The Royal Navy - is that it?
Discussion
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Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
Simpo Two said:
https://gillianjonesdesigns.com/products/fleet-202...
Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
Victory has never been decommisonedNice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Victory#:~:tex...
The purpose of the Navy has changed.
We dont need loads of Dreadnaughts that can preform a 12 gun barrage.
1 ship/sub could take out the coast of Normandy with a couple of missiles these days.
Also as part of Nato we dont need to supply all the ships for a Aircraft carrier battle group.
We dont need loads of Dreadnaughts that can preform a 12 gun barrage.
1 ship/sub could take out the coast of Normandy with a couple of missiles these days.
Also as part of Nato we dont need to supply all the ships for a Aircraft carrier battle group.
no real need for ships these days except subs. they're obsolete for peer to peer arguments due to the power of modern missiles and EW. a US general or admiral recently stated that you could tell if it's getting 'hot' as all the carriers are in dock. kids these days learn coding instead of guns.
Simpo Two said:
https://gillianjonesdesigns.com/products/fleet-202...
Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
At the time of the Falklands War, when there was even talk of getting the recently decommissioned HMS Bulwark back into service, a cartoon depicted two sailors chatting on the Portsmouth shore looking landward, with one saying to the other, "If they're getting the 'Rusty B' going again, I wonder what's next?" Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
Of course, in the background, tugboats were pulling HMS Victory across the harbour.
Tye Green said:
no real need for ships these days except subs. they're obsolete for peer to peer arguments due to the power of modern missiles and EW. a US general or admiral recently stated that you could tell if it's getting 'hot' as all the carriers are in dock. kids these days learn coding instead of guns.
The expert opinion of another armchair admiral.Wafu7 said:
Tye Green said:
no real need for ships these days except subs. they're obsolete for peer to peer arguments due to the power of modern missiles and EW. a US general or admiral recently stated that you could tell if it's getting 'hot' as all the carriers are in dock. kids these days learn coding instead of guns.
The expert opinion of another armchair admiral.Simpo Two said:
https://gillianjonesdesigns.com/products/fleet-202...
Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
Its even less than that now, that was 5 years ago...!Nice to see HMS Victory there. Might need to recommission her if that's all the fleet there is!
This was the status of the whole of the RN combat fleet (excluding minesweepers and other small vessels etc) in the week leading up to xmas, with only one single ship on active patrol outside home waters, and less than 10 in total that can put to see inside a week. I know its a long time since the Royal Navy ruled the worlds seas, but, I suspect the truth of the current state of the RN would surprise most people today, largely because politicians ensure the state of the armed forces are kept out of the media, as they are not important any more.
And for the same xmas week, this was the status of the RFA fleet, non outside home waters, with only 3 fit to sail at immediate or very short notice.
sherman said:
Also as part of Nato we dont need to supply all the ships for a Aircraft carrier battle group.
This fallacy that we don't need "XYZ because we will only ever operate within NATO and not alone" has proven to be wrong by the Falklands, and yet people still persist in trotting it out.No-one knows what the future holds, so giving away independent operating capability on the "promise" that we will never again, not even once, be required to operate alone is the easiest way to get a lot of people killed in a conflict.
Wafu7 said:
Tye Green said:
no real need for ships these days except subs. they're obsolete for peer to peer arguments due to the power of modern missiles and EW. a US general or admiral recently stated that you could tell if it's getting 'hot' as all the carriers are in dock. kids these days learn coding instead of guns.
The expert opinion of another armchair admiral.You can't protect shipping lanes in the red sea from a submarine.
IanH755 said:
sherman said:
Also as part of Nato we dont need to supply all the ships for a Aircraft carrier battle group.
This fallacy that we don't need "XYZ because we will only ever operate within NATO and not alone" has proven to be wrong by the Falklands, and yet people still persist in trotting it out.No-one knows what the future holds, so giving away independent operating capability on the "promise" that we will never again, not even once, be required to operate alone is the easiest way to get a lot of people killed in a conflict.
LotusOmega375D said:
What happened to the old Royal Navy fleet size policy of counting up all of the world’s other navies’ ships and then doubling it?
That was never the doctrine - the Two Power Standard was the principle that the RN should be bigger than the next two largest powers combined (France and Russia originally, then France and the USA). Even when that was in place it was realised that while this was a politically popular and media-friendly way of setting the fleet's size, it was strategically flawed and hugely expensive. The first revealing flaw was the development of the dreadnought; by rendering all existing battleship obsolete this effective 'reset' naval power - the RN had built itself up to a Two Power Standard but a single dreadnought was worth multiple pre-dreadnought ships. So naval powers were effectively starting from scratch, and Germany, France or the USA only needed to build a handful of dreadnoughts to maintain parity with the RN, despite the British superiority in ship numbers (this, btw, is a mistake that is still often made to this day when comparing, say, the RN to the PLAN or the Russian Navy - it's not just a matter of ship numbers but of capability).
The second flaw was that the rise of the German High Seas Fleet showed the strategic weakness for the British Empire; as a continental power Germany effectively had no overseas territories or maritime trade routes to protect. For all its numerical superiority the RN had to spread itself around the world to protect British territory, trade, property and interests, meaning that the ships available for the Home Fleet was nothing like number the Two Power Standard would suggest. Since the HSF existed only to challenge the RN and maintain control of the North Sea coast, it presented an existential threat to British sea control even though it was much smaller because the British fleet available to counter it was close to parity.
The Two Power Standard officially ended as policy after WW1 and the Naval Treaties. It came to a definitive end in WW2 when the USN massively outreached the RN to become the world's largest navy - the USN added 1200 major warships to its strength during the war, never mind what was on the books at the start. When America has the ability to build nearly 100 aircraft carriers in four years and come out of a war with nearly three-quarters of the world's heavy naval tonnage then the Two Power Standard is a mockery.
2xChevrons said:
The Two Power Standard officially ended as policy after WW1 and the Naval Treaties. It came to a definitive end in WW2 when the USN massively outreached the RN to become the world's largest navy - the USN added 1200 major warships to its strength during the war, never mind what was on the books at the start. When America has the ability to build nearly 100 aircraft carriers in four years and come out of a war with nearly three-quarters of the world's heavy naval tonnage then the Two Power Standard is a mockery.
And in the 2-3 decades post WW2, as we started shedding our overseas territories on an almost yearly basis, the need for such a navy further diminished, especially after the withdrawl from Singapore and most of the area east of the Suez in the early 70's.
It was only shear luck (and Galtieri being so desperate) that we still had what we had left in 1982. Had he waited another couple of years to try what he did, it might have been a different outcome.
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