Perhaps some of you missed this press release from the Prime Minister's Office - 13 Oct 23:
The carrier group, including HMS Queen Elizabeth, will return early next year to lead the UK’s contribution to the first phase of NATO’s most ambitious military drill since the Cold War, Exercise Steadfast Defender.
The operation will span almost six months and see 16,000 UK soldiers deploy to Estonia and Norway...
The Houthis are not at the top of our list of threats. The Russians are, and contributing to NATO fits in with constraining Vlad - see the explanations of CONSTRAIN in the Maritime Operating Concept. The 2021 defence paper, written nearly a year before the invasion of Ukraine, correctly recognised the threat posed by an aggressive Russia and prioritised NATO and the Euro-Atlantic.
I see that a
Telegraph writer is claiming that we are not sending a carrier to the Red Sea due to a lack of personnel. I wonder how they managed to find enough people for the CSG23 and WESTLANT23 deployments, and where have all these sailors gone since then?
Sad to see such an esteemed paper go downhill.