Warships are complicated engineering marvels, requiring extensive work and support to keep operational and effective. A modern escort ship is a floating town, able to generate power to provide life support and hotel services, propulsion, aviation operations and the ability to operate a variety of very complicated electronic systems and weapon systems, and it is built to do this while surviving damage from enemy attack.
This complex world requires attention on a regular basis, both to make sure that the constituent parts still work as planned, and also to update and replace parts with more modern or better alternatives, or to provide planned upgrades. For instance, it is common for new ships entering service to undergo a short refit to add in any extra capability upgrades that may have been rolled out since construction began, and to rectify any defects.
For the purposes of planning how the fleet works, the Royal Navy looks to provide enough ships to meet agreed defence tasks. In simple terms the MOD works out what tasks are required of it, and what military assets are needed to meet them. This can range from providing a constantly available SSBN to deliver the deterrence mission through to deploying the ice patrol ship to Antarctica.
Once these commitments are understood, planners can work out how many ships / planes / tanks are needed to meet this goal. For example, it may be agreed that the RN needs to sustain multiple overseas deployments, and also be able to generate a carrier strike group too.
If, purely hypothetically the requirement for this is 6 ships, then the next task is to work out how many ships are needed to ensure 6 ships are constantly available. Usually, this has historically been at a 3:1 ratio – one ship is on task or ready to fulfill it, one is in some form of work up or other training ahead of being assigned to the role, and one is just back or in refit.
In practical terms this means that the RN never looks to get 100% of its force to sea, but rather to ensure it doesn’t fail to ensure enough ships are available to meet all the tasks that it is required to do. Consequently there is always going to be a mismatch between the number of ships owned, and the number of ships deployed.
Sir Humphrey, “Inoperable or just maintenance”, Thin Pinstriped Line, 2019-10-24.
April 6, 2024
QotD: No navy ever has all its ships at sea at the same time
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