HMS Exploit (P167): From a Fire Off Lundy Island to NATO Exercises in the Baltic

Constructed at Woolston

HMS Exploit was built by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston in Hampshire and commissioned in 1988, an Archer-class patrol vessel, part of the same P2000 family of small training and patrol boats as her many sister ships. The name had been allocated once before, to a 1942 Catherine-class minesweeper, though that ship never reached the Royal Navy and was renamed USS Vigilance before she was even launched.

That earlier Exploit is a stranger case than the record makes it look, because she never served in the Royal Navy at all. Thirty-two Auk-class minesweepers were ordered in American yards specifically for transfer to Britain under Lend-Lease, numbered BAM-1 to BAM-32 for British Auxiliary Minesweeper and allocated British names in advance; in Royal Navy service the type was to be known as the Catherine class. Exploit was BAM-24, laid down at Seattle on 28 November 1942 by the Associated Shipbuilding Corporation.

Then the United States Navy, short of escorts and minesweepers itself, decided to keep some of them. On 23 January 1943, before the ship had even been launched, Exploit was taken off the transfer list and renamed Vigilance. She went down the ways that April, commissioned in February 1944 and spent her war in the Pacific under the American flag. Twelve of the thirty-two were kept back in the same way, and seventeen of the ones that did reach Britain went home to the United States after the war anyway.

So the name Exploit sat on a hull for eight weeks on a slipway in Washington State and never once went to sea with it. Which means this twenty-metre patrol boat, crewed by five sailors and a dozen undergraduates from Birmingham, has a considerably better claim on the name than the ship usually listed ahead of her, who never wore it at all.

Like several of her class, she was originally ordered for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, distinguished at the time by a black hull, before entering full Royal Navy service as part of the Coastal Forces Squadron, a role combining coastal patrol duties with the essential business of training the next generation of naval officers.

HMS Exploit has served the University of Birmingham's Royal Naval Unit, giving undergraduates hands-on experience of navigation, seamanship and leadership at sea, the same essential purpose shared across the whole small fleet of Archer-class vessels dotted around Britain's university towns and coastal training bases. She is currently led by Lieutenant Cameron Osborn, and, like most Royal Navy vessels, keeps a wide circle of affiliations: the destroyer HMS Daring, 845 Naval Air Squadron, the town of Berkeley, Hereford Cathedral School's cadet force, the Rhondda Sea Cadet Corps, King Edward's School and Lordswood Boys' School in Birmingham, and a Girl Guide unit in Walsall, a genuinely eclectic list for a boat barely twenty metres long.

The organisation she was originally built for is worth knowing about, because it no longer exists and its job was a strange one: the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was a body of civilian volunteers whose task in a nuclear war would have been to clear Britain's ports and control what moved in and out of them afterwards. It was disbanded in 1994 and its boats were handed to the Royal Navy, which is how a handful of black-hulled coastal auxiliaries became grey warships with pennant numbers. That story, and what the University Royal Naval Units are actually for, is set out in the article on HMS Example (P165).

A Fire in the Bristol Channel

HMS Exploit's service was not without genuine drama. On 19 March 1994, while transiting from Greenock to Portsmouth roughly 30 miles off Lundy Island, she suffered a severe fire in her machinery space, the result of a major mechanical failure in her starboard main engine that left a large hole torn in the sump casing.

Emergency services were alerted and stood ready to respond, though in the end their assistance was not required, the crew having brought the situation under control themselves, a remarkably tense episode for a small vessel operating well out into the Bristol Channel at the time.

It is worth appreciating how serious that was. A fire in the machinery space of a warship is the thing every sailor is trained hardest for and least wants to meet; in a boat of two hundred tonnes, thirty miles out in the Bristol Channel in March, with a hole torn in an engine sump and burning oil loose in a compartment the size of a small garage, there is nowhere to fall back to and no other compartment to fight it from. The crew put it out themselves. The emergency services that had been mobilised were stood down without having to do anything, which is the outcome every fire exercise in the Royal Navy exists to produce and which almost never makes the news.

Into NATO Waters

HMS Exploit's role expanded well beyond routine coastal training duties in more recent years.

In June 2017, she deployed to the Baltic alongside several sister ships to take part in NATO's BALTOPS exercise, marking the first time Royal Navy P2000 patrol vessels had ever been involved in an exercise of that scale, a truly significant milestone for a class of ship more usually associated with training cruises around the British coast than major multinational NATO deployments.

In June 2022, HMS Exploit returned to the Baltic for BALTOPS 22, one of six unarmed P2000 boats from the Coastal Forces Squadron tasked with a genuinely mischievous job: acting as "hostile vessels" and mounting mock swarm attacks against the destroyer HMS Defender and allied Lithuanian, Latvian and Norwegian warships, their own self-described "party trick" once the exercise reached its dynamic phase. Her commanding officer at the time, Lieutenant Martin Head, called it "months of planning" finally paying off, with "fantastically warm welcomes" awaiting the crew in Antwerp, The Hague, Hamburg and Copenhagen along the way.

That job is a great deal more serious than the phrase party trick suggests, and it is worth explaining what these boats are actually simulating. The fast inshore attack craft swarm is the classic asymmetric threat to a modern warship: not one target but a dozen, small, fast, low in the water, coming in from several bearings at once in confined coastal water. Against that, almost everything a destroyer carries is useless. Her area air-defence missiles are designed for aircraft, her main gun cannot traverse fast enough to engage twelve things at once, and her own radar picture is cluttered by the coast behind them. What is left is machine guns, close-range cannon and a helicopter, handled by people who have practised. It is the threat the Royal Navy takes most seriously in the Gulf, and there is no realistic way to train for it without something to be the swarm. A P2000 is almost exactly the right size and speed, and there are six of them.

In early 2024, HMS Exploit and three further sister vessels deployed to northern Norway to take part in NATO's Exercise Steadfast Defender, one of the alliance's largest military exercises in decades, held amid heightened tensions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a striking demonstration of just how far the role of these small training vessels had expanded from their original, more modest coastal patrol origins.

Steadfast Defender is worth setting out at its actual size, because "one of the alliance's largest military exercises in decades" undersells it considerably. It ran from 22 January to 31 May 2024, involved roughly ninety thousand troops from all thirty-one NATO members plus Sweden, and put more than eighty aircraft, about fifty warships and over eleven hundred armoured vehicles into the field at once. It was the largest thing NATO had done since the Cold War ended, and its purpose was not display: it was to test, for the first time in a generation, whether the alliance's regional defence plans actually work when you try to move that many people and that much equipment across a continent.

The Royal Navy put about seven thousand people into it, with just under two thousand Royal Marines in the amphibious phase. HMS Prince of Wales led the British contribution as flagship, with the frigates Somerset and Portland, a submarine and the landing ship RFA Mounts Bay. The northern part of it, Nordic Response, involved more than twenty thousand soldiers from thirteen countries, some eight thousand of them Norwegian, working in the Arctic in February and March.

And four fast patrol boats. That is the detail worth holding on to. In the largest NATO exercise since the Cold War, alongside an aircraft carrier, a submarine and two frigates, the Royal Navy also sent four twenty-metre boats crewed by a handful of regulars and a rotation of undergraduates, because there is work in the fjords and the inshore water that nothing bigger can usefully do, and because somebody has to be the enemy. Exploit was one of them.

And the choice of the Baltic for that work is not incidental either. It is a shallow, narrow, island-strewn sea with restricted approaches, exactly the kind of water in which a large warship has least room and small craft have most advantage; a destroyer in the Gulf of Finland has a fraction of the searoom she would have in the Atlantic. It has also changed character completely in the space of two years: with Finland joining NATO in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, every state on its shores except Russia is now in the alliance. The Royal Navy's smallest and least warlike vessels, unarmed boats crewed largely by university students and a handful of regulars, have found themselves genuinely useful in the one European sea where being small is an advantage.

Continuing Service

HMS Exploit remains based at HMNB Portsmouth, continuing to serve the Coastal Forces Squadron with a small permanent crew supplemented by naval training personnel, carrying on the dual role that has defined her entire career: training the officers of tomorrow while remaining ready, when called upon, to take her place alongside the Royal Navy's larger warships in significant international exercises.

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