With any POD after 10th May 1945, how can you keep the Royal Navy strong until the present day? A continous Carrier capability is a must.
AHC: Strong post-war Royal Navy?
- Thread starter King_Arthur
- Start date
Big challenge is defining mission and role in an ever evolving security imperative with a devolving imperium.
Second challenge is minimizing clusterfucks and dead ends on strategy, ideology and project management.
Riain
Banned
Easy, Britain started from a high level and is/was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. A start in 1945 would be for the Admiralty to realise that it has too many ships rather than too few and stop maintaining ships in reserve while the active fleet had hardly any in commission.
GB is still number 6 in the world so it isn't weak.http://listamaze.com/top-10-most-powerful-navies-in-the-world/ . To get it higher you could hold back India and China by having them not reform. If the Japanese aren't threatened by China their navy goes down the list. It could simply outspend Russia or India(barely) if it needed to and it doesn't have a prayer of equaling the US unless it goes isolationist after WWII. Basically it went down so far on the list because it isn't as relatively rich as it was. You either need larger economic growth in GB or smaller growth elsewhere.
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Lovely list, I didn't know that the USS Essex LHD-2 belonged to the Indian Navy though.....Sorry that list has about zero credibility.
This one puts it at number 5 http://www.military-today.com/navy/top_10_navies.htm This one puts it at number 5 https://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-top-10-strongest-navies-in-the-world as does this http://listographic.com/top-10-navies so it is at least in the right ballpark. I knew it was in that range and it was the first that came up.
My thoughts on the matter - albeit from a while ago.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...r-on-the-strength-of-the-armed-forces.442563/
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...r-on-the-strength-of-the-armed-forces.442563/
Riain
Banned
Not long.
The argument in 1945 was that only the battleship can deal with all threats in all weathers. The counter argument was no country had anything that required a battleship to deal with .
The treasury kept saying that the RN didn't need more ships in 1945 than in 1939.
Pangur
Donor
That would be how I would approached the matter, I may also have had the Malta class redesigned fully
I think a clear set of priorities is a must. IMHO, it has not been as much lack of money but lack of clear priorities which has shaped the RN for the post-1945 period. The real lost decade for RN seems to have been 1945-1955 when RN stuck with quantity over quality.
Granted, managing decline is much harder than managing growth. RN has done much better than post-Soviet Russian Navy for example.
Can this be achieved by killing Nasser and Mossadegh in the late 40s? But Egypt was basically a time bomb and there is no way we could've kept it long term post-Israel.
Riain
Banned
Maybe by the late 60s that is the case, but there were a lot of options to not put Britain in that position between 1945 and 1968. Even by 1968 you don't have to withdraw 53,000 men from Germany to find 4000 for the Strike Fleet.
Barry Bull
Donor
Why would the Brits want to kill Nasser who was a nobody in the 1940s?
Also, people need to keep in mind that UK need to accomodate US and French interests for any acts in Middle East.
Barry Bull
Donor
I would said the RN has clear priorities as the UK strategic requirements changed over the decades of cold war and the RN changed accordingly to the political scenes.
People need to remember that miitary forces, at the end of day, is a tool for and are dictated by political needs, not vice versa.
I think it interesting AH.com members tends to ignore how domestic and international political scenes affect development of national militaries and try to come with solely technical arguments.