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| Daring class Destroyer (Wiki Info - Image: Wiki Commons) CC-BY-SA-3.0/Brian Burnell |
By James R. Holmes
The Naval Diplomat begins his series on middle power navies in the Indo-Pacific with the United Kingdom
RESOLVED: that this column shall undertake an occasional series on Asia-Pacific Indo-Pacific Indo-Asia-Pacific sea powers not named China, Japan, or the United States. Starting forthwith.
And why not start with the Royal Navy? The 2013-2014 academic year is drawing to a close, and by happenstance it’s been my year of the British Empire. I served on a panel with the current First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, last fall in Australia, and on another alongside his predecessor, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, last week in Singapore. Throw in a quick Canadian trip, and that’s a decent grand tour of the erstwhile imperium on which the sun never set.
But, you protest, isn’t today’s Royal Navy the merest shadow of the hegemon that once ruled the waves? Didn’t London throw in the towel on the Indian and Pacific oceans decades ago, withdrawing from east of Suez when it could no longer afford a fleet big enough to concentrate meaningful power along the Eurasian rimlands? Isn’t it starving the surface fleet of shipbuilding funds to bankroll nuclear submarines and a couple of flattops? Hasn’t the gulf separating ends from means — and mismatched priorities within those means — reduced the Royal Navy to a boutique navy composed of a handful of sexy platforms and not much else — a force with little punch outside Europe? All true, arguably. Britain looks like a post-Mahanian sea power.
Read the full story at The Diplomat