We Brits must stop freeloading on US defence spending and fix the Royal Navy

It seems quite likely that in June at the next Nato summit in The Hague, President Trump will say something like: “The US is paying for Europe’s protection. All Nato nations must spend 3 per cent of GDP on Defence immediately.”
He said something similar at the 2018 summit, and although it was only 2 per cent then, it caused a ruckus. Every British government since 1990 has wished defence spending would just go away. Can Trump shift that mindset this time around? Or what if our government concludes that we should spend more anyway, what with it being a dangerous world out there these days?  What would the Royal Navy do with more cash?
The first point to note is that there is little that can be done quickly. Decades of rot cannot be turned around overnight, even with unlimited cash. And before we even get to the Navy, Treasury reforms are needed. Annualised budgets, the inability to plan beyond them and the requirement to find in-year savings are a curse much wider than Defence. 
But let’s say that happened and serious money started to head the Navy’s way. I think there are three broad areas that need reform: sustainability, shipbuilding and lethality.
Sustainability is a vast subject and not sexy at all, but like Treasury reforms, if you don’t get it right, nothing else follows. It also includes elements that have naval implications without being the Navy’s to control.
Culture is key. Getting people used to spending money again and being ambitious would take time. Learned behaviours such as jealously protecting your project against the one from next door, or the neighbouring Service, would take time to undo. So would decoupling parsimony from promotability. 
Next in line would be a critically important internal campaign to convince the workforce that things are on the mend. This has been tried many times before but unless actual cash is attached, it rings hollow. This, at least, would be a quick win.
This strand would need to be accompanied by a total review of ‘the package’, starting with pay and including all items that affect standards of service. Imagine what the teams involved in recruiting and retaining our people could do with extra money. This is essential because if we lose many more people, the whole thing will collapse anyway. 
The Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) in particular is on the verge of breakdown. It is currently down to six sea-going chief engineers, enough to run three ships. It is critically necessary to start paying them and everyone else properly, and make the whole business rewarding to be part of again.
The Britannia Royal Naval College, responsible for Royal Navy initial officer training, has been falling apart for years now, constantly denied the funds required to bring it to an acceptable standard. It should be fixed up. Likewise, the ratings’ training establishment at HMS Raleigh, and indeed a large percentage of naval accommodation and Married Quarters. You would not believe how bad some of these are. Properly resourced, all could be fixed and the endless conversations playing one off against the other could be parked for good.  
Shipbuilding and maintenance is a vast subject and one that was the subject of a strategic review in 2017 and a refresh in 2022. This strategy promised an extra four billion pounds over 30 years “to deliver more than 150 naval and civilian vessels” with significant implications for the Navy as well as the entire offshore sector, which is growing exponentially. The National Shipbuilding Office was set up in 2021 to oversee this, but as it stands, the government has yet to endorse it. Doing so would be a clear sign that it recognises the pace of activity now required. 
The fact that much of our ship support infrastructure has rotted away is the prime reason for the Navy’s current availability woes. Essentially, we are unable to build new ships on time and we are unable to carry out work on existing ones on reasonable timescales. The ancient Type 23 frigate is a good example of how this hurts us. Its replacement (the Type 26) is late so the maintenance burden of keeping the later T23s sort-of seaworthy is increasing, but the yards can’t get it done in a timely manner and ships stay in dock for months or years. It doesn’t help that the newer Type 45 destroyers were supplied with a deeply flawed power system that is having to be rectified by a significant package of yard work applied to every ship.
There’s a similar maintenance backlog with the Astute class attack submarines, with no nuclear docks available in large part due to ongoing issues with the deterrent boats – also extended far beyond their time and needing huge amounts of extra work as a result. It is now taking so long to get the next Vanguard deterrent boat ready for sea that six-month-long patrols are becoming routine. Meanwhile the attack boats just have to wait, with the result that none at all were available to go to sea for a large part of this year. 
None of this is easy to fix and much of it lies outside the Navy’s direct remit. The Service just has to manage the fallout. 
When it comes to building new ships, there are some big-ticket items that need to be resolved now. 
The Fleet Solid Support ship is the first. It is an essential component of Carrier Strike support. The ongoing issues at Harland and Wolff are not helping. This ship was supposed to be ready in 2026 in good time to take over from RFA Fort Victoria. They’re late and Fort Vic has retired early. Even if the support ships were here now, the RFA couldn’t crew them due to its manpower crisis. As it stands, this capability gap will likely last for about five years.  
Another capstone shipbuilding project is the Multi Role Support Ship (MRSS). These ships, also planned to be RFAs rather than Royal Navy warships, will be focused on the ability to launch and recover Commando Force personnel and will form key parts of both Littoral Response Groups and Carrier Strike Groups as detailed in the Commando Force Operating Model. Sitting somewhere between the existing Bay Class of the RFA and the now inactive Albion Class of the Royal Navy these will need to be flexible ships. What this means in practice is that there will be many customers and, therefore, much interference. First steel is supposed to be cut in 2028 – I can’t find anyone who thinks this will happen. Extra money could cut through some of this, but an organisational reset is required for the rest. 
Just behind MRSS in terms of immediacy is the replacement destroyer. These ships are essential for carrier strike operations, general duties and Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) either of the UK or somewhere else. They need to be in train now and aren’t. The Type 45 destroyer is due out of service in the mid 2030s and one doesn’t need to look too deeply into its operating history to know that extending that class is not a good idea – the ongoing engine fix is not a full solution to the T45’s problems. For the replacement ship to arrive on time a design needs to be agreed upon now and then either BAE or Babcock persuaded to set up another yard which can actually build new warships. In effect there is only one warship yard in the UK at present, in Glasgow. The big contractors will only make this sort of investment if they think the Navy is serious – extra money will help with that.
For lethality, the shopping list is huge. It’s fair to say that the Royal Navy hasn’t made this a priority for a while now: the curse of ships “fitted for but not with” weapons has run rampant through the fleet, so that ships which ought to be powerful are in fact almost unarmed. An Admiralty memorandum from 1902 determined that “The traditional role of the Royal Navy is not to act on the defensive, but to prepare to attack the force which threatens – in other words, to assume the offensive.”
Our current submariners would agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, and when they can actually get to sea they are armed to go on the offensive. The rest of the Navy is not so lucky: the Type 45 destroyer has only 48 missile launch cells (all for defensive weapons only) some 20 years after the US Navy’s Arleigh Burke set the benchmark at 96. The Red Sea has exposed these limitations. They need cash to rectify: the T45s should not only get extra Sea Ceptors, they should also receive Tomahawk land-attack missiles and the Naval Strike Missile as well. A destroyer without any effective weapons against other ships or targets ashore – like ours – is a sorry sight. 
Then we need to ensure that all our ships are fully armed all of the time and there are plenty of reloads in the solid support ships and stored ashore. The era of gold, silver and bronze missiles being rotated between ships and half the fleet or more driving about with empty launch cells now needs to end. This requires a mindset shift every bit as much as a cash uplift. 
Drones are part of the lethality quest but must always be complementary to the big-ticket items, not replacement therapy. Their ubiquity over land in Ukraine does not translate over the sea, and the effective use of surface drones in the Black Sea carries localised caveats. Put simply, by the time your maritime drone has the size, range and ordnance required for blue water operations, it often will not save much in cost or people-to-operate over its crewed alternative. 
Having said that, there is some real innovation to be had here with much smaller companies pushing the boundaries. Tiltrotor drones now exist, like a mini-Osprey, that can launch vertically, transition to conventional flight and achieve decent ranges. Put some loitering munitions on these and you have a decent force multiplier. Or don’t put munitions on and use them for all your stores transfers at sea.
Then, Project Ark Royal is set to look at drone technology for our carriers and could seriously increase their lethality – useful given the slow purchase rate of the F-35B fighter jet. Air-to-air refuelling and fixed-wing airborne early warning are both absent from our carriers just now. A properly funded Project Ark Royal could fix both.
The remotely operated minehunting solution was a good example of committing to an uncrewed solution too soon with the existing ships being paid off (to save money) before the tech and supporting infrastructure was ready. We’ve now got rid of much of our world-class minehunter force – one of the few things where we were the best and could genuinely provide useful help to the Americans, who have always been weak at mine warfare. The replacement RFAs and remote systems are not even vaguely ready. More cash would stop decisions like this from being forced upon the Navy.
Dragon fire laser technology for defeating drone swarms is coming along nicely as are microwave alternatives. Both are needed now; both would benefit from a cash injection. 
Platform numbers are key too. Navies need balance and mass; the Royal Navy only has the former. We should have had 12 Type 45s, not the six we got. We now need 12 Type 83s to replace them. We needed 18 Type 26 frigates, we’re getting eight. We need lots of Type 31 second-line frigates: we’re getting five. We need 12 attack submarines, we’re getting – eventually – seven. When we were spending 4 per cent of GDP on defence at the end of the Cold War, we had over 150 ships and submarines. That would be an appropriate stance in today’s world: we managed to afford it then and we could perfectly well afford it now.
The final part of the lethality equation is the wrapper that goes around much of the platforms. This includes everything from intelligence agencies, to heavy lift to classified communications networks, cyber and data transfer at sea. All of these have atrophied over the last 20 or so years but we have got away with it due to US support. We need to invest in all of these enablers now, to be ready should that support not be there one day.
Between sustainability, shipbuilding and lethality, there are many things that would benefit from the Royal Navy having more money. And none of this needs to wait for a national strategy. As long as we want a deep-water navy, then all of the things I’ve listed will be of use – we can work out where later. And anyway the answer will be North Atlantic first, rest of the world second. 
In reality, will Trump becoming president again move the defence spending dial in the UK? I’m not sure it will. If daily Russian interference in UK systems and infrastructure, a hot war on our doorstep, one in the Middle East getting worse and one brewing in the Indo-Pacific hasn’t elicited any response, why should being yelled at from Washington make any difference?
Rachel Reeves has just raised taxes and borrowing in order to spend on the public sector, but fifteen other departments got bigger increases than Defence. A nominal £3bn for Defence and £22bn for the NHS shows a government that is simply unaware of the world beyond our borders – and the Tories did no better while they were in charge.
I hope this isn’t just my cynicism shining through but I suspect we’ll see a few incremental increases and creative accounting until we can claim, with disproportionate fanfare, that we are now spending 2.5 per cent of GDP (0.3 per cent above where we not-very-truthfully claim we are now). That’s barely a 10 per cent budget increase. The US won’t be impressed, and nor will the serving members of our armed forces.
More importantly, our enemies won’t be impressed either. It’s not a good look when the next leader of our best and most powerful ally is publicly wondering why the USA should defend a nation that can’t be bothered to defend itself.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer