Type 45 Destroyers will not see service life extended

The Royal Navy will not extend the lives of its six Type 45 air-defence destroyers, which are due to begin retiring from 2035, as the service shifts towards a hybrid fleet of crewed and uncrewed vessels under the Defence Investment Plan, Ministry of Defence officials said.

Officials told a briefing on the plan, published on Tuesday and launched by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Defence Secretary at a British drone manufacturer, that the department had decided against prolonging the Type 45s and would instead use the roughly ten years before the class leaves service to stand up the hybrid navy intended to take over the air-defence role, with an additional £1.3 billion going into that effort on top of the more than £7 billion already committed to the Type 26 and Type 31 frigate programmes.

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis, opening the launch, said the plan put “more money for hybrid Royal Navy,” and one official, describing the change as “a genuinely do different moment” for the fleet, said the department wanted to see the first hybrid vessels appear before the end of the decade rather than waiting until the destroyers had gone.

At the centre of the plan are at least six Common Combat Vessels, the hybrid warships trailed over the weekend that are to act as the hub of a networked air-defence system, supported by a family of uncrewed platforms designated Type 91 to 94 covering tasks that run from carrying missiles to hunting submarines and scanning for air threats, with the Common Combat Vessel taking the place of the planned Type 83 destroyer that has now been dropped. Sir Keir Starmer set out what that would mean in practice when he launched the plan, describing frigates moving to intercept a Russian ship in British waters accompanied by “outriders, uncrewed ships above and below the surface,” their artificial intelligence working in unison with the warships so that the whole group operated as a single integrated force.

The decision not to extend the Type 45s rests on a combination of their age and the cost of holding a small number of complex ships in service, weighed against a judgment that a fleet mixing crewed and uncrewed vessels is better suited to the pace of modern warfare, and although the six destroyers and their Sea Viper missile system have furnished the fleet’s high-end air defence for more than a decade, they have been dogged by propulsion problems and the class has at times struggled to keep enough hulls available for sea.

The obvious risk in the approach is one of timing, because the hybrid vessels meant to succeed them remain at an early stage, with the design and procurement work for the Common Combat Vessel only now beginning, which leaves a full decade across which the transition has to be managed if the Navy is to avoid any gap in its air-defence cover.