HMS Duncan (D37): Shadowing the Admiral Kuznetsov Through the Channel

The Last of Her Class

HMS Duncan was built by BAE Systems Surface Ships at the Govan and Scotstoun yards on the River Clyde, work commencing in 2006, laid down on 26 January 2007, and launched on 11 October 2010, a date deliberately chosen to coincide with the 213th anniversary of the Battle of Camperdown, the famous 1797 naval victory won by Admiral Adam Duncan after whom the ship is named.

Adam Duncan deserves rather more than a passing mention, because the finest thing he ever did was not the battle. In the spring of 1797 the Royal Navy mutinied, first at Spithead and then, far more bitterly, at the Nore. Duncan commanded the North Sea fleet, whose job was to keep fifteen Dutch ships of the line bottled up in the Texel so they could not come out and combine with the French. One by one his ships left him for the mutiny. He was reduced to two: his flagship Venerable of 74 guns and the Adamant of 50. He was sixty-six years old. What he did was take those two ships off the Dutch coast and, for three days, change their appearance daily and make elaborate signals over the horizon to a fleet that was not there. The Dutch, who could see the flags going up, concluded that the British battle line was just out of sight and stayed where they were. It is one of the purest bluffs in naval history, and it worked. When he finally got his fleet back and brought Vice Admiral de Winter to action off Kamperduin on 11 October, the King marked the victory by pardoning 180 of the imprisoned Nore mutineers, and Duncan was made a viscount ten days later.

She was commissioned on 26 September 2013 and entered service on 30 December that year, four months ahead of schedule, the sixth and final Type 45 destroyer built for the Royal Navy, displacing between 8,000 and 8,500 tonnes and carrying a crew of 191.

Striking Islamic State

HMS Duncan left Portsmouth on 2 March 2015 for her maiden deployment to the Mediterranean and Middle East, and on 7 July joined United States Navy Carrier Strike Group Twelve, led by USS Theodore Roosevelt, to strike Islamic State targets. Over more than six months in theatre the strike group flew 1,812 combat sorties totalling 10,618 flight hours against Iraq and Syria under Operation Inherent Resolve, direct participation in the international coalition campaign against the group's territorial holdings and a genuine demonstration of the close operational integration between British and American naval forces even when working under predominantly American command structures.

Shadowing the Admiral Kuznetsov

In October 2016, HMS Duncan and the frigate HMS Richmond were dispatched to intercept and, in Defence Secretary Michael Fallon's own words, "man-mark" a Russian task group of four ships heading for Syria: the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, the nuclear-powered battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy, and the destroyers Vice-Admiral Kulakov and Severomorsk, as they transited the English Channel, a particularly high-profile piece of shadowing work that attracted considerable public and media attention given the size and notoriety of the Russian force involved. When the same task group made its return journey through the Channel the following January, it was a different Type 45, HMS St Albans, that took up the escort duty.

It is worth knowing what happened to that task group next, because the shadowing was the least of the Kuznetsov's problems. She was on her way to what remains her only combat deployment, and within weeks of passing Duncan in the Channel she had lost two aircraft into the sea, neither of them to anything the enemy did. A MiG-29K ran out of fuel circling while the arrestor gear was repaired, and an Su-33 went over the side when an arresting wire parted as she landed. The remaining aircraft were flown off to the Russian airbase at Khmeimim and operated from the beach for the rest of the deployment, which rather defeats the object of having a carrier. She also made her passage trailing the column of black smoke that has become her trademark, accompanied, as she always is, by an ocean-going tug in case she breaks down. Two Royal Navy ships shadowing four Russian ones made the headlines. The more instructive story was the state of what they were shadowing.

The following month, HMS Duncan suffered a propulsion problem while sailing off the English coast, a dramatic-looking incident that saw eyewitnesses report her under tow by three large tugs and apparently without power. The Royal Navy's own account was rather more matter-of-fact: it named the cause as a split water coupling and said she in fact returned to Plymouth under her own power, with tugs merely assisting standard berthing procedure. Whichever version of the story one prefers, it was a visible symptom of a genuinely serious fleet-wide problem: the Type 45 class's original intercooler design could, in warm climates, trigger a near-total electrical failure, disabling propulsion, weapons and navigation systems all at once, serious enough that all six ships eventually needed their hulls cut open to fit extra diesel generators under a dedicated engineering programme, the Power Improvement Project, contracted from 2018.

That programme is still running, and Duncan is the last ship waiting for it. Under the Power Improvement Project each destroyer has her two original diesel generators taken out and three larger and more reliable ones fitted in their place, which means cutting the hull open to get them in, and the high-voltage distribution is strengthened at the same time so that the radar and the missile system have a supply that will not fall over in warm water. By the end of 2025 three ships had been through it, Dauntless, Daring and Dragon, with Defender and Diamond in hand, and the ministerial line is that all six will be done by 2028.

Duncan is scheduled to go in at her next docking period at Portsmouth. Which means that Duncan is, as things stand, the only Type 45 in the fleet still running on the original power arrangement, and the reason for that is not neglect: she is one of the very few that has been consistently available, and a navy with six destroyers and a carrier group to escort cannot easily spare the one that works. There is a certain irony in a class whose defining problem was electrical keeping its least-modified ship at sea because she keeps going.

NATO Command in the Black Sea

HMS Duncan deployed as flagship of NATO's Standing Maritime Naval Group 2 in June 2017, operating across the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and resumed that command role again in January 2018, visiting ports including Constanța in Romania and Split in Croatia. She took up the same flagship role for a third time in July 2023, during which she joined the American carrier USS Gerald R. Ford's own strike group in the Mediterranean on 16 November that year, carrying out a replenishment at sea with the fleet oiler USNS Laramie and a joint air defence exercise, a notably substantial track record of NATO command responsibility for a single ship.

Protecting Shipping in the Gulf, and the Gaza Crisis

HMS Duncan was ordered to the Persian Gulf in July 2019 to help protect British shipping amid rising tensions with Iran, operating alongside HMS Montrose during a dangerous period for merchant vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

Between May and December 2024, she deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean, initially to help address Houthi attacks in the Red Sea before remaining in the region to support the wider response to the Gaza crisis, providing air defence escort duties throughout a volatile period.

HMS Duncan returned to Portsmouth in early December 2024 following this deployment, remaining in active service as the final and, in many respects, most operationally tested of the entire Type 45 class.

Operation Firecrest, 2026

In July 2026, HMS Duncan sailed as air-defence escort to flagship HMS Prince of Wales for the first phase of Operation Firecrest, a Carrier Strike Group deployment to the Arctic and North Atlantic in support of NATO's Northern Flank. She returned to a jubilant homecoming in Portsmouth on 24 July, with a second phase of the deployment planned for northern European waters later in the year.

Sailing for Firecrest Phase Two

HMS Duncan left Portsmouth again on 19 August 2026, following a period of summer leave and planned maintenance, to begin training drills ahead of the second phase of Operation Firecrest in northern European waters later in the year.

Her first port of call after slipping out of Portsmouth was in Denmark, the first foreign visit she had made since coming home from the Arctic in July. The autumn phase of Firecrest takes the Carrier Strike Group into northern European waters, which is where the alliance's attention has been since 2022 and where the Royal Navy has most to offer: the Norwegian Sea, the Baltic approaches and the gaps between them, all of it shallow, crowded, within range of the shore and covered by other people's radar.

A destroyer's job in that is the one the Type 45 was drawn for and the one no other British ship can do. A carrier is only as useful as the umbrella over her, and the umbrella is a single destroyer with a Sampson radar on a mast and forty-eight missiles in the deck. There is a straight line from Adam Duncan making signals to an imaginary fleet off the Texel in 1797 to a ship of his name standing between a carrier and the sky off Norway in 2026, and it is the same line: one ship, in the right place, doing the work of several.

Home for a Major Refit

After a defence diplomacy visit to Copenhagen, Duncan joined HMS St Albans and HMS Severn at the end of August 2026 in a concentrated 72-hour operation shadowing the Russian destroyer Admiral Levchenko and two sanctioned cargo ships, General Skobelev and Sparta, through the North Sea. On 30 August she berthed at Crombie on the Firth of Forth, the first naval vessel to use the jetty there since March 2024, to unload her ammunition, and on 6 September she arrived back in Portsmouth to be handed over to BAE Systems for a major refit. As the last of the six Type 45s to go through the Power Improvement Project, she will have three new Rolls-Royce MTU diesel generator sets fitted, and a new silo of 24 Sea Ceptor missiles will go in forward of her existing 48-cell launcher, leaving the main magazine free for the longer-range Aster 30. No date has yet been given for her return.

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