| abstract | - The County class was a class of guided missile destroyer, the first such vessels built by the Royal Navy. Designed specifically around the Sea Slug anti-aircraft missile system, the primary role of these ships was area air-defence around the aircraft carrier task force in the nuclear-war environment. The class represented a merging of the cruiser and destroyer role on a displacement of about that of the Second World War era Dido-class cruiser, but with modern combined gas turbine and steam turbine propulsion and, although short on the support and logistic spares stocks of a traditional cruiser, able to fulfil traditional flagship and admiral's barge functions in the 1960s—the last decade when the UK oversaw significant colonial territory ("East of Suez"). Its missile capability was overtaken by aircraft development by 1962–63, when HMS Devonshire and Hampshire entered service, but in the early and mid-1960s the modern lines of these guided-missile destroyers, with their traditional RN cruiser style and their impressive-looking missiles, enabled the overstretched Royal Navy to project sufficient power to close down the threat of a militant, left-leaning Indonesia to Malaysia and Borneo during the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation.
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