Thin Pinstriped Line

The Daily Mail has run a story about how a Russian ‘spy plane’ was seen over Dartmouth recently under the auspices of the ‘Open Skies’ treaty (story is HERE ). This is a great example of how poor understanding of international issues can often lead to significant confusion for the public. Notwithstanding fears by Twitter wags that the long secret ‘Spanish Windlass’ technique employed by the RN to solve PLTs may be vulnerable, this sort of incident helps build concern that the UK is at risk. Conventional Arms Control and Confidence and Security Building Mechanisms (CONAC / CSBMS) were an integral part of maintaining a reasonable state of security during the Cold War. Some treaties such as the Mutual Balanced Force Reductions – MBFR or ‘Most Bizarre Form of Ritual’ or the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty focused on imposing limits on tanks, guns and equipment on the Central Front during the 70s and 80s. The aim was to reduce tension by reducing the amount of equipment that...

News in the papers this weekend focused on the alleged proposal by the Army to try to close down and merge various ‘Regimental HQs’ (RHQs) and instead collocate their function into one single super site at Andover. This has caused complaints that it will weaken the relationship between the regiment and the local area, that it will harm welfare for soldiers and that it is damaging for recruitment. Humphrey finds this sort of story fascinating as it encapsulates many of the challenges that the Army faces today in remaining relevant and showing it is meeting tight budget targets. For the uninitiated, the RHQ is essentially the administration hub for Regiments within the British Army – but confusingly as far as Humphrey can make out, not all units or cap badges in the Army have an RHQ due to their different structure (although they may have some kind of equivalent at different levels such as a Corps HQ). Its role is providing support to the Regiment, primarily on welfare, communit...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if you have news to reveal in Parliament that you'd rather not get much attention then do so on the last day of the session (with apologies to Jane Austen, who is according to shock news this week apparently one of Britains greatest living authors…). That was proven again this week when the Government mentioned on 20 July that there was to be a review of national security capabilities ( LINK HERE ). This announcement seems to have been left until the last day of the Parliamentary Session to be released, with relatively little in depth information as to what the Review will actually cover. The text implies soothing corporate buzzwords such as  ‘joined up effective and efficient as possible’. Fighting the urge to shout BINGO at the host of buzzwords in the statement, it is worth considering what it could imply. Under current plans the UK undertakes a 5-yearly review of the strategic situation, which was done in 2010 and 2015. On ...

Humphrey is rarely moved to write on wider government issues (particularly Brexit), and certainly does not wish to express his views on  it.  Sometimes though something happens that is so staggeringly stupid and yet so widely propagated that a reply is called for to try and set things straight. In this case it is the ridiculous assertion doing the rounds on social media and political spokespeople that David Davis went into meetings with the EU without any paperwork on him. One of the tasks that generations of Civil Servants have come to dread is the Friday afternoon phone call, usually just when the finish line is in sight going something along the lines of “we’ve just found out the Minister is going to Upper Bongozwania over the weekend and needs a full brief with lines to take”. This is the cue for a flurry of work as briefs are pulled together, lines to take on policy issues formulated and every conceivable issue that could come up is pulled together into one briefing pa...

The Times ran today with a story suggesting that the JSF is over budget, fails to work on a range of issues and that it is fundamentally not fit for its intended purpose. Is this fair, or is this the latest round of rumour mongering on a project that has long split opinions? More to the point, in an era of ‘fake news’, what version of the truth should we believe? The problem with stories such as this is that they capture very specific snapshots of an issue, are roughly stapled together with some narrative to form a story, and in turn this can be spun as the author sees fit. It is clear that the Times has managed to unearth documents purporting to show big price rises, reduced capability and issues with testing, but does this mean the programme itself is at fault? In truth the likelihood is that no one outside of a fairly tight circle really knows or understands. We have to be clear on what JSF is – it is by a significant margin probably the most complicated multi-national avia...

There has been coverage in the last few days of the UK governments confirmation that only 35% of the new Type 26 frigates steel would be sourced from UK suppliers, with the remainder coming from overseas. Is this necessarily a bad thing? The problem with the modern defence industry these days is twofold -firstly it is hard to keep everything required for a ship or kit ‘in country’ and that you have to go overseas for parts of the supply chain. Secondly, its hard for any government to keep giving out orders that continue to sustain a credible industry without either very heavy subsidies, or making the ship far more expensive. In the case of the Type 26, the clear problem was that despite MOD aggressively trying to persuade industry to bid and provide UK solutions, no UK steel manufacturer was able to meet the specifications and provide all the steel. Its hard for Government to support industry when industry itself is unable to meet the needs of the requirement. Much like ...

The excellent website ‘Save the Royal Navy’, which has done a superb job over many years of raising issues with the RN today, recently put out some analysis looking at fleet escort availability ( ARTICLE HERE ).  The article was picked up on twitter, and got quite a few comments by people who seemed to not understand why only 6 RN escorts were available for sea right now from a force of 19 hulls.  To Humphrey, there are a number of issues coming out of this article and the twitter response which are worth further comment. Firstly, the traditional metric of how a Navy can deploy is that it requires a roughly 3:1 ratio to sustain a vessel on a task indefinitely – in very rough terms this means that when a ship is deployed on OP KIPION, her successor is nominated and working up through to being on passage to join her (e.g. HMS DARING saw HMS MONMOUTH sail sometime before being relieved). At least one more ship is going to be somewhere in the refit system requiring essent...

The inspiration for this article came from a recent Guardian article which was talking about the role of the RN’s OPV fleet post Brexit, and which placed some fairly dismissive views on the role of HMS SEVERN during her lengthy west indies deployment. In turn this sparked a wider debate on Twitter about whether ‘forward basing’ was the answer for the RN in the West Indies. The Royal Navy has had a long history in the West Indies from buccaneers and naval battles of old through to a pretty much continuous presence for the last 200 years. Throughout the Cold War the RN commitment in the region was built around a naval presence headquartered in Bermuda (HMS MALABAR) and supported by a small number of frigates to support the UK colonial commitment to the area. Administered initially under the post of ‘Senior Naval Officer West Indies’ (SNOWI) which was disbanded in 1976, the RN presence reduced to a rotating escort, and HMS MALABAR (used for cold war duties, and which closed in the 1...

If you are a follower of UK defence matters, then it seems to be traditional that you must be find a reason, any reason, to naysay and be downbeat about something good. The recent sailing of QUEEN ELIZABETH (QEC, and of course, not yet an HMS), is a good example of this. There were tweets and moans aplenty about an aircraft carrier supposedly without aircraft, about it being empty for years across a barren flight deck with tumbleweed and adrift deck hockey quoits the sole occupants, and of course that’s assuming a 17r old hacker hadn’t somehow taken charge of the ship using its SHOCK HORROR Windows XP system that’s not actually connected to the internet to somehow do something bad. This is without mentioning the near orgasmic levels of excitement the media wound themselves up into with the prospect of the vessel running into the side of the dockyard, or being stuck under the Forth Bridge. In reality the opening days of the QE’s sea trials could not have gone better for the Royal N...

The ThinPinstripedLine blog began back in 2011 as a private blog, written in the authors spare time, and with the aim of trying to provide an alternate source of views and opinions on defence and foreign policy issues, predominantly written from the perspective of trying to understand whether there was a deeper rationale behind many of the defence stories appearing in the news. It was, and remains, the bugbear of the author that defence journalism is often fairly sensational, built on easy to write stories, often on the premise of ‘ the MOD has cocked up, now whats the story about again ’?  In mid 2014, circumstances meant that it was no longer possible to continue writing the blog and it was suggested to Humphrey that it may be a good time to call it a day. Despite three years passing, the site has continued to attract hits and comments, and people have made clear that they miss it. Humphrey always wanted to restart the site, but circumstances meant that this has not been possib...