Thin Pinstriped Line

It has been confirmed that the next Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) will be General Carter, the current Chief of the General Staff (CGS). The decision by the Prime Minister to recommend General Carter to Her Majesty The Queen as a suitable choice for post came after a series of interviews with himself, the Vice Chief (General Messenger) and General James Everard (DSACEUR).   This appointment marks the culmination of months of briefing and rumours, with there being intense speculation that General Messenger would become the first Royal Marine to act as CDS. The interview process was fascinating in that two of the three candidates have never served as a Single Service chief. Since the post was created in 1959, there have been a total of 22 Chiefs of the Defence Staff since 1959, of whom 6 have come from the Royal Navy. In practise this total is slightly uneven, with the longest tenure (6yrs) coming from Earl Mountbatten. For the first 30 years of the post, the appointments...

It has been confirmed that as part of Brexit contingency planning, approximately £12m has been made available to the MOD to keep all three Batch 1 River class OPVs in reserve pending a full assessment of fishery protection requirements as the UK exits the EU. This announcement, slipped out in Parliament confirms that for the first time in many years, the Royal Navy will actively maintain a small reserve fleet capability. Other than singleton LPDs like HMS INTREPID and HMS ALBION, who went into reserve after the 2010 SDSR, and whose £100m reactivation was so costly partly because she had spent years alongside without any crew onboard, the RN has actively tried to avoid maintaining any semblance of reserve ‘standby squadrons’ since the mid-1980s. Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright The cost of keeping three middle aged OPVs that have been worked very hard (each averaging some 300 days at sea per year for the best part of 15 years (that’s approximately 12 of ...

HMS SUTHERLAND has arrived in Sydney, Australia on the latest leg of her Asia Pacific deployment. This trip marks the first time in a few years that a Royal Navy escort ship has ventured into the Asia Pacific region, although 2018 will see at least two separate deployments by RN escorts. The visit led to observations by some on social media comparing the RN presence in the region unfavourably compared to the French Navy, and suggesting that the UK has somehow ‘lost influence’ as a result of a few years of no ship visits in the region. The aim of this article is to consider whether this is true, and whether in fact the UK remains perhaps more influential than we give it credit for, although this influence is built by other means. The UK defence presence in the Asia Pacific region has for many years, arguably since the handover of Hong Kong, been built around a combination of limited physical presence and wider engagement and training. Today the permanent presence is limited ...

During Defence Questions in the House of Commons on 5 th March, the claim was made by a Minister that the Royal Navy was growing again for the first time in a generation. This is a strong statement to make, and one that has been used a lot over the last few years, but is it true? The genesis for the ‘growing the Royal Navy’ claim seems to have come out of the 2015 SDSR, where the two main ‘good news’ announcements to underpin it were that there was to be a small growth in manpower (some 350 people) and that the intention of ordering what became known as the Type 31 light frigate was that the aspiration existed to grow the escort fleet beyond 19 hulls at some point in the 2030s. These announcements were initially spun as news that the Royal Navy was expanding for the first time since the Second World War, but have since become rebranded as ‘first time in a generation’ ( LINK ), or alternatively the phrase used was ‘growing’ Royal Navy. These are bold claims to make, and aim t...