Smaller than the Belgian Navy?

Leave it to the New York Post to contort this naval disgrace into a reason why we should be in Iraq. If Cornwall was indeed in a position to interfere with this hostage taking, then why didn't it do so? The answer was that they had no orders to cover this situation and no one on scene had the cojones to act on his own initiative. Just like in the Pueblo incident, when we had jets warming up in Japan to come to assist, local commanders had to get orders from HQ to launch a strike and the bureaucracy just couldn't respond fast enough. And in those days we had a 600 ship Navy and were fully deployed in Asia, Vietnam, Korea and Japan.

Where would those orders come from, Whitehall? The Admiralty? Probably not. There was almost certainly an American admiral in overall Theater Tactical Command and I'd bet the request was working its way up our chain of command, not theirs. And we have no shortage of Naval power available. In either case, it was a question of failure to anticipate an emergency and having a plan to respond to it that led to this. Just like in the Pueblo. Exactly like in the Pueblo.

Sure, I agree that the Royal Navy is on hard times, and even on some of the NYP's reasons for it and concerns about it, but this has nothing to do with this particular incident and the NYPs extrapolations about it. The Royal Navy has become a mere support squadron for NATO since the end of WWII, it's mission of patrolling the Empire is finished. That's why they feel they don't need carriers. Even during the Falklands, the aircraft carriers Invincible and Hermes were already scheduled for the scrap yards when the war broke out. Now that the Soviet Union is supposedly no longer a threat in Europe, the Brits felt they no longer needed that kind of Navy. I believe they are mistaken, I've always been a strong supporter of national defense for both ourselves and our allies, and in that aspect I agree with the Post's analysis. But the rest is bullshit.