The decision to retire HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, the Royal Navy’s Albion-class amphibious assault ships, has raised questions about the future of Britain’s amphibious warfare capability.
Maria Eagle MP, Minister of State for Defence, has sought to reassure that the decision “will not impact the operational programme of the Royal Marines, who continue to deploy globally.”
She said that both ships are currently held at lower readiness and have not been operational for some time:
“Both are currently held at lower readiness having not been to sea since 2023 and 2017 respectively. On current planning, neither was due to go to sea again before their planned out-of-service dates of 2033 and 2034.”
This article is the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the UK Defence Journal. If you would like to submit your own article on this topic or any other, please see our submission guidelines.
Eagle highlighted the continued role of other assets in maintaining amphibious capability.
“The Royal Marines are supported by the three Bay Class Landing Ship Dock (Auxiliary)s and RFA Argus, which also provides aviation support and acts as a hospital ship. These ships will continue to support amphibious capability until they are succeeded by planned Multi-Role Support Ships,” she explained.
HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark have long played pivotal roles in supporting the Royal Marines and delivering the UK’s amphibious capabilities. However, their withdrawal from service represents a strategic shift designed to focus resources on modernising and enhancing the Royal Navy’s overall capability.
From my perspective as a defence journalist, this decision reflects the difficult but necessary process of prioritising future readiness and operational efficiency over retaining older platforms. The effort to phase out ageing and manpower-intensive ships has been years in the making, often hindered by political complexities, but ultimately, it clears the way to concentrate on emerging technologies and newer vessels better suited to contemporary and future threats.
While this transition presents challenges, it also frees up critical personnel and resources, enabling the Navy to direct its efforts toward delivering cutting-edge capabilities and ensuring the force remains relevant in an evolving global landscape. It’s a balancing act, but one that positions the Navy to meet its strategic goals with a fleet ready for the demands of the future.
The planned Multi-Role Support Ships are intended to fill this capability gap, but their timely delivery and operational effectiveness will be critical. Without dedicated assault ships, the Royal Navy risks stretching its resources thin, relying heavily on auxiliary vessels to meet both peacetime and crisis requirements.
Maria Eagle’s reassurances may offer some comfort, but the question remains: can the Multi-Role Support Ships fully replicate the amphibious capability that Albion and Bulwark were designed to provide? For Britain to remain a leading global maritime power, maintaining a robust amphibious capability will be essential.
At the UK Defence Journal, we aim to deliver accurate and timely news on defence matters. We rely on the support of readers like you to maintain our independence and high-quality journalism. Please consider making a one-off donation to help us continue our work. Click here to donate. Thank you for your support!
Albion was in reserve and Bulwark coming to the end of what appears to have been a pro-longed, delayed(deliberately??) Refit. Bulwark was due back to sea, do her stint and Albion would go into refit…….but clearly someone made a decision sometime ago to get rid of these ships and there is a very bad smell arising from this mess
I think a lack of a crew to man Bulwark played a big part in the decision making. As they need to start planning crew training for the first T26.
Agree with this. A really weasily way to cancel and scrap a very useful capability. Only recently some review or other had looked at these and decided that we needed to keep the capability. From than handful of pocket change needed to run them it seems insane that they took them out of use with a plan to never actually put back into use.
And could they affordably be repurposed into mother ships for MCM, drones or reworked as some arsenal or AAW platforms, patrol frigates? They have Artisan so surely CAMM, NSM and a larger forward cannon ould be added? The Israelis were showing a sea version of Iron Dome on the back of an Arafura 80m OPV here so not even talking mk41s. Probably all too expensive and a couple of T31s would be better value. On the positive side, their four Phalanx’s will be useful for other ships.
I agree, I suspect the navy brass decided these needed to be gone so they could crew two carriers simultaneously, but the previous government would simply not accept the optics and pretended they were still going to be business as usual.
I’m not seeing any real need to carry out amphibious ops right now. That said i’d rather have the capability than not have it. But, a positive would be if the money saved was used to plug some of those glaring holes we have in our defences which are being exposed by the Ukraine war. Only time will tell on the wisdom of this decision, I can only hope it’s been made as part of a cohesive plan.
Just imagine if we had 15 billion to spend that was gifted for a proxy war.
Just imagine the years to prepare and massive reduction in enemy capability that measly £15M bought us at the expense of the blood of others.
Bloods cheap
On the contrary, it can be one of the most expensive parts.of war, especially for an under-manned military such as ours.
If we ever did go to war with Russia that war is likely to cost us 30% GDP for however long it goes on for and however many thousands of service personnel. That’s the cost of a peer war…15 billion to help prevent that from occurring is peanuts money.
I am making no claims of expertise – merely that it is often the case, with government certainly, but also other large organisations, that if you want to remove some kind of service that you have your eye on as something to save money / resource / whatever, then it is run down, so that the powers that be can say “well, it wasn’t being used anyway, so there is no real loss”. While there may be major changes to the way that the Royal Marines undertake their business, it’s still the case that they need to be moved across the sea to do it. Saying “oh, we have MRSS coming” is to place an inordinate amount of faith in a UK government apparatus whose word when it comes to defence procurement I think should be taken with a pretty hefty pinch of salt.
In two world wars this country twice came far to close by starving , two saviours came to the fore, the farmers and the Royal Navy . Yet a country surrounded by sea we cut back, now our beloved P.M attacks the farmers, face it Labour are anti military
To be very fair, the new inheritance tax on farmers will not cut back on food production, infact if you’re being completely brutal it will probably over time increase it. Because the land that is sold as the family farms go out of business will be purchased by the big corporate farms that are far more profitable and efficient yield per hectare wise, because they have scale and that’s all the focus on. So the total food production argument is a bust and is best not used as anyone can cut straight through that argument. What it does do is:
1) put the final nail in the coffin of the culture of small family farm ownership and leave us with a model of large corporate farms who employ farms to farm the land ( AKA wage slaves) and large land owners with tenet farmers ( AKA serfs). So it reduced social mobility, puts more wealth in the pockets of the few and big corporations.
2) The only people really interested in land stewardship are small family farmers, who are generationally tied to the land and do a lot to keep our environment and organisations like the national trust..the large corporations are only interested in industrial farming and put nothing back and the large land owners have tenant farmers who have no real tie or motivation and also have to pay the landlord rent so cannot divert resources to stewardardship and it’s not their land.
3) food quality, smaller family farms tend to focus on good quantity but slightly more expensive food, the corporates mass produce trash food, that’s not as good for our health.
In reality what this Labour decision has done has supported the large businesses over the individual, it’s classic neoliberal politics and the only reason the tories did not do it is because farmers vote for them…every government since 1960 have supported that destruction of the the family farm with the number of same farms going from 160,000 to 30,000 since 1960…infact the entire population supported this move it’s called Tesco and Asda.
It’s not neoliberal politics (the state is better at since things, private enterprise is better at others, and each should do the things they are good at).
It’s fascism. (The state uses it’s power to direct outcomes, behind the guise of supposedly private ownership).
No it’s not fascism that’s a profoundly incorrect statement,
The core character of fascism
1) The supremacy of the nation over the individual
2) emphasis of extreme nationalism
3) extreme militarism
4) cult of the personality
5) popular mobilisation
If you have those five things in play together you can just maybe consider you have a fascist.
Hitting family farms with inheritance tax is not fascism.
I am trying to come up with a scenario we could face where the possession of two (formerly three) large amphibious ships would be critical to our national survival or even to providing essential support to treaty partners. I can’t and I can think of many areas where we are nearly or totally lacking, including point and area air and missile defence, mobile armoured anti tank missile launchers, anti tank mines, fpv and bomb dropping drones, a Lancet equivalent etc. Our anti submarine frigates won’t be getting any ASW weapons and as I understand it the Type 31s won’t even have sonar.
If these vessels are obsolete and extremely vulnerable to modern weapons such as hypersonic missiles and drones and I tend to agree if not refitted with additional weapons and enhanced protection. Then how do we for example expect to reinforce the Baltic states with British Army equipment using the Point or Bay class, which are both merchant ship designed vessels. Surely using a fixed port installation to offload armour would be tantamount to suicide in a real war fighting scenario and not a NATO exercise.
I would argue dedicated amphibious shipping is the only way an Island nation such as the U.K. can put its forces ashore wherever it pleases and without the risk of using little more than Channel Ferries.
Unfortunately scrapping equipment prematurely and creating a capability gap to pay for the partial filling of another has now reached a farcical scale, which I think most people on here have come to recognise as total folly.
I am afraid it is all about manpower and money, which I believe is around £9m a year. We are currently spending £15m a week on hotels.
And, at the same time, I believe Australia have just planned an expansion of their amphibious capability, and aligned 3 such groups to their army.
What a concept! Pity we as an Island are so sea blind.
I read that and very much a concept that we should adopt with the RM and army working much closer together to provide NATO a really unique and mobile capability. I am sure some our politicians don’t actually realise armies still largely move en masse by sea and not via air.
She goes on about “Capability” but conveniently omits:
1 LCU vs 4.
No LCVP vs 4.
No C3 vs C3 facilities.
No BARV vs BARV.
The two types, LPD(A) vs the LPDs are not comparable in any way. One of them is also tied up in the Gulf supporting the MCMVs, so that is another minor detail the honorable minister chose to ignore.
This is, at best yet another capability gap, and at worst yet another massacre of kit for the sake of saving 500 million over 5 years.
She might point to that going on new capabilities, so would 12.5 BILLION going on GCAP development over just 5 years more.
So Chicken feed defence wise.
In reality the bays were build and purchased as logistic ships, nothing more nothing less, that’s why they were crewed by the RFA.
The RN and governments have pushed more and more on the RFA, but the simple fact of the matter is their entire role should be moving stuff..logistics. Because there is one fundamental difference between the RN and RFA even if the ships they have may look the same ( say they both had the same LPD, if they commissioned 6 MRSS and make 2 of them RN crewed) an RN vessel is a commissioned warship, an RFA is an auxiliary. This is hugely important in international law as only a commissioned warship is able to undertake belligerent action auxiliary’s are only legally allowed to defend themselves from belligerent action of another state….consider that for a second when we have an amphibious force made of auxiliary amphibious vessels that are not in law allowed to undertake belligerent actions only defend from attack.
Personally I think the RN decided a while ago it was moving away from amphibious warfare because it wanted to play with its two carriers and basically handed the RFA bag of snakes to manage. Consider the who MRSS programme..six vessels to replace 4 RFA and 2 RN, in no world was the RN ever planning to all of crew them and it would make no sense to have 4 crewed by the RFA and 2 by the RN. That’s why bulwark has been sitting there for over a year doing nothing.It’s also very interesting the political statement that “ there was no plan to bring them out of readiness until they were scrapped” that is all on the RN..I suspect no government wanted to give out the actual new but the one that won the election was forced to do it.
Personally I think the RN should be running to crew one carrier at all times and one Albion….but clearly they want to keep both carriers available as much as they can..this is again I suspect a political move by the RN so it’s more difficult for a government to scrap an active carrier..but I think they have made a mistake.
Totally agree with you.
No
I understand retiring older obsolete equipment but these two ships have ten years of their expected life left , cost millions to build and cant be replaced overnight should the need arise .
Only an idiot would think loosing the LPDs, especially after the loss of the LPH HMS Ocean, without replacements in commission (or near too) is a good decision for UK defence.
Especially in the current threat environmnet.
The minister is talking BS.
As a former Royal Marine, I see this as the beginning of the end for our amphibious assault capability. For decades we have been able to move around the world’s seas and be positioned in readiness should we be required.
There are multiple and notable examples of where an when we have been able to exert that elite capability, hand in hand with the commando training that makes us more than just foot soldiers.
Yet we continue to cling on to the ones that wear furry hats and spend most of their time polishing their boots and brasses.
Disgust doesn’t even come close.
Can’t remember the last time the Corps did an amphibious landing. Probably in or around my leaving. Clearly you and I know that is just not possible now. I feel the expertise in the basics like Serial Assuult Schedules, flight deck and well deck chess are gone. Two LPDs and an eight spot LPH is your starting point and anybody that Can’t understand that Clearly has no comprehension of the concept. In my time you normally did a brigade landing on Clockwork. A unit would carry out one in May on Sardina that was Dragon Hammer. Very often there was another landing in the Autumn usually Denmark or Norway. We knew how to do it. Another capability lost.
On a personal note I think Radakin has questions to answer on this.
Radakin is a career civil servant (“safe pair od hands”) and like all of his ilk, he will do or say nothing that will threaten his pension. Radakin has done little on his watch to stop Britain’s armed forces decending into the shambles they are today and when he finally goes, good riddance.
Unfortunately I fear, Radakin and others within the Navy are obsessed with the carriers and that we have had two in commission despite only planning to have one at anytime underscores this. Add to that we will want to be seen to be good Europeans so we will focus our efforts on our 140 CH3s and the army despite it being virtually irrelevant in the mainland European theatre of operations because of its size.
If we are talking about our defence then a fully functioning ABM capability is required and a strong navy and airforce. If money is tight then the army must shrink still further to facilitate this and I would have focused on our reinforcement of the Baltic and Scandinavian states only with an enhanced amphibious capability with the RM leading and supporting the army in this role.
Instead we are seeing the continuing reduction of our fixed and rotary wing air lift capability along with our amphibious forces. These forces coupled with our RFA flotilla and our Navy was what we offered most to NATO. They also happened to give us the flexibility to reach way beyond the NATO area more than other nation bar the US.
The choices being made are political and not based on wholly U.K. defence requirements. They have forgotten we are an island.
Why don’t we just sell them off to China to become floating casinos? Or maybe just give them to Argentina for a song. £3 million each so they can invade the Falklands properly next time.
I just despair with our politicians and spending of public funds when whole military capabilities are willfully abandoned as deemed “unnecessary” whilst our enemies are doing all within their power to add military mass and capabilities. It’s shocking really, bordering on treasonous
Hold onto these 2 vessels in reserve!
For the price of 4 x storm shadows we gave to Ukraine
per year these vessels can be kept in extended readiness.
As the old wise man says :
☆☆Its better looking at them rather than looking for them☆☆
Have we not learned any lessons from the past!!
I dispair
Retiring a specialist ship because she had not been to sea since 2023 is not a good justification. Its not as if 2023 was a very long time ago
How can the RM be totally unaffected by losing their 2 amphibious assault ships? Only if you never intend or require for Britains ‘sea soldiers’ to ever do another amphibious assault.