Sky Views: Tanker crisis requires decisive action on Iran or UK will be seen as soft target
Sunday 21 July 2019 08:46, UK
By Deborah Haynes, foreign affairs editor
The seizure of a British-flagged tanker by Iran was an accident waiting to happen.
Not only does the move expose Britain's limitations in defending its interests after decades of cuts to the military, it also suggests the lack of a coherent strategy to deal with the crisis in the Gulf at a time when the UK government is effectively leaderless.
"They [Tehran] said they'd grab a tanker and they did. We look completely daft," a defence source told me on Saturday.
London's desire to de-escalate tensions in the region is well intended - it wants to defuse the chances of a conflict and to salvage a nuclear deal with Iran and other world powers that the United States has unilaterally ditched.
But this position has become increasingly at odds with a series of escalatory steps by Tehran over the past two months.
This includes a threat to target British ships in the Gulf following the capture of an Iranian tanker off the coast of Gibraltar at the start of the month by local authorities, assisted by the Royal Marines.
In response, Britain belatedly sped up the deployment of a second major warship to the Gulf - HMS Duncan - and said a third major vessel will be dispatched in the coming weeks.
But it has not sent anywhere near enough military hardware with sufficient haste to deter Iranian fast boats from targeting British-linked ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
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This has left some within the Ministry of Defence feeling frustrated because a range of military options had been drawn up, just not green-lighted, according to a second source.
The absence of an empowered prime minister may well have rendered any kind of decisive action on Iran, such as increased military force or a shift in policy, much harder.
Theresa May will imminently hand over to a new leader - almost certainly Boris Johnson.
Another factor looming large over all response options must be the reality that the Royal Navy no longer has sufficient warships to dedicate to escorting maritime traffic through the Gulf and at the same time maintain its other commitments around the world.
I know such an operation would be done as part of an alliance but it is troubling that a maritime nation like the UK, which is also a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, is no longer able to offer even the semblance of a sovereign capability to protect its interests at sea.
To offer you a sense of this contraction: in the 1980s, when Britain last helped to provide escorts to tankers in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war, the Royal Navy had well over 40 frigates and more than a dozen destroyers.
Fast forward to today and the force stands on paper as 13 frigates and six destroyers, though not all are in working order, with a fully-manned crew of sailors and sufficient weapons and spare parts to be able to operate effectively.
This did not happen by chance.
The degradation of the Royal Navy and the rest of the armed forces has been a political choice since the end of the Cold War.
Mrs May has moved to start re-growing capability and investing in new technologies but this will take time, which is a luxury we do not have when it comes to the Gulf crisis.
This places the UK in a particularly vulnerable position.
Defence experts have warned for years that the moment when Britain finally acknowledges what some see as a self-inflicted act of national vandalism (in terms of cost-saving cuts to the military) will be when we suffer a defeat or catastrophic failure on the international stage.
Could the seizure of the Stena Impero tanker be that wake-up call?
HMS Montrose, the Type 23 frigate permanently based in Bahrain, has been doing the best it can to improve maritime security to UK shipping in the region.
But it is one ship compared with up to 30 British-flagged vessels that operate in the Gulf on any given day.
It is a challenge ideally suited for maritime patrol aircraft to ease the strain on warships by providing a much wider intelligence picture from the air on what vessels are in the area.
Unfortunately the UK still does not have any of these planes in operation after taking a pause on that capability back in 2010 under David Cameron's coalition government to save money.
Of course, the UK can rely on its allies and the United States has maritime surveillance aircraft in the Gulf, but questions will be asked about how the government allowed a British-flagged vessel to be taken despite specific warnings of exactly that threat.
All is not lost.
Defence experts have warned for years that the moment when Britain finally acknowledges what some see as a self-inflicted act of national vandalism (in terms of cost-saving cuts to the military) will be when we suffer a defeat or catastrophic failure on the international stage.
Longer term, let the limitations the Gulf crisis has exposed in Britain's defences prompt the next prime minister to invest sufficient money, strategic thought and innovation into rebuilding the armed forces so the UK is not caught short again.
More immediately, defence chiefs need to be empowered by their political leaders to adopt a stronger stance on Iran.
They still command one of the most capable militaries on the planet despite the shortfalls.
Now is the time for decisive action to secure the release of this stricken tanker and move forward with a US-led plan to create a coalition of navies to protect all commercial ships from the Iranian threat.
A failure to act will cement Iran's opinion of the UK as a soft target and ensure British calls for de-escalation in the Gulf continue to go unheeded.
Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.
Previously on Sky Views: Adam Boulton - Scandal-free, a devil for detail - things to like, or respect, about Theresa May