Are European warships unreliable?
This week there has been a big scandal in the Danish defense. On 9 March, the Danish frigate Iver Huitfeldt was attacked by Houthi drones in the Red Sea, and they successfully managed to down four UAVs. This was originally touted in the Danish press as a big success, and the military command commended the soldiers for their professionalism. But then, three weeks later, it came out that the actual story was far from impressive: vital systems on board the frigate had malfunctioned during the encounter, and for 30 minutes the ship was unable to launch air defense missiles.
The exact technical details are not publicly known, but they are also not important for understanding the severity of the problem. Something in the interface between the ship’s APAR radar, the combat information system, and the sea sparrow missile launch system failed, and the crew needed to reboot some computers to make it work again. This took about half an hour, and in that time the ship’s only defense was the deck gun. Unfortunately, it turned out that the ammunition for the deck gun was of older date, and a significant number of the rounds exploded right after leaving the barrel instead of in the vicinity of the target.
The frigate managed to defend itself and got through the encounter without damages, but it was obviously a deeply unsatisfying situation. It is easy to see how things could have gone badly. If the ship had been under attack from missiles instead of slow UAVs, it is far from certain that they would have made it without getting hit.
A few days after the incident, the commanding officer of Iver Huitfeldt send a signal – which is a kind of old-fashioned military type of email – to the military authorities in Denmark and the American task group commander where he complained about the situation. His anger was tangible just from reading the signal.
The military dimension of the situation was bad enough, but on top of that the whole affair was also mismanaged in the defense command and the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Defense. My guess is that someone thought it would be better if this situation did not get too much public attention, but that is just guessing on my part. In any case, nobody informed the defense minister about the problem, and he was far from pleased when he was confronted by a journalist who had somehow gotten his hands on the classified signal from the frigate’s commanding officer. The chief of defense was sacked as a result.
The situation was serious. Vital self-defense systems must be robust enough to be trustworthy, and it is just not good enough that the frigate’s only air defense missiles were unusable for 30 minutes while the ship was operating in an area with a high air threat. And what’s worse, it appears that the crew only learned about the malfunction because they needed to use the missiles. So they might’ve been out of order for a long time before that.
When is a ship reliable?
This may be a good opportunity to reflect a bit on what it means that a system is reliable, because I think it’s a topic that is often misunderstood. We often have unrealistic expectations about reliability, and it is assumed that if a ship has a certain system, then that system works. So that gives the idea that we can take a list of the systems on a warship, and that will give an accurate picture of what the warship is capable of.
This line of reasoning was apparent in some of the comments I got to my video about why maritime drones are such a big problem for the Russian Black Sea fleet. Some people argued that I was too pessimistic about the prospects that a western Navy would be able to handle this threat, because they have this or that system that can counter an incoming speedboat.
But the problem is that things never work perfectly. Murphy is always at play. It is an accepted truth in modern accident investigation theory that we always have to understand ships as platforms in some state of brokenness. There has never been a ship where everything worked all the time, and there never will be. It will always be the case that some systems on a ship are working while others are out of order or partially degraded. On a good day, maybe 80 or 90 percent of the systems on a ship will be working as intended, and on a bad day there might only be 50 or 60 percent capability.
The way to create reliability is to accept this reality, that you can never expect all systems on a warship to work at any given time. So you use the “Swiss cheese” method to create reliability. Each system is to be considered like a slice of cheese with big holes in it, and the way to cover all the holes is to put enough slices on top of each other. In other words, you need redundant systems to create reliability.
Warships bought on a budget
And this is where the incident with the Danish frigate in the Red Sea is a cause of concern about the state of European warships in general. A few weeks earlier, a German frigate was also in a situation in the Red Sea where they were unable to engage with their air defense missiles. That turned out to be a partly good thing, because the German warship had mistakenly identified an American drone as a threat and tried to shoot it down, but the drone survived because the guidance system for the missiles didn’t work.
Are we in a situation where many warships are generally too unreliable? I think it is a concern whether the many years of budget austerity have caused navies to build large warships with too few redundant systems – and too few slices of Swiss cheese to cover the holes.