The scrapped warship that makes a mockery of the British navy

 In 35 years at sea, HMS Iron Duke only ever fired her guns in anger a handful of times. She did so to hit a gun battery during the war against Colonel Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, and before that while seizing drugs in the Caribbean in 2009.

For a Type 23 frigate, designed in the 1980s to take on the might of the Soviet navy, it was small-scale stuff. But at a time when the Cold War seemed long over, it was a reminder that a well-resourced navy still had its uses.

Yet for many years during those more peaceful times, that reminder was ignored. Rather than building replacements for the 15-strong Type 23 fleet, each of which had an intended 18-year lifespan, the order books were kept empty. That meant frigates such as the Iron Duke, which launched in 1991, were kept at sea long past their use-by date.

Last week, it was revealed that the ship had quietly been withdrawn from service in October – despite having had an almost five-year, £103m refit completed in 2023 which was meant to keep her going. At a time of renewed tensions with Moscow and conflict with Iran, it leaves the Navy with just five operational frigates, most also showing signs of wear and tear.

The news raises fresh doubts about Britain’s war readiness, following the furore over the tardy deployment of the destroyer HMS Dragon to Cyprus after Iranian drones attacked a British base there. Other flagship naval vessels, such as the destroyer HMS Daring, have languished in dock for years undergoing repairs, prompting fears from military chiefs that Britain is incapable of defending itself from a Russian attack.

For HMS Iron Duke, there are particularly awkward questions being asked about why a ship now bound for the decommissioning yard had more than £100m worth of taxpayers’ money spent on her just years beforehand. Yet, the truth is the vessel should have been phased out well before that work took place.

“The Type 23s were one of the best ships of their time, but they were only designed with an 18-year life – nobody anticipated running them for twice that time,” says Francis Tusa, editor of the newsletter Defence Analysis. He likens the Iron Duke’s costly final years to an elderly car that needs ever more expensive repairs to keep her going.

“An ancient car requires a lot of maintenance once it’s got hundreds of thousands of miles on the clock – plus if it’s really old, spare parts also get hard to find. A ship is the same.”

Indeed, the Iron Duke itself may now be used as spare parts, according to Chris Parry, a retired rear admiral and former government adviser. He believes she has been decommissioned to be “cannibalised” to maintain the operability of her ageing sister ships, who are now back to their original Cold War task of countering threats from Russian submarines in the north-east Atlantic.

It is there where the Vanguard submarines operating Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent usually lurk. The frigates’ job is to protect the Vanguards, using sonar that can detect enemy subs from up to 60 miles away.

“The Navy is drawing its horns in to focus on the essentials, which is maintaining the integrity of the strategic nuclear deterrent,” Parry says. “I suspect that equipment on Iron Duke, along with the specialist and technical ratings, will be shifted to the other frigates so they can stay on patrol.”

He adds: “Sadly, we took a big risk by not replacing these frigates for 25 years, and now they’re just getting clapped out. Nobody would keep a used car this long, would they?”

The last of the Type 23s was ordered in 1996, and it took another 21 years for modern replacements to be commissioned. Given their versatility (frigates are considered to be workhorses of the fleet), that has left the Navy ever more exposed. The loss of Iron Duke also means one fewer ship of her kind available for the UK Carrier Strike Group, which has been patrolling in the North Atlantic this year with Nato partners. At best, the Navy might now be able to assign only a single frigate to the group at any one time, increasing Britain’s reliance on support from allies.

HMS Iron Duke was first confined to docks in 2017 because of problems with corrosion to the hull – a standard problem for well-travelled warships. The refit, also involving weapons upgrades and extensive refurbishment, was part of the Navy’s Lifex, or life extension programme, designed to keep all her frigates going for another five years or more.

As one of the oldest Type 23s still in service, however, the Iron Duke’s refit was more complex than most, requiring some 1.7 million hours of labour. “A significant element of it was massive amounts of steel work, riveting and strengthening,” says Tusa. The ship did not return to sea until 2023, when she began monitoring Russian naval activity off Britain’s shores. In 2024, she followed the Russian spy ship Yantar in British waters, and last year Iron Duke tracked a Russian submarine, Novorossiysk, that surfaced in the Channel.

The first hint that Iron Duke’s sailing days were over came in November, when Luke Pollard, a defence minister, said that a further upgrade programme would no longer be going ahead. “Given the platform’s remaining service life, the time required to complete the conversion, and competing operational priorities, the benefits of proceeding did not justify the additional cost or extended period out of service,” he said.

But it was not until this week that the website Navy Lookout revealed that the ship was being stripped of her weapons and sensors, despite no official decommissioning announcement. A blistering commentary in Navy Lookout described it as “a tale of huge financial waste”.

“It reflects a broader failure to align refit expenditure with sustainable crewing, equipment fit and realistic service-life projections,” the commentary added. “Investing over a hundred million pounds in a hull that ultimately delivered less than a year and a half of front-line service, and then withdrawing her without ceremony, is another dismal episode in the RN’s recent history. The collective failure to order a single new frigate between 1996 and 2017 is having disastrous consequences.”

So why were no new frigates ordered in that time? “Successive governments continued to take the post-Cold War peace dividend, long after that dividend was no longer there,” says Gerry Northwood, a former Navy captain. “They failed to appreciate that to have a navy, you actually have to build new ships to replace old ones.”

That, says Tusa, left naval chiefs grappling with ever more complex decisions about which frigates to keep repairing, dilemmas they will continue to face for years to come.

“Some of the Type 23’s key parts may have been made by companies that have either disappeared or have not produced them for decades,” he says. “To get those reordered may take years.”

By the time such repairs are complete, defence priorities may also have changed. When the Iron Duke’s refit began in 2019, for example, few would likely have envisaged Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or Donald Trump’s drawdown of America’s role in Europe’s defence.

Nor, though, is it necessarily wise to splash out on brand-new naval fleets when the future threat is unclear, says Prof Kevin Rowlands, journal editor of the Royal United Services Institute. He points out that during times of relative peace, postponing such decisions can seem sensible. Until a decade ago, for example, the main threats Britain seemed to face were insurgencies in the deserts and mountains of the Middle East rather than conventional warfare at sea.

“There is no point in spending cash when there is no perceived threat, as it’s hard to work out what you should be focusing money on,” he says. “Also, with the pace of technological change now, do you really want ships that were designed the decade before?”

Against that, however, is the time lag in building a new fleet. Constructing and sea-trialling a new frigate, for example, can take five to 10 years. The Conservatives signed the contracts for the first of the planned replacement fleet of Type 26 and Type 32 frigates (a lighter variant) in 2017. But they may not be operational until 2028 at the earliest. Meanwhile, the remaining Type 23s will become ever more decrepit: Tusa believes at least one more will soon be withdrawn from service.

“It’s quite depressing,” he adds. “The Royal Navy used to be world leading; now it’s no longer a global player.”

A Royal Navy spokesperson said: “The Royal Navy keeps planned out-of-service dates under continual review as part of routine force planning, balancing operational requirements and affordability. Any decommissioning decisions will be announced in the usual way.

“Through the strategic defence review, we are building a new hybrid Navy – investing in world-class submarines and cutting-edge warships, transforming our aircraft carriers, and introducing autonomous vessels to patrol the North Atlantic and beyond.”

Rowland says it may now be time to “ruthlessly prioritise and maintain strategic discipline”, accepting that the Navy’s main job is protecting Nato’s maritime backyard.

“If the most pressing threat is Russia and the High North, then that’s what we need to do,” he adds. “We don’t have the luxury to deal with other issues, as we don’t have the mass and depth of force.”

That could spell an end to long-standing shows of strength – be it anti-drug patrols in the Caribbean, sailing ships through the Taiwan Strait, or diplomatic visits to far-flung capitals. Just as the sun has long set on the British Empire, so now has time – and money – run out for the Navy that helped create it.