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.