“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” said Admiral Beatty during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, as he watched the battlecruisers HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary blow up. If he were alive today and looking down on the collective Nato and Five-Eyes navies, I reckon he’d say something similar.
Everyone with a decent navy is discovering that the budgets and processes they had in place to run, build, sustain and crew their navies during the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ are now insufficient.
If we needed proof that even the mighty US Navy is suffering from the same problems, yesterday Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro approved a plan to keep 12 Arleigh Burke class destroyers in service for longer than their originally intended 35-year life span.
“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” said Admiral Beatty during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, as he watched the battlecruisers HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary blow up. If he were alive today and looking down on the collective Nato and Five-Eyes navies, I reckon he’d say something similar.
Everyone with a decent navy is discovering that the budgets and processes they had in place to run, build, sustain and crew their navies during the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ are now insufficient.
If we needed proof that even the mighty US Navy is suffering from the same problems, yesterday Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro approved a plan to keep 12 Arleigh Burke class destroyers in service for longer than their originally intended 35-year life span.