You knew that the Royal Navy is in trouble. You’ve heard that even the mighty US Navy has its problems. What you probably haven’t yet heard is that the utterly vital auxiliary support fleets, essential for both these navies to operate, are in an even worse mess.

First, there’s the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA). Formed in 1905 and trusted ever since with the replenishment of the Royal Navy at sea – and other tasks nowadays, including amphibious warfare and mine countermeasures – the RFA finds itself unable to continue under current conditions and 79 per cent of its officers have voted to go on strike. They can do this as they are civilian merchant seamen, not servicemen and women of the Royal Navy.

This is not the first time. In 2000 the RFA ratings (the ordinary non-officer sailors) took strike action over pay and leave disparity with their officers. This was dealt with by keeping them at sea where they aren’t allowed to go on strike. At the time this led me to wonder if there has ever been a worse way to deal with an issue.

In 2010 there was a minor strike over pay and in 2019 they got close but it was averted. In other words, this is a problem that has been brewing for some time.

In essence, the RFA over the last 10 years or so has seen tasking increase and pay (in real terms) decrease. I spent many years at sea in the Royal Navy suffering from the same squeeze and we would often muse how long this could be sustained.

Despite this, both the RN and RFA consistently deliver on operations – as proudly trumpeted by various Secretaries of State – but eventually, as hull and crew numbers inexorably attenuate to zero, morale follows and eventually something has to give. In the case of the RFA, we are at that moment.

The RFA has 13 ships and around 1700 sailors to support them. Their core task is to provide at-sea logistical support to the Royal Navy. The RFA provides tankers from which His Majesty’s warships can fill up, and supply ships from which they can get munitions, food and other vital supplies. Without them you are reliant on host nation support or other navies, neither of which are guaranteed. One can argue that without the RFA, the RN no longer has its centuries old, global, expeditionary, blue water status – so important to a major island nation.

The RFA fleet can be broken into four groups. First the tankers, or ‘oilers’ used for transferring fuel at sea to Naval vessels. There are six of these. Three are now in what’s optimistically called Extended Readiness due to crew shortages; the two older Wave-class ships and one of the brand new Tide class. So the RFA is 50 per cent down on its core task.

Second is the sole Fleet Solid Support Ship RFA Fort Victoria, also at ‘extended readiness’. She was supposed to be getting ready for next year’s Carrier Strike Group deployment but she isn’t. There are plenty who think she never will but because she is a single point of failure for independent Carrier Strike Ops and is on the verge of failing, no one dares say so. Given that her absence was at the centre of the discussion as to whether or not we could send a carrier to the Red Sea, you can see why. Three more solid support ships are planned but the first will not be available for many years because we are buying them from a long-dead shipyard in an attempt at a social regeneration project for Belfast. How they will be crewed is unknown.

Third, there are three Bay class amphibious assault ships. The original idea was that these ships would do a somewhat safer job than the RN’s own amphibious ships. They would be the follow-on element, landing the second wave of amphibious forces after the navy proper had delivered the first wave.

This doesn’t have to mean storming the beach, something that many consider unlikely these days. It can also mean delivering large quantities of aid and food to, say, Gaza, should that ever be needed. It’s worth noting that with both the Royal Navy’s own amphibious assault ships in ‘extended readiness’, if the RFA go on strike and the Bay class ships are not given operational exemptions (i.e. ordered not to strike) then the UK is without an amphibious capability.

There are three of these vessels. RFA Mounts Bay is alongside in Falmouth. Lyme Bay is with RFA Argus (the RFA casualty receiving ship) as part of the Littoral Response Group (LRG) now in the Indian Ocean picking up what’s left of that deployment having been in the Eastern Med on important but largely unnoticed work since late last year. The third is Cardigan Bay who has been detached from her minehunter command duties in the Persian Gulf and is possibly heading to the Eastern Med to become part of the Gaza aid solution (see above). We have to hope there is no Iranian mine threat in the Gulf in the meantime. That the two forward-deployed Bays and Argus are routinely operating without warship escorts is another conversation, but that is not good either.

Finally, there is the ocean surveillance vessel RFA Proteus and mine countermeasures support vessel Stirling Castle, both recently taken up from trade to meet glaring strategic requirements and both, despite only needing crews of between 20 and 30, struggling to reach full operational status.

In sum, of the RFA’s 13 ships, six can be crewed at any one time.

Despite these ships being painted grey and operating hand in glove with the Royal Navy and thus confusing politicians since 1905, there are some contextual differences between the two services to note before we can get to a solution.

The first is the status of the crew. They are civil servants with a sponsored reserve status that enables them to go to war. This is why they are allowed to go on strike.

The second is that their ships are crewed along merchant navy lines, i.e. with much smaller crews. For example, a Tide Class tanker at 200 metres and 37,000 tons has a crew of 70. Compare that to a Type 45 destroyer at 150 metres and 8,500 tons with a crew of over 200. This makes the RFAs less survivable in combat and less able to multi-task but if all you care about is the spreadsheet then they are excellent value for money. This is even more so when you see that they rotate their small crews thus generating excellent sea-to-shore ratios.

“Defence on the cheap” was how one retired officer described the RFA to me. But from inside the ship, they have been working harder and harder, increasingly picking up tasks that traditionally were done by the Royal Navy.

As someone else said to me, “if you continuously ask a crew of 70 to do what a warship crew of 200 does, guess what happens next”.

The final one is the nature of their qualifications, particularly for the masters/captains and the engineers. This is much more akin to the merchant marine model and gives them a status that is jealously guarded by the RFA. Of course, it also makes them eminently poachable.

As ever, at the heart of the problem is pay. The RFA union Nautilus said in its statement announcing the strike:

“Since 2010, RFA employees have faced a real terms pay cut of over 30 per cent, beyond other blue light services, leading to significant challenges in recruitment and retention and low morale across the workforce.”

One ex junior deckhand put it thus:

“This pending strike action is a sad day for the service which is very proud of what it does, but this is the only remaining option as the system is not listening.”

To give you an idea, a deck officer in the RFA can expect to join on a salary of £37k per annum. This comes with tax relief if they are out of the country for more than six months in the year, but then so it should. Their US equivalent in the Military Sealift Command (MSC), also civilian crews, are offering $156k plus bonuses - 3.5 times the amount.

At the more senior end, a ship captain in the RFA is paid £86k whereas his commercial merchant LNG tanker equivalent is on £150k (and compared to an RFA in a war zone, those ships are safe as houses). A first officer in America’s MSC (i.e. second in command) is on $222,921 + $44,168 bonus.

My bags are packed.

Despite these eye-watering salaries, the MSC is still struggling to recruit and retain – partly because their hiring model is so taut. For every person they need at sea they hire just 1.2 bodies. This zero-slack model makes it nearly impossible to get relieved on time and so their crews are putting in huge shifts at sea. Add to this the same recruiting struggles that the entire global maritime eco-system is facing; austere living conditions, hierarchy, lack of WiFi/modern communications and endless separation and they are in a poor state as well. The MSC has 5600 people: as ever, mass affords them a degree of smoothing that the much smaller RFA doesn’t have. It also shows that extra money isn’t a solution on its own.

Back in the RFA, they increasingly feel undervalued. They work alongside RN sailors who on average are paid 20 per cent more and (again on average) spend less time per year away. Seeing the recent pay rise coming in at half a percent less than their RN counterparts landed badly. Rolling out a new uniform across both services but with Royal Navy badges sewn on didn’t help either. If that sounds trite it shouldn’t; identity is a big part of serving life and they no more want to wear Royal Navy badges than I would have wanted to wear an RAF cap.

And then they look to their leadership only to discover that their uniformed head – Commodore RFA – leaves at the end of this month to be replaced by a non-uniformed ‘Deputy Director Afloat Support’, a civil servant who could come from anywhere. In the meantime, Serco are being used as a maritime crewing agency (sticking plaster) but their leave allowances are so much better (probably what the RFA should be on) that they end up costing twice as much.

While poor pay, eroding terms and conditions and a general feeling of being undervalued featured unanimously across the people I asked, what should be done about it was less clear.

The US has shown that money is not the only solution but it is definitely part of it. Parity with the RN should be the minimum (noting that there’s a vigorous debate going on right now as to whether that is enough as well). This is easily achievable. A Freedom of Information request from last November showed that the total pay bill for the entire RFA was £92 million, equal to 0.17per cent of defence expenditure for the year. I know resources are tight and the government will be keen to not set a precedent here, but really?

Many suggest merging the RFA into the RN. This is a notion that superficially makes sense, but the closer you get to the detail, the harder it looks. There would likely be further mass exodus among RFA crews saying “this was not what I joined for”. Then the RN would need to fill the gaps which, given that they are currently paying off ships early due to crew shortages, is not possible.

Maybe there’ll be a hybrid solution, where the three emerging fleet solid support ships come under the Royal Navy (and therefore fly the white ensign), Proteus and Stirling Castle are set free to be run by Serco leaving the RFA to concentrate on what it does best with the oilers (Tide class), Argus and Bay class amphibs.

One person suggested that the senior officers onboard the ships (Captain, Chief Officer, Engineer) could be RN leaving the specialist crew positions as RFA. Another said this wouldn’t work as the ships are classed by Lloyds and flagged by the MCA and this dual-status crew would put them in breach of that. So neat solutions that suit everyone are clearly going to be difficult to come by. One also wonders how many of the decision-makers really understand all this. I know I don’t.

Initiatives proposed in government on 11 March to aid recruitment are sound, particularly the one about making better use of RN leavers: “the RFA is fostering relationships with universities and colleges to raise awareness of the opportunities available, planning to launch a graduate engineer scheme, sponsoring academic top up schemes to attract newly qualified engineers, and introducing a mechanism for seamless transfer to the RFA for Royal Navy (RN) service leavers. In addition to this work, the RFA plans to release a focused RFA recruitment marketing campaign.”

The soon-to-depart Armed Force Minister James Heappey wondered over the weekend if we have enough Merchant Seafarers if we had to go to war?

He meant more generally but it turns out we don’t have enough seafarers even to crew the logistics ships that allow our warships to go to war, and it’s getting worse.

Freedom of navigation is vital to our survival as an island country, in both peace, “pre-war” (whatever that is) and war itself. The Royal Navy is essential for ensuring that. The RFA is a strategic enabler that allows the RN to do so in a time and place of our choosing, with or without anyone’s permission.

Are we going to risk that autonomy, and our status as a blue water navy, for a fraction of a per cent of a defence budget (that itself is just 2 per cent of GDP) or will this potential strike action stimulate bold and decisive plans for recovery?

I normally try and be a little more upbeat in these articles but have found it hard with this one so I will say ‘no, we won’t’. We’ll keep making do, applying sticking plasters and hoping for the best while forcing more and more sacrifice from our sailors (of both types) until something forces our hand, or breaks. At which point it will cost a lot more.