Carriers without jets are just white elephants

Fully equipped, they will be a powerful reminder that Britain is essential to Europe’s defence

Isuppose we should take it as a back-handed compliment that Russia’s response to the launch of the Navy’s first Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier has been to mount an intensive spying operation to discover its capabilities.

As the 65,000-ton HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the Navy’s two new aircraft carriers that are being built at a cost of around £6.2 billion, set sail for the North Sea to begin lengthy sea trials, Russian submarines and spy planes were scrambled to monitor the ship’s progress.

The Russians, moreover, are right to be concerned about this mighty addition to Britain’s war-fighting capabilities. Once the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy become fully operational with their fleet of F-35B stealth fighters, they will be more than a match for the Russian navy’s ageing flagship, the Admiral Kuznetsov. Russia’s Soviet-era carrier was last seen belching diesel fumes in the Channel as it limped home from Syria, having managed to lose two jets on bombing missions.

If the Russians have good reason to be concerned about how much of an impact the Navy’s new warships will have on their own operations, other European nations, particularly those with EU membership, would also do well to reflect on the broader message of Britain’s multi-billion pound investment in these naval behemoths.

For many Europeans, the postbrexit narrative is one where Britain, having turned its back on the EU, has lost interest in maintaining its status as a major world power.

The arrival of the new carriers, therefore, should help to banish these misconceptions. For, far from being a nation in retreat, the programme demonstrates that Britain still takes its global responsibilities seriously.

Indeed, by the time both carriers become fully operational early in the next decade, Britain will be the only European power with the ability to maintain a continuous at sea carrier presence, thereby enhancing its status as a top-tier military power.

Only France, Italy and Spain still operate carriers, and none of them bear comparison with the size and range of capabilities of the Queen Elizabeth-class ships.

The Charles de Gaulle, the French navy’s sole nuclear-powered carrier, regularly suffers engine problems that limit its operational scope, while the Italian navy’s Giuseppe Garibaldi and Spain’s Juan Carlos I are similar in design to the Royal Navy’s much smaller 22,000-ton Invincible-class carriers, which were decommissioned as part of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review.

It is very much in the interests of EU states, therefore, that they continue to have access to high-end British military capabilities such as the carriers, a fact the EU’S Brexit negotiating team would be welladvised to take on board as they consider the future relationship with Britain.

That said, the Government still has a lot of work to do to ensure the carriers constitute a credible threat, and are not reduced to the status of white elephants, which is how they are viewed in some military circles.

Critics of the carriers have argued they are too big and costly for the country’s needs, and that, in an age when warfare is conducted by increasingly sophisticated means, such as cyber attacks, they are something of an anachronism.

Yet you only have to look at the good use the US makes of its 10 carrier strike groups to understand their relevance to modern conflict. The shooting down of a Syrian warplane this month was carried out by an American fighter operating from the USS George HW Bush, while President Donald Trump’s decision to dispatch a carrier group to North Korea this year galvanised diplomatic efforts to resolve the stand-off with Pyongyang.

Britain, though, still has a long way to go before its new generation of carriers will have anything approaching this level of global clout, not least because they are being built when the Government is placing unprecedented pressure on the defence budget.

Stephen Lovegrove, the Mod’s permanent secretary, says the department needs to find savings of £20 billion during the next decade, which seems at odds with the pledge on these pages yesterday by Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon that the Government is committed to raising the defence budget this year and next.

Senior officers from all three services are already warning the cuts are having a negative impact on their ability to wage war, and it would be counter-productive in the extreme if the drive for savings efficiencies adversely affected the carrier programme.

The whole point of having the carriers is to make them a credible military force, one that will keep potential foes like the Russians at bay, as well as reassuring our allies in Europe.

But if the carriers are denied the kit they need – namely a proper complement of 36 F-35B stealth jets per carrier – then the Government will end up with nothing more than two floating white elephants.

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