HMS Vengeance: The Youngest of the Nuclear Four

The Last of the Class, Constructed at Barrow

HMS Vengeance was built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down in February 1993 as the fourth and final Vanguard class boat, following HMS Vanguard, HMS Victorious and HMS Vigilant into service.

She was launched in September 1998 and commissioned in November 1999, entering service with the 1st Submarine Squadron at HM Naval Base Clyde, Faslane, where she remains based today, carrying Trident II D5 ballistic missiles as part of the Royal Navy's Continuous At Sea Deterrent, the standing commitment, unbroken since 1969, to keep at least one of these boats on patrol at all times.

Understandably, the Royal Navy's own account of her service is deliberately thin on operational detail, submarine deployments being, by their very nature, a secretive business, and this article will not attempt to fill in the gaps with guesswork.

A Refit That Was Not the One You May Have Heard About

It is worth a word of clarification here, since the Vanguard class's refit history has attracted a good deal of press attention in recent years, almost all of it about a different boat. HMS Vanguard's own second refit famously overran spectacularly, stretching to more than seven years against an original four year estimate.

Vengeance's equivalent refit and refuelling, carried out at Devonport, was a considerably more orderly affair by comparison, she entered dry dock in March 2012 under a £350 million contract originally planned to take around three and a half years, involving a new reactor core intended to see out the rest of her service life without needing refuelling again, alongside renewal of her machinery, electronics and weapons systems.

The work was completed in December 2015, broadly in line with her sister boats Victorious and Vigilant, whose first refits averaged around forty two months, a remarkably unremarkable outcome next to Vanguard's well publicised troubles.

Getting to Devonport in the first place required Vengeance to transit up the River Tamar, large enough a spectacle that the Torpoint and Cremyll ferries had to be suspended for safety while she passed.

A Missile Test That Made the Papers

In June 2016, as part of her post-refit demonstration and shakedown operation off the coast of Florida, Vengeance fired an unarmed Trident II D5 missile that suffered a malfunction during its test flight, veering off course towards the United States instead of its intended target area off West Africa.

The Ministry of Defence did not make this public at the time, and it only became widely known some seven months later, after the vote in Parliament to renew the Trident programme, when it was reported by the press, prompting accusations of a cover up.

The government maintained that Vengeance and her crew had been successfully tested and certified regardless, while critics, including a former First Sea Lord, called the silence surrounding the incident bizarre. It remains a disputed episode in the detail, and this account sticks to what was reported and confirmed rather than the more excitable claims that circulated at the time.

One of the Longest Patrols on Record

In March 2024, Vengeance returned to Faslane after a patrol lasting some two hundred and one days, six and a half months submerged, reported at the time as among the longest deterrent patrols in Royal Navy history.

Quite where it ranks precisely is disputed between sources, with differing figures circulating for the longest patrols on record by her sister boats Victorious and Vanguard, so this article will simply say that it was one of the longest rather than claim a precise ranking it cannot verify.

The unusually long patrols in this period were widely attributed to reduced fleet availability while Vanguard remained in her prolonged refit and Victorious underwent deep maintenance of her own, leaving as few as two boats to cover a rota built for four.

Visible wear on Vengeance's hull on her return, rust staining and missing anechoic tiles among them, was noted at the time as a quiet testament to the strain of extended service.

Still on Patrol, Still Waiting for Her Replacement

Vengeance remains in active service today, the youngest of the four Vanguard class boats yet already well past the twenty five year service life originally envisaged for the class when she was designed.

She and her three sisters must continue to carry the deterrent until they are replaced, one by one, by the incoming Dreadnought class submarines, whose lead boat is not expected to enter service until the early 2030s.

No confirmed retirement date exists for Vengeance specifically, only the broader expectation that she will serve on for some years yet, a particularly remarkable span of service for a submarine already older than most of the crew who sail in her.