Mark Urban
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 9 Aug
Mark Urban’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There will be six motherships that will be designed to support fleets of smaller specialized vessels.
Those could include radar vessels, missile barges carrying long range weaponry, a submarine detecting boat, or uncrewed submersibles.
It's easy to see some advantages with this approach.
Take the missile barge.
If it fires off all
Its weapons, it can then go off to rearm while the censorship maintains its watch forward, giving uninterrupted coverage even during that resupply.
And the individual parts of this system will surely come in well below the cost of a Type 83 destroyer.
But add them all together and the bill could be quite high.
On top of that, the new hybrid fleet has to be ready to go into service in 2035 when the Type 45 destroyers will be withdrawn from the fleet.
Nine years might sound really
Reasonable enough, but the Navy's new anti-submarine frigate was first ordered 16 years ago.
And although this first one, HMS Glasgow, is now on trials, it still hasn't entered service.
With this new model, if one part of your new hybrid fleet, say a simpler one like the missile barge, is ready to enter service years before the other one.
What happens?
Or an enemy disrupts the data links between these vessels.
Doesn't that hobble the whole system?
Many within the forces are hoping that one upside will be the division of warship design across several separate vessels that will liberate them from the control of major defence contractors.
These traditional so-called prime contractors, giants of the defence industry, integrate all the components on a single ship, but are frequently blamed for escalating costs and scheduling.
So doing things differently, replacing the planned Type 83 ships with up to five variants can help the Navy boost its ship numbers.
But it means taking a big risk with the technology.
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