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rasoulallahbinbadisassalacerhso  wefaqdev iktab
السبت, 13 تشرين2/نوفمبر 2021 09:53

Reflections on the Royal Navy’s Indo-Pacific engagement

كتبه  By Dr Euan Graham
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The deployment of the UK-led Carrier Strike Group to the Indo-Pacific has been an important showcase of ‘Global Britain’ for both regional and British audiences. Euan Graham assesses the operational lessons and long-term legacy of the deployment.

Last week, the UK-led Carrier Strike Group (CSG21) paid a brief port call to Singapore on its homebound journey to Portsmouth. After a five-month deployment as far as Japan and Guam (twice), an exercise with the Indian Navy this week is likely to call time on its regional engagements. In a momentous year for the UK’s Indo-Pacific defence profile, this is an opportunity to reflect more broadly on its maritime presence, apropos Global Britain and various regional policy settings via the Indo-Pacific ‘tilt’, AUKUS and the Five Power Defence Arrangements


The proposal to send a UK carrier strike group to Asia on its inaugural deployment was first floated by former Secretary of Defence Michael Fallon at the 2016 Shangri-La Dialogue. It has been long in the delivery with Brexit-inspired jitters about the UK’s commitment along the way. But since then the Royal Navy has over-delivered on expectations of a UK naval presence in the region, as part of its global re-posturing effort. CSG21’s exit from the Indian Ocean will be followed shortly by the arrival of two River-class patrol vessels that will remain forward deployed in the western Pacific for several years. They won’t count for much in the strategic balance, but as tools for defence diplomacy and regional immersion they are likely to prove their worth. Having set the bar so high in 2021, it will be imperative not to follow this year’s naval feast with famine. The intention remains to deploy a Littoral Response Group (LRG) late in 2023. Details are sketchy, but LRG (South) is likely to concentrate on the western Indian Ocean and will probably venture as far east as Singapore.  More speculatively, one consequence of AUKUS could be an Australian offer of basing access to facilitate regular deployments of UK nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) to HMAS Stirling, in Western Australia. This would do more than resurrect a lapsed Royal Navy submarine presence in the eastern Indian Ocean. If Australia settles on a British design for its future nuclear submarine requirement, the UK could play a key role in kick-starting its programme; an early offer of nuclear submariner training to the Australians would be prudent. AUKUS could further tie the UK operationally into a tripartite undersea warfare framework if the US Navy also opts to forward deploy SSNs to Australia. The Royal Navy has only seven SSNs, but it could be done. A direct UK contribution to the undersea balance in Asia would be strategically consequential, as this is one area of military capability where the US enjoys a clear lead over China, although the PLA Navy is busy closing the gaps in its anti-submarine capabilities. Hard and soft power projection Frustratingly, most Asian countries on CSG21’s itinerary remained semi-shut, owing to pandemic restrictions. This not only constrained activities onshore, but made a challenging logistics train more complicated, forcing an unscheduled deviation from Japan to Guam to undergo maintenance. This at least allowed HMS Queen Elizabeth’s crew to disembark. Logistics is king in the Indo-Pacific and has probably been the Royal Navy’s most important learning experience from this deployment. CSG21 nonetheless managed to project a mixture of British hard and soft power. The carrier and her escorts played a slick social media game, customising virtual engagement to different national audiences. The dearth of shore-based engagement had the unforeseen advantage of forcing the carrier group to concentrate on at-sea activities, culminating in a four-carrier set-piece drill, involving six navies off Okinawa. CSG21 was probably more operationally focused than would have been the case without the pandemic. As an exercise in naval diplomacy, CSG21 was primarily about tangibly showcasing ‘Global Britain’ for regional, as well as British, audiences. Viewed in perspective, however, it was just one strand in a much wider mustering of maritime power in the Indo-Pacific in 2021. The US, Japan, Australia, India, France and the UK all deployed task groups across the western Pacific this year, folding in smaller players such as Canada and New Zealand. Importantly, the strike group itself is multinational in composition, mainly from the US, but the Dutch frigate embedded within CSG21 has served as a symbolic reminder that the Royal Navy continues to cooperate closely with EU member states, even while Germany’s concurrently deployed frigate has kept its distance. Having a US Marine F-35B squadron onboard HMS Queen Elizabeth was helpful not just for bringing additional capacity, supplying the majority of 18 F-35Bs onboard, but as an opportunity for the RAF pilots to learn from the Marines given their greater experience with the aircraft, including optimising its potential as a networked sensor. On that front, the experimental deployment of the Royal Navy’s Crowsnest airborne early warning system, on HMS Queen Elizabeth’s Merlin helicopters, appears to have fallen below expectations. That is not surprising given that Crowsnest was rushed into service for the CSG21 deployment. One solution could be simply to buy more F-35Bs. The US Marines were no bar to exercising with most countries in the region, including Singapore. But their presence onboard might have been a contributing factor behind the decision to keep the carrier out of this month’s Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) exercise, owing to Malaysian sensitivities. Offloading US Marine aircraft and crew from the carrier would have been logistically burdensome given Covid-related restrictions. Still, the fact that the UK did not allocate any aircraft for the FPDA exercise, even though a Type-45 destroyer was assigned, feels like a missed opportunity in the FPDA’s 50th anniversary year, given that the carrier was in the area. The impending arrival of the patrol vessels, both transiting via the Pacific, is therefore well timed. Although eclipsed in scale by CSG21, they will do much to demonstrate ‘persistence’ to the UK’s defence presence, long after 2021. The Royal Navy-run Sembawang facility in Singapore will serve as their primary logistics hub, but the vessels are likely to spend the bulk of their time traversing the western Pacific as far north as Japan, and Australia and the southwest Pacific to the south. In Southeast Asia, they will support the FPDA and add a naval component to complement the UK’s longstanding terrestrial presence in Brunei, via the Gurkha garrison. Eventually, the plan is to upgrade the patrol vessels to Type-31 frigates. Risk mitigation As the wild-card regional strategic development of 2021, AUKUS remains vague in outline but has clear potential to flesh out the security and defence-industrial dimensions of the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt. If Australia were to opt for a British SSN design, UK-listed firms could be the prime contractors for the two highest-value defence projects in Australia’s history – the other programme being the future frigate, based on the Type-26 design. Equally, AUKUS has some potential to be a poison pill. If Washington opts to furnish Canberra with a US SSN design, despite Australia’s initial interest in the Astute-class, this could puncture Britain’s enthusiasm for the tilt. Australia’s future submarine programme may be years away from sinking ships, but it has already sunk the hopes of France, Japan, Germany and Sweden. To avoid a similar fate, it is important that the Royal Navy and British government understand and mitigate that risk as far as possible, while still aiming to demonstrate that partnering with the UK offers defence benefits that go significantly beyond delivering on contractual obligations.

Link : https://www.iiss.org/blogs/analysis/2021/10/reflections-on-the-royal-navys-indo-pacific-engagement

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