The Royal Navy’s small force of attack submarines has ended up back alongside all at once, with none of the boats currently out at sea, the UK Defence Journal understands.
The exact whereabouts of individual boats is something the Ministry of Defence will never spell out, but the broad picture has not been hard to read for a while now, because availability across the five-strong Astute-class fleet stayed badly depressed throughout 2025, a year in which the boats are reckoned to have managed only around 300 days at sea between them, and earlier in 2026 it was being reported that just one of them was genuinely fully operational at all.
That one boat was HMS Anson, the most active of the bunch, and the navy’s decision to send her halfway round the world only sharpened the squeeze at home, because she spent the early part of the year in Australia, at HMAS Stirling, becoming the first British nuclear submarine ever to be maintained on Australian soil as part of the AUKUS arrangement meant to help Canberra stand up the workforce for its own future boats, and now that she has finally made it home her return really just parks another hull alongside rather than putting one back out on patrol.
The crisis behind Britain’s record-breaking submarine patrols
These are not boats the country can comfortably do without, because the Astutes are the navy’s hunter-killers, carrying Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and Spearfish heavyweight torpedoes, gathering intelligence, shielding the carrier strike group and, more than anything else, screening the ballistic-missile submarines on which the whole nuclear deterrent rests, so when the entire lot is tied up in harbour the country loses the ability to slip that firepower or that covert surveillance quietly to sea at short notice, and that is hardly an academic worry given how much more active Russian submarines have grown right across the waters around Europe. The strain is being admitted at the very top too, with the First Sea Lord having warned back in December that the long-standing advantage allied navies once took for granted beneath the Atlantic is now “at risk” and the margin over Russia, as he put it, has turned uncomfortably narrow.
The Ministry of Defence, for its part, would not be drawn on any of the specifics, saying only that it does not routinely comment on individual submarine operations and availability, while insisting all the same that British waters are always protected by a range of assets including warships, patrol aircraft and submarines, and ministers have been similarly tight-lipped in Parliament, with the defence minister Lord Coaker declining to give any figures on how many boats are actually operational at any one time even as he pointed to the navy’s submarine recovery plan as the answer to the docking and maintenance bottlenecks that have been throttling availability.
As for why the boats keep stacking up in port, the answer has far less to do with anything going wrong on patrol than with the sheer difficulty and cost of keeping the fleet maintained, something the House of Commons Library has flagged for years alongside persistent manpower and skills shortages in the submarine service, and at the root of it sits a chronic shortage of the specialist dock space these nuclear boats need, with deep maintenance and refitting able to happen only at Devonport, the sole site in the country equipped to do that work on nuclear-powered submarines to the extent required, and with the unrelenting demands of keeping a deterrent submarine on patrol every single day swallowing much of the capacity that does exist.
The response has come in the shape of a new framework that the navy formally launched on 14 January, the Submarine Maintenance Recovery Plan, which the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, set up explicitly to pull together what had until then been a scattered set of separate maintenance initiatives and to run them under a single structure with clearer priorities and proper resources behind it. Jenkins, who was blunt that “submarine maintenance throughput needs to drastically improve”, travelled up to the Clyde on 20 January, days after the launch and alongside the Chief of Defence Nuclear, Madeline McTernan, to look over the earliest changes on the ground, the most visible of which has been the rapid bolting-together of extra engineering space at the base, a deployable workshop of around 90 square metres run out of containerised defence facilities and meant to come on line within weeks so that vital tasks can be pulled forward.
Even the small print tells the same story, with a modest contract worth just under £69,000 going to the Shropshire firm Beaverfit for a covered, secure workspace built from eight shipping containers and a canopy near a car park on the base, a stopgap while the bigger and slower infrastructure work gets sorted.
Beyond that immediate scramble the bigger fix is supposed to come from expanding the country’s chronically thin out-of-water maintenance capacity, and to that end the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that design work is progressing on Programme Euston, a plan to procure floating dry docks for the submarine fleet that ministers have called a critical enabler both for availability and for the continuous deterrent, with the National Shipbuilding Office consulted and the shipbuilding sector reckoned well placed to bid, although no date has yet been put on any contract.
Day-to-day support at Devonport, in the meantime, has had to be propped up by a six-month stopgap deal struck with Babcock after the previous five-year maintenance contract ran out at the end of March, with a longer-term agreement reported to be all but finalised.
Further out still the navy is pinning its hopes on new steel altogether, the Strategic Defence Review of 2025 having committed Britain to building as many as 12 next-generation attack submarines under the SSN-AUKUS programme with the Americans and the Australians, on top of the Dreadnought-class deterrent boats expected from the early 2030s, while the seven-boat Astute class is itself still being finished off, with the sixth boat, HMS Agamemnon, now commissioned but not yet fully worked up and the seventh and last of them still under construction.
None of that, though, does a thing for the here and now, and with Anson only just back from the Pacific, the rest of the fleet tied up for maintenance and the whole creaking enterprise being asked to do far more than it comfortably can, the question that actually matters is how fast the new recovery plan and all that promised dock space can get even two or three of the existing boats back out to sea at the same time.
Proverbial in a brewery springs to mind.
It’s worth point out that with a fleet of 5 boats normal expectation would be for just one and at a push two to be out of port at any time. The situation is bad but the media needs to stop painting everything as so catastrophic just to sell clicks.
Like yesterday with the Daily Mail and the Independent reporting PoW had “broken down again” despite the event having happened a week earlier and the repairs carried out pretty minor.
Bad journalism is a bigger threat to the UK than most CRINK nations.
The constant need to find anything wrong in the UK or with its forces then broadcasting it world wide does nothing but fuel our adversaries great zone operations.
There was an amazing recent piece on the success of SAS and Signals patrols in Ukraine in 2021 covered by several American news channels recently. Due to the work of UKSF and GCHQ the UK was able to predict the Russian invasion and send thousands of anti tank weapons to Ukraine. The US has had to commend the work done and copy much of what the SAS has learned. So it was the UK that was instrumental in thwarting the Russian invasion, not the USa or anyone else by the UK.
Not a single thing covered by UKDJ or any British media outlet as far as I have seen.
Well said.
As always, a military let down by decades of under investment.
Some will disgree, but I’d like to see the Ministers responsible and the Sea Lords who put their career over their service and put up with it for years lined up on TV before HOSCDSC for a grilling.
It’ll never happen, but public shaming is needed, there is no deterent and no learning otherwise.
No issue at all with recriminations, for me a shock to the system is needed.
I agree, unfortunately most of those actually responsible for the current mess and being paid by the Daily Telegraph or Times Radio to come out and tell everyone how it’s the current governments fault and that in their day everything was sunshine and roses.
These people are traitors to the nation, bought and paid for by foreign owned media to sell a narrative or how bad the UK is any everything.
Unfortunately UKDJ is falling in to much the same trap, rarely an article on good things being accomplished by UK forces nowadays, the majority of the content is aimed at the same click bate media. I suppose good news does not sell unfortunately.
Afternoon Jim.
I just emailed George to ask If he could spare some Editing space so that you can post all the many positive articals.
I’ll let you know what he says. 😁👍
😂
I can think of several other parties more fitting to be labelled “traitors” than the ones trying to shame the public into taking action.
No, I’m going to reject this, and I’d ask you to actually look at what we publish before making the charge, because there’s no difference in revenue for us between reporting a good thing and a bad thing. Our job is to report the thing. When it’s good we say so, when it’s bad we say so, and that’s not a trap we’ve fallen into, it’s the whole point of the publication. We’re bound by the IPSO Editors’ Code to report what we can verify either way.
The obvious place to start is Ukraine, because we broke the story of British weapons going to Ukraine before it was a story anywhere else, reporting in real time as RAF transport aircraft were ferrying anti-armour weapons in. A good few of those were stories only we were really covering at the time, not something we lifted from someone else, including the surveillance effort behind it, which we’d been tracking for months, making the point again and again that people only know this stuff happens because we bother to report it. We’ve also covered the whole long history of British training that made the difference, from Operation Orbital through to the multinational programme that replaced it, which between them have put tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops through their paces.
And the positive coverage runs well beyond Ukraine, right into the territory the complaint says we ignore. We covered HMS Diamond’s finest hour, downing Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea as part of a coalition effort that knocked down a serious salvo in a single engagement. We covered the RAF holding NATO’s eastern flank, scrambling again and again over a single week to intercept Russian aircraft and seeing off a Russian jet buzzing an American warship. We covered the long RAF campaign against Daesh, Operation Southern Sovereignty with its joint Navy, Army and RAF mission across the South Atlantic, and the genuinely impressive fact of a whole array of frigates being built at once, including the day steel was cut on one ship and another rolled out of her build hall the same evening.
We’ve hammered the capability story too, from DragonFire downing fast-moving drones and heading to sea years ahead of schedule as the first high-power laser fielded by any European nation, to the Royal Navy’s biggest ever uncrewed underwater vessel entering service, to record-breaking defence exports and the double carrier strike group working with the Americans in the Pacific. And to be honest, some of these we got a bit wonky, like the Operation Shader piece that wrongly suggested RAF strikes were ending when the position was actually still up in the air, which we corrected openly and on the record, because getting something slightly wrong and then fixing it in plain sight is part of doing this properly, not evidence of some agenda.
On the claim that the majority of our content is negative, the front page just kills it. Over the last week or so we covered Britain ordering more air defence missiles and the jobs that supports, the latest phase of the Ukraine training mission, the carrier carrying on with its deployment after sorting a minor issue alongside, a Royal Navy mine disposal support deal, a long-term machine gun supply contract, a Ukraine innovation roundtable in Parliament, a shipyard upgrade and autonomous vessels being named the future of the Gulf presence. Against that you’ve got a smaller handful of critical pieces, the spending watchdog warning of drift, the committee criticism of the Defence Plan delay, the scrutiny of nuclear spending, the row over how you even define a UK firm, and a peer’s remarks on Gulf basing. That leaves the positive and neutral stuff comfortably outnumbering the critical pieces in the same window, so while those critical ones are real accountability journalism and absolutely belong on the page, they’re plainly the minority, not the majority. The balance just doesn’t back up the charge imho.
The bit really worth dwelling on here, and I’ve been thinking how to explain this, is that your complaint assumes if a good-news story exists somewhere, our not running it proves bias, and that’s journalism backwards. We don’t run a story just because someone else did, and we don’t bury one because nobody else has. The fact that a piece exists elsewhere isn’t a reason to run it here. We publish when we can stand a story up, when it’s accurate, when it’s ours to tell and when it’s up to standard. Chasing someone else’s copy just to balance the books isn’t impartiality as it is the exact clickbait behaviour the complaint claims to hate. The thing gets covered because it’s true and it holds up, not because somebody else happened to get there first.
Inter service punch ups and “we want” doesn’t help either.
No, I think the French routinely manage to operate two at sea regularly, and their force is of a similar size to our own. 1/5 is not the normal operating procedure.
The transplanting of the vague SSBN doctrine that ‘four guarantees one’ to other areas of the fleet is not a good way of checking availability.
Where did you read this Jim?
Chickens are coming home to roost. Its admirable steps are now being taken , but it begs the questions as to why this prioritisation wasn’t actioned earlier.
Why doesn’t the UK consider a small conventional sub force to complement the Astutes/SSNRs abd work with the drones? Base up in Edinburgh/Leth area? Interoperability with Norway & Germany and if the Canadians go for the 212CDs surely they’ll be good enough for the UK. Isn’t something needed in the middle between drones and the nuclear subs?
Should be possible by 2060 ish.
Now, come on. Don’t start getting sensible. Healey will have a breakdown. 😊
There are a couple of reasons.
1) The UK needs to sustain a nuclear production drumbeat in order to prevent the atrophy of skills. If production remains at just 11 boats total (within each cycle), work will dry up, and atrophy will begin. Now, you can balance this by slowing down the build rate (as has been done with the Astute-class), but this introduces new problems, mostly revolving around the cost of the platforms and the penalty against readiness.
Building the same class of boats over three decades also stymies your ability to iterate effectively, and introduce new advancements to the design in order to maintain parity with foreign competition, or to adapt to changing requirements. The American Virginia-class submarines now expect dome six different sub-classes to be in operation, almost as many classes as the UK operates individual attack submarines.
All that is to say that an efficient nuclear submarine industrial base needs a strong flow of orders to function consistently.
Now, the French get around this by supplementing their limited submarine production with additional naval nuclear work through their carriers, and through export orders for de-nuclearised conventional attack boat designs. Unfortunately, the UK doesn’t have any nuclear surface ships, nor does it has an established conventional submarine export niche. Given so much of British submarine technology is intertwined with the American industrial base, I think the UK would find it difficult to export what ought to be their biggest selling point over the French – ‘British SSN technology, in a non-nuclear boat’.
So, the resulting consequence is that the UK needs a strong drumbeat of orders. 12 attack submarines, assuming a decade to build the first starting from 2029 and that the ‘one submarine every 18 months’ goal is achieved immediately, then 12 boats would sustain Barrow through till 2055, which would then require an immediate pivot to production of the four replacement SSBNs for Dreadnought in the late 2060s (at which point the first SSN-AUKUS would be coming to the end of its life). In reality, the timeline will be more forgiving in the long run.
Now, diluting those 12 attack submarines with a small force of diesel-electrics will throw off the nuclear industrial balance that the 12 boats could achieve.
2) Conventional boats don’t really bring the UK any major capability uplift. Their major advantage to the UK is their cheaper price, meaning they could be used to bulk out the submarine fleet. Now, even assuming an uplift in defence spending, there is simply not enough money to fund an uplift in submarine capability beyond 16 boats. This means that the UK would be losing out on some of those planned 12 SSNs, to receive cheaper but less capable SSKs.
So, unless the decision is taken to reduce the planned 12-SSN order, committing to a small SSK force is just a drain upon the submarine service.
3) This one is pretty short. They need a new training, maintenance, production, and operational scheme that has been left unused and unsustained since the 90s.
4) This is the most often mentioned argument against additional SSKs for the SSN fleet, but personally, I think it’s the weakest. Politicians, having seen the RN operating a mixed fleet, and balking at the fiscal burden of the SSNs, would be tempted to lose the latter, to invest in the former, thus relegating the UK from a major to a middle power and slashing our global operational capability.
Now, I think this ignores historical precedent – the UK operated a mixed fleet throughout the Cold War – and ignores that our nuclear submarine infrastructure is directly tied to our nuclear infrastructure, no matter how much the RAF likes to pretend otherwise. Lose the nuclear submarine fleet, and you lose the nukes.
But on the whole, those are the most commonly cited reasons.
Cutting spares is the favourite ‘in year cost saving’ – and eventually, you have no spares
Hmmm.
1. Possible answers are –
2. Having a well earned rest.
3. Re-stocking Snorkers and Beans.
4. Annual service, filter and oil change.
5. De-coking the boilers.
6. So as not to offend the Snowflakes.
7. Due to the rising price of Diesel.
8. Trapped In the Doldrums, not enough wind.
9. Waiting for the Press Gangs to bring fresh crew.
10. They are all fucked and successive Governments have failed to bother fixing the many Issues.
There.