Is it any wonder no one wants to join our woefully neglected Navy?

The Royal Navy cannot recruit enough sailors. Two of its shrinking force of frigates will be decommissioned without replacement, it is reported. This, it is said, is to ensure there are sufficient numbers to provide ship’s companies for new frigates. But the fact is that the service doesn’t have enough people even for the few vessels it has left.

This isn’t new. Until a few years ago it was standard practice to tie up some ships permanently in harbour as “training ships”, for lack of sailors. That crisis was probably triggered in part by the decision taken in 2010 to make large numbers of people compulsorily redundant.

The wild swings between cuts and shortages go way back: when I joined in the 1990s, the service decided towards the end of my training period that it had too many officers, and dealt with this by sacking much of my cohort.

Large numbers of young officers were dismissed after years of expensive training, their families having already attended their passing-out parades at Dartmouth.

My cohort lost many more people in the years that followed, as disillusion set in. The RN can be a great organisation, particularly if you manage to get into the right parts of it. But it is also capable of mind-numbing levels of risk-averse, bureaucratic nonsense.

The culture got worse. One sad process was the long, slow erosion of the belief that sailors should be tough, adaptable combat personnel. Long ago, every warship would have an explosive demolitions team, and a diving team.

Back then, it was expected that you could issue weapons to sailors and they would be able to board and take over other ships, or act as a security force ashore. All these things were done on a part-time basis by ordinary sailors, technicians, chefs, alongside their “day job”.

That has almost all gone now. Sailors are seen as too delicate to conduct armed boarding if any opposition is expected (and if none is, why are they armed?) They don’t do any of the other things any more, either.

I managed to get into one of the good bits of the RN, the diving branch, which still expects its sailors to be tough. There’s no problem at all recruiting would-be divers even today; mainstream navy take note.

Apart from cultural matters, there is the palpable state of weakness. The few remaining frigates are very old and worn out. The handful of destroyers break down catastrophically all the time, and are feebly armed. Our new aircraft carriers had no jets at all for 95 per cent of 2022. Our submariners have to do six-month patrols due to maintenance failures.

The one thing the 1990s RN was genuinely good at, far better than the US Navy, was mine countermeasures.

But we are getting rid of our entire minehunter fleet, whose work can apparently now be done by a couple of cheap civiliancrewed auxiliaries. (None of the other expert minewarfare navies is doing this – and the fleet auxiliary’s manpower situation is even worse than that of the RN.)

It’s hard to take pride in a fleet like this.

The RN does need more money and better kit. But it also needs to rebuild its culture as a proud, tough combat force if it wants to solve its manpower problems.