The Globetrotting French

While the Royal Navy has been increasingly in doldrums, its love/hate sister fleet across the Channel has been hard at work. The French Navy celebrates its 400th anniversary this year, and you can tell they are going big. Big Chuck On 18 May, while deployed in the Indian Ocean, the sole French aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle (R91) celebrated 25 years of entering active service. How it started: Since 2001, she has been holding down deployments around the world in Operations Heracles, Agapanthe, Harmattan, Arromanches, Clemenceau 19/21/22/25, etc., and has traveled in excess of 865,000 nautical miles, and logged more than 60,000 catapult traps. She had sailed from Toulon in late January for the multinational ORION 26 exercise in the Baltic, then had been shifted to a more war-adjacent deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean and now the Indian Ocean/Arabian Sea. While scheduled for long-term maintenance for July 2026, this could very well be bumped. Le vendredi 15 mai, sur le pont…