Dr Sidharth Kaushal on the Royal Navy's presence in the Gulf

“It’s difficult to offer protection and would have been even two or three decades ago during the Armilla patrols of the 1980s, when the Royal Navy could keep two or three frigates on station in the Gulf but still couldn’t have necessarily covered every particular contingency in the region. But it’s true that it could have offered perhaps a more robust protection to British tankers in the region.”