THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITISH SEA POWER

Britain is an island.
An island trading power does not get to treat sea power as optional.
It does not get to assume that trade routes, undersea cables, overseas territories, distant bases, and maritime deterrence will somehow take care of themselves.
And it certainly does not get to discover, in the middle of an actual crisis, that it has preserved more brass than ships.
Yet that is where Britannia is today. She no longer rules the waves, not even in junior partnership with the United States. She can barely put to sea.
The Royal Navy’s escort fleet is down to just 13 destroyers and frigates, only a handful of which are actually usable at any given time. Britain began the year with only seven frigates in service, one already in deep maintenance, with only around four effectively available.
For shameful perspective, the last official parliamentary count showed 41 admirals across Navy Command, the Ministry of Defence, other government service, and NATO. The Navy’s headquarters culture is robust, the brass is plentiful, and the fighting fleet is vanishing.
That’s not a statistic. It’s an indictment.
Nor is it merely Britain’s problem.
Britain is not some modest continental state freeriding quietly under somebody else’s umbrella.
It sits astride the North Atlantic approaches.
It is a nuclear power, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a nation with sovereign territories scattered across the globe.
It is supposed to be, alongside the United States, the premier maritime power in NATO.
Instead, it has spent decades dismantling the material basis of that role while continuing to speak as if the role still existed.

This is the fortress town of Shatili in an extremely remote Caucasus region in Georgia called Khevsureti. It was built by the Crusaders 1,000 years ago. The Khevsur people who live here trace their ancestry back to these Crusaders and until the 1930s still wore chain mail in feud-battles with other towns. I took this picture in 1991.

In the Mediterranean, experienced travelers know the French Riviera from St. Tropez to Menton, and the Italian Riviera from Ventimiglia to Cinque Terre. There is one Riviera in the Med they may not know – Albania’s. The Med has many beautiful coastlines, and just about all of them have been “discovered” by jet-setters to backpackers. Not yet, however, for Albania from Saranda in the south across from Greece’s Corfu to Vlora across from the tip of Italy’s Boot Heel.





John Solomon is reporting on previously suppressed information indicating that, as early as 2020, we knew the Chinese were trying to interfere in our elections, and that this intelligence was covered up.