British Navy to buy six ships, enters new ‘golden age’ of shipbuilding

BERLIN — Britain’s Royal Navy plans to buy up to six new multirole support ships and give its future frigates the capability to attack land targets, the defense secretary said Tuesday.

The offensive capability comes as the military learns from recent operations in the Red and Black Seas, Grant Shapps noted, the former involving a fight against Yemen-based Houthi militants and the latter linked to the nearby war in Ukraine. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.

In total, the service is seeking 28 new vessels to reverse the trend of a shrinking fleet, Shapps said at the Sea Power conference in London. The 2017 National Shipbuilding Strategy first formalized this target, which Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government updated in 2022.

As part of this strategy, the UK seeks to become “the most competitive maritime nation in the world by 2050”, Sarah Kenny, then president of industry association Maritime UK, said at the time.

The push to build new ships also comes a month after the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced a £75 billion ($94 billion) increase in defense spending over the next six years, bringing British military spending at 2.5% of gross domestic product. in an economic environment that is only just beginning to recover from a recession and is grappling with stubbornly high inflation rates.

The UK’s shipyards are sure to be abuzz in the years to come as Shapps pledges to get the Royal Navy’s new entries built domestically during a new ‘golden age’ for the British shipbuilding. Type 26 and 31 frigates will be built in Scotland; The Astute and Dreadnought submarines assembled at Barrow-in-Furness, northwest England; and solid fleet support ships produced in Belfast and Devon, the service said in a press release on Tuesday.

The six multi-role support ships for the Royal Marines are to be multi-role platforms that can carry aircraft, vehicles, insertion craft and unmanned systems. They should also serve as mobile infirmaries to treat the wounded on the battlefield. They are expected to replace all of the Royal Navy’s current amphibious support ships by the early 2030s.

Meanwhile, the newly built Type 26 and 31 frigates will feature land-attack capabilities, Shapps said, following a recent trend among European blue-water navies. The Netherlands previously announced it would equip four of their Tomahawk missile frigates between 2025 and 2029, and France recently conducted a synchronized test firing of naval cruise missiles from a ship and submarine approximately 250 miles apart.

“Our operations in the Red Sea have proven that to address growing threats to freedom of navigation, we must be capable of destroying targets at sea, in the air and on land,” Shapps said. written the shortly after announcing the addition of the weapon systems.

To support the next “golden age” of British shipbuilding, there would need to be a “very large expansion” of domestic capacity, Shapps said.

Defense preparedness has been given new urgency by the UK government following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, British weapons contributed to important battlefield victories for kyiv, including the sinking of Russian ships in the Black Sea.