Naval Service General Discussion - Fleet, Manpower, Policy

I’m not dismissing you, but I have high doubts, the RN frigates are dying very quickly and very publicly, there is only so much more time before they aren’t even going to be able to paper over the cracks in Northern European waters, let alone all the other areas they have had to abandon. They need the new frigates, it’s not really optional for them at this point.Getting buy in from Norway helps them long term and might open up the odds of a “Batch 2” buy for the 26s for the RN, and there was the rumoured interest from the Danes for the 31s as well, which helps the MOD and Government. Perhaps the real issue is the paper ship of the Type 32 seems to have died so that means they need someone ordering something from the Babcock facilities pretty much in the next 18 months to avoid that line going cold, which might be where any suggestion is coming from?

As to what we might do, add it to the list, along with pretty much everything else as we haven’t done anything. Harris downplaying the idea of COMBAT ships is going to run headlong into the sight of a French frigate in Dublin bay in 9 months if the IT article works out, which might just lead to some “questions” (not from the Opposition of course, the shower of Tankie shite), as to what the NS should be buying.

I will say though, Christ the MOD is a shitshow that rivals ours, just with nuclear weapons.

Edit, here’s the NL article on just how tight the RN frigates are going to be over the next 10 years, even assuming the 23s struggle on and the 26/31s come on stream as planned.

I see that NL has picked up the story on asking the French to cover our arses.

However it's not going to stay a minor story, neither here nor abroad, if we do end up going cap in hand begging to whoever will listen.

Naomi O'Leary of the Irish Times just said on The Tonight Show says that ironically, if we want to be less reliant on NATO we will have to spend 'a pack more on defence'. Says we have had the UK escorting Russian aircraft out of Irish airspace, Russia in the Irish Sea etc.

Also says there are different models of neutrality like "armed neutrality", such as Switzerland.

I think as an island nation, we really need a navy. It's not good enough that we have four ships and don't even man them all. The drug cartels have an open goal to flood the country with narcotics. That aspect is often ignored in this debate. The cartels are even using submarines now.

The Vikings have landed. Danish frigate(?) docked 7am this morning.

as seen on social media, Gobnait is out and about in the harbour.
https://x.com/dohville/status/1993739305777549420

Well given our entire economy from energy to data transfer relies on undersea cables, yes it would be worthwhile protecting them, particularly as we are still battling our NIMBY's over the idea of actually having a gas reserve in case of emergency. Is it an easy question as to what might be of best use for countering any hostile actions, no, ideally we'd have warships and aircraft capable of detecting any unknown actors.

Should we "allow" friendly nations to help… What do you think is happening day to day right now, its just none of those nations have huge amounts to spare (the RN is losing another Frigate, can't even pay to bring it home), and all are likely getting "erked" at us sitting on budget surpluses while still begging for help.

Is he heading for the pension with no replacement announced?

To return to this question, the Indo has an article today on the Government/Department exercise last year about the impact of damage to the interconnectors, with 6 months of rolling blackouts, and lockdowns to reduce fuel consumption. So yeah it's probably worth trying to make efforts to protect the Subsea infrastructure:

https://archive.ph/EnQeo

Thanks for your responses. They are informative, but I get the impression I did not make it clear what I meant by asking if it was worthwhile. It seems like this was taken as me questioning whether damage to the cables would have enough impact to justify the cost of protecting them. But that's not what I meant. My question was whether bad actors could just go beyond our section of the cables to sabotage them, making guarding them not necessarily worthwhile, just because it wouldn't actually prevent anything.

The other point is the further out, generally the deeper water, so equipment for taking action against the cables is more complicated than say the onshore terminus.

There's no way to create a 100% safe environment, but we can make it more difficult for hostile actors to operate at least within our EEZ.

For example...them auld PC9's should have been waiting on the runway at BD to take off and intercept and destroy....and that task is within their very limited capability. Poor day all round for the DF.