Washington: There is need to account for the degraded capabilities of US NATO allies, former head of the US Navy said in June testimony as the service grapples with establishing the right type of force hinting at the once substantial Cold War-era European navies.
“In my mind [there’s] been an over-fixation on the total number of ships as opposed to the nuance numbers of specific types of ships that support viable operational plans,” Adm Gary Roughead (Retd), former chief of naval operations, US said before the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. “There’s also the need to understand just how small our allied navies have become, and in the past we have always looked to our allies to support us, but those navies are extraordinarily small.”
With Europe’s navies focused on low-end missions like counter-terrorism and counter-piracy in the post-Cold War era, it has led to a precipitous decline in naval power available to surge in the event of a high-end conflict.
Where they collectively had about 100 frigates in 1995, that number hovers at 51 today.
With the US increasingly focused on Asia and amid tension within the alliance, Europe is coming to grips with the need to grow its forces and regain high-end capabilities it once had — a realisation that also grew out of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
“Throughout the 1990s, the focus was low-end missions: counter-piracy, counter-terrorism, migration, search and rescue,” said Sebastian Bruns, head of the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security in Kiel, Germany.
But an unfortunate side effect of the long-lead times involved in force design — sometimes a decade or more — is that pre-2014 ship designs that are coming into service now are ill-suited for the high-end fight, Bruns said.
The prime example of this mission mismatch is Germany’s 7,200-tonne Baden-Württemberg-class frigate. It began entering service in 2019, but is designed for low-end operations.
But new, more advanced frigates are starting to filter into the market. For example, in 2017, French Naval Group launched a five-hull intermediate air defence frigate programme designed to intercept air threats with the Aster 15 and Aster 30 missiles.
And in January this year, the German Navy announced it had hired Dutch shipbuilder Damen to build at least four new MKS 180 frigates — a 9,000-tonne ship designed to operate in waters with ice formations in a nod to the renewed competition in the Arctic.
Similar to the track the US Navy has taken in fielding the Naval Strike Missile on its littoral combat ships and the Marine Corps’ approach to fielding it as a shore battery, European navies have begun to upgrade their ships’ systems in preparation for a high-end fight, said Jeremy Stöhs, a naval analyst who authored the book “Decline of European Naval Forces.”
Countries like the Black Sea and Scandinavian states are investing in anti-ship missiles and shore-based missile systems, he added, whereas a lot of those weapons were disbanded in the 1990s.
The Franco-British Sea Venom anti-ship missile is being designed to launch from a helicopter such as the UK’s Wildcat. It recently passed its first firing trial. The missile is currently designed for small, fast-moving vessels up to Corvette-sized warships.
Europe’s evolution toward more high-end naval battles in many ways mirrors the United States’ own pivot away from wars in the West Asia and Asia. But it’s also informed by changing politics.
But with this evolution has come a realisation of Europe’s shortcomings and just how dependent those navies have been on the US for some core capabilities.
