters Cardiff, Belfast and Birmingham are also currently being built. However, of the eight vessels planned in the Type 26 class, rumours abound that the government is probably going to sell one of them, most probably Birmingham, to Norway.
‘The other class of smaller frigates, the Type 31s, are also progressing, with five vessels planned. Though I think it likely we will see a rerun of the Type 45 class destroyer debacle, where 12 vessels were ordered but the government of the day decided to save money by cutting the order by 50 per cent, leaving the Royal Navy with only six Type 45s — our only class of destroyer — completely inadequate, especially when you consider that today only one is actually operational, HMS Dragon, with the rest in refit. The good news, apparently, is HMS Duncan is about to re-enter service. So much for the Navy’s much-vaunted “rule of three”.’
He relays the rule that requires three ships per operational role: that is, one deployed, one in training, and one in deep maintenance.
‘This, the current Royal Navy struggles to fulfil due to chronically small numbers of vessels and too few crew to man them,’ he says.
‘All of this prompts the question: if the Navy is decommissioning frigates due primarily to insufficient crew, how can they manage to crew 13 new vessels when they can barely crew five today? I will be very surprised if the government doesn’t in fact sell off 50 per cent of the new vessels to foreign nations, and will probably also have to permanently dock one of our two aircraft carriers to redirect its manpower to somehow crew the new and existing ships.
‘That is why joining the Royal Navy today does not seem a particularly attractive option for young people. The figures suggest so. Since 2012, the Navy’s personnel has dropped by 16 per cent. Last year, it had a drop of 1.1 per cent alone. In the last 12 months, according to figures, 220 trained personnel left the Navy — the equivalent of the crew for two new Type 31 frigates. Recruitment for 2023 to 2024, the last full figures, was 40 per cent short of targets.’
Felton then describes the death spiral, saying: ‘The remaining sailors are seriously overworked and over-deployed, feeding the low morale and poor retention rates that bedevil the service.
‘According to the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy is currently about 1,000 trained personnel under strength. So the Senior Service has in fact entered a death spiral. Not enough sailors remain to properly crew vessels, so the Navy decommissions more and more warships without replacement, while of course it can’t hope to crew new warships, which are much needed to maintain both its fleet and Britain’s defences — which of course leads to more and more cuts, and round and round goes the spiral, ultimately making it an unattractive career prospect for young people, fuelling again the death spiral.’
He concludes by asking what can be done to stop the doom loop. The only real answer, he says, coming back to his starting point, is to make the Royal Navy an attractive career option again. But he says he is not so sure the doom loop can actually be arrested at this point because he sees no evidence that the government really wants to make the deep changes required to overhaul the entire service and make it functional again.
All parts of the armed services are facing a recruitment crisis. In the case of the British Army, the problem of British people not wanting to join has been offset by simply recruiting more Gurkhas and Fijians. The Brigade of Gurkhas has expanded so much that today 8 per cent of the entire British Army are Gurkhas, which is a good thing in my opinion, as they are some of the best soldiers in the world. Fijians also have a splendid warrior tradition and are very good infantry soldiers in a variety of units, and now number over 2 per cent of the army.
Dr Felton’s final words are a warning: ‘Mark my words, very few of those 13 new frigates will ever see service in the Royal Navy. Many of them will be cancelled before they’re even built or, if completed, sold to foreign nations to recoup costs. A doom loop is well named, for the Royal Navy looks increasingly doomed to operational impotence and irrelevance on the world stage. Something I never thought I would see.’
