The UK Commando Force (UKCF) had a busy summer this year. The Force’s mission, led by the Royal Marines, is defined by a year-round permanent presence in northern Norway and the High North. Based at Camp Viking, the UKCF trains in Arctic warfare training, coastal surveillance and contributes to the defence of Nato’s northern flank. The stakes are getting higher as the threat posed by Russia not only includes aggressive cyberattacks and disruptive behaviour along the land border with Norway but also offshore activities designed to repeatedly test Norwegian resolve in the Barents Sea and the archipelago of Svalbard.

UK military personnel have not, however, spent this past summer in and around Camp Viking, some 25 miles east of the military air station of Bardufoss. They and other UK armed forces personal have been active in what we might think of as northern ‘dots on the map’. A term used by James Callaghan in the 1970s, it was a shorthand reference for places like British Honduras and the Falkland Islands that the former Labour prime minister thought could become national crises.

Having served in the Royal Navy during the second world war, Callaghan was perhaps more attuned than others to what the UK’s military reach was in an era dominated by a divided Europe and a British Army on the Rhine. Fearing possible Argentine agitation over the Falklands in 1977, a British nuclear-powered submarine HMS Dreadnought was dispatched to the South Atlantic. Operation Journeyman was designed to deter – whether the Argentine military regime knew about it is another matter.

A new generation of Russian-sponsored Q-ships could yet menace European coastlines

A new generation of Russian-sponsored Q-ships could yet menace European........

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