Why has the Royal Navy taken over a civilian support ship? The answer won't cheer you up

Telegraph

24-07-2025

Could the RN take back the amphibious mission and the minehunting motherships, leaving the RFA to run the tankers and support ships? This seems like a natural division of labour but would need firm leadership to force it through and even then the RN is short of people too. At least that problem is not as severe as it is for the RFA. The recent Strategic Defence Review mentions some of this but offers no detail – especially on money. The Investment Plan, due in the Autumn, will have some serious questions to answer here, as with everything all across Defence.
The other even broader question is to what level should the Stirling Castle model of simply putting combat equipment on affordable merchant service hulls be used. Here the answer is divided between traditionalists and realists. The traditionalist view is that a warship should be a purpose-built thoroughbred, sleek, as fast as possible, bristling with weapons and sensors and made to exacting standards in order to be survivable in war.
There are others of my acquaintance who would suggest that (for example) three Merlin anti-submarine helicopters on an ex-merchant hull would fight submarines at least as well as a single Merlin on a frigate. They'd suggest that radar drones or helicopters would find enemy surface units or aircraft much further away than a destroyer's radar can, being up in the air with hugely greater line of sight. They'd point out that destroyer weapons are already supplied in containerised forms suitable for bolting on to any hull. These people point out that a dedicated warship's high top speed – typically achieved using expensive gas turbines – is usually irrelevant as the thirsty gassers get through fuel very quickly at speed. A warship cannot actually travel over any serious distance any faster than its accompanying auxiliary tanker. When high speed is called for in combat, aircraft or missiles are what count: a frigate's primary means of attacking submarines is, after all, its helicopter.
But I'm a former frigate captain and a specialist in the use of destroyers, and I'd rather have frigates and destroyers. There is a reason frigates, destroyers, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines etc have remained largely unchanged in recent decades – they work. But I would freely admit that an insistence on exquisite, fast, heavily equipped specialist warships has got us to a terrible place in terms of capabilities and numbers. I do wonder how we punch our way out of the navy-wide hole we are currently in when there is no more serious money coming. I do ask how we achieve the mass that is missing and uncrewed advancement that we so obviously need? Before long every platform starts looking like a Stirling Castle -type purchase, or container ships with drones the way the Iranians are doing it, or uncrewed surface weapons and expensive proper warships are consigned to the military history bin.
As ever, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but this is a balance that is hard to strike when financial conditions constantly force you to make decisions because you have to, not because you should. In the meantime, it's a safe bet that the practice of converting unusual ships for RN use is going to increase. So let's use the transfer of Stirling Castle to the Royal Navy as a test bed to become better at it.