Why a Royal Navy ship still hasn’t reached Cyprus after Iran strike

Professor Kevin Rowlands, a former senior Royal Navy officer and Captain, who now works for the defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said each ship has a declared "readiness" level that tells politicians how many days it would take until it is ready to set sail. He told The Independent there would "always" have been a basic level of supplies on the ship in order to adhere to that readiness level and that the prime minister would have been aware of the vessel's state when the decision to deploy it was made. "If we wanted something earlier or quicker there would be ways of doing that," he said. He added rather than being an issue of unpreparedness, the situation highlights how the UK's strategic priorities have turned towards Russia and Nato in recent years. "The UK, through successive defence reviews have made some strategic choices," he said. "It's Nato first. It's the North Atlantic, it's the high North. The principal adversary is Russia. "And so if so those choices have been made, that has meant a drawdown of fewer forces in other regions including the Middle East. Every time you make a choice, sod's law is it's going to be the wrong one, but then you've got to accept the consequences which are you're not necessarily going to be there straight away."