To ship ships to the sounds of gunfire… you will need to first have ships: LORD WEST
When I was First Sea Lord 20 years ago, I tended to send warships towards the sound of the guns. But to do that, you must have the ships to deploy in the first place. So shrunken is the Royal Navy today that even when we hear the sound of guns, we seem unable to respond.
Two months ago, I raised concerns about the lack of British naval forces in just such an area where tensions were mounting – Iran and the Gulf.
For good reason, we have long held a symbolic military presence east of Suez, a presence which has variously been engaged in counter-piracy operations off the Horn of Africa, intercepting multi-million-pound narcotics supply chains, protecting commercial shipping, and evacuating civilians from war-torn Sudan.
But after it emerged that our last remaining warship in the region, HMS Lancaster, was being retired, I asked in January whether there was any intention to beef up our forces there. My question fell on deaf ears.
Until recently, our east-of-Suez base in Bahrain hosted minesweepers and a supply ship as well as HMS Lancaster.
Disgracefully, our last ageing mine-hunter has now left the region and we do not even have the means to replace the warship. It means that on the eve of this current missile and drone war, we withdrew from a strategic presence that was both a reassurance to the Gulf states and a reminder of the continued importance of the United Kingdom. That we are in this position is nothing short of a dereliction of duty which has led to a diminution of the UK’s status in the region.
HMS Lancaster, a Type 23 frigate, spent three years in the Middle East and, in that time, seized £150million of narcotics and was the first ship on task in the Red Sea during heightened threats from Houthi attacks in December 2023.
Designed to track hostile submarines, she was also fitted with anti-aircraft capabilities, including the Sea Ceptor missile system. I do not overstate how useful she would be in a missile war. It would have been farbetter if HMS Lancaster had not been stood down. But to make matters worse, we are now scrambling to get just one destroyer, HMS Dragon, to the Mediterranean to protect our sovereign bases in Cyprus from Iranian drone attacks.
The UK’s last remaining warship in the Gulf, the HMS Lancaster (pictured in the Strait of Hormuz in May 2023) is now being retired
HMS Dragon pictured in Portsmouth harbour ahead of being deployed to Cyprus
HMS Dragon is one of six Type 45 destroyers in our fleet and, at any time, only one should be in deep maintenance allowing the other five to be deployed. But the necessary maintenance has not been done, so other vessels are not ready.
For 14 years, I have been urging the MoD to order new ships and build them quickly. That didn’t happen, and frigates under construction won’t be ready until 2027. Of course, many of these problems began with the Coalition government in 2010, which cut our military in general by a third.
Until recently, the cuts kept on coming. The Labour Government has now vowed to reverse these historic mistakes and invest more in our vital defences.
But these plans must be implemented now – not postponed till a future date. I fear Whitehall has forgotten that the UK’s sway in international affairs was linked to our powerful military, and the Navy in particular.
We were at the top table in the Balkan wars and Sierra Leone, and were the second biggest military contributor in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the historic Falklands campaign, we deployed a carrier battle group in days because we had them ready to go. But as I say, to send ships to the sound of gunfire, first you must have the ships.
