Page 74 - Navy Journal 219

Navy Journal 2019

Sri Lankan government and SLN headquarters didn’t resort to lesser supervision
for operational and tactical level planning/ execution. Ultimately, it made the
higher directives distinctive of purpose and desired end state for operational
commander. Later on, such lesser supervision proved instrumental to maintain high
operational tempo and enhance mutual trust between senior and junior leadership.
The faster decision-making cycle virtually nullified the enemy’s window of
opportunity and brought to the long awaited win against LTTE.

Interaction with officers of Royal Malaysian Navy, Indonesian Navy,
Philippines’ Navy and Mexican Navy reveals the similarity of facts in Bangladesh
Navy. While in command, they experienced few of the vital weapons or sensors
were falling short of optimum readiness for about three to nine months due to the
delay in getting the spares supplied by foreign Original Equipment Manufacturers
(OEM). This delay also prompted the command to minimize the utilization of other
sophisticated weapons and sensors during on job training of crews onboard.

General Status of Warships and Equipments in Smaller Navies

Most smaller navies do not have indigenous warship-building capability.
Hence, those navies rely heavily on heterogeneous sources like the United States of
America, United Kingdom, Germany, China, Korea, Yugoslavia, France, India,
Malaysia, Italy etc. Taking BN as an example, about sixty percent of her warships
are procured from China, twenty percent from the UK and the remaining twenty
percent from the USA, South Korea, Yugoslavia and Bangladesh. The major
weapons, sensors and equipments on board indigenously built BN ships are mostly
from China. Hence, BN is considerably dependent on the OEM for their respective
manufactured equipments on board the procured warships or support ships. This
leads to a potential delay of vital spares supply from OEM unless it is available in
the inventory of the initial spares purchased from OEM during the procurement of
the warship or the equipment. The delay time appears relatively longer once the
platform or equipment gets older and the spares would no longer being produced by
the OEM. It is important to note that the BN generally phases out the platforms at
an average age of 30-35 years in case of newly procured ships and 20 years for off
the shelf procured ships. However, the duration of repair or replacement of
important weapons, sensors, and equipments depends on the user’s requirement
and OEM’s recommendations. The country of origin of platforms and equipment
and their OEMs may differ in case of other smaller navies than that of the BN.

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