There are some inaccuracies in the reuters article but the truth remains that the RN/FAA are effectively on life support and in dire need of rapid intervention. Sad times.

"you have replaced the two lesser capable ships with one, that cannot be in two places at once."

bang on Nut!!! I understand why they keep uppinghte spec on ships but eventuaslly we'll finish up with one that can do everything - and it will have a radius of effectivness of maybe 100kms...................................

But until someone tells the electorate they're going to have to pay and take less we won't see any changes

Have you considered that people are "crying" about Russians in Ukraine because 1) they are the invaders and 2) they deny any direct involvement. And people are NOT crying about "NATO advisors and volunteers from West" because 1) Ukraine are the defenders trying to stop invaders and 2) no one is denying that Ukraine is getting outside help to repel invaders.

People forget recent history very quickly. Which given all the recent Brexit fuss and bother about immigrants is a surprise, people seem to have forgotten that our borders are water, so we need and have always needed an effective Navy to police them. That's before you commit anything abroad. I'd be interested to know exactly how many and what ships we currently have available to enforce our watery borders. I suspect the answer will be in single figures and nothing bigger than a trawler!

Well, this little killer is in our local waters right now, I believe ...

HMS Gleaner

Funny you should mention HMS Gleaner. A few years back she was booked in to operate from "my" yacht club pontoon on the S Coast, but the last minute was diverted off to survey a wreck somewhere. Had looked forward to being entertained aboard.

I suspect the Wardroom is a bit minimal, with just 2 officers on board!

Here's me wondering if the sub fleet will end up bigger than the surface fleet...

Reports indicate that the A boats are perfectly capable of giving the USN a nasty surprise.

One might also ask if there would be a sufficiently large, skilled workforce to operate the kit? Consider that a rhetorical question, we all know the answer. Well, seemingly all apart from politicians and service Manning authorities, planners and financiers.

Unless of course the creeping normalisation of 12-14 hour days as the expected norm in a peacetime HQ for anyone above mid-level flt lt / equivalent means brute force manning will see it work right up to the point they need to surge to Op tempo only to realise the tank is empty.

Oh and as for Russians in Ukraine, of course there are. Try looking up signs of any social media savvy Russian squaddie and you'll find selfies taken in Ukraine all over the Internet of them operating as 'local resistance'. RUSI did a very good paper recently on how the Russians operate in the Info Ops arena; Ukraine is a textbook example. Apologies for the thread drift.

Does anybody have a clear statement of what the RN is there for ?

Seems like everybody expects it to be something but what is it's clear stated purpose ?

Why should everything have to have a clear and stated purpose?

It is there like all militaries to do whatever is needed when asked.

The real world is not black and white and quantifiable no matter how much people will try to stick it in boxes.

Because that is the way the Government decrees our (MoD) financial planning works. (1) There shall be a Navy: (2) This is what it will do: (2) This is what we (the Navy) need to do it. (In descending order of decision maker seniority).

Correct, although it is told. The Navy chiefs are in turn paid to tell politicians when this cannot be reconciled with (2) above. They seldom do.


Correct again, but given the above, some are paid (not a lot) to make decisions of what event is more likely to occur. Very often they are wrong, which is why we need a greater degree of built-in flexibility.

Most would be quite surprised how low a level many of these decisions are made at, and how small the RN's input is. Perhaps worse, the "box-ticking" exercise you mentioned was ditched about 25 years ago. At least it was a laid down process with robust procedures. Today, it's more like making it up as you go along.

That resonates with me. I left the RAF in 1993 ... meltdown followed ;)

The country could try and get its navy back if it really tried, and could vote to build and pay for it-but I somehow doubt that day will come. The people are realists- they know as Britons we sold ourselves out a long time ago. Why pay for a Navy when our utilities are foreign owned, along with just about everything else? Future foreign powers that want to hurt us will not fire fight with us- they will close us out via trade agreements and decline to invest or trade with us.
We are not a great power and we are not even a military middling power any more. We don't want to be one. When will the penny drop?

* Just as an afterthought, when we were projecting the very last of our declining maritime air power - I give you the years 1992-99 with CVS in the Adriatic/Balkan situation-my question -Did it actually make a figs difference to the average man in our street what we did there, and how we did it? Why should he now be expected by some to dig deep and pay for a new expensive RN?

Hard-Ball, Hangarshuffle, but I take your point!

Sadly, Joe Public isn't really inspired by the placement of ships, or pictures of them. They've moved on to imagery of air strikes on targets, regardless of how that's actually achieved. We have a lot to thank the WWW and Media input for that.

The British people have been consistently indifferent to the fate of the Navy since about 1970, maybe even earlier. We make our own bed and we will all have to lie in it.
Facing up to it and in retrospection, I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone to join it anyway- its often hard, living conditions and harmony I would describe as difficult and at times its a bloody unpleasant life- neither is it well paid and any fringes it once had such as even a limited pension have gone to the dogs.
The picture that was floating around a few days ago of every one of the six Type 45's tied up in Portsmouth told its own story-that the recent management of the Navy, at many levels, in our recent time has been a disaster.
Do we really expect the public to now suddenly volte face and back up such a crock?

The public may well look at the RN as having plenty of money spent on it of course.


The two new Aircraft carriers are costing billions, along with all those shiny new jets to operate off them. And the replacement for Trident has just been authorised, with the money ring-fenced from outside of the defence budget. And those Type 45's are not too cheap either....(even if most of them are a bit broken).


To the uninitiated, that looks like a lot of shiny new kit, at times when the RAF are reducing their front-line squadrons, and the Army are reducing their manpower.....?

Same is true for all our armed forces. Don't kid yourselves into thinking that people give a moments thought to the disposition of the RAF or Army either.

It's perfectly natural - all populations grow to under appreciate their armed forces during extended periods of peace at home. And WWII is now a dim and distant memory, and even today's young teenagers weren't born at the conclusion of Gulf War 2.

The RN has an important role to play. There's the ultimate Top Trumps winner - the nuclear deterrent. And whilst it's strike capability is small, it can put a Tomahawk down almost anywhere in the world at quite short notice and gives no prior warning of impending doom. In contrast the RAF often has to go and ask about borrowing an airfield somewhere before it can do anything, which limits it's usefulness when something discrete is called for.

And for a lot of the things going on at the moment, small discrete involvements are definitely flavour of the month. They always have been - the trouble in Malaysia and Borneo were successfully dealt with without the large scale involvement of RN, RAF and Army, back in the days when all three were much larger.

The thing that is generally quite tricky is "What to do About Russia if they Invade". It'll probably never need to come to it (all of Putin's money is in Switzerland; not even he's going to risk blowing his retirement plan...), but all of Western Europe would need to seriously tool up fast in all departments, not just the UK.

No longer true, I'm afraid, now it comes from the main budget, so other programmes will get salami sliced to support it.

Another of the legacies of Smiler George.....

Trident costs must come from MoD budget, Osborne says - BBC News

Well, that article is 6 years old, and Osborne isn't Chancellor any more. Is there a prospect of a re-think, under a new PM and Chancellor?