Fill the NYC showroom with bridges…
Anybody remember General Schwarzkopf?
“Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.”
DB2
2 Likes
Great line. Yet I remember from history class that France was a, actually the world power in the 1700’s. Either they have fallen dramatically, or everybody else really sucked at that time, or, uh, something else. Amazing how far down the ladder you can fall in just a couple hundred years.
(They still think of themselves as a world power, but the rest of us know better, we just don’t need to humiliate them without cause.)
It was something else. The two superpowers of the day were France and Britain. They fought a series of wars, beginning with Queen Anne’s War and ending at Waterloo. We know who won.
Of course today Once Great Britain would be hard pressed to get together a dozen ships to sail to the Falkland Islands.
Chilean President José Antonio Kast expressed support for Argentina’s sovereignty claim over the Falkland Islands, a British-controlled territory in the South Atlantic, during his first visit to Argentina…
His [Milei’s] administration’s strategy includes bilateral negotiations with the United Kingdom, drawing on the precedent of Hong Kong, and strengthening national defense through the planned installation of a joint naval base with the United States in Ushuaia.
DB2
As recently as a decade ago, the RN maintained at least a few ships on deployment around the globe and in a crisis had options to quickly re-task assets to respond. This is no longer the case; only the 2 forward-deployed OPVs and submarine HMS Anson in Australia are east of Suez.
There are no RN warships in the Mediterranean other than an RFA laid up in Gibraltar. Putting aside the deployment of Anson, countering the Russian threat is really the main priority, but events do not always account for such a delicate balance of resource management. This crisis further exposes the tiny number of combat-ready vessels the RN has available.
DB2
HMRN was made redundant by our military spending.
1 Like