HMS Daring (D32): The First of a New Class, Now Waiting to Rejoin the Fleet

The First of a New Generation

HMS Daring was built by BAE Systems Naval Ships at Govan on the River Clyde, ordered on 20 December 2000, with construction beginning on 28 March 2003, and launched at 14:21 GMT on 1 February 2006, sponsored by the Countess of Wessex, now the Duchess of Edinburgh.

She was the seventh Royal Navy ship to carry the name Daring, a lineage stretching back to a twelve-gun brig of 1804, though little about her forebears quite prepared the fleet for what she represented. Contractor's sea trials ran through 2007 and 2008, testing everything from basic seaworthiness to weapons, radar and endurance, before she was formally handed over to the Royal Navy in December 2008 and entered her new home port of Portsmouth for the first time in January 2009, some six months ahead of her formal commissioning that July.

One of those forebears did not come home. In the early hours of 18 February 1940, a D-class destroyer named Daring, built by Thornycroft at Woolston eight years earlier, was bringing convoy HN 12 back from Norway when U-23 found her north of Scotland. Her commanding officer was Otto Kretschmer, who would go on to sink more tonnage than any other U-boat captain of the war. The torpedo took Daring in the stern. She capsized and went down within minutes, in the dark, in a February sea north of the Orkneys.

A hundred and fifty-seven of the hundred and sixty-two men aboard her were killed. Five got out. Four of them were found on a drifting Carley float by the destroyer HMS Inglefield. It is one of the worst proportional losses the Royal Navy suffered in the first winter of the war, and it is the reason the name was available again.

She was commissioned on 23 July 2009 and formally declared in service on 31 July 2010, the lead ship of the Type 45 class and, significantly, the first entirely new destroyer class built for the Royal Navy since the Type 42s of the 1970s.

Her name recalls the Roman youth Gaius Mucius Scaevola, celebrated for his bravery, reflected in her motto, Splendide audax, 'Finely daring'.

The motto is worth unpacking, because Splendide audax is not a boast about a radar. Gaius Mucius was a young Roman in about 509 BC, when the Etruscan king Lars Porsena had Rome under siege. He volunteered to go into the enemy camp and kill him, got in, stabbed the wrong man, and was seized. Brought in front of Porsena, he did not plead. He told the king that three hundred young Romans had sworn to do the same thing and that he was merely the first, and then, to demonstrate what Roman resolve looked like, put his right hand into the fire burning on the altar beside him and held it there while it was destroyed.

Porsena, understandably shaken by the prospect of two hundred and ninety-nine more like him, let him go, made peace and took his army home. Mucius was given land across the Tiber and a new name: Scaevola, the left-handed, on the grounds that a right hand was now beyond him. So the ship is named for a man whose assassination attempt failed completely and who then talked his way to victory by mutilating himself, which is either the finest possible naval motto or a rather pointed one for a class that has spent a good deal of its life alongside.

During Stage 1.1 sea trials, HMS Daring reached her design speed of 29 knots in just 70 seconds and hit 31.5 knots within 120 seconds, an impressive demonstration of the power delivered by her Integrated Electric Propulsion system. She first fired a Sea Viper missile in May 2011 during testing in the Outer Hebrides, proving out the air defence system that lies at the very heart of the Type 45 design.

It is worth saying what Sea Viper actually is, because the whole ship is built around it. The Type 45 carries a Sylver launcher forward holding Aster missiles, in two versions: Aster 15 for close-in work and Aster 30, which can reach out well over sixty miles. What makes the system unusual is not the missile but the eye. On top of the mainmast sits SAMPSON, a pair of radar faces back to back inside a rotating dome, electronically scanned, capable of tracking a very large number of targets at once and of picking out something small and fast against a cluttered background. When the class was designed it was reckoned the best air defence radar afloat in any navy, and nothing that has happened since has seriously disturbed that view. Six ships were built. Twelve were originally intended, to replace twelve Type 42s; the order was cut to eight, and then to six.

Commanding a Multinational Anti-Piracy Force

HMS Daring departed Portsmouth on 11 January 2012 on her maiden deployment, transiting the Suez Canal on 2 February that year to relieve HMS Argyll in the Persian Gulf.

That transit made her the first Type 45 destroyer to pass through the Suez Canal, a twelve-hour, hundred-and-twenty-mile passage made as part of a merchant convoy, with her own force protection teams held at full readiness throughout. Gunnery Officer Lieutenant Jason Hannigan noted afterwards that the crew had trained repeatedly for exactly this demanding passage, and by all accounts it showed.

During this deployment, she took part in Operation Scimitar Anzac, an anti-piracy mission across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, acting as command ship for a particularly multinational force that included Royal Australian Navy and Pakistan Navy vessels, a striking early responsibility for so new a ship.

A Pacific Deployment and Typhoon Haiyan

In September 2013, HMS Daring transited the Panama Canal for an extensive Pacific deployment, taking part in Australia's International Fleet Review in Sydney and the Five Power Defence Arrangements exercise Bersama Lima.

During this same deployment, she was urgently dispatched to the Philippines as part of the British government's humanitarian response to Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most devastating storms in recorded history, putting her considerable capabilities directly to work supporting disaster relief rather than any military mission.

Her itinerary during this deployment took in San Diego, Pearl Harbor, the Marshall Islands, Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, a notably extraordinary tour for a single ship.

The Gulf, the Black Sea, and a Long Refit

HMS Daring deployed to the Persian Gulf again in September 2016, supporting Operation Inherent Resolve against Islamic State, before being relieved by HMS Monmouth in April 2017 and transiting the Bosphorus for exercises with the Romanian Navy in the Black Sea.

Which brings us to the problem that has defined the class in the public mind, and it is a propulsion problem rather than a fighting one.

Its root lay in her Rolls-Royce WR-21 gas turbines, specifically a Northrop Grumman-designed intercooler-recuperator meant to recycle exhaust heat for extra efficiency and a smaller thermal signature. It worked well enough in cooler waters, but in the warmer seas of the Gulf, precisely where Daring and her sisters were most often sent, it was prone to sudden and total power loss rather than any gentler decline, an engineering irony neat enough to keep her in British shipyards for the best part of a decade.

She was subsequently laid up pending refit from 2017 to 2020, and after refit work commenced in June 2020, was towed to the Cammell Laird shipyard on 15 September 2021 for a Power Improvement Project installing new generators, work that finished at the end of 2022, with HMS Daring returning to Portsmouth in January 2023.

Waiting to Return

By August 2025, HMS Daring had been inactive for more than 3,000 days, a stretch that by itself exceeded the entire time it had taken to build and commission her in the first place.

The next real milestone came in February 2026, when her ship's company formally moved back aboard, a step known in Royal Navy shorthand as Ship's Staff Move OnBoard, and a genuine marker of progress after more than eight and a half years without one. That April, Defence Minister Luke Pollard confirmed to Parliament that Daring would return to the fleet later that year, following completion of her Power Improvement Project and associated upgrades.

Fixing the ship, it turned out, was only half the job. Reporting in August 2026 revealed that once the physical refit was complete, the Royal Navy was still around 190 trained sailors short of a full crew for her, a gap closed by reassigning personnel from other ships and extending the training pipeline before sea trials could even begin, a reminder that a destroyer's readiness depends as much on finding the right people as on fitting the right generators.

That last detail is the one worth sitting with, because it is not a Daring problem. A Type 45 needs a ship's company of about 190 to 200, and the Royal Navy has been short of trained people across the fleet for years; a ship that has been out of service for the better part of a decade has no company of her own left to come back to, because they were all posted elsewhere years ago and many of them have since left the service altogether. Regenerating the ship and regenerating the crew are two separate pieces of work, and the second one cannot be contracted out to Cammell Laird.

The picture has moved on since. Commander Graeme Hazelwood took command in July 2025 and it was he who took the formal handover of the ship from BAE Systems back to the Royal Navy, which is the moment a hull stops being a project and becomes a warship again. The ship's company followed him aboard in February 2026, and by the middle of the year she was being described, not unreasonably, as expected on operations within six months.

What she got out of it is more than a repair. The Power Improvement Project took out the two original diesel generators and put in three larger and more reliable ones, and rebuilt the electrical architecture around them, which is intended to keep her viable into the 2040s. She is also no longer alone in having had it done: Dauntless went first, Daring and Dragon have followed, and the remaining three are due to be through the same conversion by 2028. Whether the class then gets to spend the 2030s at sea rather than in dock is the question the whole programme has been built to answer.

The system Daring first fired over the Hebrides in 2011 was finally used in anger by one of her sisters. From late 2023, HMS Diamond spent months in the southern Red Sea shooting down Houthi drones and missiles aimed at merchant shipping, the first time Sea Viper had been fired at anything that was actually trying to do harm and the first time a Royal Navy ship had shot down an aerial target in combat since 1991. It worked. The awkward fact the class has had to live with is that the weapon system has been vindicated completely while the ships carrying it have spent a great deal of the same period alongside.

Her extended period out of active service reflects the properly difficult maintenance and availability challenges that have affected the Type 45 class more broadly, even as HMS Daring's earlier operational record, from Gulf anti-piracy command to typhoon relief in the Philippines, demonstrated exactly the kind of versatile, far-reaching capability the class was originally designed to deliver.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.