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HMS Richmond to be decommissioned this year – Royal Navy down to six frigates 

https://www.navylookout.com/hms-richmond-to-be-decommissioned-this-year-royal-navy-down-to-six-frigates/

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Royal Navy begins to explore integrating Aster missiles with Mk 41 vertical launch system

https://www.navylookout.com/royal-navy-begins-to-explore-integrating-aster-missiles-with-mk-41-vertical-launch-system/

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[HSMW]

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UK Carrier Strike Group To Deploy Into North Atlantic

https://navyleaders.com/news/uk-carrier-strike-group-to-deploy-into-north-atlantic/

[Duarte]

New images of HMS Glasgow show the Royal Navy’s first Type 26 frigate taking shape on the Clyde as the 8,000-tonne warship moves closer to sea trials.

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/images-show-huge-new-british-warship-ahead-of-sea-trials/

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UK Royal Navy notes hybrid air wing progress with eyes on Peregrine drone development

https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/air-warfare/uk-royal-navy-notes-progress-on-hybrid-air-wing-vision-eyes-further-developments-on-peregrine-uas/

[Duarte]

Babcock Hails Type 31 Milestones As HMS Active Emerges From Build Hall

https://navyleaders.com/news/babcock-hails-type-31-milestones-as-hms-active-emerges-from-build-hall/

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https://www.facebook.com/reel/1615767066034199/

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Ou se tem sol na eira, ou chuva no nabal

[LM]

Há anos que o Reino Unido "importa" pessoal de saúde - desconfio que precisam mesmo e os "nativos" não estão nada interessados; mesmo os qualificados - enfermeiros - há quem diga que se aproveitam do investimento na educação (que é caro!) de Portugal e outros e depois limitam-se a vir buscar. 

[P44]

The Royal Navy made Britain impossible to invade. Now we face a rude awakening by Robert Tombs...

Weakness invites aggression, and we have never been so vulnerable since the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway...

Many people think Britain has never been invaded since 1066. They recall Shakespeare’s lines about the sea being like “a moat defensive to a house / Against the envy of less happier lands.” The daily arrival of immigrants in small boats shatters that illusion. The sea is not a moat but a highway. Since the Norman Conquest, these islands have in fact been invaded innumerable times.

The most important – and on that occasion benign – instance was the Dutch invasion by William of Orange in 1688. There have been many near misses too. In 1745, the French were poised to land in Kent to support Bonnie Prince Charlie. In 1779 a big French and Spanish invasion fleet came in sight of Cornwall. In the 1790s, there were hostile landings in Wales and Ireland. In 1804 Napoleon had an invasion fleet and army ready and waiting to march on London: “If we control the crossing for twelve hours, England is dead.” We faced a similar prospect in 1940.

Building a navy to make invasion impossible was, in the words of our leading naval historian Nicholas Rodger, “the most complex and expensive project ever undertaken by the British state and society.” It was only completed, after more than a century of effort, in Nelson’s day, and it lasted over a century and a half. It required money and resources. The Royal Navy became the world’s biggest and most modern organisation. It obtained tar and hemp from the Baltic, copper from Wales, cannon from Scotland, masts from Canada, and oak from Croatia (though to boost local supply chains, one admiral carried a pocketful of acorns to plant in suitable locations). It pioneered production lines and steam-driven machinery.

As Napoleon realised too late, Britain had made itself invulnerable. It was France that was doomed to defeat, its foreign commerce ruined, its navy destroyed, its territory open to invasion by armies armed and paid by a Britain whose economy relied on control of the oceans.

Though the navy was run down after Waterloo (by which time, uniquely in history, it possessed half the world’s total of warships), the priority of maintaining a presence round the globe, and absolutely controlling European waters, was recognised by every government. They stayed in the forefront of technological change – steam, screw propellers, iron hulls, rifled guns, steel armour, submarines, aircraft.

When the French launched the ironclad Gloire in 1860, a junior Admiralty minister sneaked on board and made some measurements with his umbrella, and Britain built the more powerful HMS Warrior. When Russia, Germany, Japan and America began building ocean-going fleets, Britain responded with HMS Dreadnought, built very fast in 1906. It made earlier warships obsolete and disrupted every other country’s naval plans.

The Royal Navy pioneered aircraft carriers during the First World War. During the 1930s, when rearmament began in the face of the Nazi threat, Britain out-built every other country, and had the most technically sophisticated weapons systems. In the 1982 Falklands War, Britain launched a naval operation that only the Americans could have equalled.

The priority was homeland defence. Only three times in its history has the Royal Navy’s main fleet left home waters: in 1782, in 1945, and in 1982. Making yourself invulnerable is itself a huge deterrent. But the navy was also a devastating offensive weapon. Blockading Napoleonic France altered the whole French economy, and it took generations for western ports to recover. Sea power gave global reach. In 1850, the Royal Navy unilaterally (and illegally, according to international law) ended the Brazilian slave trade. In 1878, it protected Turkey from Russian aggression – and, topically, acquired Cyprus as a forward base.

During the First World War, it strangled Germany’s huge overseas trade. Its increasingly tight blockade helped tip Germany into economic collapse, revolution and defeat: its economy shrank by 30 per cent and – let’s be blunt – thousands starved.

A certain Corporal Hitler decided that in his future war of revenge, British blockade would be beaten by seizing lebensraum in Eastern Europe, deliberately starving millions of Slavs in the process. But when war came, British control of the seas again made Germany’s defeat inevitable. Take oil: Germany could never get more than 8 million tons a year for the whole of occupied Europe, but Britain, controlling the Atlantic, imported 20 million tons in 1944 alone. The Royal Navy also supplied Russia, controlled the Mediterranean, and protected the D-Day landings.

I mention this history not to indulge nostalgia, but to underline a point: for an exposed and strategically important island state, controlling the surrounding seas is existential, and it demands unceasing and expensive effort. Governments and people used to understand this, even those that preferred spending money on welfare. The public demanded battleship building to counter the German navy in the 1900s – “We want eight and we won’t wait!” In the late 1930s, the Conservative government doubled defence spending in a year. They knew they had to. So did the public.

And today? Have we forgotten we live on an over-crowded island? Already in the 1840s, one hostile European politician gloated that one day Britain would be starved. Today we depend even more on sea communications. We rely on the ships that carry our food, fuel and goods. The pipelines. The offshore wind turbines. Perhaps most vulnerable of all, the net of flimsy cables that carry the digital information on which our economy and our everyday life depend. And we struggle to send a single warship to defend our base on Cyprus, the most important intelligence hub we possess.

I had the privilege of spending a day on HMS Duncan, the Type 45 destroyer that was first mentioned for the Cyprus deployment. I was hugely impressed by the ship and its young crew, women and men in their twenties and thirties, calm, competent, utterly reassuring. Nelson would have approved.

But there are so few ships. Their crews are overstretched, undervalued and under-rewarded. Weakness invites aggression, and we have never been so vulnerable since the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and captured the Royal Navy’s flagship in 1667. If we don’t wake up to this ourselves, I fear we shall have a rude awakening at the hands of our enemies.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/09/hundreds-years-royal-navy-made-britain-impossible-invade/

[P44]

Há anos que o Reino Unido "importa" pessoal de saúde - desconfio que precisam mesmo e os "nativos" não estão nada interessados; mesmo os qualificados - enfermeiros - há quem diga que se aproveitam do investimento na educação (que é caro!) de Portugal e outros e depois limitam-se a vir buscar.

Conheço uma pessoa que foi para lá assim que se formou, ganhar 2000€ logo de entrada, e isto em 2019