Pictures: Greg Barrott, 11(ATT) Sqn

ROYAL Marines are testing a high-speed assault boat to shield the Fleet from fast attack craft.

The green berets at RM Instow in North Devon have been loaned four Swedish Combat Boat 90s as the Navy looks to buy a dozen ‘force protection craft’ to serve on the front line in the second half of this decade.

For future operations, the marines need a boat which is fast, can provide accurate and effective firepower to protect ships and landing craft, and can put a small raiding/reconnaissance party of commandos ashore well in advance of the main force – and a long way from the mother ship.

There’s nothing in the inventory of the various Royal Marines assault squadrons – which operate a mixture of large and small landing craft, smaller raiding boats, and hovercraft – that meets such criteria.

So to help understand the scale of the change in operations looming, 11 (Amphibious Trials and Training) Squadron are evaluating the CB90s (in return, the Swedes have been loaned some of the marines’ Offshore Raiding Craft).

Royal Marines come ashore from a CB90 in a choppy Plymouth Sound

As the name suggests, the CB90 has been around since 1990. It weighs around 16 tonnes, has top speed of about 45kts thanks to its water jet engines (which also allow it to turn on a sixpence) and is similar in size to the smaller landing craft (vehicle and personnel) used by the Royal Navy’s amphibious forces.

In the cabin there’s seating for up to 18 troops, plus plenty of space for their equipment, and the craft can mount heavy machine-guns for firepower.

The team at Instow – a mixture of around four dozen Royal Marines, Royal Navy and civilian experts – are about one third of their way through assessing the CB90.

So far they’ve tested basic handling, operating with other landing and assault craft (a prerequisite for any future boat), working out of the loading dock of HMS Bulwark, putting troops ashore, carrying a stretcher aboard safely.

“There’s no real comparison with what we operate at the moment – it’s a completely different beast,” said Lt Col Simon Guyer. Officer Commanding Craft Trials Wing with 11(ATT) Squadron.

“It’s a basic boat, you can really throw it about and it keeps coming back for more. That’s the sort of thing we like.”

A CB90 manoeuvres at speed in relatively calm seas in the Bristol Channel

The boats won’t complete their trials until the end of next year; there’s exercising with one of the RFA landing ships to carry out (they’ve already been successfully run in and out of Bulwark’s dock), and more thorough weapons tests to complete (not least remote weapons firing; a commando will sit in the ‘cockpit’ and ‘PlayStation-fashion’ control a gun mounted on the boat’s stern), and most importantly, the ability to safely recover a CB90 to Bulwark’s davits while under way in rough seas, because landing operations don’t stop when the water’s a bit choppy.

“It is very easy to drive – if you can drive an ORC, you can drive one of these,” says C/Sgt Ian Gibbons, whose spent 13 years in the landing craft world.

All the lessons learned will be incorporated into the final specifications and requirements when the MOD looks for firms to build the Force Protection Craft.

The first Force Protection Craft is planned to arrive at Instow in 2015 with front-line assault squadrons getting their hands on it from around 2017.

See January’s Navy News for a feature on the CB90 trials.