The post-Cold War case for cutting the class to six rested on unusually favourable strategic assumptions. Britain was not expected to face a peer war or an unchosen emergency, so two ships in maintenance, two training or transiting, and two available appeared adequate. Repeated deployments, deferred maintenance, and the fleet-wide Power Improvement Project eventually pushed several destroyers toward heavy work at the same time. A dry dock is useful only if the dock itself has been maintained and modernized for the ships that need it. The March 2026 discussion links insufficient dock capacity to the lack of an available Type 45 during the Cyprus crisis. The cancelled seventh and eighth hulls would have provided additional capacity when the maintenance cycle failed to match the plan.
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The six-ship readiness model assumed a predictable world
The case for six Type 45s assumed chosen wars, two ships always available, and maintained dry docks. Later deployments and simultaneous upgrades broke those assumptions.