Absence of aircraft carriers for Houthi mission is a sea-change
Some time into his tenure as the defence secretary, Ben Wallace asked the Navy to think the unthinkable. Could they scrap one of Britain’s precious aircraft carriers?
To understand what a shocking suggestion this was, we must go back to the late 1990s when HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales were conceived. It took three Labour governments; one coalition; two Tory governments; umpteen political aboutturns; and a multiple of the original £2.3billion budget to transform the vessels from a job-creation scheme for bored shipbuilders on the Clyde to anything remotely seaworthy. The 25-year saga almost bankrupted the Navy and drove successive defence secretaries to despair. Now, amid the most serious challenge to freedom of navigation since the two ships were delivered, they are nowhere to be seen – raising serious questions about their utility in an age of modern warfare.
On the face of it, the crisis in the Red Sea is the perfect opportunity for the Navy to show that all the pain and woe for the ships they call “our nation’s spearhead” was worth it. After all, the United States has sent one of its carriers to the region. Various fighter jets including the F/A-18 Super Hornet and E2 Hawkeye command and control aircraft have been zooming off USS Dwight D Eisenhower to teach Houthi militants a lesson. As Britain joins US air strikes against dozens of positions in Yemen, surely one of our great carriers is on its way to the action?
Sadly not. Both ships are currently keeping watch in that notorious trouble spot known as... Portsmouth Harbour. A few days ago, Tobias Ellwood, the Tory MP and former defence minister, asked the Defence Secretary whether he plans to task an aircraft carrier to the Middle East. The answer was no time soon, though according to the Ministry of Defence, our Carrier Strike Group (the collective term for the carriers and their support vessels) is ready to sally forth, should the call come.
To describe that as misleading is generous. For while it is true that the Navy could just about cobble together something resembling a Carrier Strike
Group, despatching it anywhere remotely risky would be criminally foolhardy – and leave Britain dangerously exposed. The painful truth is that since the ships were first commissioned, the march of technology has threatened to render them both obsolete.
We do not have enough smaller warships or submarines or indeed weaponry to protect them, optimally in the way the US carrier is kept safe, unless we are willing to abandon the protection of our own coast and our nuclear deterrent.
In 1998, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown approved the project, carriers were still the undisputed empresses of the sea. They had played a key role in the Falklands and would be critical to operations in Afghanistan. No piece of military hardware was more emblematic of hard power. Few countries can afford them, making them international status symbols. In the time it took to make them, the UAE built an entire booming metropolis: Dubai. No sooner were they ready, than they developed mechanical faults.
Meanwhile our enemies have been busy developing “carrier killers”. As a result, what the Navy optimistically calls “our national spearhead” is now vulnerable to a new generation of weapons such as China’s Dongfeng21d, a ballistic missile said to be able to close in on its target at 10 times the speed of sound. They are extremely difficult to intercept, and Beijing can make about 1,200 for the price of an aircraft carrier. Iran has similar stuff – so our carriers need to be kept hundreds of kilometres away from conflict zones. Unfortunately they are equipped with a take-off and landing system that limits aircraft range – rendering them somewhat useless in a situation such as we now have in the Red Sea. It is hard to avoid a sinking feeling that these two glorious vessels will never be much more than a ruinously expensive display piece.
No wonder Wallace, head in hands, commissioned a study into the viability of “mothballing” one of the pair. What he actually meant was getting rid of it altogether. Ashen-faced admirals then pretended they would be more expensive to scuttle than keep. Presumably Wallace couldn’t face an almighty fight – or the national humiliation of scrapping a flagship.
The unprecedented threat to freedom of navigation all over the world shows that the Navy is more relevant to our national security and prosperity than ever.
Sadly, the absence of any realistic role for our two flagships in today’s conflict suggests that our carriers are not. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but Wallace was probably right.
‘What the Navy calls “our national spearhead” is now vulnerable to a new generation of weapons’