I was a warship captain and missile specialist. Here’s how we should arm the Navy

Drones haven’t really changed the world of warfare that much

Looking at Ukrainian battles with the Russians in the Black Sea and Houthi attacks on most of the world in the Red, it would be easy to imagine that warfare is now all about drones and that the era of the missile has passed. But it’s important to remember that a missile is, in the end, just a one-way-attack drone with more powerful propulsion and more sophisticated guidance. Missiles are still, in fact, very important.
We can see this in all the active combat theatres. The Ukrainians needed missiles to sink the Russian cruiser Moskva and have needed missiles in every case to down Russian aircraft and missiles. Most of their drone successes, both sea and land, have been against stationary targets. Drones have been used extensively by the Houthis but almost always together with missiles. In fact, 94 per cent of Houthi attacks over the last year have been missile and drone, or missile only. And the missiles have been far more successful in striking targets.
Against this background, then, it’s good news that the US has just overcome a major limitation of its own seagoing missile system – the inability to reload missiles into a warship while underway at sea. We’ll get on to the Mark 41 vertical launch cell shortly, but first I need to remember that most Telegraph readers aren’t former anti-air warfare officers like me and fill in some missile background.
There are two other major problems with modern missiles: complexity and cost.
The complexity isn’t a surprise, considering that making a missile intercept another missile (or a fast aircraft) is not unlike shooting down a bullet in mid-flight. Even so the necessary tech has, in theory, been available since the 1950s. The US and the Soviet Union/Russia have consistently produced cutting-edge offensive and defensive missiles in a never-ending spiral of cat and mouse … and cost.
SM-3s of the sort that were fired overland from US warships to intercept some of Iran’s latest missile barrage at Israel cost either $11 or $18 million a shot, depending on the variant. A Trident II D5 strategic missile costs between $30 and $37 million. Admittedly these are extreme examples but relatively workaday Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles – jet drones, you could call them – cost $1.87m, Royal Navy Aster 30 surface-to-air missiles cost £2.5 million and even the shorter-range Sea Ceptor costs over £1m.
Missiles are, indeed, not cheap. Drones can be, but their propulsion is often very slow and they often can’t guide themselves to hit anything but a set of fixed coordinates. They are, also, not usually built by major defence contractors and don’t involve classified tech – which probably tells you some more reasons why missiles cost a lot.
Then there’s the matter of how you launch your missiles, where there’s been a big change in recent decades. A lot of missiles used to be pointed roughly in the direction of the target before being launched, by swivelling and tilting the launcher. Then the launcher would return to position to have a fresh missile or missiles slid onto its launch rails from the magazine by automatic machinery.
Nowadays it’s almost universal practice to just fire missiles vertically up from their holders – Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells in the deck of a warship. The missile then tips over and aims itself at the target. The transition was a natural one given how long it took to load and fire the old launchers.
The last slew launcher for a big missile in the Royal Navy belonged to the venerable Sea Dart missile system. If you saw how long that took to get a missile from the magazine, up the hoist, onto the launcher beam – this involved hundreds of salt-caked micro-switches all functioning perfectly, if you were lucky – then manoeuvre the ship if the target was in your blind arcs, train the launcher and then fire you’d know why that all went out. This is time the modern missile era no longer affords us. The old slewing launchers for the smaller Sea Wolf system were perhaps even worse: sailors had to manually heave fresh rounds into those. Something in its own canister that is omnidirectional and lets you pop off any kind of missile rapidly makes enormously more sense.
As is often the case, the US led the charge when it came to this kind of technology. By the late 80s they had developed the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS), initially for their Ticonderoga-class cruisers and then the Arleigh Burke destroyers. There have been a number of other systems developed since, including the Royal Navy’s French-built Sylver VLS (from which the French-made Aster is fired), but the Mk41 is becoming ubiquitous with, at my count, 16 navies either using it or about to.
Sylver/Aster is exquisite in some respects and its selection by the Royal Navy did support some jobs in the UK as well as in France and Italy, but the Mk41 is more adaptable, reliable and carries a greater range of weapons. It is the VHS to Sylver’s Betamax – if that doesn’t date me too badly.
In terms of flexibility, the Mk41 is unrivalled. It can hold short-range surface-to-air missiles packed four to cell. To give an idea of how fast this area has moved on, my Type 23 frigate 12 years ago was then armed with 32 VLS Sea Wolf with a range of about 5 km – whites of the eyes stuff. Type 23s now have 32 VLS Sea Ceptor, which have a range roughly five times that. However, the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) fired from a Mk41 tube has a range of 50 kms. Quad-packing means that a single Arleigh Burke could carry up to 384 ESSMs in her 96 cells.
The Mk41 can also carry the SM-2 and SM-6 for air and (lower) ballistic missile defence: the SM-6 is the only weapon now available likely to defeat a hypersonic glide vehicle such as the Russian Zircon or Chinese DF-27. The Mk41 can also take the very expensive SM-3 mentioned before for (higher) ballistic missile defence beyond the atmosphere as well as Tomahawk land attack missiles, long-range surface-to-surface missiles and even ASROC anti-submarine missiles (these drop a sub-killing torpedo into the sea at range from the ship). It’s a full menu even before one gets to the weapons that Mk41 tubes could take in the future.
That we have selected this system for our two new frigate classes in favour of a homegrown option makes sense to me, as a former warship captain and missile specialist.
There was one advantage to the old Sea Dart and Sea Wolf, however. It was possible for the warship to get some more missiles from a supply ship out at sea, transferring munitions from ship to ship using an underway jackstay system which would work even in fairly rough weather. Today’s VLS reload canisters are long and heavy, and until now nobody had bothered to develop a way to refill VLS cells at sea.
This matters, because warships can refuel at sea from support ships, and take on food and other essential supplies. This means they can stay on task for long periods of time, far from friendly bases. But if they can’t rearm once they’ve shot their missiles away, they have to go off task, probably for a lengthy period. Our own HMS Diamond had this problem recently when heavily engaged in the Red Sea: she had to withdraw all the way to Gibraltar to reload. This was actually sensible as it coincided with lots of other work that was needed but the point about VLS ships needing to leave the threat area for protracted periods remains valid. 
This is the third problem and has been around since the inception of VLS. Lowering a 7.6-metre canister, weighing 2.8 tons and full of explosives, into a perfectly sized hole is demanding enough when tied up in harbour. The US Navy has been wrestling with how to do this on a moving platform since the early 90s. I don’t think it’s just happenstance that they’ve finally forced through a solution at last, having fired 770 missiles from ships and submarines in the last year. 
The ability to reload at sea is another advantage for the Mk41, then. However, when it comes to what to put in our new Royal Navy ships, some big decisions are needed now, if they are to avoid the blight of many first of class warships – empty space where weapons should be. Our Type 26 frigate, for example, needs to carry the ASROC anti-submarine missile if it’s to be an effective anti-submarine ship. It will have 48 cells dedicated to Sea Ceptors and as discussed, that is an excellent short-range system but what else will it have? The official in-service date for the FCASW surface-to-surface missile is 2028, although most indications are that this will not be met. This is our highest-end warship and we are building just eight of them. They should be packed with multiple missile types and have a long tail of replacements ready to reload. 
The announcement in 2023 that the Type 31 will be fitted with eight Mk41 cells was a welcome surprise given that it is not being designed as a ‘high-end’ warship. In the current climate, having these cells ‘fitted for but not with’ actual missiles is probably acceptable – just having the capability offers flexibility in the face of what will undoubtedly be a diverse range of tasks.
Then there’s the matter of what replaces our current Type 45 destroyers. The problem is, nobody knows what that replacement even looks like and when it will be ready, much less what missile outfit it will have.
Drones, AI, systems-of-systems and innovative solutions such as arsenal ships will all feature in this discussion and some may even be more survivable than a conventional destroyer in the worst-case scenario. But fixating on the “most dangerous course of action” is to forget that warships spend 99 per cent of their time delivering against the “most likely course of action”, specifically trying to avoid “most dangerous”.
For me, therefore, the new destroyer should still look like … a destroyer. As a bonus, get this ship right and we have a ready-made missile defence system for the UK that unlike, say, Iron Dome, can do 100 other things. This would make these ships, which will be expensive, “sellable” to the taxpayer.
Missile defence from ships also avoids another of the problems of land-based systems: local residents near the launch sites aren’t usually keen on the idea of clouds of toxic rocket exhaust and spent boosters dropping out of the sky. This is a major reason why Japan recently abandoned the idea of shore-based defences in favour of ship-based ones.
Our future destroyer should carry at least 96 VLS tubes – that is the benchmark. The Royal Navy has always been under-gunned in this respect but to do that again now, given the live test cases in how fast ships burn through ammunition, would be unforgivable.
Maybe my thinking on what the ship should look like is already dated but I do know this: the solution that is chosen will be late to the front line and the Type 45s will have to run on longer than they were designed to. This is frustrating given that the fleet is seeing the terrible consequences of doing that to the old Type 23s right now.
In sum, missiles are still very much in vogue. They will be the primary weapons of our ships, aircraft, and submarines (attack and deterrent) in peace and war for decades to come. Drones will complement them over time, but not usurp. The Royal Navy adopting the ubiquitous Mk41 system mitigates the mind-boggling complexity of missilery and now, the inability to reload them at sea. It also means we can reload our ships from allies should the need arrive before our planned new ammunition-resupply ships do – we don’t have any of those right now.
So the way is clear. All we need now is an increase in funding and a robust procurement and logistics solution to support it (also more money). Investing in missiles is expensive but less so than fighting wars or losing them because you didn’t.
It’s long been predicted that even the premier-league Type 26 frigate will enter service with empty Mk41 tubes, not just the second-tier Type 31. We really don’t need to wait for a Defence Review to tell us that that’s even less acceptable now than it was before the current wars.
Commander Tom Sharpe served for 27 years in the Royal Navy and commanded four different ships including the frigate HMS St Albans. He trained as a specialist anti-air warfare officer