Thin Pinstriped Line

The Times reports today that the RN is considering scrapping 1000 Royal Marine posts as part of a wider options package to save money. The report suggests that the RN could save up to £100m per year, which would go a long way to addressing the financial black hole sitting at the heart of the MOD. For all the talk of a rising defence budget, it remains clear that the devaluation of the pound, coupled with rising equipment costs clearly shows that that there isn’t enough money to do everything that the 2015 SDSR set out to deliver. For all the spin of ‘backed by a rising defence budget’, when you speak to friends in the military or MOD, these lines are met with hoots of derision. Their view is simple – the budget situation is bordering on catastrophic and only major reform, or a major injection of funds will solve the problem. From a Treasury perspective, the case for MOD to have extra cash is weak. The Department enjoys considerable latitude in how it chooses to spend its cash,...

It seems to have become a traditional British media pastime to run at least one annual story decrying the death of the Royal Navy and making out that the RN is no longer able to defend our shores. Previous versions of this story have run in a variety of papers, usually focusing on the perception that because ships are in harbour, something is ‘wrong’ and that the UK no longer has a Navy. The Daily Telegraph on 15 September splashed an exclusive article and editorial claiming that the RN was a ‘global laughing stock’ according to ‘senior unnamed military sources’, and that it was all going horribly wrong. The article is lurking behind a paywall, but it could be condensed into putting across a few core arguments, namely; ·          Only a third of the escort fleet is at sea ·          The RN can’t afford to send ships to sea over fuel costs ·          There ...

The news cycle continues to be dominated by Hurricane Irma, which is now making landfall in the US and causing astonishing levels of damage and destruction, without yet reducing in intensity – by a significant margin Irma remains the most destructive hurricane in the Caribbean region in recorded human history. In the UK a tale of two narratives is unfolding. On the one hand, the UK government is quickly and effectively getting on with the job of delivering aid and support where it is needed. On the other the media, Parliamentarians and opinion formers are attacking the UK Government for ‘not doing enough’ to help. The original ‘Has the UK failed’ article on this site came out Friday lunchtime, and since then the original article has had over 8000 hits on the blog site, with wider tweets on the subject reaching nearly 30,000 ‘impressions’ as Twitter likes to call them. By a significant margin this has been the largest reaction to any article on this blog since it was first esta...

There has been significant media coverage of the dreadful impact of Hurricane Irma in the West Indies, which has caused immense damage across a wide swathe of the region. The hurricane, at Category 5 is the single worst one ever recorded in the regions history and has done enormous damage. Islands have been devastated, with widespread destruction and loss of life likely. Three European nations still retain territory in this region – the UK, France and the Netherlands, while the US maintains sovereignty over other islands as well in its peculiar ‘empire that is not an empire’ approach to the world.For France and the Netherlands, the island groups form a integral part of their homeland – with parliamentary representation and enjoy a very different constitutional relationship to those islands still associated with the UK.  The French West Indies have a population of almost 850,000 people across 7 main islands, all located relatively close to each other. The Dutch Antilles have ...

A perennial subject of debate across the internet is the so-called ‘fantasy fleet’, or discussion which starts off usually with a question about why a Navy didn’t do one thing, and quickly spirals out of control into a debate about how with unlimited funding and change, the author would quickly make the Navy a much better one than it is now. Such threads are usually pretty boring to read, based on wishlisting of nice equipment, the desire to achieve numbers and never based on financial realities, second and third order effects or trying to deliver a military force against a hugely constrained set of financial and other factors. Recently debate has focused on whether the new Royal Navy Batch 2 River class OPVs, which are now running sea trials should have increased armament. The ships as currently configured carry a 30mm cannon, some miniguns, GPMG mounts and a flight deck – on a hull of roughly 2000 tonnes (or similar to the old Type 14 Frigates). The argument is that the RN of to...

With the announcement that the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) has conducted its 6 th nuclear test this weekend, the world once again has its attention drawn to the far east and its potential for nuclear stalemate. Last week the UK Prime Minister Teresa May visited Japan, and made announcements on the deepening of bilateral defence links, while senior UK military officers once again visited the Republic of Korea (ROK). The UK finds itself engaged in this region, but also more widely in collaborating with both Japan and the ROK. The purpose of this article is consider these links and try to understand why the UK is deepening its engagement with nations thousands of miles away and what do we bring to the table? The UK’s engagement with ROK goes back to the 1950s and the Korean War, when over 1000 UK personnel were killed over three years operating as part of UN Forces. This bloody, often forgotten war saw brutal fighting occur and served as a wakeup call for rearmam...