Navy plans for 1,000 boats

Your weekly dose of defence news, biased opinions and poorly curated content. You’re welcome.

Ohhhhh, I see what they’ve done here. Given the wild lack of sailors in the Royal Navy, defence procurement geeza Luke Pollard has come up with a solution: just buy a shedload of autonomous vessels. Could work.

To be fair, he actually said some sensible things at a conference last week - the big one being: if it doesn’t work for Ukraine, we aren’t interested.

Let’s see.

One of Europe’s largest militaries (Poland) has signed a defence pact with one of Europe’s smallest (the United Kingdom). This is obviously good news for the UK, which is scrabbling around for relevance in the military sphere and needs to keep the big players close.

The idea is that this will help secure NATO’s eastern flank against the angry bear.

We need friends right now to be fair.

Squaddies off on cultural excursions to France this summer are being warned by their CoC to leave the delicious pillows of joy nicotine pouches at home or risk jail for five years.

Snus & Pouch advocate Mark Oates said: "As mad as it may seem, France is now offering UK visitors a potential five-year trip to the nick for possessing nicotine pouches. It is important that British soldiers are aware that while the French may be our NATO allies, their government would apparently rather people smoked than used a safer nicotine product.”

Probably still worth the risk for Strawberry Ice though, right?

Big events from the past, covered in brief and probably inaccurately.

After a massive chase across the Atlantic, the Last stand of the German battleship Bismarck ended with the Royal Navy destroying Nazi Germany’s most powerful battleship.

At its peak, Britain could mobilise carriers, battleships, destroyers, submarines and reconnaissance aircraft across entire oceans to hunt down a single threat.

Today we celebrate if a frigate leaves Portsmouth four weeks late.

Changing things up? This is where we briefly look at career options from across the civvy world - everything goes here so expect some absolute drivel. Sometimes Forces Assist can help place you, sometimes we can’t. Either way we can offer advice.

Right, we’re on the hunt for some gas engineers this week. Leeds/Donny/Stafford - your gasworks need you. Starting north of £32k with a decent benefits package. Reply to this email or fill in this form (just ignore the driving question and put your gas quals in the notes). As always, if you give us the name of someone who is looking for work and they pass probation, we’ll send you £500 no questions asked.

Bored of asking - they’ll love Despatches and we’ll love them.

Cheers,

Team Forces Assist

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