The Diplomat
Royal Navy Lieutenant Natasha Richards has just finished her stay on board the frigate Canarias, a Spanish Navy ship that has been hosting Royal Navy personnel for 25 years in a sign of military cooperation between the two countries, according to the British Embassy in Madrid.
According to the British Embassy in Madrid, Richards, 26, has been replaced after two and a half years on the Spanish ship by fellow British Navy Lieutenant James Marwood, 23. The Canarias, based at the Rota naval base, began hosting British military personnel in 1996. Such ships follow common NATO procedures, so there is a strong similarity in the way they work.
The Royal Navy lieutenant has been a bridge officer on the Spanish frigate, which she arrived on in April 2019 and with which she took part in the deployment in Operation Atalanta against piracy off the coast of Somalia, as well as in manoeuvres such as Poseidon, a NATO anti-submarine exercise.
“The British Navy will always have a perspective of the Spanish Navy through this officer, but so the Spanish Navy also has a perspective of the British Navy,” explained commanding officer of the Canarias, frigate captain Rafael Samaniego. “This officer ends up acting as a hinge in the bilateral collaboration between our navies.
The collaboration between the British and Spanish navies extends to other activities, such as participation in multilateral manoeuvres such as NATO’s ‘Formidable Shield’ air and missile defence exercise, which took place this summer in waters beyond Scotland and in which the frigate Cristóbal Colón was the flagship; or in the recent ‘Dynamic Mariner/Joint Warrior’, also of the Alliance but led by the British, in which the frigate Almirante Juan de Borbón took part, and which later visited Portsmouth. In addition, the two navies work together on missions such as ‘Sea Guardian’, the Atlantic Alliance’s operation to reinforce maritime security in the Mediterranean.
The Defence attaché at the British embassy in Spain, Captain Ian Clarke, highlighted the possibility of increasing these exchanges “in order to have more interactions at different levels”, he said.
Another 30 British military personnel are stationed in Spain, fifteen of them from the RAF, at NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre in Torrejón, Madrid, whose purpose is to plan, direct, coordinate, analyse and report on air policing missions in southern Europe. Two officers are based at NATO’s High Readiness Ground Headquarters in Bétera, Valencia, Spain, including Brigadier General Lisa Keetley, who is the highest-ranking British officer in Spain.
The exchange of military personnel takes place in both directions. At the moment, there are around ten Spaniards in the UK, in postings mostly equivalent to those of the British in Spain. Two of the officers are stationed at Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) headquarters in Innsworth, England – equivalent to the British stationed in Bétera.
