Thin Pinstriped Line

The recent TV series by Chris Terrill (Britain’s Biggest Warship) has now concluded. This three-part show followed the challenges of taking HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH (QEC) out of the builder’s yard and through to becoming a commissioned warship. Years in the making, it provided a candid perspective on the challenges of what it means to bring a new aircraft carrier into service. The reviews and the commentary online has been overwhelmingly positive, and Humphrey personally regards this as the best TV programme made about the Royal Navy in years. So why did it work so well? It seems to be surprisingly difficult to make good television shows about life in the Royal Navy. Documentaries about the Army can rely on easy footage of exercises and the dramas of being in the field under fire. Indeed Chris Terrils previous show ‘Commando’ interspersed training footage at Lympstone with his experiences of being under fire in Afghanistan when working with Royal Marines on the ground. This made...

  It was reported this week that nearly a quarter of British Army soldiers are medically unfit to deploy (some 17,000 people). Cue panicked headlines and images suggesting that the UK ‘only’ has an Army of 60,000 people amid suggestions that the real Army is somehow smaller than many other countries. The MOD maintains a highly effective system of monitoring the physical health of the armed forces, recording their overall medical condition and health, ensuring that they are employed in an appropriate manner.  The normal health classification is known as ‘P2’ (e.g. fit for duties worldwide in all respects). P3 means that an individual may be limited in their ability to deploy, and that a risk assessment is required before each operational deployment to ensure it is appropriate to do so. There are a smaller number of classifications (P0,4,7,8) which render an individual medically not deployable. A good guide to the system can be found HERE It is important to understan...

On the evening of Friday 13 th and early hours of Saturday 14 th April, British, French and US armed forces conducted strikes on regime targets in Syria in response to the use of chemical weapons a week previously on civilians. The reaction to the strikes has been mixed, from broad political support across the West, to condemnation or opposition from regimes opposed to the West, particularly Russia and Iran and the leadership of the UK Labour Party. It is still early in the post-strike assessment and hard to tell what damage has, or has not, been inflicted. But it is already possible to consider some of the immediate implications and impact of this situation for the UK. From the outset it would have been impossible to deliver a proportionate response to these operations through a UN mandate. Russia has consistently used her position on the UN Security Council for several years now to protect the Syrian regime (in marked contrast to the UK and France, neither of which have...

The tragic events in Syria over the last couple of days, where reported use of chemical weapons has sparked a major international crisis, has seen commentary on the manner that Presidents Trump and Macron have spoken regularly. There have been suggestions online that the way in which these two have spoken is in marked contrast to the UK Prime Minister and that this somehow reflects a lack of UK influence on the international response. The role of the Prime Minister in Government is twofold – it is partly to set the leadership and direction for the Country during their time in office. They will provide an overall vision of what policy they wish HMG to deliver, with Ministers in Departments working to agreed strategies and goals to help meet this vision. They also serve as an influence instrument of last resort, able to intervene in a situation to persuade others to take courses of action to help meet wider Government goals. The diary of a leader is incredibly busy – it is a 24...

In an era of ‘fake news’ it is easy to question what you read and wonder whether there is any truth in. This is particularly true of Defence reporting, which due to the very nature of the subject, where you have a multitude of complex issues wrapped in secrecy, vested interests, subtly different views depending on where you sit in the system all combining to make it hard to accurately report accurate objective facts. Despite this, the UK has got a plethora of very good journalists who write on defence matters and have acquired a good reputation for knowing their stuff. One only must look at broadcasters and writers like Jonathan Beale at the BBC, Alistair Bunkall at Sky, Larissa Brown at the Mail, Deb Haynes at the Times and David Willetts at the Sun. There are good specialist publications and writers / commentators out there too, such as defence & aviation specialists like the team at Shepard Media or the many smaller publications and consultants like the UK Defence Journal,...

The UK has formally opened the new ‘Naval Support Facility’ Bahrain, marking the completion of a major enhancement in the Royal Navy’s overseas support facilities. Officially opened by HRH Prince Andrew this week, the site is a major cornerstone of the ambition to help make the UK a significant permanent player in the Middle East region. The site (sometimes referred to, albeit inaccurately as ‘HMS JUFAIR’) is a considerable step forward in the UK’s facilities in the region, providing accommodation and shore support facilities for the RN forces deployed in the Gulf. But why does it matter so much to the RN and UK, and what benefits will the UK derive from it? On a practical level the facility offers permanent accommodation and welfare facilities for several hundred personnel, allowing collocation in one site for the first time of the many RN staff based in Bahrain. This will permit significant savings on previous accommodation arrangements and help give MCMV crews accommodat...

While the long Easter weekend heralds a period of much needed time off for many, it is also a time when media organisations tend to rely on skeleton staff, putting individual reporters to cover a range of desks, rapidly copying, pasting and slightly modifying news off the press wire and other papers to provide ‘news’. This weekend saw a classic example of where the media managed to take two sets of facts, mix them together and turn this into a story that has all the classic hallmarks of being tabloid outrage and scandal. There were breathless accounts that due to defence cuts, and despite being on operations in the Middle East, the Tornado was being axed and replaced by just 12 F35 aircraft next year. It was also accompanied by quotes from various senior retired officers who frankly should have known better. This rather unhelpfully came out on the weekend of the 100 th Birthday of the Royal Air Force, trying to provide a very negative story to counteract a genuinely positive goo...