There’s an old line that gets passed around military circles: amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. It’s been repeated so often it’s basically a bumper sticker, and it gets pinned on a different general depending on who’s telling it. But it’s pretty hard to argue with, especially when the thing you’re trying to keep supplied is an aircraft carrier.<\/p>\n
So here’s a logistics story. In late October, HMS Prince of Wales, the British carrier that serves as the Royal Navy’s flagship these days, sailed through the Norwegian fjords to a military jetty and loaded ammunition there. According to the Royal Navy<\/a>, it’s the first time one of its Queen Elizabeth-class carriers has stocked up on ammo in a port outside the UK.<\/p>\n That might not sound like a big deal. Carriers get resupplied all the time, right?<\/p>\n They do. But for a British carrier, the ammunition usually comes aboard at home, or out at sea from a dedicated supply ship. And the Royal Navy is pretty upfront that this stop was about having a plan B for when that supply ship isn’t around.<\/p>\n The jetty is at Hammernesodden, near the town of Namsos, which the Royal Navy puts about 70 miles north of Trondheim. USNI News<\/a> dated the visit to October 26 and described the site as one of Norway’s main munitions depots. The US Marine Corps keeps munitions there too, under the Marine Corps Prepositioning Program-Norway.<\/p>\n That last detail tells you the place is already set up to store and move military explosives in bulk, and that matters more than you’d think. You can’t just pull a warship up to any commercial dock and start loading bombs. Ammunition needs a facility built for it, with safe distances from everything else and people who know exactly how to handle it.<\/p>\n And this is a big warship. HMS Prince of Wales weighs 65,000 metric tons by the Royal Navy’s count, which works out to about 72,000 US tons, compared with roughly 100,000 tons for the Ford-class carrier that just caught its first F-35C<\/a>. The Royal Navy’s spec page<\/a> lists the class at 932 feet long, with a flight deck that can carry up to 36 F-35B fighter jets. On this trip, it had F-35Bs from 617 Squadron, the famous “Dambusters,” plus Merlin helicopters. Norway’s armed forces say the ship also brought along Malloy drones, built by the same British company behind the cargo drone that recently got fitted with rocket pods<\/a> in Florida.<\/p>\n Now seems like a good time to explain what a “solid support ship” is, because the whole story hangs on it. Navies basically split resupply into two buckets. Liquids are fuel. Solids are pretty much everything else you can stack on a pallet, like food, spare parts and ammunition. A solid support ship carries that second bucket and sails alongside a warship, close enough to pass loads across on wire lines, so the warship doesn’t have to head for port.<\/p>\n In Britain, that job belongs to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the civilian-crewed fleet that keeps the Royal Navy supplied. The Royal Navy has described RFA Fort Victoria as the RFA’s only solid support ship, and she’s been in service for more than three decades. Whether she’s ready to sail right now is a different question. UK Defence Journal reported this summer that the defense ministry wouldn’t confirm her operational status.<\/p>\n Three replacements are on the way, starting with RFA Resurgent. But the UK government says that first ship won’t enter service until the early 2030s.<\/p>\n So if you’re the Royal Navy, you’ve got a carrier that needs ammunition to do its job and one aging ship designated to bring it out to sea, whose current status the defense ministry won’t confirm. That’s frankly a bit of a gamble. Ships break down, they go into maintenance, and sometimes they’re simply needed somewhere else.<\/p>\n That’s the scenario this stop was built around. The Royal Navy says loading at Hammernesodden opens the door to carrier operations when a solid support ship, whether it’s Fort Victoria or one of the future Resurgent-class ships, isn’t available for resupply. A UK defense ministry photo release quoted by USNI News said the point was to fine-tune how a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier runs a “large-scale ammunitioning evolution” at the Norwegian site.<\/p>\n “Ammunitioning evolution” is Navy-speak for loading ammo, in case you were wondering. It isn’t going to win any poetry prizes.<\/p>\n The carrier wasn’t wandering around Norway on its own, though. The Royal Navy says the destroyer HMS Dauntless and the Norwegian frigate Fridtjof Nansen escorted it, and the Norwegian tanker HNoMS Maud joined the group later in the trip. The “first” the Royal Navy is claiming is strictly about ammunition at a foreign port.<\/p>\n Parking a carrier at a jetty in a fjord while it takes on ammunition is the kind of thing you want to keep a close eye on, and the Norwegians did. The Royal Navy says the country’s Home Guard ran patrol boats on the fjord and set up heavily armed positions on the jetty itself.<\/p>\nSo where exactly did this happen?<\/h2>\n
The Royal Navy has named one ship for this job<\/h2>\n
Norway brought its own security<\/h2>\n