Royal Navy: Nuclear submarines underway in the Mediterranean

For six months - the entire period of Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine - HMS Audacious, the UK's newest operational Hunter-Killer nuclear submarine, has been on patrol in the Mediterranean. While the NATO surface units were monitoring shipping traffic as part of Operation Sea Guardian - and primarily keeping an eye on the Russian naval units that had gathered there at the start of the war and were still there - HMS Audacious was looking after the corresponding vehicles under water. After all, there were still a few conventional Kilo-class submarines left there when the Bosporus was closed. HMS Audacious, the fourth boat in the Astute class after HMS Astute, HMS Ambush and HMS Artful, operated from Souda Bay on Crete and practised its submarine-hunting capabilities with Italian naval units in particular.

HMS Anson at BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness. Photo: Royal Navy/Crown Copyright

All good things come in sevens

Three more boats are in the pipeline: HMS Anson has just been commissioned at BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness, 50 kilometres north of Liverpool, at the end of August. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose political career has since been sidelined, was also part of the party. HMS Agamemnon and HMS Ajax are still in the construction and outfitting phase in Barrow. The 97-metre-long boats, which displace 7,500 tonnes when submerged, have already replaced the Swiftsure-class boats and will also replace the last remaining Trafalgar-class boats by 2026 or 2027.

Retrofitting for the future

It was only in May of this year that the Royal Navy decided to upgrade the Raytheon Tomahawk Block IV land-based cruise missiles on board to the improved Block V in order to ensure that it would continue to have a wide-ranging, state-of-the-art weapon capability in the future.