Photo: AP
The announced British budget cuts will slash spending across the board but will hit the Royal Navy hardest of all of the military services.
Anchors away: Britain’s once-proud navy falls prey to budget cuts
In all the carnage, the worst damage, at least to the island’s national pride, is the torpedoing of the Navy. For a kingdom defined by its sea battles, heroes, and ships, Britain is witnessing a humiliating shrinkage of its once-world-conquering maritime force. In the next five years, it will lose four ships (bringing the total to 19), 5,000 personnel (down to 30,000), and perhaps, most ignominiously, will soon have two aircraft carriers with no aircraft to outfit them.
In a final appeal to the National Security Council, navy chiefs offered to make cuts that would reduce the senior service to its smallest since the time of Henry VIII.
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This morning we posted about the possibility of the immediate lay-up of the UK’s flagship, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. We now read that one of the two new £3 billion aircraft carriers will never carry aircraft and may sail into lay-up or be put up for sale, shortly after she is delivered.
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Today is Blog Action Day where bloggers around the wold are posting about a common theme – water. Most, no doubt, will be blogging about the almost a billion people in the world who do not have access to clean drinking water. This is an immediate problem which should be addressed. I have decided to blog to about another problem, not quite so immediate and not as easy to understand but still a serious threat to all of us – ocean acidification.