FLOATING mausoleums to political VANITY
Our two new aircraft carriers cost almost £8 billion to build but, with the Middle East on fire, they’re languishing in Portsmouth – too expensive to run, too vulnerable and not suited to modern warfare. We’d be better off selling them to the Americans,
THE Black Sea stretches out into the distance. It is April 2022, in the Ukrainian city of Odesa, just over a month after Russia’s all-out invasion. The port is closed as the Russian navy has laid mines all around it. But until very recently, out near the horizon, there was a hulking, metallic grey warship; a dark smudge on a seaside postcard. My Ukrainian friend Hanna turns to me and smiles: ‘Goodbye, Russian warship.’
Just weeks earlier, two Ukrainian R-360 Neptune cruise missiles had sunk the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet. The Moskva was more than 610ft and weighed just under 11,500 tonnes when fully loaded.
It was the largest Russian warship sunk in wartime since the end of World War II and the first Russian flagship sunk since Knyaz Suvorov in 1905. It was also the largest warship sunk anywhere since the 1982 Falklands conflict.
For retired U.S. Navy Admiral and former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis, it was a ‘ stark reminder of the vulnerabilities of surface ships — including aircraft carriers — to relatively lowcost, numerous and technologically advanced cruise missiles’.
I was reminded of the vulnerability of large ships this week, when it emerged that the UK was refusing to deploy either of its two brand-new aircraft carriers to help launch airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen who are disrupting world trade by attacking international cargo ships in the Red Sea.
Both HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales remained anchored in Portsmouth so RAF Typhoons had to fly 3,000 miles from their air base in Cyprus to drop eight guided missiles near the Yemeni capital Sana’a before heading back again on a journey so long they had to refuel in mid-air on both legs.
Aircraft carriers are flagships, the floating air bases which allow nations to project power abroad and operate close to the combat zone. The decision not to use these two titanic vessels shocked senior officers. ‘I find it absolutely extraordinary we have not sent a carrier,’ exclaimed former First Sea
Lord, Admiral Lord West.
‘ With either HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales in situ we would be able to make a much more significant contribution...Why did we bother building the carriers in the first place?’
It’s a good question.
BETWEEN them the carriers cost £ 7.6 billion, some 15 per cent of the annual defence budget. They took just under a decade to build and each is longer than the Houses of Parliament.
They are designed to carry F- 35s — unquestionably impressive planes that can fly at a speed of Mach 1.6, carry four weapons internally and engage both airborne and ground-based targets.
A well-equipped carrier enables fighter planes to conduct attacks against enemies on land or sea for months at a time. With the radar equipment of the F-35s, our carriers can detect threats from hundreds of miles away. Extensive onboard defences (in addition to the other vessels surrounding it) means they are — in theory at least — well-defended.
Yet both of Britain’s sit idle — floating mausoleums to political vanity.
The ships do not sail because we simply cannot afford the aircraft, escorts and support craft that help them to deploy, protect them and give them striking power.
The loss of an aircraft carrier has always been considered catastrophic in military terms. The last one that Britain lost was the 8,000- tonne HMS Dasher in 1943 during WWII.
Then there is the problem of the planes — simply put: we don’t have enough to make the carriers worthwhile.
According to a September 2023 House of Commons Committee Report, the UK is set to take delivery of 48 F-35s by the end of 2025, with a later, second tranche to take the number up to 74 (including a replacement for the plane that plunged from the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth into the Eastern Mediterranean in November 2021).
Between them, the two carriers can carry 72 F-35s — in theory we can place our entire fleet on them. But in reality some would inevitably need maintenance, and if we put them all on the carriers then the RAF wouldn’t have any.
On top of this, the Queen Elizabeth does not even have catapults to help planes take off in the limited distance of its deck, which means that the F-35 with its vertical thrust is the only plane capable of operating on it.
When HMS Elizabeth left harbour in September 2023 to conduct exercises in the North Sea and North Atlantic, it only had eight F-35s onboard (out of a capacity of 36), only two ‘Crowsnest’ radar helicopters and no store ship to accompany it, since our only one, Fort Victoria, was under maintenance.
It was simply in no fit state to deploy. It was decided that to free up funds for the relevant escort craft, the carriers would be modified to support amphibious landings; we promptly decommissioned existing ships such as HMS Ocean that already had this capability.
It then emerged that we do not have the requisite £60 million to modify the aircraft carriers. The proposal was dropped; and now our amphibious landing capabilities are diminished as well.
Then there is the Navy’s recruitment crisis. Last year, the MoD announced that between March 2022 and March 2023, intake for the Navy and Royal Marines dropped 22.1 per cent. Earlier this month, the Navy had to use LinkedIn to advertise for a Rear-Admiral after it was determined no serving officers were suitable.
It is true that in 2025, the Queen Elizabeth will be deployed to the Indo-Pacific as part of a broader pact covering economic, defence, security and technology collaboration with Japan.
It will include a naval escort and F-35 combat jets, but our own jets will be bolstered by a squadron of US F-35s.
The naval escort will be supplemented by vessels from other allied navies, but precise details of how many and from which countries are not yet clear.
WHAT is clear, however, is that we do not have enough resources of our own to enable Queen Elizabeth to function as a British-funded and operated vessel.
And this at a time when UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps recently observed that we are ‘moving from a post-war to a pre-war world’, while Army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders recently spoke of the need for a 500,000- strong citizen army in Britain.
In my view, it is time to subordinate national pride to pragmatism. Let’s sell these steel whales to the incomparably richer Americans who could at least fully resource their operation. Not least, because there is also the question of whether our aircraft carriers are actually suitable for modern warfare given the revolution that is taking place.
There is no doubt that they are wonders of British engineering. But I fear they are also an anachronism, and, in a world of growing violence, a dangerous one.
The reason aircraft carriers need so many support vessels is that slow-moving ships are intensely susceptible to attack — as the sinking of the cruiser Moskva showed.
China, for example, now has a vast arsenal of land, sea, and air ship-targeting cruise and ballistic weapons. Experts argue that U.S. carriers would not last in the face of an attack by them.
Indeed, in a war game in a remote part of China, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army ‘sunk’ a U.S. aircraft carrier using its Dong Feng DF-21D ‘Carrier Killer’ missile.
Beijing has long sought to neuter the effect of aircraft carriers. It unveiled the DF-21D missile — the first long-range precision missile developed specifically to target aircraft carriers — as far back as 2010.
In 2020 it followed this up with the longer-range DF-26B. According to Ashley Townshend, a research fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, these missiles ‘ potentially encroach on U.S. capability to deploy military power close to Chinese shores. It significantly raises the risks and costs.’
Iran and Russia have similar missiles. In July 2022, Russia’s media reported that the country had developed a ballistic missile with a hypersonic warhead known as Zmeevik that allegedly resembles the Chinese DF-26B.
In March 2023, Iran boasted of successfully developing a ballistic missile that is able to strike aircraft carriers from more than 900 miles away.
If our enemies are developing the high-level technology to take out an aircraft carrier there is a further problem. A decade of covering Ukraine taught me many things, but most of all that so many of the ideas of war I had grown up with were either out of date, imprecise or just wrong.
During the year-long battle of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine that began in the summer of 2022, one of the most vicious battles in modern history, I embedded with Ukrainian special forces using drones against the enemy. But these were not drones developed by the state at a cost of millions, they were $3,000 ones you could buy online.
The Ukrainians would then 3D-print a projectile for $30, place an explosive charge in it, attach it to the drone and use it to destroy Russian T90 tanks costing $1.6 million each.
The lesson was stark: the weaponisation of everyday objects could defeat military tech costing millions.
At sea, the Ukrainians have followed the same principles. That they have managed to
protect their port at Odesa and keep the Russian fleet at bay goes against much of traditional military logic — not least since Ukraine possesses pretty much no warships.
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, it also stole 75 per cent of Ukraine’s naval fleet, the majority of its helicopters and the majority of its ship-repair capacity.
This meant the Ukrainians have had to become creative, using, as well as anti-ship missiles like the one which hit the Moskva, explosive-laden uncrewed surface vessels (USV) — essentially speedboats which crash into large ships — plus remote and naval mines. USVs strike at the waterline, which means they can carry a larger payload than an airborne vehicle, and seriously damage critical parts of the ship.
They are also cheap and can be used in large numbers to overwhelm defences, leading some to liken them to sea drones. Some might argue that USVs work less well in open oceans. But most naval battles in history have been fought in relatively confined coastal waters.
More than this, if you look at the likely locations for future naval battles, notably the Taiwan Strait separating democratic Taiwan from Communist China, then USVs would do the job; there is simply little need for vast and vulnerable aircraft carriers.
At a conference in November 2023, Australia’s Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, said that ‘the future of sea power lies not only in crewed surface and subsurface vessels, but also in uncrewed and autonomous systems’.
The Ukrainians have spent almost a decade fighting a much larger, richer and more technologically advanced neighbour. Even with all these advantages, Vladimir Putin could not take Kyiv. And this is a historical pattern.
From the French and Americans in Vietnam, to the USSR in Afghanistan, to Israel in Lebanon, to coalition forces in Afghanistan ( again) and Iraq, technologyadvanced armies have been repeatedly defeated or repelled by those possessing nowhere near the same tech. Our enemies realise this. In January 2023 reports emerged that Iran had converted two merchant container ships into drone carriers.
For now, it seems that drones are not sophisticated enough to overcome protective vessels, ultrasonic sensors and kinetic interceptors, but this is likely to change, especially if drones are used in swarms of thousands.
I repeat, it is not that (if they can ever be deployed properly) the aircraft carriers have no value. It is that the cost does not justify the benefit. Every pound spent on them is one less spent elsewhere. And they are simply not suited for the wars we are going to fight in the future.
Indeed, the same goes for the F-35 fighter jet.
In his excellent book Goliath: Why The West Doesn’t Win Wars And What We Need To Do About It, Sean McFate, a former officer in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, points out that the F-35 fighter is an awesome piece of tech.
But what is the point of it when there has not been a sky battle that helped decide a conflict since the Korean War?
This is why we should sell the carriers to the Americans. Washington can, first, afford them, and, second, deploy them effectively.
Take the billions we receive from this sale and invest it elsewhere. There are so many better ways to spend the money.
What is effective are, for example, Special Forces, which is why they are overstretched everywhere they go. But instead of investing more in them we are seduced by enormous shiny toys. Impressive, no doubt, but simply not what we need most.
Our aircraft carriers are monoliths to our pathological belief that technology is the solution to all our problems.
History teaches us that it is not. We must internalise its lessons.
It is time to properly prepare for an increasingly dangerous future, because it is getting closer by the day.