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January 05, 2007

Massive cuts in Royal Navy

James Lewis
The British Royal Navy has just been told to cut its fleet in half. This shocking report was just published by The Telegraph of London.
"Navy to cut its fleet by half."

"Royal Navy commanders were in uproar yesterday after it was revealed that almost half of the Fleet's 44 warships are to be mothballed as part of a Ministry of Defence cost-cutting measure. ...

A need to cut the defence budget by £250 million this year to meet spending requirements has forced ministers to look at drastic measures.

MoD sources have admitted it is possible that the Royal Navy will discontinue one of its major commitments around the world at a time when Sir Jonathon Band, the First Sea Lord, has said more ships are needed to protect
the high seas against terrorism and piracy.

The six warships to be mothballed are the Type 22 frigates Cumberland, Chatham, Cornwall and Campbeltown and two Type 42 destroyers Southampton and Exeter.

It is likely that they will eventually be sold or scrapped. There are also fears in the Admiralty that two new aircraft carriers, promised in 1998, might never be built.

Meanwhile the French navy, which will be far superior to the Royal Navy after the cuts, will announce before the April presidential elections that a new carrier will be built.

Two of eight advanced air defence Type 45 destroyers on the Navy's order books will not be bought, defence sources said. The order is already six months behind schedule and £157 million over budget.

A senior officer, currently serving with the Fleet in Portsmouth, said:"What this means is that we are now no better than a coastal defence force or a fleet of dug-out canoes. The Dutch now have a better navy than us.'"
At a time when new and wild-eyed powers are building their military power, halving Britain's naval strength seems astonishingly irresponsible.

There are two obvious lessons for Americans. One is that in a social democracy like Britain under the Labour Party, all the political pressure goes to welfare payoffs to various political constituencies. The National  Health Service is politically untouchable, and is rationing and postponing such things as major surgeries.

A second lesson suggests that under a Eurosocialist regime, the military are last in line for strategic and philosophical reasons. In Britain under Labour, the aim is to sink the national military in favor of the international military -- in this case, the European Union's planned military arm. The aim is to weaken the institutional strength of the military, and to send a strong signal to ambitious young officers that the only path of advancement is through the EU. That is how the EU is suborning the national bureaucracies of its 25 member states, and funneling their personnel into its own unelected new elite.

There's a third lesson: Europe's media and political elites may hate America, but they will be militarily dependent upon Uncle Sam for the foreseeable future. Socialist democracies cannot defend themselves --- either financially or ideologically. The EU will have a hostile-dependent relationship with us for the foreseeable future, as long as the United States does not let its policies be dictated by Brussels.

With the instruments of sovereignty being systematically undermined, Britain is likely to slip more and more deeply into the control of the French-style dictatorial bureaucracy of the EU. The only option it  has is to lean on the United States, and France (and sometimes Germany) are determined to stop that from happening in the future.

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