News & Comment

There remains little evidence that the UK has a plan to fight a war lasting more than a few weeks," argues Rusi's Hamish Mundell. "Medical capacity is limited. Reserve regeneration pipelines are slow… The British plan for mass casualty outcomes appears to be based on not taking casualties." With classic British understatement, he says: "This could be considered an optimistic planning assumption." He adds that to fight a long war you need proper back-up. "It demands a second and even third echelon; personnel, platforms and logistics chains that can absorb losses and continue the fight. Yet this depth is notably absent from current British force design."

If you get it wrong the first time and you’re attempting to fix it, you’re in effect stuck with the problems that are kind of baked into each individual platform.”

This is the legacy of a decade’s worth of operating at a very high tempo, despite the fleet being quite old. The older a fleet gets, the more significant the impact on maintenance and readiness,” said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior researcher in sea power at the Royal United Services Institute. “It has really worn on the navy, particularly its older hulls.” ... A naval presence in the Middle East remains important to enforce freedom of the seas, maintain energy security and strengthen diplomatic ties, according to Kaushal. “Naval presence lends itself to missions other than war,” he said. “This is one of the areas the United States will pivot away from — the ability to backfill American capabilities in an area they can no longer allocate resources to represents a rather useful foreign policy offer.”