How Britain holed the Royal Navy below the waterline

“The last time we had to confront Russian aggression of this scale in the North Atlantic and ensure freedom of navigation in Strait of Hormuz, the Royal Navy was five times bigger,” says Steve Prest, a former Navy procurement specialist and fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), the military think tank...Rusi’s Prest praises sailors for doing “a brilliant job” to get the warship [HMS Dragon] out of maintenance in short order but warns that the fiasco is merely a symptom of much deeper problems. “The question,” he says, “is why didn’t we have any more ships available? “Why didn’t we have a ship ready in the Middle East or eastern Mediterranean, ready to do this sort of work? Because we always have done in the past. “The answer is this reduction we’ve seen in hull numbers."...“Navies are capital assets,” he says. “They take time to build. You therefore have to build them before you need them. But peacetime navies are expensive.”