Lessons from the Black and Red Sea on the Use and Design of Future Fleets

As the Royal Navy digests the lessons it can derive from recent events at sea both above and below the threshold of open conflict, it can make several deductions regarding the navy’s employment and operations. 

First, engagements in both the Black and Red Sea carry some lessons regarding the nature of sea control. In the Red Sea, there has been a relative mismatch between tactical and strategic effect. Although the Prosperity Guardian coalition has been relatively successful in terms of its ability to engage Houthi missiles, most shipping has nonetheless been rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. Moreover, despite years of interdiction missions, it is generally taken as a given that the Houthis will replenish any capabilities that they either expend or lose in the ongoing clashes. In the Black Sea, a successful sea denial campaign has allowed the Ukrainians to open a grain corridor running through the western approaches of the sea. The ability of weaker naval actors to circumvent the effects of superior maritime power either through evasion (as with Iran’s use of diffuse smuggling networks) or through localised sea denial (as in the Black Sea) raises questions regarding how sea power might be used to deliver one of its most historically important roles, the ability to control the flow of goods on the maritime commons. Over the last 50 years (albeit with some exceptions), navies enjoying a dominant position in the blue water have struggled to translate this into effective control. Instead, the ability to control the flow of goods has depended on the ability to operate close to potentially hostile shores. Operation Pocket Money, the US’s blockade of Haiphong harbour during the Vietnam War, depended on the ability to seed naval minefields, as has Russia’s blockade of Odessa. In the mid-2000s the Sri Lankan navy struggled to control the Tamil Tigers’ fleet of dark ships until it fundamentally altered its approach by relying on Israeli-made fast attack craft to police waters closer to Tamil Tiger-held shores. Attempting to control flows of goods at sea from positions at reach is an inherently difficult task, made more difficult by the cost asymmetries between naval vessels and the blockade runners that evade them. Yet in an age of proliferating modern anti-access threats, there are real risks involved in enforcing a close blockade. For the Royal Navy, a lesson from this might be the importance of vessels capable of operating in the littorals in ways that more high-value vessels cannot. These might include optionally crewed vessels, a successor to the P2000s operated by the coastal forces squadron, or indeed the surface manoeuvre craft planned in support of the Future Commando Force concept. 

This, in turn, creates a demand signal for motherships and support vessels. While bespoke options such as the planned Multi-Role Support Ship can provide one avenue, this is not the only viable approach. Auxiliary vessels can also act as logistical hubs supporting interdiction at reach. For example, during the Iran–Iraq Tanker War, two converted vessels – the Hercules and Wimbrown – were used by the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as motherships for a range of surface craft and helicopters. Closer to our own time, SOCOM still relies on the converted point class roll-on/roll-off ship the MV Ocean Trader (operated by the US civilian sealift command) to act as a mothership. Needless to say, small craft cannot operate without the support and cover provided by larger vessels and aircraft operating from reach. However, unlike larger surface combatants, at a point where a threat has been sufficiently degraded (but still exists in a residual form), smaller vessels will likely be critical to ensuring that a militarily dominant position at sea can be translated into meaningful sea control. For the Royal Navy, the lesson may well be that recent experiments with the forward deployment of Coastal Forces Squadron (CFS) vessels are likely to be of considerable importance, but only if the force is adequately resourced; and that synergies between CFS and other elements of the navy (such as the commando force) should be considered integral to sea control in the littorals. Additionally, any decision to rely on converted vessels as hubs would (if this solution is opted for) raise questions regarding the crewing of these additional capabilities, something that will likely exceed the capacity of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary as currently constituted.

A second lesson regarding sea control is that there is a shrinking role for defensive sea control missions such as convoying, something which has arguably been evident for some time. When it has been deemed impossible to ignore a threat to freedom of navigation, because shipping passed through a single chokepoint or because the economic damage was too great, it has typically been offensive action that has forced the termination of the threat. For example, during the Iran–Iraq Tanker War, offensive action by the US navy under Operation Praying Mantis ended the Iranian threat to US naval vessels and US-flagged ships. By contrast, convoying by the US Navy was often less consequential, with naval vessels having to form up behind more robust merchant vessels to cross minefields in several instances. Where a threat is deemed sufficiently important, cost imposition has been the most effective strategy for navies that have neither the numbers nor the vessel types for convoying. Where this is not the case because the costs of a blockade do not justify the escalatory risk of imposing costs to an extent that would compel an opponent to desist – as arguably seen in the Red Sea – market adjustment may be a perfectly valid instrument for avoiding the risks imposed by a blockade. Despite ongoing Houthi attacks, a combination of a glut in shipping and the offsetting advantage of vessels not paying tolls in the Suez Canal means that the effect of the Houthi blockade in terms of consumer inflation has been marginal. This is not to say that naval presence may not be important to assert the principle of freedom of navigation without major escalation, but the weight given to protecting sea lanes of communication as a core mission (as opposed to strike at and from the sea) might be rethought. More broadly, this has ramifications for an important component of the maritime operating concept – the idea that denial rather than punishment is generally the core component of deterrence – since in some cases punishment may prove more important.

At a more tactical level, there are several deductions which might be of relevance for the development and employment of the Royal Navy. First, the integral link between aircraft and surface vessels in fleet air defence has been reinforced in the Red Sea, where the intercepts performed by the F/A-18s of the Eisenhower carrier strike group have been critical to ensuring that surface forces did not expend their vertical launch system capacity. The ability to integrate data from aircraft onboard vessels can both enable a fleet to form a single joint engagement zone and allow for the engagement of targets such as bombers and transporter erector launchers at longer distances where surface-based radar are limited by the earth’s horizon. In principle, the F-35 provides a considerable capability to this end given the aircraft’s ability to generate wide-area sensor coverage without support from airborne warning and control systems. However, Royal Navy guided-missile destroyers (DDGs) currently do not possess a cooperative engagement capability or the ability to download data via Multifunction Advanced Data Link in the way that US vessels equipped with Aegis baseline 9 can. The absence of a synergy between the fleet air arm and its DDGs comparable to that which networks such as Naval Integrated Fire Control Counter Air provide the US Navy also poses a second challenge, namely that if aircraft on combat air patrols are restricted to using their own interceptors (rather than cueing surface vessels), more aircraft from the 24–36 F-35s embarked on the Queen Elizabeth carrier will be needed to provide combat air patrols. This in turn raises the risk of aircraft carriers dedicating more capacity to self-preservation than to other functions. 

Secondly, the rate at which expensive strike munitions have been expended against targets in Yemen – the US Navy has fired 80 Tomahawks, more than the UK procured in 2014 – illustrates that precision strike capabilities built to engage high-value targets in well defended airspace are an inappropriate tool for power projection against sub-peer opponents where the cost of their use often outweighs the value of targets struck. In the 2017 strikes on Shayrat airbase in response to the Assad regime’s chemical weapons use, for example, a salvo of 59 Tomahawks did not prevent the base from being operational the next day, while attacks on a scale that would have rendered the airbase inoperable would have proven far too costly. Systems developed to strike points of failure (such as C2 nodes) in sophisticated adversary networks are of limited value against opponents with more crude but numerous capabilities, and in the case of the UK the assumption that Tomahawks should be available to support expeditionary activity also imposes burdens on a limited fleet of nuclear-powered submarines (which are currently the UK’s only launch platform for Tomahawks, though this will change with the introduction of the Type 26). A greater emphasis on a ‘high-low mix’ which incorporates second tier strike capabilities will likely be required to ensure that the demands of persistent activity do not erode stockpiles of systems and launch platforms that are best employed in Europe. While hardened and buried targets may require the use of expensive standoff capabilities, many likely targets in a campaign against anti-access/area denial such as radar sites do not.

Finally, the two theatres carry lessons regarding the principles that should underpin force design and transformation. In many ways, the evidence from both theatres provides some vindication for the Royal Navy’s stated emphasis on a ‘wise pivot’ philosophy. In the Red Sea, the success of platforms such as the Arleigh Burke – the product of Admiral Wayne Myer’s incrementalist philosophy, and which operates a software package that has been iteratively improved over four decades – illustrates the importance of iteratively improving the capabilities a fleet already has even as transformation is pursued. Similarly, in the Black Sea, the utility of platforms such as the aged Su-24MR in Ukrainian service has been increased considerably through the incorporation of systems such as Storm Shadow. As the Royal Navy contemplates its future force design, it is thus also appropriate for it to consider ‘quick wins’ that can be achieved with existing platforms, with the capacity for cooperative engagement representing one possible example.

Conclusions

The conflicts in the Red Sea and Black Sea carry a number of important lessons that might inform the Royal Navy’s efforts to generate its future fleet. In many ways, the technological dimensions of these conflicts – though the most heavily studied – have been less important than the fundamental lessons that they carry regarding how a fleet must structure and prioritise tasks to prepare for major contingencies. The lessons learned from these conflicts, then, have an evolutionary quality where many of the challenges of greatest significance relate to generating the capacity to leverage existing capabilities and competencies effectively. Technology is an important part of this picture, but in many ways the more fundamental questions for the navy will revolve around how it employs the fleet and approaches transformation. In some areas, lessons learned vindicate the Royal Navy’s approach, while in others they may challenge its assumptions.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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