Thin Pinstriped Line

  The Royal Navy has sailed a force of warships from their home ports, setting out on a global journey to the Indo-Pacific, to showcase British and NATO maritime power and prestige. Led by the aircraft carrier HMS PRINCE OF WALES (PWLS), and escorted by British, Canadian and Norwegian vessels, this is the highest profile Royal Navy deployment in years – but is it actually worth the effort to show the RN as a truly global force, or is it a Potemkin operation by a failing navy desperate to recall its now long gone glory days? The goal of the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) deployment is to send a task group, that is intentionally international by design and construct, to carry out a global deployment to work with partner nations and deepen defence relationships. This construct is part of a years long rebalancing effort for the Royal Navy, which has now mostly moved away from the notion of long-distance deployments of escort ships to far flung waters, and now either relies on forward pre...

  In 2025 the subject of Russian monitoring of British waters and vessels remains newsworthy. In April the Russian Ambassador to the UK confirmed that the Russians did attempt to monitor Royal Navy submarines, yet this is hardly new or novel. Throughout the Cold War, off the cold waters of Malin Head, the most northerly point of the island of Ireland, a small Soviet trawler would spend months at a time sitting and listening. Her target was not fish, but submarines. This vessel was intended to act as an intelligence collector, targeting the major US and Royal Navy submarine bases on the Clyde, to try and collect invaluable intelligence on the movements and characteristics of their submarines. The AGI was seen as a genuine threat to national security and led to a range of measures to counter its presence and protect the most sensitive national secrets. The Russians are known to have maintained converted trawlers off Malin Head and elsewhere for decades. By the 1980s there was growi...