In response to Iran’s seizure of the UK flagged merchant vessel Stena Bulk, the Royal Navy deployed a destroyer, HMS Duncan, to the Arabian Gulf to protect UK-flagged ships against further boarding by the Iranian military. The world breathed a sigh of relief, but should it?
The Royal Navy was for centuries the envy of the world. In the early 1800s Admiral Lord Nelson (his statue overlooks London’s Trafalgar Square) decimated a French and Spanish fleet, making Napoleon’s defeat inevitable. Nelson achieved his victory by using asymmetric tactics in a symmetrical war. Unlike his contemporaries, Nelson did not choose to slug it out broadside to broadside. Rather he would “break the line” by sailing directly between his enemy’s fleet, and in doing so he brought to bear the full might of his own ship’s firepower, while denying his enemy the same capability.
For the next 150 years the Royal Navy used its size and ability to defeat adversaries in symmetrical battle by outnumbering or outgunning the opposition. At the time of the second world war, only the US Navy was larger.
By the 1980s the Royal Navy had shrunk considerably, but it fought and won what was in all likelihood the last war ever to be fought by the British when it is not part of a multi-national coalition. A significant factor in the Falklands campaign was the UK’s use of its submarines that forced an asymmetric conflict by denying Argentina’s ability to put its navy to sea for fear of being torpedoed.
However, even with a fleet of 70 warships, including four aircraft carriers, it had been a very close call. Had the Argentinians waited another year to invade, the UK’s carriers would have already been sold off and the result would have been different.
Fast forward to the current threats of Iranian piracy against British merchant ships: The Royal Navy is a shadow of what it once was.
Devastating defence cuts of successive UK governments have reduced it to an alarming state, further exacerbated by naval planners who persist in building and equipping to fight symmetrical adversaries, though none of similar size or shape exist.
Iran takes the view that large ocean-going warships represent a priority sinking opportunity for its adversaries. It therefore utilizes a low-tech fleet of nearly 400 “green water” vessels as fast, missile and gun-boats.
Operating in swarms of craft, the Iranians seek to harass, confuse and out-maneuver the likes of singular British guard-ships by forcing them to be in more than one place at a time. Their continued aggression has forced UK merchant vessels to adopt inconvenient and commercially costly convoy protocols.
Operating in swarms of multiple craft, the Iranians seek to harass, confuse and out-maneuver the likes of singular British guard-ships by forcing them to be in more than one place at a time.
Howard Leedham
The swarms of Iranian fast craft have had global repercussions in terms of conflict tension and price volatility in oil and financial markets.
Such pressures now reverberate into the UK’s Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBRA) and must surely pose some searching questions in terms of the Royal Navy’s fleet planning and cost effectiveness.
Today’s Royal Navy has just one aircraft carrier (with no aircraft), two seaworthy destroyers, seven operational frigates and ten submarines. It has just two high speed patrol vessels in the form of Scimitar class patrol boats with a top speed of 59 kilometers per hour. These vessels are seldom given a thought as the smallest commissioned vessels.
However, if such vessels were commissioned in numbers, they would arguably represent future doctrine against a marauding threat — from illegal immigration or smugglers in post-Brexit UK waters to Iranian gunboats in the Straits of Hormuz.
The introduction of autonomous and armed Pacific 950 rigid inflatable boats (RIBs), currently developed by British Aerospace, brings an additional and inevitable modern dynamic for planners to consider. Working with each other, the combination of manned and autonomous vessels will utilize high speed response capability to confuse and deter the attacks of any “green water” adversary.
This utilization may not reflect the might of the Royal Navy’s past, but it does point to a clear, rapid and economical way to contain threats that can cause havoc by not adhering to traditional fleet composition.
Were the Iranians faced with this competing and technically superior adversary, the asymmetries of Iranian tactics become irrelevant. Such style of containment would cost a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars it costs to build and deploy just two complex warships.
To quote Sun Tzu: “He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.”
Because of its heritage, the Royal Navy sees warfare in terms of defeating superior forces and man-for-man, ship-for-ship it will likely achieve just that. However, such symmetric adversaries have become rare and now, in facing low-tech fleets of hundreds of vessels, the Royal Navy must surely be considering a fleet structure that would break the line of Iran’s asymmetric forces, much like Nelson did before them.
Other naval forces in the Gulf might also study this as a serious policy option.
• Howard Leedham MBE is a former Royal Navy Commander and British Special Forces Officer. Twitter: @howardleedham
