The missing link to make sense of the SDR and recent decisions on air power is a major ACP (Loyal Wingman) programme for both RAF and FAA.

This is an SDR recommendation and needs to be properly funded (billions), but is unlikely to get those resources until after 2029. Introduction of an ACP to FAA needs to be timed with a 2030s MLU of the carriers, but can enter service earlier with the RAF, initially as part of UK IAMD and for the SEAD/DEAD mission, increasing mass in the fast jet force.

With the prospect of the RN getting a new Type 92 sloop, I though I'd take a look at the history of the 'sloop' in the Royal Navy.

Sloop is an anglicised Dutch term, meaning a small flat bottomed ship, adopted by the Royal Navy from the 17th c. for small second class warships. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the sloop was formalised as an unrated single gundeck warship of 18 guns, under the command of a 'Master and Commander' rather than a post Captain. Smaller than frigates, they were used for trade protection on distant outposts.

Hunt class escort destroyers.

Concerned that the new classes of large fleet destroyers were unsuited for convoy escort duties, a new type of small escort destroyer was designed in 1938-9.

The design was for a 1,000 ton ship based on the Bittern class colonial sloops. Like the Bitterns, they would be built to naval standards, but power was raised from 3,300 to 19,000 shp on two shafts, giving a speed of 28 knts.

This resulted in considerable loss of range, making them only really suitable for North Sea and Mediterranean service.

O & P class destroyers formed the 1st and 2nd Emergency Flotillas, and were the first wartime emergency classes.

Stripped down J-class hulls with raised fo'castles that could be built quickly, the 'O' class had four 4.7" low angle guns, similar to the earlier pre-war classes. The 'P' class were armed with five 4" HA guns for improved AA performance.

Both classes were optimised for escorts duties with only four 21" torpedo tubes.

AA armament was a quadruple 40mm pom pom and six 20mm Oerlikon guns, four on power operated twin mounts.

Weapon class destroyers were the last RN wartime design, a larger follow-on to the War Emergency Classes, which could be built in yards too small for the Battle class.

Armament was similarly arranged to the Battles, with four 4" guns in new twin power operated mountings forward. They had a heavier torpedo and ASW armament than the Battles - 10 torpedo tubes and twin 'squid' ASW mortars, and were optimised for ASW escort of carrier groups.

Secondary AA armament was two twin STAAG radar guided 40mm bofors mounts and four single 40mm bofors mounts.

The L & M class destroyers were the last classes laid down for the Royal Navy before the war in 1938-9.

They were larger and more complex ships than the J, K and N classes, incorporating three power operated twin 4.7" dual-purpose gun barbettes as main armament. Four were completed with four twin 4" HA mounts in place of the 4.7" barbettes, and it was found the better AA performance and higher rate of fire of the 4" guns offset the loss in weight of shot.

Secondary AA armament was a quadruple 40mm pom pom and four twin 0.5" HMG mounts.

The J, K and N class, were built during the run-up to war, and were smaller and cheaper versions of the Tribals. They swapped two 4.7" guns for two extra torpedo tubes.

Five 'N' class were all crewed by the RAN, two by the Dutch Navy in exile and one by the Polish navyin exile. As some of the most modern destroyers in Royal Navy service during the first two years of the war, they were heavily engaged in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Inidan Ocean, and 13 of the 24 ships were lost - mostly to aircraft while on convoy escort duties in the Med.

Why is Diego Garcia and BIOT different from other overseas territories?

1./ At the time of Mauritius and Seychelles independence in 1966, BIOT was created specifically for UK defence purposes, with an agreement to return it to Mauritius once UK no longer needed the base.

1/2 2./ It was created in the context of the UK withdrawal from East of Suez, and its naval and air bases at Singapore, Gan (Maldives) and Aden (Yemen), so that USN and USAF could pick up the burden in the Indian Ocean.

3./ the population of DG was forcibly evacuated to Mauritius.

The Surface War, the Atlantic 1941-2: a 🧵..

After Operation Berlin and the commissioning of Bismarck, Tovey's Home Fleet was faced with the prospect of both Donitz's u-boat campaign and sustained KM surface raiding disrupting the vital flow of troops and supplies to Britain. By mid-1941, the wartime shipbuilding programme began to pay dividends, with large numbers of smaller combatants coming into service.

Dozens of rapidly-built convoy escorts, destroyers, escort carriers and AA light cruisers would need to backfill the gaps in the surface fleet.

The Surface War, Part 5 - Mediterranean 1942.. a 🧵..

Cunningham's strategic assessment in January 1942 was dire.

Force H had been gutted for the Eastern Fleet, Forces B and K at Malta had been decimated and the Med Fleet was reduced to a handful of destroyers and cruisers. Yet during the second half of 1941, Malta's light cruisers and destroyers of Force K and B, u-class coastal submarines and Swordfish torpedo bombers had sunk 60% of Axis shipping supplying North Africa.

Keeping Malta in the fight was Cunningham's key to unlock victory.

The Surface War - The FarEast, 1941-2 a 🧵..

From'39 the Eastern Fleet made do with a collection of hand-me downs and crocks, mostly to conduct convoy escort missions to Suez and Cape Town.

First World War vintage light cruisers and destroyers made up the bulk of fleet. By the end of 1940, they had been joined by the walking wounded from the Mediterranean war.

Ships damaged or with material flaws that could not be repaired at Alexandria.

These included the partially repaired cruisers Glasgow and Mauritius and the RAN's 'scrap Iron flotilla'.

The Surface War, Atlantic 1940-1, a 🧵..

The Battle of Norway ensured that during the summer of 1940 the remaining handful of Kriegsmarine destroyers, cruisers and damaged battleships were in no position to defeat the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, leaving that task to the Luftwaffe. Adm Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, could afford to detach Force H to Gibraltar with Hood, Valiant, Resolution and Ark Royal to counter Vichy French naval forces in North Africa, and send the battleships Warspite and Barham and the new carrier Illustrious to the Mediterranean.

The Surface War Part 2.. Med '40-41, a 🧵

The Atlantic u-boat war posed a strategic threat to the allies, but it was the surface war in Europe that determined tactical and operational control of oceans and seas over which Axis and later Allied armies were landed and supplied. Churchill's immediate concern in June 1940 was the fate of the French fleet.

If it were to fall into Nazi hands, it could help the KM control the channel and enable an invasion of Britain.

'Force H' was sent to Gibraltar to bottle-up the Vichy fleet in North and West Africa.

The Royal Navy's surface war.. a🧵

Things began badly for the Home Fleet in 1939 when a well prepared Kreigsmarine u-boat force targeted the RN's surface fleet, sinking the battleship Royal Oak at anchor in Scapa Flow and the carrier Courageous off Ireland.... Much of the phoney war was taken up by an operation to hunt down the surface raiders Deutchland and Graf Spee, both of which set sail for the Atlantic a week before the invasion of Poland.

Deutchland managed to evade the Ango-French hunting groups and sink three merchant ships..

Battle of the North Cape: a🧵

Naval warfare in the Arctic during winter was a very different prospect from the Pacific or Mediterranean.

In December 1943, a Royal Navy at peak fighting power showed how it should be done. The Arctic convoy route was one of three major arteries to deliver lend-lease to the USSR, along with the Persian rail corridor from the Gulf to the Caucasus and Bering Straights from Alaska.

After the disasterous scattering of Convoy PQ17 in June 1942, tactics were modified.

Cavalry.. a 🧵...

Oliver Cromwell revolutionised the British 'horse'.

His Ironsides were big men on big horses drawn from the rural yeomanry, equipped with cuirass and helmet.

Highly trained to charge at the trot, knee-to-knee, they proved unstoppeable during the civl war. The British 'standing' Army was founded after the restoration of the Monarchy, in 1660.

Charles II household cavalry would include the Life Guards, raised from the nobility, but also the Royal Horse Guards, one of Cromwell's regiments of cuirassiers, and Horse Grenadiers.

As our forces have declined in size the 'veteran' has become separated from society. When I was a kid everyone knew veterans, they were our parents and grandparents. All of mine, and their siblings, and those of my friends had served in the first or second wars, Malaya or Korea. The bar at the British Legion was packed with men and women who never spoke of their wartime experiences, but if one dug a little would turn out to have been a RAF tailgunner or an able seaman on arctic convoys. It wasnt unusual, or special, to have done so.

Hawker Hunter & Rolls Royce Avon, a 🧵

Two uncomplicated, spirally developed designs which proved long-term winners.

The Avon 200 is still in production by Siemens as a commercial gas turbine, 80 years after it was first designed. Both designs were developed to incorporate new technologies emerging at the end of the war - swept wings and axial flow compressors.

Metrovick developed an axial flow jet engine in 1943, the F2 'Beryl', but more reliable centrifugal designs were chosen for the first jets.

In 1978 British Steel employed nearly 300,000 mostly men and made raw steel from British coal and iron ore. It was already loss making and outcompeted on global markets.

Now it is a tiny, perhaps nominal, industrial hangover. Yet steel is industy's most important raw material. The current crisis marks the low water mark for deindustrialisation, and the realisation that economic globalisation, driven by Thatcher and Reagan's 1980s revolution in market-liberalistion (and embraced by the World Bank and IMF after 1984) has failed.

RN is currently procuring STRIKE NET -to allow the communication and exploitation of data from multiple, distributed sensors, deciders and effectors.

These include a peer-to-peer RF mesh network (with no single point of failure), common services platform and UxV C2 capabiity. P2P networks are highly resilient (essentially built from the combined power of the network, with no requirement for centralised servers), and software defined UHF/HF more resistant to EW, the CSP enables data encryption and sharing, & UxV C2 a plug-in drone C2 interface.

Normal jogging for MOD equipment plan requires continued work to replace aging capabilities before any expansion can take place.

Tthat includes programmes like GCAP, Boxer, Skynet 6, Type 83 DDG etc.

Some can be rescoped (e.g. T32 to CABOT) but forces cannot be grown much.🧵 Without downgrading some capabilities, growing the budget to 2.5% GDP is likely to enable greater resilience, but not greater mass.

Stockpiles, supply chains, reshoring of sovereign capacities and lethality can be improved, as well as protection for CNI, but not much more.