As we all know, frigate usually serves for more than ten years or even decades. Even the first ship of the littoral combat ship , which was previously built by the U.S. Navy, and the first ship of the littoral combat ship, were in service for 13 and 11 years respectively, which is already very short.
, while the 2,000-ton frigate Bangabond Lake, manufactured by South Korea for the Bangladeshi Navy, was retired after only one year of service. So why?
We know that Bangladesh Navy 's surface ship has not been very strong. The Bangladesh Navy has more than 270 various ships, and the main battleships are several frigates, such as the 053 series, the British Navy Type 61 frigate, the British Navy Type 41 frigate, etc. It can be seen that the Bangladesh Navy does not have many "big ships". So after finally obtaining a 2,000-ton ship from South Korea, why did it retire in a hurry?
Bangladesh Navy Frigate
About 1999, in order to thank Bangladesh, which also belongs to YSL, for its support, Saudi provided Bangladesh with US$130 million to build new ships for the Bangladesh Navy. Bangladesh attached great importance to this matter, so it found South Korea, which is a "ship-making power". asked it to build an advanced frigate suitable for the Bangladean Navy based on , the Ulsan-class frigate of the South Korean Navy as the model to create an advanced frigate suitable for the Bangladean Navy. This was the later "BNS Bangabandhu, F-25).
"Bangabande Lake"
Bangabande Lake absorbs advanced frigate design concepts from Europe and the United States. The ship is 105 meters long, 12.5 meters wide, 4 meters draft, and a full load displacement of 2,300 tons. It can also carry an carrier-based helicopter . The design in the middle of the ship is very similar to that of the German MEKO frigate. Since the Bangladesh Navy does not require long-range operations, its endurance is only about 4,000 nautical miles (18 knots), which is completely enough for the Bangladesh Navy.
Since the Ulsan-class frigate has a relatively large service volume in South Korea, the Yupu Shipyard of Daewoo, which was responsible for building the Bangabandhu frigate, delivered the frigate in 2001 in just 14 months. South Korea is even more happy about this, believing that the ship will open the export of South Korean ships to West Asia, North Africa and . South Korea believes that there will be at least a dozen frigates like this in the future, which is indeed good news for the South Korean shipbuilding industry.
The result is unexpectedly that just one year later, in 2002, the ship was discovered by the Bangladesh Navy in just one year of use. In addition, the Bangladesh Navy, who was short of money at the time, did have difficulties in repairing and maintaining such ships. Therefore, this 2,000-ton frigate, which had only been in service for one year, had to announce its retirement on February 14, the following year after the service, almost setting the highest retirement speed of the Meng Navy and even modern naval ships in the world.
However, I have to say that Koreans are still very responsible. After the incident, South Korea felt very embarrassed, so it helped the Bangladesh Navy improve the ship and helped the Bangladesh Navy shipyard to obtain the ability to repair such frigates. After this operation, the frigate returned to service in 2004, two years after retirement.
After that, South Korea also learned from its mistakes, put a lot of effort into the external provision of ships, and achieved good results. South Korea has successively provided the British Navy with a 37,000-ton tidal-class supply ship, assisted the construction of the "Arugno" submarine, and also built the "Rizar" class light frigate built by the Philippine Navy .
Tidal-class
According to relevant figures, among the 7 billion US dollars of various equipment exported by South Korea last year, the proportion of ships ranked first with 68%. From 2017 to 2021, South Korea's ship exports increased by 1660% month-on-month compared with . It can be seen from this that South Korea's progress in this area is indeed obvious to all.
