The British Navy: A Sea Strategy
With the chance of renewed political will to fund the Navy, possibly to the detriment of the Army, Nick Hewitt wonders if British defence policy is reverting to type.
Does the new Secretary of State for Defence, Dr Liam Fox, favour a strong Royal Navy as the basis for cost-effective, versatile defence? The media seems to think so. On February 6th, 2010, the Daily Telegraph reported him stating that ‘we must not be sea blind, we are a maritime nation’, a point he reiterated again for the Portsmouth News as recently as August 3rd:
We are a maritime nation – 92 per cent of our trade goes by sea. A number of threats to our interests are by sea. This is no time for Britain to become sea blind ... We do require power projection beyond our own continent.
The possible implications of these statements have certainly made some media commentators jumpy. On June 7th, Robert Fox, writing in the London Evening Standard, opined that any forthcoming cuts might ‘leave Britain with its smallest army since the Boer War’, going on to reiterate that ‘Dr Fox appears to favour the Royal Navy’.
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