11 thoughts on “The Imperial Order Is Over”

  1. How the once mighty Royal Navy has fallen. Today, they’d be lucky to deploy a couple rowboats to the region, perhaps even with a couple sailors as crew. Decline is a choice and Britain chose poorly.

    1. When we run out of missiles we will be right behind the UK. And when CCP attacks Taiwan this fall the US will be able to do nothing.

  2. It was hard to get NATO and Europe to spend more on their armies while they at war with Russia and they still don’t understand why they need navies. Self hatred combined with normalcy bias.

  3. The Royal Navy has an embarrassment of missing resources:

    2 non-operational mini carriers
    5 attack subs – non-operational (and one stuck in Australia)
    6 type 45 destroyers, 2 operational (counting the one they’re sending maybe to the gulf)
    7 type 23 destroyers, 5 operational.
    4 SSBNs, who knows how operational they are but the RN has difficulties when they attempt Trident launches.

    2. I wouldn’t call the Queen Elizabeths “mini-carriers” — unless the argument is now that anything smaller than a Ford class carrier is “mini.” The QEs are 80,000 tons.

      But yeah, it’s true that they’ve got balky propulsion systems that the Brits are now being forced to really fix.

  4. I don’t see the point of this article’s bragging about the situation. The US created the risk that the US is allegedly exploiting to drive out Lloyd’s. And the US Navy hasn’t physically guaranteed anything yet. They still need to clear the strait.

    Let’s suppose for the moment that this story is accurate. What happens after the strait reopens? Will shippers stay with the US firms in question or revert back when Lloyd’s starts insuring boats again?

    Cui bono? How much are Trump’s family and administration officials invested in these US insurance firms?

    Finally, it’s telling how opaque this source is. Who owns European Business Magazine, the source of the insurance story? There is no history behind either the source or its owner, NST Publishing. There is no author on the essay either. I looked at a few other essays in the I glanced at the Facebook page, The part I could see mentioned no humans involved with the organization.

    The UK has a website that mentions one sole officer associated with NST Publishing, a “Nicholas Paul Staunton” who also was a director of “NICKSLUXURYWATCHSTORE LTD” incorporated at the same time.

    Think about that. Nobody stands behind the stories that this business writes.

    1. There are a seeming infinitude of random people on the Internet posting arrant nonsense, none of whom have even bothered to establish a corporate entity of any sort. NST Publishing may not have much of a digital footprint but it has more of one than the normative Internet blowhard.

      Pointing to the alleged sketchiness of the source – which is actually a lot less sketchy than 99+% of Web twaddlers – is, in any case, not a useful indictment of the accuracy of the alleged reportage. That, at least, has a ring of plausibility about it and it should be possible to investigate further on one’s own if one harbors sufficient suspicions as to its accuracy.

      Given how rapidly nearly everything else about the UK is crumbling these days, it’s hardly obvious that one should harbor dark suspicions about a story which merely purports to add that sad island’s venerable maritime insurance industry to the list.

      1. Most of that European Business Magazine article is complete bunk.

        The US STILL isn’t in a position to provide any escort service in the Gulf, yet the article purports that they’ve been doing so since 48 hours after the first bombs struck.

        Also, even though the US Treasury eventually decided to offer underwriting assurance for some of the risk, they took forever to do it and it still hasn’t had any material effect on actual transit through the Strait.

        It’s either an AI hallucinated garbage article, or a human hallucinated garbage article.

        The schadenfreude exhibited in the PJ Media article that quotes it, and the implications it claims to have, may be accurate if the underlying article was accurate, but this seems to be a case of GIGO.

        Doesn’t mean the UK Navy isn’t a shambles, but the idea that the US is even close to stepping up to replace the UK as a major player in shipping is somewhat laughable if you look at the LCS program, all of our recent warship contract changes, the current state of our own Navy, the pointless (and likely damaging) Jones Act suspension, and the state of shipyards in the US.

        1. The article was posted on the 10th of March, nearly two weeks ago. During that time, the Trump administration has gone from openly scorning the possibility of help with the Strait of Hormuz from an initially reluctant NATO to demanding said help from not only NATO but Japan as well. This aspect of the war appears to have been poorly thought out during the planning stage. With all of the policy whipsawing at the time, I’m inclined to cut the article author some slack anent exactly what the Strait of Hormuz situation was at the time of writing.

          It’s worth noting that preserving rights of navigation was one of the key missions intended for the USN’s Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). And yet none of the LCSes still in commission seem to be deployed for that purpose. Go figure.

          The UK’s role as a “major player in shipping” is entirely a matter of its up-until-now dominant insurance industry. The sudden eclipse of that is the main story being told in the article. The Royal Navy vs. the USN is not really a factor in that. Nor are their respective woes – which are admittedly multifarious and serious in both services.

          I hadn’t heard that the Jones Act has been suspended in any way but one can only hope this action can be made permanent. The Jones Act was the biggest single factor in the destruction of both American shipbuilding and the American merchant fleet. Jones Act-induced rot to both was already serious when WW2 broke out and promptly resumed once it was over. US coastal and interior waterways are barely used anymore compared to their actual capacities and even riverine ports are shadows of their former selves. The Jones Act was the best thing that ever happened to truck and rail transport modes, but the worst thing that ever happened to waterborne commerce.

          And yet the same maritime labor unions that got the Jones Act passed in the first place, still guard it like junkyard dogs even though it has also decimated their own membership rolls along with every other aspect of American shipping. The maritime unions are hardly unique in this – all industrial unions have had the effect of poisoning their industries into either death or near-death and killing hundreds of thousands of jobs for their members. Certain forms of greed-based stupidity seem entirely intractable.

Comments are closed.