A Navy Too Small for a Dangerous World

16/09/2026 – by Adrian Hill – 11 min read

Written by Adrian Hill

A Navy Too Small for a Dangerous World

We are living through the most dangerous geopolitical era since the end of the Cold War, and the Royal Navy that must protect us is stretched to breaking point. Former British diplomat Adrian Hill shows how governments of both parties hollowed out the fleet in peacetime, and what it will now take to rectify the situation.

Post Segments

• A Dangerous New Era
• Sixty years of cutting corners at sea
• We need a Maritime Big Bang
• The merchant fleet is also key

We are living through a geopolitical era more dangerous and unpredictable than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And the Royal Navy is in dire straits, weaker than at any time in its modern history. It has about a third of the manpower it had in the early 1960s, and its escort fleet — the frigates and destroyers that do the actual work of protecting shipping, carriers and coastline — has fallen from 50 in 1990 to just 11 today.

Our new Chancellor John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary in June over this very issue. The Chief of the Defence Staff had identified a £28 billion shortfall in defence spending to 2029 against minimum critical need (as identified by the 2025 Strategic Defence Review led by Lord Robertson, himself a former Labour Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General). PM Starmer’s ‘final’ settlement offered less than half of what was needed, just £13.5 billion. Healey’s resignation letter said it fell well short of what the country required at a dangerous time. Yet Healey’s first Budget will not commit to spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 – the very issue over which he resigned. Britain spent just 2.3% of GDP on defence in 2025/26 — fourteenth among NATO’s members — and is committed to spend 3.5% by 2035.

Labour’s cuts are just the latest in a long-term trend. Over the past sixty years, governments of all colours have cut the fleet in peacetime and hoped that no crisis would arrive to test the decision. But the present cuts are especially reckless given the state of the world in which they are being made.

A Dangerous New Era

Britain has not faced this many simultaneous threats at sea since the Cold War ended.

Russia has not only explicitly threatened to attack British military targets in response to our supply of military equipment to Ukraine, it is already conducting sabotage against ‘unfriendly countries’ below the threshold of war. The prospect of the Russians sabotaging our critical undersea infrastructure – the gas pipelines that bring three-quarters of our imports from Norway, the interconnectors that carry electricity from the Continent, the cables that carry the City’s data – is all too real. The Russian spy ship Yantar has been tracked inside the UK’s economic zone, on one occasion loitering directly over critical undersea cables, and on another aiming lasers at RAF pilots monitoring it. The Ministry of Defence states that Russian deep-sea submarines now escort such vessels, built to survey infrastructure in peacetime – and sabotage it in war. It is even possible the Russians could lay minefields across our shipping lanes.

Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands has hardened again, with President Milei calling his alliance with Washington the key to recovering the islands. Now the USA is threatening to withdraw its support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falklands. In 1982, Britain sent more than 120 ships to the Falklands, some 50 of them major surface combatants. A comparable operation today could barely muster six or seven escorts around a single carrier.

Our Far East allies and trading partners — Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore — are threatened by China and North Korea. China has built the world’s largest navy in twenty years. North Korea is strengthening its navy with apparent Russian help, and plans to build two major surface warships a year to 2030.

In the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz — through which a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes — has been mined and its shipping attacked. Whatever one thinks of how that conflict began, the upshot for an island trading nation is the same: sea lanes close, and someone has to reopen them.

Critically for our over-stretched navy, several of these threats could materialise at once. A capable adversary would try to take advantage of British naval resources already being committed elsewhere.

Sixty years of cutting corners at sea

Decisions to cut the Navy have been taken at numerous times over the past sixty years, by governments of both parties, for the same reason and with the same result.

In January 1963, encouraged by Russia and China, Indonesia caused a revolt in Brunei and invaded newly independent Malaysia’s territories in Borneo. The campaign became known as Confrontation. Over the next three years, a third of the Royal Navy supported Malaysia until Indonesia was defeated. Some ten-thousand British soldiers fought in the jungle along the frontiers throughout Confrontation. Yet we were still able to fulfil our NATO naval obligations – plus an army and air force in West Germany – and maintain our deterrent forces. And all this was achieved as National Service was phased out. That was a fleet with depth.

The events of the early 60s had just demonstrated exactly what a global fleet was for. Denis Healey’s response as Defence Secretary was to cut it. Healey cancelled the planned super-carrier and seven out of its escort force of Type 82 destroyers. The decision came in the February 1966 Defence White Paper, barely months after Confrontation ended. It was made to save money, not for any strategic reason: Wilson’s government was fighting a sterling crisis, and defence was where it chose to find the savings. Healey, as Defence Secretary, was the man handed the axe.

In 1981 Margaret Thatcher and John Nott wanted to reduce the Navy’s surface fleet. Three years later we needed every ship we could lay our hands on for the Falklands War. During this conflict the UK lost six warships and a container ship, all of them to air attack. Governments do not get to choose when the fleet will be needed.

Thirty years later, in 2010, the Navy suffered the most severe cuts of all from David Cameron’s coalition with Nick Clegg. It lost HMS Ark Royal and with her the Harrier jump jets, and with them our ability to fly fighters from the sea at all. For the next ten years Britain had no carrier aircraft: no air cover for its own ships, and no way to use air power anywhere without a friendly country within range willing to host the aircraft.

Similar severe damage is happening again now. The current government has just decommissioned two recently modernised Type 23 frigates, one of which passed through the Taiwan Strait less than a year ago. The strait carries a fifth of global maritime trade. China declares it as its own internal waters and demands that foreign warships seek its permission to transit the strait, while warships from the USA, Japan, Canada, the UK and others regularly pass through it precisely to affirm that it is international water rather than China’s. Without such frigates, Britain has no way of defending a principle its own trade depends on.

The Starmer government cancelled the planned Type 83 destroyers in its June 2026 Defence Investment Plan, replacing them with uncrewed ‘Common Combat Vessels’ not due until the early 2030s. A carrier cannot sail alone. It needs destroyers and frigates around it to shoot down missiles and hunt submarines, because the carrier is the enemy’s main target. Britain has two carriers and eleven escorts in total — and those eleven cover everything else the Navy does as well. Nothing is now due to replace the six Type 45s when they retire by 2038.

There is a case for uncrewed vessels. Drones are cheap and expendable. But no other navy is axing its escorts to pay for them, because the two do different jobs. The drone ship is an arsenal ship that carries missiles to where they are needed, while an escort stays alongside the ships in its care and defends them from attack. The new drone ship is also slow, managing only 18 knots against a carrier’s 25 to 30. Over any sustained voyage it will steadily fall behind until it is out of sight, leaving the carrier undefended.

We need a Maritime Big Bang

No amount of bluff and bluster in Westminster can replace a first-class global navy. Aircraft carriers can move a small air force over 71% of the planet and attack targets hundreds of miles inland. Nuclear submarines can do the same with missiles, but a surface fleet with airpower has greater flexibility and carries far more ammunition of all types, plus highly trained and motivated Royal Marine Commandos. We should reinstate the Type 83 and double the planned order from eight destroyers to sixteen, and double the orders for Type 31, Type 26 and Type 32 frigates, to match a fleet that must protect far more shipping and coastline than eight destroyers could ever cover.

Britain has one of the best nuclear attack submarines in the world – the Astute Class. A successor class, SSN-AUKUS, is planned with Australia and the USA as our partners, but the first boats are not due until the late 2030s. Britain needs more attack submarines than it has, and sooner. The difficulty is that we build them in just one yard, at Barrow, where the last three Astutes each took eleven years. The target for their successors is one boat every 18 months. A fleet is not bought out of a single year’s budget, and the yards, welders and designers needed to build it cannot be summoned at short notice. That is why the money must be found now, not once the shooting starts.

The merchant fleet is also key

Warships alone, though, have never been the whole story. The surface warships of the Task Force during the Falklands War depended on civilian ships requisitioned into service — Ships Taken Up From Trade, or STUFT — including the Atlantic Conveyor, which was lost to an Exocet missile attack. Britain has needed that kind of depth before: in the Second World War, ships sunk equalled half the pre-war merchant fleet. We survived only because shipyards could replace merchant losses as fast as the German U-boats inflicted them. That replacement capacity is exactly what we have since let disappear.

The UK’s merchant fleet has shrunk sharply in recent years, and largely for the same reason: government neglect. The UK Ship Register peaked in 2017 at around 16 million gross tonnes. By the end of 2025 it stood at 8.7 million — down 12% in a single year alone — and Britain had fallen to 31st in the world league table of trading fleets, from 24th just two years earlier. Government disinterest and a disadvantageous tax regime are mostly to blame.

Where have all those ships gone? Many joined the registers of British Overseas Territories — lower taxes, while not forfeiting protection from the Royal Navy. The Bahamas — which share the sovereign as an independent nation, like Australia, Canada and New Zealand — have 61 million tons on their register. The Royal Navy is still expected to protect them — with a fleet that keeps getting smaller. Did anyone allow for global demand on the Royal Navy’s time before they reduced it to the rump of a once world-admired fleet?

The capacity to build the ships has gone the same way. We built ships fast during World War II, but it was the Americans who pioneered the methods used for the mass production of the Liberty ship — a British design, adopted and perfected by them. After the war, we did not adopt those methods. The busiest shipyards on the planet today are in the Far East. We build only special-role ships: ferries, scientific research vessels, warships.

Fortunately, it’s not too late to reverse the situation. AI-driven technology offers an opportunity. South Korea is already racing ahead on this front, investing hundreds of millions in AI-powered ‘smart shipyards.’ If Britain is serious about rebuilding shipbuilding capacity, it will need to match that investment. Simply hoping that AI will close the gap on its own is not enough. In short, it will take a government willing to invest in the Navy, the merchant fleet, and the shipbuilding technology that could rebuild both.

Adrian Hill served in the Commonwealth Relations Office’s defence department during Confrontation, and ran the British commercial department in Seoul from 1986 to 1989.