Interesting. I wonder if the ships are considered somewhat disposable in the event of a "hot" war in the Baltic and whether the crews are expected to have time to get off or are also considered disposable. In the wider-world of maritime security, evacuating people from places having revolutions/uprisings and anti-piracy I would expect the lack of damage control to be less of an issue as they shouldn't be facing anything that can harm the hull.
A few thoughts:
No ship is considered disposable, even the Oliver Hazard Perry's, which are infamous for this. It is acknowledged, however, that losses are going to occur, and every navy would rather lose a frigate than a destroyer, a destroyer over a cruiser and a cruiser over a carrier, it's all about numbers at that point. I'm reminded of a quote from the movie
War of the Roses "Divorce is like a war, there's no such thing as winning, only varying degrees of losing".
Lots of things can harm the hull, most of them are pretty cheap too. For the record, however, hull integrity requirements in modern vessels are all set to civilian requirements, most of them cover leaks and discharges, not impact resistance. Modern vessels aren't armoured, as this was expensive and ultimately pointless. The only real advantage warships tend to have, in terms of survival, is more water tight bulkheads and generally duplicated power and cabling. Most warships can have around six or seven power configurations to prevent total loss even if two major engineering compartments are lost. Ultimately though, ships are somewhat fragile in the modern era, with only some old dinosaurs still possessing armour. The LCS, from my understanding, has kevlar layering on the inside of the hull and superstructure to protect crew and equipment in the event of a small arms engagement, something pretty well unthinkable 20 years ago.
In the event of a major conflict against a parity opponent, every modern navy will be scrambling wildly for the old textbooks. We have all grown up on a steady diet of littoral combat, MIO and HADR, not blue water combat. There are many lessons willfully forgotten, which are really only useful in a parity conflict. Most navies still practice these procedures, but only half-heartedly, which will make the next major blue water conflict tragic indeed.
The RN also seems to generally prefer to have the slower smaller vessels have anti-mining capabilities so while there are only 3-4 OPVs there are a lot of minehunters and minesweepers.
<snip>
Compared to most equivalent or peer navies, I feel the RN has a tradition and on going role of distant patrolling and commerce protection for the size. The other European powers tend to be more focused on local protection or at least only deploying to where there are friendly bases while the USN is 1) huge and 2) feels more built around large multi-ship expeditionary or strike forces. The SSNs are the best tool for this sort of cruising in a lot of ways but suffer sometimes from their lack of visibility in the same way that their invisibility means that we can have them potentially be in lots of places and no one will know until the torpedo, Harpoon or Tomahawk hits.
The RN has a lot invested in the seas, and the quickest way to neuter them would be mine their ports, which is a lot cheaper and easier to do than clearing said mines, hence why the RN has such a large MCM capability. Somewhat similar to Australia. :-)
The RN also has a totally different history and tradition to the USN, which largely descends from it. The USN has been maintained at a wartime level, unlike the RN which uses the traditional European method of rapid construction when a conflict becomes imminent. Philosophically they two are at opposite ends of the readiness scale, and there is merit to both.
