The 14,000-ton vessels can intercept ballistic warheads in space and strike targets hundreds of miles inland.
Japan is in the middle of building one of the most formidable warships of the modern era. A step forward based on tried-and-tested US systems, I have no doubt that it will be an excellent air defence platform. And yet, through gritted teeth, I’m going to argue that our decision not to attempt anything like it is the right one, provided – and this is the clincher – we properly fund what we’re doing instead. Which at the moment we are not doing.
First, the Japanese ship. Whether they end up being called destroyers or cruisers, Japan’s two planned Aegis System Equipped Vessels (ASEVs) are big ships. At 190m long and 14,000-16,000 tons displacement, they are longer and heavier than an American Arleigh Burke Flight III and will dwarf our current Type 45 destroyers, which come in at around 8,500 tons full load.
Only the now retiring American Ticonderoga-class cruisers (in terms of VLS cells, anyway) and China’s Type 055 Renhai-class sit in the same bracket. In many respects, the ASEV out-guns both. Each Japanese ship will have 128 vertical launch cells and it looks like they will be loaded with SM-3 Block IIA interceptors that intercept ballistic missile warheads in space plus SM-6 for everything from hypersonic glide vehicles downwards – including other ships. I’d also expect the ASEVs to carry the potent Tomahawk cruise missile for long-range land attack.
That combination of exo-atmospheric defence, advanced air defence, maritime and deep strike in one hull is as good as it gets, albeit eye-wateringly expensive. A single SM-3 can cost in excess of $25m (£19m) on its own. Sitting above it all is the SPY-7 radar, four fixed arrays each over four metres tall, with predictions suggesting this latest iteration of the SPY family will have up to five times the tracking performance of the radars on Japan’s existing Aegis destroyers. As a radar, the SPY family has been leading the way since its acceptance into active service in the 80s, and its ability to mesh with the Aegis command system and SM Standard Missiles, and continuously update all three, is what has kept the US navy’s Arleigh Burke destroyers – and their equivalents in sensible navies like South Korea, Australia and Japan – ahead of the pack all these years.
Now the part that makes everyone in Whitehall wince. The first ASEV was laid down in Nagasaki in July 2025 and will commission in March 2028. Keel laying to in-service in under three years, at a unit cost of roughly £2bn per hull. We could not get close to either of those figures.
The ships are being built for a clearly stated reason: they are the sea-based replacement for Japan’s cancelled Aegis Ashore programme, built to hold the ballistic missile-defence line against North Korea and, increasingly, China. But there is a downside – Japan is building only two. The rule of three – one ship on task, one working up or in transit, one in maintenance – is as close to an immutable law as anything in naval planning. See the stress this is placing on US carriers just now as a live example. With two hulls, there will be times when neither is available. The other law is that even the best ship ever built can only be in one place at a time, and sometimes that place has to be a dry dock.
This is where the divergence with our own path becomes interesting, because the ASEV is what the Type 83 – the planned successor to the Type 45 destroyer – could have been. Except it wouldn’t have been. Ours would have been smaller, with fewer missile cells, less capable missiles in them, a less capable radar and it would have cost more – probably £3bn apiece, money we simply do not have. Or anyway we choose not to have it – it is, after all, less than 1 per cent of a single year’s welfare bill. More on that later.
We would have planned for six and ended up with four. They would have been late and riddled with the “fitted for but not with” curse that has haunted British warships for decades. We have form here. Building two strike carriers to take stealth jets was the right decision for an ocean-going navy protecting an island nation. Nearly everything we have done thereafter has been half-baked, and there are those who would argue that even the carriers were not done properly. This is heresy from a retired destroyer man, but part of me is glad we’re not even trying on new destroyers.
So what does a destroyer or cruiser actually give you that nothing else can? In outline, two things: magazine depth and a big, powerful radar for early detection and classification of small, multiple, fast-moving objects (unless these are below the horizon from the ship, as will probably be the case with drones, cruise missiles etc).
Take magazine depth first. Two Japanese cruisers (assuming both are at sea, operational and all tubes are full) equal 256 missiles. If our newly emerging unmanned or lean-manned Type 91 missile sloop has 32 cells (this hasn’t been determined yet, but to me this is the logical number) then we would need just eight to equal the Japanese cell count. Unless we make these things out of gold (always possible in UK defence – particularly if the priority is to create industrial jobs rather than weapons) then even eight should come in at a fraction of the cost.
Culled from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
