WASHINGTON, LONDON and PARIS — Several nations have announced their contributions to Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new multinational security initiative in the Middle East to help protect merchant ships in the Red Sea area from drones and missiles.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin formally announced the effort Dec. 18, after previously hinting that collective action is required to protect civilian ships in the region.

To date, Houthi rebels in Yemen have launched at least 100 attacks with one-way drones and ballistic missiles, targeting 10 merchant vessels that represent more than 35 different nations, according to a readout of a virtual meeting between security group participants.

“Operation Prosperity Guardian is bringing together multiple countries to include the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain to jointly address security challenges in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, with the goal of ensuring freedom of navigation for all countries and bolstering regional security and prosperity,” Austin said Dec. 18.

He noted this effort will fall under the purview of the Combined Maritime Forces — a multinational maritime partnership based in Bahrain — and its Task Force 153. The CMF is made up of 39 nations, and its various task forces help secure the Gulf of Oman, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Some task forces also focus on countering piracy across the region as well as and training and partner-building activities.

About 20,000 commercial vessels transit the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden every year, according to the French Navy. Task Force 153 specifically covers the Red Sea and was established in 2022 to address human trafficking and smuggling of both legal materials like coal and illegal weapons and drugs, Defense News previously reported.

The readout of Austin’s meeting noted that task force “could be leveraged to deter attacks under the CMF,” but the Defense Department declined to provide additional information.

Here are some details about forces participating in Operation Prosperity Guardian.

Britain

Britain has committed a Type 45 destroyer equipped with air defense weapons to the international task force.

The Defence Ministry announced Dec. 19 the destroyer HMS Diamond will lead the Royal Navy’s contribution to Operation Prosperity Guardian.

HMS Diamond has been in the region for a little more than two weeks and moved to the Red Sea on Saturday. It was almost immediately called into action to shoot down a suspected Houthi drone aimed at a commercial ship in the area. This was first time the Royal Navy shot down an aerial target since the Gulf War in 1991.

“This is an international problem that requires an international solution. That is why HMS Diamond has joined Operation Prosperity Guardian,” Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said while announcing the work with the security group.

British forces have been on hand with a small fleet of ships in the region. For example, the military operates a flotilla out of Bahrain that includes the frigate HMS Lancaster, three mine-hunting vessels and a Royal Fleet Auxiliary support ship.

Italy

Italy will do its part to counter “destabilizing terrorist activity” by sending the multimission frigate Virginio Fasan to the Red Sea, the country’s Defence Ministry said in a statement.

Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto and Austin discussed maritime security in a video call Tuesday, including options for securing shipping routes to avoid economic repercussions and “dangerous impacts” on commodity prices.

“It’s necessary to increase the presence in the area in order to create the conditions for stabilization, to avoid environmental disasters and also to avoid a resurgence of the inflationary push,” Crosetto said in the statement.

France

The French multimission frigate Languedoc has been patrolling the Gulf of Aden and the southern area of the Red Sea since Dec. 8 to secure freedom of navigation, the French Navy said in a Dec. 15 statement.

The Languedoc shot down two drones coming from the direction of Yemen that appeared hostile on the second day of its patrol duty. The frigate destroyed a drone threatening the Norwegian oil tanker Strinda on Dec. 11, before moving in to protect the stricken tanker and prevent a hijacking, according to the Navy. A fire aboard the Strinda was brought under control without injuries.

Norway

Norway will dispatch as many as 10 staff officers to the Combined Maritime Forces, the Norwegian Defence Ministry said.

Marita Isaksen Wangberg, a ministry spokesperson, told Defense News the country isn’t sending any vessels.

The Netherlands

The Netherlands plans to contribute two staff officers to the operation. The country doesn’t have any vessels in the area at this time, and the contribution of ships is under review, Navy spokesperson Alex Kranenburg told Defense News.

Spain

Spain has not made a decision regarding its participation in Operation Prosperity Guardian, the Defence Ministry’s spokesperson, Nuria Fernández de la Fuente, told Defense News. Any participation by Spain, the representative added, would not be unilateral but within the framework of NATO or the European Union.

The U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations and First Sea Lord Adm. Tony Radakin intend to “sign a future integrated warfighting statement of intent that sets a cooperative vision for interchangeablty,” CNO Adm. Mike Gilday announced at the virtual Atlantic Future Forum, being held on board the RN’s new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth.

“We will synchronize pioneering capabilities, strengthen operating concepts and focus our collective efforts to deliver combined sea power together. By organizing our cooperation on carrier strike, underwater superiority, navy and marine integration and doubling down on future war fighting like unmanned and artificial intelligence, we will remain on the leading edge of great power competition.”

It is unclear what the specifics of the statement of intent will be, but the U.S. and Royal navies have been focusing heavily in recent years on aligning its capabilities to be useful to each other in combined maritime operations. The message from both navies is that this will continue into the future.

Throughout the Royal Navy’s effort to get the Queen Elizabeth ready for deployment, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have been working closely with the service, training British pilots on the F-35B and getting the ship certified to operate them. The Marine Corps’ Fighter Attack Squadron 211 embarked on Queen Elizabeth earlier this month during the ship’s group exercise ahead of a deployment next year.

The Marines will also mix in with Royal Air Force F-35Bs during the QE’s 2021 deployment.

In remarks at the forum, Radkin echoed Gilday’s remarks, saying the two forces needed to continue to work to align efforts.

“Throughout our careers we have had a drive for interoperability with allies,” Radkin said. “But increasingly it feels to us that bar has to be raised. … The obvious example is the U.S. Marine jets on board the QE carrier. That is an obvious example of interchangeability.

“So, we are trying to drive a new standard. Partly to drive all of us to strengthen our interoperability but to go even higher and recognize that interchangeability is going to be an even stronger feature in the future.”

Radkin said the services would focus on four areas to grow this “interchangeability”: undersea warfare; carrier operations; aligning the efforts of the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy to become a cohesive fighting unit; and on advanced warfighting programs such as artificial intelligence and cyber.

The United Kingdom is in the middle of an integrated defense review, initiated after Boris Johnson was elected prime minster. It was interrupted during the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak but appears to be running again. The review could have sweeping impacts on the British defense budget, but it is unclear where the budget ax will fall.

When the review was announced, however, the government promised a “radical reassessment” of Britain’s place in the world.

The MoD announced contract awards to BAE Systems, Babcock and Atlas Elektronik UK, each worth up to £5 million (U.S. $6 million) to push ahead with the next phase of the competition, according to an MoD release.

The U.K. plans to initially build five of the frigates, with a top-line budget of £1.25 billion for the whole program.

“This is the first frigate competition the UK has run in a generation, and today we are funding three shipbuilding teams with extremely exciting concepts to continue developing their plans,” Britain’s defense acquisition minister, Stuart Andrew, said in the release. “Next year we will announce the winning bidder, and one of these designs will go on to bolster our future fleet with five new ships, creating UK jobs and ensuring our Royal Navy maintains a truly global presence in an increasingly uncertain world.”

The first Type 31e warship is slated for delivery in 2023. In 2015, the British government announced plans to build a fleet of at least five light, general-purpose frigates under the Strategic Defence and Security Review.

The shortlisting comes just days after the MoD named the contractors it was listing as contenders to build three fleet solid support ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the service that supplies the Royal Navy with ammo, food and fuel.

The British contender is a partnership comprising BAE, Babcock, Cammell Laird and Rolls-Royce.

International bidders are Fincantieri of Italy, Navantia of Spain, Japan Marine United Corporation, and Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering of South Korea.

A winning bidder is expected to be announced in 2020, with the first ship ready for sea in 2026.

One of the main tasks of the Fleet Solid Support vessels will be to provide the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carrier with task groups on deployment.

The Type 31 frigates and eight new Type 26 anti-submarine warfare frigates are planned to replace the British Royal Navy’s Type 23 fleet by the mid-2030s.

BAE already has a contract to build the first three Type 26s. A deal for the remaining five warships is expected early in the next decade.

The Defence Equipment & Support organisation, the MoD’s procurement arm, has issued a “prior information notice” informing potential bidders it is moving forward with the Type 31e program, and plans a short period of market engagement with companies or consortia that have expressed interest starting on Aug 20.

“We have relaunched discussions with industry for our new Type 31e fleet, and this week issued a Prior Information Notice to ensure we do not lose any momentum. We remain committed to a cutting-edge Royal Navy fleet of at least 19 frigates and destroyers, and the first batch of five new Type 31e ships will bolster our modern Navy,” said an MoD spokesperson.

“The purpose of the market engagement is for the Authority [DE&S] to share key elements of the new procurement, including technical and commercial elements. The Authority intends to use the feedback from the market engagement to inform the further shaping of its requirements and commercial construct,” said the DE&S in its announcement it was relaunching the competition.

DE&S said suppliers should “only respond if they are in a position to undertake the full Type 31e programme, meeting its full requirement including a £1.25billion cost and building the Type 31e in a UK shipyard.”

The Type 31e is a key part of the government’s 2017 national shipbuilding strategy which in part seeks to open up the sector to local competition, rather than contract via a non-competitive single source contract with U.K. giant BAE Systems, the world’s third largest defense company according to the Defense News Top 100 list.

The fast track schedule for the Type 31e calls for the initial vessel to be in service by 2023, replacing the first of 13 Type 23 class frigates due to be retired by the Royal Navy in the period up to the middle of the 2030’s. The final Type 31e — the e stands for export — is due to be delivered in 2028.

Eight of the Type 23’s will be replaced by anti-submarine warfare Type 26’s. The remainder of the Type 23’s will be replaced by the Type 31e.

DE&S and industry are up against a time crunch on getting the first Type 31e into service, one which some executives here see as daunting, if not unachieveable, thanks to the need to restart the competition.

But despite the delay in getting to the competitive design phase contract announcements, DE&S says it remains committed to the 2023 service date.

“A new streamlined procedure will present an opportunity to save time in the overall program. We will release more information about our plans when we have completed the market engagement – which we plan to start from Aug 20,” said a second MoD spokesperson.

A Cheap Frigate, A Challenging Competition

The Type 31e is planned to carry out maritime security, interdiction and other tasks, releasing more complex warships to their primary roles.

Originally the British were planning to build 13 Type 26’s and use five of the warships in the general purpose role. The scheme was junked in the 2015 defence and security strategy review on cost grounds, and a decision taken to build five of the lighter, bargain basement Type 31e’s alongside the Type 26’s.

The first of the Type 26’s is under construction by BAE at its Glasgow, Scotland, warship building yards. BAE is under contract to build three Type26’s and all eight warships are scheduled to be built by the company, with the first one handed over by the contractor in 2025.

The program received a major shot in the arm recently when Australia selected BAE and the Type 26 for a huge anti-submarine warfare frigate requirement. Assuming the deal is signed, the warships will all be built in Australia.

It’s the same type of deal for the Type 31e and the Royal Navy. The stipulation is that all the warships have to be built in Britain using a design which offers export opportunities for industry here.

The Conservative Government has made vague promises about building further frigates for service in the 2030s to bolster its meager surface warship fleet, but until funding is committed that remains just talk.

In February, Britain launched the competition to find a contractor interested in building five frigates, at a total cost of no more than £1.25 billion. But the process had to be abandoned in late July when the DE&S said it had failed to attract sufficient compliant bids.

DE&S originally said it was looking for up to four bidders to award six month competitive design phase contracts, ahead of placing a design and build contract by the end of the first quarter next year.

The MoD hasn’t said how many compliant bids it received, but it is likely only offers from a consortium led by Babcock and a Cammell Laird led partnership with BAE Systems in the running.

The Babcock-led team, which also included naval designers, sensor suppliers and other shipbuilder,s were offering the Arrowhead 140, a modified version of the Danish Navy’s Iver Huitfeld-class warship designed by OMT.

The opposition Cammell Laird-led team was offering a smaller frigate design known as the Leander.

At the time of the original procurement termination, industry executives here said the requirement for so much of the work to be done in the UK had deterred some international companies who initially had shown interest.

One executive said the exceptional degree of risk the MoD wanted industry to take on the program had also been a deterrent.

Future hypersonic weapons engagements will present scant warning cues to platforms, and will be delivered so fast that traditional man-in–the-loop responses will be unable to cope, according to Paul Bradbeer, the electronic warfare operational support sales manager at MASS, a leading British company in the field.

Bradbeer is expected to tell conference delegates at the EW Show, which opens here June 6, that the key to countering this emerging threat will be to use machine learning to automate EW responses.

This, he’s to say, maximizes such defensive capabilities by exploiting every piece of information available to the platform: establishing and filling platform information gaps, using data to locate your position in another’s kill chain, and then taking effective action to disrupt the kill chain.

“In future, we will need machines to interpret these indicators and assess the likely sequence of events. The response could involve machine-led reconfiguration of combat systems and initiation of countermeasures,” Bradbeer said, speaking ahead of the show opening.

The problem is that some platforms, such as warships, rely on legacy command-and-control systems that are often based on human thinking, decision-making and communication — thereby increasing the risk from new and evolving threats, said the executive.

Some navies are aware of the threat, but Bradbeer told Defense News “there needs to be more work done to address the problem.” 

Hypersonic missiles remain a development item at the moment, but work is advancing in China, the U.S., Europe, India and Russia to produce a weapon that would be a game-changer in its ability to defeat the defenses of naval and other targets.

India and Russia are collaborating in the development of the Brahmos II hypersonic weapon.

In April, the Moscow-based news agency TASS reported unnamed sources as saying Russia test fired a missile known as the Zircon at a speed of Mach 8, or 9,878 mph.

No further details were given, although a later story claimed production of the weapon, initially destined for the Russian Navy, could start next year.

None of this has been officially confirmed, and Doug Barrie, the senior air analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, reckons Zircon’s speed profile at best is likely to be “barely hypersonic” at somewhere around Mach 5 or maybe even Mach 6.

The broad rule of thumb is that below Mach 5 a weapon is supersonic, and above it is hypersonic, said Barrie.

Bradbeer noted that as a general guide, some “future hypersonic missiles may be seven times faster than the threats we have dealt with in the past, and engaging from twice the distance.”

IISS’ Barrie said the threat to high-value targets is further exacerbated by the possible attack profile of these new cruise weapons.

“Some of these cruise missiles could fly at 80,000 feet or more, an altitude most naval radars traditionally don’t bother to look [at],” Barrie said.

A declaration to better coordinate maritime patrol aircraft operations and support in the region was signed in London by British Defence Procurement Minister Harriett Baldwin and her US  counterpart, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work. It is only a declaration of intent at the moment.

A statement issued by the two officials said they “plan to cooperate closely on operation of their P-8A aircraft in the North Atlantic to ensure a coherent approach to MPA activity.”

“The declaration provides a new opportunity to maximize value for money for the taxpayer and continue to strengthen U.K.-U.S. interoperability and to pursue efficiencies in operations and support, including at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, [the British   P-8A base],” according to the statement.

“The United States is our pre-eminent ally in global defense and collective security. This declaration is further evidence of how our two countries continue to cooperate and build mutual security, particularly in the North Atlantic region,” Baldwin was quoted as saying in the statement.

The announcement of closer engagement by the two nations in the North Atlantic comes just ahead of Friday’s visit to Washington by British Prime Minister Theresa May for her meeting with the new US president, Donald Trump.     

Trade will be one of the major items on the agenda, but May is also likely to set out a number of areas where   continued close US-UK cooperation is vital, including strengthening   defense and security cooperation bilaterally and through NATO.

Britain is buying nine of the Boeing-built patrol jets with the first aircraft scheduled to arrive in 2019.

The British are rebuilding their fleet of maritime patrol aircraft  after axing the capability in 2010. In recent years, they have increasingly had to rely on the US and other NATO allies to help search for rising numbers of Russian submarines said to be watching for Royal Navy ballistic missile boats exiting from the naval base at Faslane, Scotland.     

The move closer on North Atlantic surveillance is part of an expanding effort to counter a growing Russian submarine threat said by analysts and others to be approaching Cold War levels.

The increase in North Atlantic cooperation is not just confined to the UK and US either. Late last year, Norway and Britain signed an agreement to work closer on training and sharing P-8A capabilities. The Nordic nation last year announced it was buying five of the jets to replace its aging Lockheed Martin P-3Cs.

Earlier this month, Defense News reported that top officials from the three nations were seeking to reenergize a maritime surveillance alliance that had faded since the end of the Cold War.

In a Dec. 4 interview, Work, of the US Defense Department, termed the expanding relationship between the three P-8A operators as “really, really exciting … it just opens up a whole new level of possibilities for us to in the future do collaborative and coordinated operations.”