THE reason the Royal Navy can't field enough ships (Letters, October 29) is not due to budget cuts but because of its unabated penchant for ever more complex, unaffordable vessels.

In particular, it continues to waste money designing and fielding frigates that are fundamentally over-manned, over-armed, maintenance-intensive, fragile and inefficient for peacetime duties, and which in any "hot war" would rapidly fall victim to satellite-based targeting. This endless pursuit of capability regardless of cost, which first took real hold in the late 1970s (later egged-on by a poor showing in the Falklands War) has resulted in an "inverted hockey stick"' trend in terms of the number of escort-type vessels that our Navy can afford.

The truth is that the Royal Navy's whole concept of frigate-type vessels and frigate-type operations is an obsolete and anachronistic irrelevance, tailored more to the open-ocean mass naval deployments of the Cold War era than as an efficient and cost-effective solution to modern (essentially patrol and monitoring) needs.

With the Royal Navy's frigate force coming due for renewal, there is a golden opportunity to change this by moving towards a larger, lower-cost and more functional fleet based on ocean-going patrol ships (lean-manned, commercially outfitted ships equipped solely with guns, a helicopter and a detachment of troops) with chartered-in offshore support vessels for sonar and minehunting operations.

Unfortunately the Ministry of Defence has its head buried in the past, and persists instead with a Type-26 frigate programme that will equip our navy with replacement ships that are unaffordable in the numbers necessary for even our basic maritime security needs, let alone meaningful participation in overseas operations.

Mark Campbell-Roddis,

1 Pont Crescent,

Dunblane.