Sometimes, to know where you are, you have to know where you have been.
First, “A Tale of Two Royal Navy’s – Ambitious Expansion Vs Strategic Decline” — which states that in the not-so-distant future, Australia will have a larger navy than the British.
Second, an excellent X-thread on the importance of Diego Garcia to the West’s defense of the Indo-Pacific theater.
Third, the 43rd-anniversary of the re-capture of Goose Green.
Great Britain is no longer a serious country. It is within living memory that the British not only relied on a large and potent navy to keep the Empire intact, but also to prevent their own home islands from being starved-out in the face of enemy blockade.
Nobody expects the return of Jacky Fisher and the Grand Review, but a fleet that only has a total of 14 destroyers and frigates, with only a few of those operational at any one time? The last commissioned more than 11 years ago?
Go ahead, Tommy Friedman and the rest of the DC crowd, and tell me about our special relationship.
It’s not just about hulls.
Take the issue of Diego Garcia, the key US-UK base in the Indian Ocean and the linchpin to Western defense in the region. It’s not just a modern-day Uhliti as an expeditionary base, with its bomber-capable runways and port facilities. It’s that it sits directly across major sea lanes.
Unfortunately, Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Island Archipelago, a British Indian Ocean Territory that the British are hell-bent on ceding to Mauritius, an island 1,300 miles away. Mauritius’s shaky claim to the Chagos is based on a history of administrative convenience, that they were once part of the same local British colonial apparatus.
Last week, British PM Starmer signed a deal that formally ceded the Chagos to Mauritius, but that provides the fig leaf of the US leasing back the Diego Garcia base. I say fig leaf because the Chagossians who were expelled from Diego Garcia to build the base want the island for themselves.
This will not end well, and the question is how much, not if, Chinese money is involved. After all, buying a bunch of Mauritian politicians to expel the base a few years from now in the name of “Chagossian rights” is a lot cheaper for the Chinese than the missiles it would need to use to destroy it.
Thanks, Britain. If you cannot do your part to keep up your military could you at least do your part not to undermine ours?
Forty-three years ago and on a week’s notice, the British deployed a task force nearly 8,000 miles, to the bottom of the planet, in the face of an approaching Antarctic winter, to fight a war in a hostile power’s backyard. The mission was to retake the Falklands Islands, a fairly desolate and sparsely populated bit of real estate, from the Argentines; a goal that the US Navy assessed to be impossible.
Well, the war lasted all of 10 weeks and the Union Jack still flies there.
That’s just not within living memory, but my living memory.
The British are faced with the fact that, through their own efforts, their not-so-distant past has become as alien to them as the proverbial Stone Age tribe in the Amazon stumbling onto a lost city built by their ancestors.
Alas, all too true. Much of the blame can be fixed to just one figure: Bloody Blair.
(I use Bloody in its historical sense as an allusion to Bloody Mackenzie and Bloody Mary.)
At some point, possession is 9/10ths of the law.
The same guy negotiated the hong kong deal in 97
Part of Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias”, beaten in the competition by Shelley’s.
We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
one day, an Arthut may have to recover his sword from a lake, and retake this province of Eurabia,
I wonder: if Argentina made a claim for the Falklands, would Britain go along? (Not that Milei would pull such a move, but his successor might.)
The ROYAL DESRON doesn’t have the same clout as ROYAL NAVY, even if it is more accurate.
I honestly am heartbroken, whenever I read any of the current news about (Formerly) Great Britain. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, and the current leaders of the place are doing their best to ride it down. it seems that the political and media elite despise the ordinary citizens, and are doing their best to see them marginalized and destroyed in every possible way – economically, culturally, and morale-wise.
I read the older books, look at the older movies, and remember how my brother and sister traveled through Britain, Wales and Scotland in the summer of 1976, and what our grandparents told us of how they lived there in the early 1900s, and I want to cry.
“Forty-three years ago and on a week’s notice, the British deployed a task force nearly 8,000 miles …”
If I remember correctly, the back story was that the UK Military happened to be preparing for a big exercise — which was the only reason they were able to redirect the forces gathered for that exercise into their task force to reclaim the Falklands/Malvinas. Further, a big part of the success of the mission was that the English were able to fly a long-distance raid to bomb the airfields on the islands, denying them to the Argentines — the Vulcan bombers used were on their way to the scrapyard.
Bottom line — Argentina chose the wrong time to invade the islands. A year or two later, they would probably have been successful.
As a side comment, the US has a lot more urgent things to do with our rapidly diminishing resources than to support a military base in the far-off Indian Ocean.
Not disagreeing with the main point of the article, but I VERY much doubt that Australia is going to have bigger navy that Great Britain in the foreseeable future. One of the main criticisms of the recently re-elected Labor government is that they simply refuse to take defence seriously and are making many quite deceptive and dishoest statements about how much money they are investing in the armed forces, which are in a truly parlous state, with virtually no vessels currently tit to put to sea. The ones they have are mainly too small and underarmed. For those us in Australia it is truly worrying situation. Recently the Chinese navy sent a quite powerful squadron to the southern Pacific to undertake a wide lap of Australia, just to show it could and challenge Australia to do something about it. We found out about this courtesy of a commercial airline flight – it seems the government didn’t even know. And there was simply notihng they coiuld do about it. Nothing much is being done to prepare for the supposed acquisition of nuclear submarines from the US. The current Australian government has already grossly blown out its budget on various health and welfare schemes so there is nothing spare left to increase defence spending.
“(Formerly) Great Britain”: I don’t know how Americans managed to persuade themselves that the “Great” is a claim to great power. It isn’t: it’s a geographical expression from the Middle Ages. Its meaning is clear if you consider the usages in three languages.
Latin: Britannia Major, Britannia Minor.
French: Grand Bretagne, Bretagne.
English: Great Britain, Brittany.
In other words it’s the bigger land of the Britons rather than the smaller land of the Britons.
except Diego Garcia is a major base of operation, against targets like Iran, if need be,
“(Formerly) Great Britain”: I don’t know how Americans managed to persuade themselves that the “Great” is a claim to great power. It isn’t: it’s a geographical expression from the Middle Ages.
Remember the days when Prime Minister Blair was trying to replace “Great Britain” with “Cool Britannia”?
We humans tend to muddy the waters with imprecise language. Great Britain refers to an island, which is part of the territory of the UK. The proper name for the country is the “United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland”. For a while, it was the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland — but lots of Irish people died to change that.
The United Kingdom comprises various political units — England, Scotland, Wales, North Ireland, along with a number of minor units like the Isle of Man and the Scilly Isles. Strictly speaking, we should refer to the entity as the UK, but often people use part as a stand-in for the whole, and talk about “England”. Just like the warmongers confusion between Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Whether any of this matters to the immigrants from various foreign countries who will soon dominate the demographics there remains to be seen. Maybe they will choose a new name?
“The United Kingdom comprises various political units — England, Scotland, Wales, North Ireland, along with a number of minor units like the Isle of Man and the Scilly Isles”
No; Man is not part of the UK. The Scilly Isles are part of England.
The very country that needed to project force around the world neglected to lean into aircraft carriers in the interwar period. They had a few, but they were still building battleships at the beginning of WW2. Also, their doctrine was never about ASW and their best striking planes were biplanes carrying torpedoes.
The country that held out until the Essex Class came online became the next global superpower and changed naval combat forever, while the British Empire dissolved.
One of the striking things about the WW II Royal Navy was its schizophrenic view of air power. The Swordfish’s attack on the Bismarck in April 1941 showed the vulnerability of capital ships to air power yet the British later that year then sent the Repulse and Prince of Wales without air cover to attack the Japanese landing areas with predictable results
“The Swordfish’s attack on the Bismarck in April 1941 showed the vulnerability of capital ships to air power yet the British later that year then sent the Repulse and Prince of Wales without air cover to attack the Japanese landing areas with predictable results”…interesting sequence. Makes me wonder if maybe the way the sinking of the Bismarck was communicated was “the battleships crippled her with shellfire and then we sent some Swordfish in to finish her off. Have to give those aviation boys their moment of glory, don’t you know.”