It’s in the news! HMS Dragon is heading east with a potential mission of escorting ships through the Straits of Hormuz . This sounds familiar, for it’s the same task that was accomplished by the Royal Navy in the late 1980s, the previous time that free passage of this maritime super-highway was seriously contested.

Silkworm! was published a year ago. It’s a fictionalised story of a Royal Navy guided missile destroyer escorting tankers through the Straits in 1988. The story draws upon my own experiences doing just that in HMS Exeter. It’s a great way to learn how HMS Dragon might carry out its task, and to understand the geopolitics, the legal constraints, and the tactics from both sides of the argument.

The story’s name comes from the Chinese Silkworm missile, which was the ship-attack weapon of choice in the 1980s and is still a serious threat to this day.

Silkworm! is available from Amazon in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited and Paperback.