With Donald Trump’s noisy war on Iran about to enter its third month, it can be easy to forget that another conflict is going on much closer to Britain’s shores. Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is creeping towards a grim milestone of its own: by the beginning of June, it will have gone on for longer than the First World War. Today, Navy chief Sir Gwyn Jenkins issued a timely reminder that the danger posed by Moscow extended far beyond eastern Europe. ‘Russia remains the gravest threat to our security,’ he warned.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank in London, Jenkins, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, revealed that incursions by Russian ships and submarines into British waters had jumped by almost a third in the last two years. Last year alone, he added, the Royal Navy was forced to respond to Russian ships entering British waters ‘dozens of times’. Jenkins named Russia’s investment in its Northern Fleet submarine programme as the thing that ‘concerns me the most’.
Jenkins is not the first defence official this week to warn that the threat from Russia is growing more acute
At the beginning of the month, Defence Secretary John Healey revealed that a Royal Navy warship and RAF aircraft had spent weeks tracking one Russian akula-class attack submarine and two spy submarines through the North Sea. The three submarines had spent time over critical British cables and pipelines. Referencing this event in his speech, Jenkins said: ‘While the world’s gaze was fixed on the Middle East, this kind of activity is something I have been warning about for some time.’ ‘All the signs suggest the pattern of behaviour by Moscow will only worsen further in future,’ he added.
Jenkins was speaking to outline his vision for a ‘hybrid navy’ and his plan to broaden Britain’s naval capabilities through the increased use of drones and collaboration with northern European allies such as Norway. The first underwater drones will be sent into the North Atlantic to ‘detect and monitor hostile activity’ later this year as part of the Navy’s Atlantic Bastion programme, he said. Jenkins also announced that the Navy had recently received 20 uncrewed boats, bought from the British company Kraken Technologies through a contract worth £12.3 million, which would be used by the Royal Marines for training and operations.
Atlantic Bastion is the Navy’s response to the surge in Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic. Moscow’s Northern Fleet, to which the three submarines found in British waters earlier this year belong, is based out of Murmansk on Russia’s northern coast. It is home to roughly two-thirds of the Russian Navy’s nuclear-powered ships, including at least 23 submarines, some of which carry weapons reportedly capable of sending missiles over the North Pole to America. Thanks to the fact that the waters around Murmansk don’t freeze in winter, the Northern Fleet has year-round access to the Arctic and North Atlantic.
Jenkins is not the only defence official to warn this week that the threat from Russia is growing more acute. Giving evidence in front of the joint committee on the National Security Strategy, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen agreed with the panel that warnings that Russia could attack Nato by 2035 were increasing the risk of Moscow striking early to maintain the element of surprise. Robertson, Tony Blair’s former defence secretary and ex-Nato chief, said: ‘It would certainly be a temptation, I would have thought, in the Kremlin, to do it.’ He added: ‘ I think we should be very wary, therefore, of the way in which we are vulnerable in both our critical national infrastructure and in our military as well.’
Jenkins and Robertson’s warnings come amid growing frustration over the government’s ongoing delay in publishing the Defence Investment Plan, originally meant to be released last autumn. Keir Starmer has pledged to raise defence spending to meet Nato’s target of 5 per cent of GDP by the next parliament, although he has, so far, failed to outline how this will happen.
The need to boost Britain’s defence spending has taken on a new urgency in military circles following Trump’s repeated outbursts criticising the Nato alliance and Britain and its Navy in particular. Some officials believe that America can no longer be relied upon to come to the aid of the UK and Europe were we to end up in a wider conflict with Russia. Should Britain and its European allies be forced to confront Russia’s northern fleet in the Atlantic without US help, some have expressed concern that Moscow’s ships and submarines would prove difficult to repel.
Jenkins’s vision for a leaner, more lethal ‘hybrid navy’ is a bold one. But with the Navy in its worse shape for at least a generation – and little indication of when the much-needed boost in defence spending will come – a vision may well be all that it remains.
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