Britain Retires ‘White Elephant’ Heavy Destroyer HMS Bristol After Almost 50 Years in Service

Britain’s Royal Navy has retired its only Type 82 Class destroyer ever built, the HMS Bristol, 53 years after it was laid down. The Bristol was intended to be the first of eight 7,000 ton destroyers, some of the heaviest in the world at the time, which would escort strike groups centred around of CVA-01 Class carriers. A sharp economic decline, however, led to the cancellation of the carrier program after a government review in 1966, which also removed the need for carrier escorts meaning the remaining seven Type 82 Class ships were never completed. The CVA-01 carrier was set to displace 63,000 tons, and was intended to replace the ageing Audacious and Centaur Class carriers of the early 1950s. It would have deployed F-4 Phantom third generation fighters and indigenous Blackburn Buccaneer attack jets for combat. The Type 82 Class ships designed to escort them were equipped primarily for air defence, namely with 40 Sea Dart surface to air missiles, with a secondary anti-submarine warfare function, but were very limited in terms of anti-shipping capabilities. 

The HMS Bristol was commissioned in 1969 and entered service four years later, with the ship used primarily as a testbed for new weapons and control systems, many of which would later be integrated onto the lighter and much cheaper Type 42 Class destroyers. The ship subsequently served in the Falklands War in 1982, albeit in a limited supporting role, and while it did fire its sea dart missiles these did not hit any targets. Although the destroyer was scheduled for an early retirement under the 1982 Defence White Paper, the British surface fleet incurred significant losses in the Falklands War forcing it to keep the Bristol in commission. Its obsolete radar was replaced with the Type 1022 long range air search radar for this purpose, although the ship would be retired from frontline service in 1991 and subsequently served as a training ship. The Bristol’s retirement on October 28th, 2020, followed reports that it was both too expensive to maintain and no longer fit for training purposes, with its hull expected to be scrapped in 2021. The British Royal Navy currently fields only a single destroyer class, the Type 45, which are also heavily oriented towards an air defence role. These newer ships may well be the last of their kind the service fields, with budgetary issues meaning that Britain could rely entirely on lighter frigates after the Type 45’s retirement which are cheaper both to operate and to built than destroyers.