“Today marks the start of a hugely significant chapter for the Royal Navy, and indeed the nation, as the future flagship is commissioned into Her Majesty's fleet,” U.K. Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson said at the commissioning ceremony on Dec. 7, 2017. “It is an honor to witness the crowning moment of an extraordinarily busy year for the Royal Navy that has seen us name the second carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, cut steel on the first Type 26 frigates and launch the National Shipbuilding Strategy.”

In June 2017, the HMS Queen Elizabeth , the Royal Navy’s first super carrier and its largest ship ever, did first put to sea for the first time. Earlier in December 2017, Queen Elizabeth II herself commissioned the ship, which is named after 16th century monarch Queen Elizabeth I , who famously directed the country’s naval forces to destroy the Spanish Armada .

That only one of these 13 deployed vessels is a major surface combatant is a serious issue, though, and speaks to broader readiness and morale issues across the board. What the U.K. Ministry of Defense had said would be “The Year of the Royal Navy” has turned out to be full of significant disappointments for the service.

For its part, the Royal Navy remains “deployed globally on operations and will be protecting our national interests throughout Christmas and New Year,” a spokesperson insisted to The Telegraph newspaper . “There will be 13 ships and submarines deployed away and in home waters, as well as the at sea nuclear deterrent .”

On Dec. 20, 2017, the Royal Navy acknowledged that only one of its 13 Type 23 frigates, HMS St. Albans, was on duty protecting the United Kingdom’s national waters and that all six of its Type 45 destroyers were also pierside. Two months earlier, after an accident crippled the submarine U-35, the German Navy, or Deutsche Marine, was similarly forced to concede that this meant that all six of its Type 212A boats were sidelined for repairs.

British and German naval forces are both suffering from historically low readiness, with almost all of the Royal Navy’s destroyers and frigates in port and none of Germany’s submarines in working order. This only underscores existing concerns about both organizations spending priorities match their needs and their abilities to respond to crises close to home and outside of Europe.

Then in December 2017, one of Queen Elizabeth’s propeller shafts sprung a leak during as the ship progressed through additional sea trials, leading to reports of significant, but brief flooding in one of the engine compartments. This is actually not uncommon and is exactly why navies put ships through these types of tests before committing them to actual operations, something Defense Secretary Williamson was quick to point out to the BBC . “It does not prevent her from sailing again and her sea trials program will not be affected,” a Royal Navy spokesperson also said in a stament to the national broadcaster.

What Williamson didn’t mention was that the Royal Navy has yet to receive any operational F-35B Joint Strike Fighter aircraft to begin forming the core of Queen Elizabeth’s air wing, that the Fleet Air Arm might not ever have enough of those aircraft to operate that ship and Prince of Wales simultaneously in the strike role , and that the Ministry of Defense was considering scrapping its last two amphibious warfare ships, along with other cuts, to both help pay for the carriers and find sailors to serve on them. That's to say nothing of technical issues with the United Kingdom's Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines and apparently terrifyingly poor discipline and low morale among the sailors on board those boats.

But critics were quick to seize on as more evidence the ship, which cost more than $4 billion to build, isn’t ready for real missions, with or without aircraft. It didn't help U.K. officials had tried to hide the issue, according to the BBC, before downplaying its significance. The latest news that a confluence of maintenance issues and crew turnovers had forced the bulk of the Royal Navy’s most capable surface warships into port at the same time only raises new questions about the service’s ability to conduct major operations or make real use of its new carrier in the near term. As we at The War Zone have noted repeatedly, the United Kingdom might not have enough destroyers and frigates at present to provide a full complement of escorts and conduct separate naval activities even when all of its Type 23s and Type 45s are combat ready.

Crown Copyright HMS Queen Elizabeth, at left, with a pair of Type 23 frigates as escorts.

As Defense Secretary Williamson noted, construction on the first Type 26 frigates, which will replace the older Type 23s, started in July 2017. The Ministry of Defense doesn’t expect the first three of those ships, also known as the City-class, to be ready for service until the mid-2020s and there’s no fixed timeline for when the eighth and last ship will arrive. The present plans do not provide for a one-for-one replacement of the Type 23s, either. The United Kingdom has yet to settle on a final design for the five less capable Type 31e General Purpose Frigates that it plans to buy to make up the difference. Pre-existing budget cuts and economic uncertainty surrounding the United Kingdom’s planned departure from the European Union, commonly known as the British Exit or Brexit, surely haven’t helped matters any. In October 2017, BAE Systems, which is part of the consortium responsible for the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers and owns the shipyard building the Type 26s, announced it would cut 2,000 jobs in the United Kingdom, including hundreds supporting the Royal Navy activities. As such, there are already indications that the U.K. Ministry of Defense may be looking to its NATO and other European allies to help with the shortfall, operating the ship in concert with other navies to reduce the strain on its own forces. The United Kingdom and the United States have gone so far as to sign a deal that will put U.S. Marine Corps F-35Bs on board Queen Elizabeth for her as yet unscheduled first operational cruise in order to make up for the lack of Fleet Air Arm aircraft.

Crown Copyright Queen Elizabeth during her initial sea trials in June 2017.

The state of Germany’s navy suggests that there could be serious problems with this course of action, too. For the Deutsche Marine, the fate of the Type 212A submarines is similarly indicative of more widespread issues across the service. The boats are an advanced and extremely quiet diesel-electric design that uses an air-independent propulsion system centered on hydrogen fuel cells that allows them to stay under water for weeks at a time. The submarines form a key component of NATO’s plans to seal off the heavily contested Baltic Sea in the event of a major crisis, especially any potential military confrontation with Russia in that region. Unfortunately, the class has been a maintenance nightmare since the German Navy commissioned the first two boats in 2005. The issue is really two separate problems creating what has become a perpetual cycle of breakdowns and delays in getting boats back into service. After the end of the Cold War, the German government, focused heavily on rehabilitating what had been an independent East Germany, and in the face of what appeared to be dramatically reduced security concerns in Europe, slashed defense budgets and the size of its military as a whole. The German Navy ordered only limited stocks of critical spare parts up front for its new Type 212As.

Bundeswehr The German Navy's Type 212A submarine U-32.