The 2025 SDR is likely to give much-increased weight to UK mainland defence. The RN has a critical part to play in this defence, in some ways a return to its historical roots but also adapting to new threats and meeting the exponential growth in seabed warfare challenges.
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In this article, we consider the growing challenges for NATO in countering a series of attacks on pipelines and cables in the Baltic Sea and the dangers posed by merchant ships of the Russian ‘shadow fleet’.
In this guest article, Stuart Dee and Charlotte Kleberg summarise the challenges ahead for Royal Navy aviation.More
In this article we look back at a difficult year for the RN, summarising the key events, achievements and issues for the Naval Service in 2024.
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Until recently, the RN maintained a meaningful force of at least 6 ships based in Bahrain. For a variety of reasons, this force may soon just comprise of two ships.
On 20th November the government announced that it would be decommissioning 5 more ships. Here we look in detail at the context and future impacts of these choices.
Although perhaps now better known for ship repair rather than shipbuilding, Cammell Laird and the wider APCL group is now heavily engaged in building sections for the Dreadnought submarine and Type 26 Frigate programs. Here we look at how this organisation has assumed a vital role in supporting the fleet and become a key enabler in major naval projects.More
A recent paper produced by the Council on Geostrategy suggested that the RN should buy at least one additional Dreadnought-class submarine reconfigured as an SSGN to launch conventionally armed missiles. Here we consider this proposal and other options for increasing the submarine force strength.
On 1st October Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles. The US Navy participated in the destruction of some of the missiles but poor messaging by UK politicians led to considerable confusion about whether the RN had contributed to this defensive mission. Here we look at the the RN’s current and future ballistic missile defence (BMD) capabilities.