Have Your Say: Aircraft Carriers
April 22nd, 2008 by Defence Team — Forum
A capabilities question this week -Â Do we need two new aircraft carriers?
There are a range of opinions on this issue from many different quarters. Whilst some argue that they are essential platforms for our force projection, especially when reaching landlocked countries, others believe that they are expensive ‘White Elephants’ that have a very limited role in our future platforms. This debate has been compounded by the already visible delays in the Joint Strike Fighters that are due to be used on the carriers.
We want to know how you see aircraft carriers:
- Are they invaluable platforms for the future of our forces or expensive and out-of-date remnants of a by-gone age of conflict?
- What role can and should they play?
- Are there any alternatives?
5 comments ↓
Warfare has changed and what is now the norm is some form of expeditionary warfare. Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of current conflicts , as long as the military are asked by its political masters to perform such excursionary roles and given that there will be no guarantee of a friendly airbase within reach then we must take our air wing with us, avoiding the problems of overflights, runways etc. It is reported that Clinton once said: “When word of crisis breaks out in Washington, it’s no accident the first question that comes to everyone’s lips is; where is the nearest carrier?”
The current Invincible class are too small for such a role so we must build bigger ships - The QE class of carriers will be the largest ships ever built for the RN, being almost in the supercarrier bracket along the the Nimitz class, and will provide an extraordinary level of force projection - some thing that we currently just cannot do.
I cannot hope to understand the rights and the wrongs of this from a military/defence/governmental perspective….my only thought really is:
Why must we be seeking the solutions on how better to attack (if it was to defend, our focus would be on our shores) - is it truly just naivety that make me want to seek intelligent, diplomatic solutions to the issues?
I am grateful to our armed forces for their commitment to the safety of our citizens - but I am too jaded by the dishonesty the current conflicts are based on, to see this from a purely logical perspective.
Today - the wars we are embroiled in are wrong; wrong for our forces, wrong for our country, wrong for those we attack, wrong for humanity and just plain wrong because they are based on lies and not noble purpose. Anything to do with defence that this government undertakes - will feel wrong as a result.
If we are going to have an Army to be used for expeditionary warfare, then we need carriers, simple as that.
So the big question is whether we have expeditionary armed forces.
The RN invented the aircraft carrier, and has always had them in the fleet ever since. There has never been any shortage of work for them to do, either. It is hard to see any argument other than an extreme pacifist one for doing away with them.
Yes, they are expensive. The current CVS ships were originally called “Through-Deck Cruisers” in an attempt to convince the Treasury that we weren’t going to have any more of those nasty expensive carriers after the cancellation of CVA01, and astonishingly the trick worked — they only became carriers again when Navy minister Keith Speed changed the pennant numbers (see his book “Sea Change”).
The Thatcher Government made another ill-advised attempt to do without carriers, and the egregious John Nott was planning to flog them off just before the Falklands War, saying that the Navy needed to get away from its “task force mentality”. The Falklands War showed pretty clearly who was right. As a joke of the time went, “Whatever happens/They have got/The Exocet/And we have Nott.”
The great virtue of the carrier is its flexibility. It is not limited to a single role, but can do all sorts of useful things. Yes, it can do air defence and pack a big punch for “big people’s war”. It can also exert the subtle threat of force in times of tension in a much politer and lower-key manner than any other instrument of military power, and can do so over most of the world. It can “poise” offshore for long periods, and so does not push panicky politicians into “use it or lose it” decisions.
A carrier group is a great thing to have to protect the lives of British citizens when trouble flares up unexpectedly abroad. Most recently the RN evacuated British citizens from the Lebanon in 2006; I also recall the evacuation from Cyprus in 1974. What you need most of all for this kind of operation is lots of flight deck space; and for that, you need carriers.
Finally, that flight-deck space can also be useful for carrying stuff the other way, in humanitarian and disaster-relief interventions.
No doubt the carriers we have on order at the moment will be procured late and over-budget, thanks to the customary criminal ineptitude of defence procurement in this country. That is a problem of managerial muddle and incompetence, not a problem with aircraft carriers. It also seems possible that we could have done better with more smaller hulls. But it is far too late to cancel the project now if we want to have carriers, and carriers we must have.
All the best,
John.
I agree with John Salt’s comments. Carriers provide an essential platform for all kinds of operation, both military and humanitarian. We cannot rely on having access to air bases on land in times of emergency. The question we need to address is which aircraft we are going to use on them if the VSTOL Joint Strike Fighter does not enter service.
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