FRIGATES STEPPING-UP

Modern frigates are now being equipped with greater capacity to deliver ‘high end’ force protection.

- Dr Lee Willett

The inaugural deployment in 2021 of the UK Royal Navy’s (RN’s) Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group (CSG) will see HMS Queen Elizabeth and its various escorts conduct operations, exercises, and diplomatic engagement around the world, from the Mediterranean Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and into the Pacific.

Precise details of both the deployment and the contributors to the CSG remain to be confirmed. However, it is likely that the CSG will include, at different stages of the deployment, international participants alongside the presence of RN assets such as Type 45 air-defence destroyers and anti-submarine warfare (ASW)-capable Type 23 frigates.

In October 2018, the UK government announced that the Royal Netherlands Navy (RNLN) would be contributing to the HMS Queen Elizabeth CSG’s maiden deployment. As of January 2020, precise details of what this contribution might be – such as which ship might participate, where, and in what role – remain to be confirmed. However, one of the RNLN’s four De Zeven Provincien air-defence and command frigates (LCFs) would be a likely candidate, and would certainly fit with the operational and capability requirements for escorting a carrier. With strategic tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Gulf, and the South China Sea enduring, a capable air-defence platform such as an RNLN LCF would add much value for a CSG.

“The original operational analysis for the UK carrier group required three guided-missile destroyer (DDG) platforms for air-defence protection, given the expected level of risk that was acceptable, against the threat posed,” Professor Peter Roberts, Director Military Sciences at the London-based think-tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told