Montrose sailed from Devonport more than 1500 days previously, departing in November 2018 and arriving in the Gulf in April 2019. Montrose remained in the region for over three years, before handing over to Lancaster in late November 2022.
Montrose spent 1300 days deployed on operations, Rear Admiral Steve Moorhouse – the RN’s Director Force Generation – told the media briefing. This availability was underpinned by new crewing and maintenance concepts that are now shaping future RN forward-deployment programmes, including for its new Type 31 frigates, Rear Adm Moorhouse explained.
The forward-deployed frigate programme uses a dual-crewing concept (‘Port’ and ‘Starboard’ crews). With Montrose returning home, its ‘Port’ crew has joined Lancaster. While in theatre, Montrose conducted 11 crew rotations, with some personnel conducting five deployments to the region, Commander Claire Thompson, commanding officer of Montrose ‘Starboard’, told the briefing.
In sustaining the ship on station, the RN has been learning lessons on how to maintain it in engineering and wider support terms, said Rear Adm Moorhouse. “
“Ordinarily, we would do a lot of that maintenance back in the UK at the end of a six- or seven-month deployment. We need to make sure that the platform is 100 percent prepared when we deploy it from the UK in the first place.”
Rear Admiral Steve Moorhouse, the RN’s Director Force Generation
For in-theatre support, the RN established arrangements in Bahrain and Oman, and has conducted support activities in Seychelles.
Support also includes individual and collective crew training. “If you think about how we’ll train those platforms going forward, if the hull is not coming back to the UK … we’ve got to make sure we train the people before they go out there, in simulation training [for example],” said Rear Adm Moorhouse. In theatre, he continued, “Some of that is sending our trainers forward, some of it is around simulation, some of it is around working with partners or international allies.”
The operational impact of the sustained presence has also been significant, Cdr Thompson explained. In 2022, for example, Montrose conducted two seizures of significant amounts of narcotics and two seizures of advanced conventional weapons.
In the latter case, an RN statement said the weapons seized included surface-to-air-missiles and engines for land-attack cruise missiles. These seizures were conducted using Montrose’s embarked Wildcat helicopter and Royal Marines Commando boarding team deployed in rigid-hull inflatable boats. This task was supported by a Seahawk helicopter deployed from the US Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Gridley.
The forward-deployed frigate programme is also being used to test new technologies and deploy them on operations. As it prepared for deployment, Lancaster participated in the NATO/Portuguese Navy unmanned systems exercises ‘Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems’ (‘REPMUS’) and ‘Dynamic Messenger’, off Portugal in September. Here, Lancaster embarked a Puma unmanned aerial vehicle, for trials designed to test new command-and-control networks enabling ships to take control of and task unmanned systems deployed from other platforms or bases. “Montrose took [Puma] into the operational theatre to see how we could develop tactics and how we could use it against the type of tasks and the mission we were deployed on,” said Cdr Thompson.
