RFA Diligence was a forward repair ship of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Launched in 1981 as a support ship for North Sea oil rigs, she was chartered by the British government to support naval activities during the 1982 Falklands War and was later bought outright as a fleet maintenance vessel.[1] She gave assistance to the damaged USS Tripoli and Princeton in the 1991 Gulf War, and to Sri Lanka after the 2005 tsunami.[1] She typically had deployments of 5-8 years in support of the Trafalgar-class submarine on duty east of Suez, with a secondary role as a mothership for British and US minesweepers in the Persian Gulf.[1] Until 2016 Diligence was set to go out of service in 2020.[3] However in August 2016, the UK Ministry of Defence placed an advert for the sale of RFA Diligence.[4] The option for the delivery of future operational maintenance and repair capability for the RFA remain under consideration