The Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer: from crisis to comeback

The Type 45 destroyer was designed to be the Royal Navy’s most advanced air defence warship, capable of protecting entire fleets from missile attack. Instead, early in its career, the class became synonymous with propulsion failures and power outages that raised serious questions about reliability. This video explores how that happened, the engineering decisions behind it, and how a major upgrade programme is now transforming the ships into the high-performance assets they were always intended to be. 0:00 – The problem, total power failure risk, reputation damage 1:07 – History of a world-class air defence ship 2:23 – The propulsion gamble. Integrated Electric Propulsion and WR-21 6:11 – Living with the problem. Operational workarounds, EIP, and deployments despite limits 7:02 – The Power Improvement Project. Extra diesel generators, major engineering work 9:09 – Upgrading the weapons. Sea Ceptor integration, Sea Viper evolution and DragonFire 11:47 – A brief operational history. The Black Sea, Gulf and Red Sea deployments 13:09 – From failure to frontline asset