Thin Pinstriped Line

  The Channel Tunnel is one of the great engineering projects of the 20 th Century. Linking France to the United Kingdom, it provides a rail link deep under the English Channel, enabling high speed passenger trains, cargo and shuttle trains to transit dozens of times per day. An aspiration for many centuries, and finally delivered in the early 1990s, the project is a genuine engineering marvel. It is also a vitally important strategic asset, and during the 1980s scene of significant debates across the British Government about how it could be used in wartime. The goal of this blog is to provide a brief look at the military value of the tunnel, its potential role during Transition to War (TTW) and wider challenges. It is not, and does not pretend to be a history of the Channel Tunnel, nor a discussion on rolling stock technicalities. This is a defence blog, not a railway history blog! The last note is that the phrase “Channel Tunnel” here is used interchangeably with “Fixed Link” ...

    Sea mines are one of the most lethal and effective ways of exercising sea control. Used defensively they can control an opponents freedom of movement, preventing easy access to certain areas by hostile forces, or ensuring that particularly sensitive locations are protected. Offensively they can be used to cause disruption to an opponents plans, bottling up high value assets in ports and anchorages until swept and declared clear of mines. In wartime this may disrupt planning, or impose an unacceptably high cost to push through suspected minefields – a classic example of this was the use of Type 21 Frigates in the Falklands War to conduct recce missions of potential landing areas ahead of the invasion to identify if mines had been laid. The UK has long been a leading player in the field of mine countermeasures, maintaining a large and effective force of ships, and increasingly remote platforms to investigate shipping routes for mines, identify them and eliminate the thre...

  Is the Royal Navy thinking of scrapping its vulnerable aircraft carriers as part of the ongoing defence review? In a word, ‘no’ but this hasn’t stopped parts of social media getting quite worked up on the subject over the last few days! The genesis of this is a series of media articles which talk about the analysis of the carriers against modern threats, the suggestion that in some scenarios they are vulnerable to sinking, and in turn, separate reports that the Treasury has asked the RN to look at the costs of mothballing one. There are really a couple of issues here which need briefly unpacking to help add some context as to why this is important to do, and why the RN is not likely to see the end of the carrier force any time soon. On the first issue – vulnerability. Every piece of military equipment out there is vulnerable to a threat and in the right circumstances can be overpowered or destroyed. Look at Ukraine where a wide range of Western land vehicles, many of which have...