Britain may have stopped publicly announcing its steady decline in warship numbers towards zero, as report claims theoretically active frigate is de-facto out of service.
It is a practice long associated with third-world navies, keeping decrepit, unseaworthy ships on the books for the sake of prestige, or to cover corruption, and now Britain’s Royal Navy stands accused of the same, with recently refitted and officially active warship HMS Iron Duke stripped of her combat systems and “unlikely ever to sail again”.
According to analysis by British intelligence group Navy Lookout, the Iron Duke is without weapons or sensors, its crew likely dispersed to other ships, and is in a state they describe as being de-facto decommissioned.
As things stand, Britain has very few frigates, almost certainly the lowest number ever in the half-millennia-long history of the Royal Navy stretching back to Tudor England, and the number is dwindling
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