The new aircraft carriers: de-bunking the hype, nonsense & mis-information.
2 aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are currently being constructed in the UK for the Royal Navy. Never before has so much mis-information, media hype and nonsense has been generated by a ship building programme. Despite already investing years of money & effort in them and the future of the RN and UK defence policy being based around them, there are still voices calling for their cancellation! Carriers are very flexible instruments of power and if used wisely can be a huge force for good in the national interest. They can deploy to anywhere on 2 thirds of the surface of the globe and can influence events from over the horizon by their very presence without even firing a shot. It is safe to say that many future Prime Ministers will be thankful for them when crises and the unexpected happens.
So let’s examine some of the mis-guided reactions and criticisms of the programme:
“We can’t afford them. Lets just spend the money on the NHS, deficit reduction, etc”
Firstly we can’t afford NOT to have strong naval forces. An inability to defend our interests and the control the sea will be far more costly and damaging to the UK economy in the long-term. Approximately £6 billion for their construction seems like a lot of money but in defence terms this is modest, especially when they will have a very long service life. (Great value for money compared to the £23 billion cost of a real white-elephant; the RAF Typhoon programme). They are assets which could potentially serve the country for 40-50 years. Their construction is providing around 10,000 jobs across the UK and maintaining the industrial & shipbuilding base the RN needs. Sadly to many politicians the programme is just a politically convenient a job-creation scheme and its survival is only down to this. (On arrival at the Treasury Chancellor George Osbourne demonstrated total ignorance/contempt by saying he wished “we could cancel the damn things”).
“Carriers are relics of an imperial past”
While they can, be used to project power abroad, they are no more relics of imperialism than any other type of armed forces. (One man’s ‘imperialism’ is another man’s ‘preserving peace & stability’) Not only do they influence events on land but they are the cornerstone of a naval task force and form a vital protective air umbrella for any operations from full-scale war to peace-keeping. Without carriers, British sailors lives are in danger. History shows carrier aircraft are by far the best defence for ships against other aircraft. Operations such as the recovery of the Falklands would not have been possible without carriers. Recent events in Libya have also further strengthened the case for carriers.
“They are too vulnerable to modern weapons and we should just build submarines”
There is a school of though that says the advent of super-cavitating torpedoes and ballistic anti-ship missiles makes carriers vulnerable and obsolete. There are always risks but other nations are still building carriers and most naval analysts do not consider they have had their day. New generation weapons are a concern but they are not yet proven and can still be countered by layered defence and future missile / laser technologies. As it stands, to save cost the carriers will not be fitted with missiles systems for self-defence and we would urge that this be addressed.
They are taking up all the RN’s resources & manpower and the rest of the fleet will suffer
It is true that government underfunding of the RN exacerbated this problem and the RN fleet that will support the carriers in service will be very threadbare. However the solution to this is not to cut the carriers (and thereby finally reduce the RN to a coastal force, relegating Britain to a 3rd rank power) but to properly fund a balanced fleet! Given they will have a very small crew for a carrier of around 1,500 including the air group, even with just 30,000 personnel, the RN will easily be able to crew the first ship without difficulty. If there was a need for both ships to be operational simultaneously then there would be a manpower problem. However current (Deeply flawed) government thinking is that 1 ship will be mothballed on completion. The bigger problem is the ‘gap’ in carrier operating experience cause by the ill-advised premature retirement of the Harrier and HMS Ark Royal and Illustrious. The RN will be reliant in the US Navy to keep naval aviation skills alive and up to date.
“There won’t be any suitable aircraft to fly from them”
Originally it was planned that the F35-B Lightning would be purchase for the carriers. The F-35B is designed to operate in a similar way to the Harrier using ski jump for a rolling take off and landing vertically. However in the 2010 the new government decided to purchase the simpler and ‘cheaper’ F-35-C which is a conventional aircraft. In the long term the F35-C is a better option as it will have better performance. However it will require the carrier to have catapults to launch them and arrestor wires to trap them on landing. This will have a significant impact on the design and cost of the ship. Developed in the US but with considerable UK industrial involvement, the F35 programme is unfortunately insanely over-budget and will deliver very expensive aircraft so the RN and RAF may only be able to afford a very small number. In addition the F-35 may not be in production until several years after the carriers are completed so they may be in the ridiculous position of going to sea with no fixed wing aircraft. The obvious solution is to buy the F-18 Super Hornet instead - an excellent and proven aircraft that is in production, vastly cheaper and can be purchased in decent numbers. It may not be as modern or stealthy as the F-35 but offers something like 80% of the capability at 20% of the cost.
“These ‘super carriers’ are too big and we should build cheaper small carriers with unmanned drone aircraft”
They are large but not strictly ‘super carriers’ at 65,000 tons considerably smaller than the 90,000 ton US ‘super carriers’. As the steel work of a ship is relatively cheap it makes sense to build vessels with sufficient capacity and scope to carry a large air group with the space to operate it efficiently. Also it gives more options for future updates and additions. In the past the RN was forced to build smaller ships than it wanted to make small savings on initial build cost but this made for less efficient ships that were costly or impossible to upgrade. Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) are likely to be a useful tools in future in support of manned aircraft rather than a replacement for them. Clearly the manned aircraft has a solid future and many nations are investing in new conventional carriers including the US, China, Russia and France.
“Carriers are no use in Afghanistan or against terrorists and suicide bombers”
A narrow and short-termist view held by many, especially in the Army. While we are currently facing immediate threats from terrorism it does not mean there will not be ‘conventional’ conflicts in the future and we must retain the capability to fight effectively. Building carriers is taking the wise long-term view that we can’t predict events. We can’t base our defence procurement on the short-term needs of today but try to invest in flexible systems such as carriers that give us lots of options in the future. However naval power is far from irrelevant to terrorism today. Carrier based aircraft have already been used for intelligence gathering and strikes against terrorist bases. Although Afghanistan is land-locked, the majority of the world’s population in lives near the sea and within the radius of carrier aircraft.
Related articles
- Air Power from the Sea – the Case for Aircraft Carriers (Save the Royal Navy)
- Liam Fox: changing aircraft carrier design ‘was right (The Telegraph)
- Aircraft Carriers – the most flexible tool of government (Phoenix Think Tank)
- [In Parliament:] Written Answers – Defence: Air Force (28 Jun 2011)
- National Audit Office challenges £6bn project to build aircraft carriers (The Guardian)
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I fully support the Aircraft Carrier programme.
As the former Minister of Defence said, the Aircraft Carriers will provide UK with 50 years of highly fexible and viable power projection from the sea. The operations in Libya proved, yet again, how vital a role Aircraft Carriers play. A role that land based aircraft simply cannot fill.
The Carriers are vital to the future of the RN and to UK’s Defence needs. The comments in Richard Beedall’s Navy Matters on Libya are well worth reading in regard to the future of UK Carrier Strike capability.
Carriers are necessary to project air power where operating from a remote or stationary and vunerable land air base are not a viable option. We only need to look at the logistics of the air campaign in Libya to see this. The costs of just keeping air refuelling tankers in the air, and long flights from the land base to final target area are huge, not to mention the strain on the pilots just in transit before going into a hostile theatre of operations. Plus with no nearby base, how to recover an aircraft and more importantly its pilot in the event of aircraft malfunction or damage. In short, you can park a carrier almost anywhere in the world and place your planes and their ordnance within strike range of targets and provide combat air patrol (CAP) for other naval assets. World war II and the Gulf war proved that air power is king, deny an adversary air superiority and strike from the air, you have them at a massive disadvantage.
The last time aircraft carriers were of critical use was n 1982. Fact is: we don’t need them.
A modern air fleet needs AEW, tankers and electronic warfare aircraft – the 2 new carriers won’t have any of these, so we will always need a land base.
Having large carriers would be wonderful – but we just dont need them.
What we could do with are 2 or 3 smaller vessels, carrying 6-12 FW aircraft that could operate as part of a wider coalition force
Sorry JJ you are totally wrong about the carriers. Firstly if money wasn’t being wasted on RAF vanity projects such as keeping useless Tornados going, we might already have funding agreed AEW, Tankers and EW aircraft for the new carriers. In fact the large carrier gives us the option of operating such support aircraft and it is realistic that the RN will gradually obtain theses aircraft during the 40+ year lives of the carriers anyway. We cannot rely on foreign airbases to be convenient for all future operations and carriers give us far more global flexibility and options than land-based aircraft.
Has it not been the case that carrierborne aircraft from US carriers have been used in Afghanistan for various bombing and strike missions, including support/cover for British ground forces too.