Let us try to be fair. In any age, recruiting and equipping armed forces is expensive and difficult, and you can never be sure if they will pass the test of combat. During the 1916 Battle of Jutland, after two British battlecruisers had blown up under German fire, Admiral David Beatty turned to a subordinate and said: ‘There seems to be something wrong with our b***** ships today, Chatfield.’
He was right. Several things were wrong. And so it continued. Between the wars, the giant battlecruiser HMS Hood looked tremendous. But the truth was less impressive. On one occasion, one of her huge gun turrets slipped off its corroded bearings and could only be put back in place by the ship’s tug-of-war team.
Other services have their problems too. The RAF’s Fairey Battle bombers, designed and built at great expense just before the Second World War, proved worse than useless in the fight against Germany in France in 1940, despite the great bravery of their crews.
Such stories, alas, are far too common. And if they are not heeded, then such failings lead to the needless deaths of good men and women, and possibly to defeat.
The performance over the deployment of HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, to the Mediterranean, is full of lessons. Her class is already notorious for breaking down in warm seas, such as the Persian Gulf, sometimes so badly that they became sitting ducks. This is now being expensively fixed but three of them are still out of action.
The much older Type 23 frigates are in an even worse state, with few of the officially available seven actually in any condition to deploy. In some cases this is because they are just too old. But they also face manpower shortages.
The Navy’s ship crisis makes experienced seamen less willing to stay, and makes it harder to recruit.
The submarine fleet is even worse off.
After an Iranian drone struck the RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus on March 1, 2026, critics lambasted the government for having no major warships nearby to defend sovereign territory. HMS Dragon (pictured) only set sail from Portsmouth on March 10, more than a week after the attack
A major point of political embarrassment for Starmer has been that France was able to pledge and move warships to the region almost immediately, while Britain’s premier air-defense destroyer was stuck in port
Our two enormous and vastly expensive aircraft carriers seem constantly bedevilled with problems.
A Navy which is mostly tied up in dock, rather than out in the world where it ought to be, cannot move as quickly as a fleet which is already worked up and prepared for war.
This was why we were able to respond so much faster when Argentina seized the Falklands in 1982.
Hence the embarrassing slowness of HMS Dragon’s preparations to go to sea, and the even more embarrassing revelation that she then spent three days stuck in the Channel, still hundreds of miles from Cyprus, which she is supposed to be defending.
President Trump’s sudden demand for a British ship in the Gulf – his latest zigzag – is unlikely to be heeded in such circumstances.
In any case, as we look now at the state of our Forces, we need to be deeply and urgently concerned.
Why is it that our ancient rival France, with a population and economy very similar to ours, can still maintain an effective and impressive navy? We need to know. Because we need to be able to do the same, and soon.
