The UK Defence Journal Weekly Brief

Commodore Maryla Ingham spent four months commanding Standing NATO Maritime Group One, the alliance's high readiness task group in the North Atlantic, Arctic and Baltic. She spoke to us from the bridge of a Canadian frigate, in the middle of a gunnery shoot, a few weeks before handing over in Reykjavík. On Baltic Sentry and how reaction times to undersea incidents fell from seventeen hours to one, on commanding a British staff from German and Canadian warships, on why any NATO ship can refuel from any NATO tanker, and on a twenty-year-old from Thunder Bay who'd never seen the ocean until two years ago. 

Russia has had no warships in the Mediterranean since June, the first time in ten years, and a NATO official tells us allied vessels now outnumber Russian ones three to one in European waters. Also this week: up to seventy jobs going at Ferguson Marine while the government that owns the yard sits on the contracts that would fill it, Donald Trump opening American warship building to foreign yards for the first time, and an American frigate being towed across the Atlantic to be sunk off the Hebrides next month.