R686 wrote:I don't see it as a wasted space and certantly not a replacement for your tanker & multi stores replenishment capabilty. More of additional capabilty once the Bays retire. They can bring a lot of capabilty for your minor war vessels and HADR. I imagine once things fall into place with the CV your AOR's should be kept pretty busy with the CBG.
Or it could be seen as a duplication of a capability, which results in wasted resources.
R686 wrote:
Well unfortunatly you don't have the assets like the United States nor the manpower or the budget, untill you have a budget that has all assets catered for continuously I can see a future need for multi role ship even in a Navy with global commitment such as the UK
No, the study in question directly focused on the Royal Navy. It found that for a small navy, such as the Royal Netherlands Navy, a multipurpose replenishment vessel was the most efficient option. For example the dutch only have one logistics vessel, so they have no choice but to make it multipurpose.
For the smaller navy making the auxiliaries multipurpose offers extra capabilities, at little extra financial cost, but rather at the expense of reducing the primary capability. This is OK because their logistical needs are not so demanding.
For the larger navy, there are much higher performance demands on the logistical fleet, and as such reducing the primary capability becomes unacceptable. The extra cost of building a new platform is offset by the gains in performance and efficiency. The multi-role ship is therefore not a true replacement of single role vessels as it must always compromise some performance aspects.
We may not be the US navy, but we still have a large fleet, which a disproportionately large logistical fleet that we place high performance demands on. When the performance demands are high that compromise costs a lot more than than building specialist platforms which is why we are removing our multipurpose replenishment ships and building brand new massive specialist ships in the search of greater efficiency.
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Navys by major fleet size
_______________________________________________
Rank | Country | Escorts | Logistcs
| | > 4,000 t | Ships
_______|_______________|____________|__________
1st | United States | 84 | 32
2nd | China | 42 | 14
3rd | Japan | 38 | 5
4th | Russia | 21 | 3
5th | Taiwan | 20 | 0
6th | United Kingdom| 19 | 10
7th | India | 18 | 3
8th | Canada | 15 | 3
9th | France | 13 | 3
10th | Korea (South) | 9 | 6
11th | Germany | 7 | 3
12th | Italy | 5 | 2
13th | Spain | 5 |
14th | Denmark | 5 |
15th | Australia | 4 |
16th | Chile | 4 |
17th | Netherlands | 4 |
18th | Brazil | 3 |
19th | Romania | 3 |
20th | Saudi Arabia | 3 |
21st | Egypt | 2 |
22nd | Thailand | 2 |
23rd | Pakistan | 1 |
24th | Morocco | 1 |
25th | Peru | 1 |