MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: What has it come to when the French navy puts ours to shame?
Let’s try to be fair. Recruiting and equipping armed forces in every era is expensive and difficult, and you can never be sure whether they will stand the test of battle. During the 1916 Battle of Jutland, after two British battlecruisers were blown up under German fire, Admiral David Beatty turned to a subordinate and said: ‘There seems to be something wrong with those ***** ships of ours today, Chatfield.’
He was right. A few things were wrong. And so it continued. Between the battles the giant battle cruiser HMS Hood looked magnificent. But the reality was less impressive. On one occasion, one of the massive gun turrets slipped from its worn bearings and could only be replaced by the ship’s tug-of-war crew.
Other services also have problems. The RAF’s Fairey Battle bombers, designed and built at great expense just before the Second World War, proved worse than useless in the war against Germany in France in 1940, despite the great bravery of their crews.
Unfortunately, such stories are very common. And if ignored, such failures lead to unnecessary deaths of good men and women and possibly defeat.
The performance of the deployment of the Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon to the Mediterranean is full of lessons. Its class is notoriously bad in warm seas like the Persian Gulf, sometimes so badly that it becomes a sitting duck. This is currently being expensively fixed but three are still out of use.
The much older Type 23 frigates are in an even worse condition; Of the seven officially available frigates, very few are actually deployable. In some cases, this is because they are too old. But they also face a manpower shortage.
The Navy’s ship crisis is making experienced sailors less willing to stay and making it harder to enlist.
The situation of the submarine fleet is even worse.
After an Iranian drone struck the RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus on March 1, 2026, critics criticized the government for the lack of large warships nearby to defend sovereign territory. HMS Dragon only sailed from Portsmouth on 10 March, more than a week after the attack
The major political embarrassment for Starmer was that while Britain’s leading air defense destroyer was stranded in the harbour, France had pledged warships to the region and moved them immediately.
Our two huge and extremely expensive aircraft carriers seem to be plagued with constant problems.
A Navy that is tied up mostly in port, rather than where it should be off-world, cannot move as quickly as a fleet that is already prepared and prepared for battle.
That’s why we were able to react much more quickly when Argentina took over the Falkland Islands in 1982.
Hence the embarrassing slowness of HMS Dragon’s preparations for sailing and, even more embarrassingly, the revelation that she had been stranded for three days in the Channel, still hundreds of kilometers from Cyprus, which she was supposed to defend.
President Trump’s sudden request for a British ship in the Gulf – this latest zigzag move – is unlikely to be heeded in the circumstances.
In any case, when we look at the state of our Forces at the moment, we need to be deeply and urgently concerned.
Why can our ancient rival France, whose population and economy are very similar to ours, still have an effective and impressive navy? We need to know. Because we need to be able to do the same in a short time.
