Troubled British Destroyer Returning to Service After Over Eight Years Under Repair

The British Royal Navy Type 45 class destroyer HMS Daring is being prepared to return to sea after a refitting and refurbishment period of over 3000 days, according to a statement by Defence Minister Luke Pollard. “HMS Daring entered service on 31 July 2010 and has delivered effect on operations since. As with all Royal Navy vessels, during her in service period there have been periods of ‘planned’ unavailability including Daring’s Propulsion Improvement Programme (PIP) which commenced in October 2021, completing in January 2023. Since her return to His Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth, HMS Daring has been re-generating and has received several capability upgrades,” the minister stated. Although the warship has spent considerably more time under maintenance than it ever did at sea, the Ministry of Defence declined to release figures on the precise number of days it has been in both states.

A significantly part of HMS Daring’s refurbishment work has been the implementation of upgrades under the Power Improvement Project, which have replaced its propulsion system with a new more reliable and efficient successor design. The new powerplant will provide an increased electrical capacity for the possible integration of future sensors and armaments. The effectiveness of upgrades to the Type 45’s notoriously problematic engines remains in serious question, however. The ships have at times seen their Rolls Royce diesel engines “degrade catastrophically,” in hot climates such as those found around the Persian Gulf. In February 2024 the Navy withdrew the Type 45 class destroyer HMS Diamond from operations near Yemen, citing “technical problems,” fuelling speculation that engine issues were responsible.

The Type 45 was built as an integrated and closed system, with its lack of modularity making it far from straightforward to make improvements. While the Type 45 is arguably the most problematic post-Cold War destroyer program pursued by any country in the world, HMS Daring has caused particularly difficulties as the first ship of the class, as some of the issues discovered on the ship were addressed when building the next five vessels. The British Royal Navy is currently working on the development of the next generation Type 83 class destroyer, although the goal of bringing the ships into service by the mid-2030s appears increasingly unlikely to be realised. As a result, the small fleet of six Type 45 class ships, which has had notoriously low availability rates, at times as low as 17 percent, will need to serve well into the 2040s, by which time difficulties keeping them in service are expected to have become significantly greater.