Britain left without single attack submarines at sea, again

The continuing difficulty in keeping Britain’s hunter-killer submarines available for operations has once more left the Royal Navy without a single attack boat at sea, according to open-source tracking of the fleet.

Readers who have followed the fortunes of the Royal Navy will be aware that for some time now its fleet of attack submarines has struggled to put boats to sea, and that difficulty has once again reached the point where none of the service’s available hunter-killers is currently on patrol, leaving Britain without the silent and arguably most potent of its conventional naval capabilities at a moment of heightened tension beneath the waves.

The situation is not without precedent, having been observed before within relatively recent memory, and although individual boats have moved in and out of availability in the period since, the broader pattern has stubbornly endured, with the greater part of the force spending considerably longer tied up alongside than it has ever spent operating at sea.

Across the in-service Astute-class boats the picture is a troubling one, with two of the submarines realistically inactive at Faslane on the Clyde after prolonged periods out of the water, and two others undergoing extended deep maintenance at Devonport, which remains the only naval base in the country capable of carrying out such work on nuclear-powered vessels. Only one boat of the entire force has returned from sea in the more recent weeks, and she now sits alongside at Devonport in the routine that follows a deployment rather than in any state of readiness, so that her return has done little to relieve the pressure on a service which has, in practical terms, run out of submarines to send out. A further boat of the class has been commissioned but continues to work through its trials and is not yet ready for front-line service, while the last of the planned submarines remains under construction.

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None of this can be traced to any failing on the part of the boats themselves while at sea, for the difficulty lies instead, as it has done for many years, in the considerable challenge of keeping a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines maintained, certified and ready for operations. Because the deep maintenance and refitting that these boats require can be undertaken at only a single location, and because a substantial share of that capacity is taken up by the unceasing demands of sustaining the continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, there remains too little room within the system to return the attack boats to service at anything like the pace required. Those constraints have been further aggravated by enduring shortages of dry-dock space and spare parts, and by a scarcity of the specialist engineers and submariners upon whom the entire programme rests, with at least one boat understood to have been stripped of components in order to keep others in some semblance of working order.

The strategic implications of all this are far from trivial, since attack submarines number among the Navy’s most valuable instruments for discreetly monitoring Russian vessels in the North Atlantic at a time when Russian activity beneath the surface around the British Isles is understood to have grown markedly, and since they play a significant role in shielding the ballistic missile submarines that carry the country’s nuclear deterrent. They are, moreover, the only platform in British service able to launch Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, and they constitute a central element of the protection and the reach that a carrier strike group is expected to carry with it to sea, so that their simultaneous unavailability erodes the Navy’s effectiveness across a number of distinct areas at the same time.

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There exists a further concern of a longer-term character, one bound up less with equipment than with people, for submariners are unable to develop and preserve their professional skills while the boats on which they would serve remain confined to harbour.

As the crews of the deterrent submarines are required to undertake patrols of increasingly demanding length, those assigned to the attack boats find themselves drawn ever more towards simulators and shore-side duties, and there is a mounting unease within the service that the hard-won expertise which once ranked the force among the most accomplished in the world will gradually wither, to such a degree that the Navy has already been obliged to lean upon the submarines of allied nations to help sustain the courses through which its own commanding officers are qualified.

The Navy, for its part, has made no attempt to conceal the seriousness of the predicament, and its most senior officer has openly conceded that the rate at which submarines are passed through maintenance must be improved very substantially. A dedicated recovery plan has accordingly been established with the intention of hastening that work, and a number of early and outwardly modest measures have already been put in place, among them the swift erection of additional workshop space designed to bring urgent tasks forward while the more substantial infrastructure schemes are developed.

Those longer-term undertakings, which encompass the rebuilding of dock facilities at Devonport and the provision of fresh docking capacity on the Clyde, will however require years to come to fruition and will furnish little in the way of immediate respite.

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For the time being, then, the Royal Navy finds itself in a position that it has occupied previously, and one that, given the condition of the infrastructure upon which the fleet so heavily depends, it may very well find itself occupying again before long. The funds have been committed and the submarines themselves constructed at very considerable expense, and yet the nation still wants for the dockyard capacity and the trained manpower that would be needed to translate that investment into a force capable of being reliably despatched to sea.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence indicated that it did not, as a matter of routine, comment upon the condition of the United Kingdom’s submarine service, while maintaining that the nation’s waters were at all times protected by a range of assets.