Navy’s big guns are impressive, but are they worth the money?
Aircraft carriers have been around since the First World War. If the usual laws of military Darwinism applied, they would be extinct by now, gone the way of the battleship which was eventually just too costly, resource-hungry and vulnerable to survive. But no. The carrier is flourishing. Fourteen navies operate them. The US has 11. They have become as much a national phallic symbol as Dreadnoughts were at the start of the last century – and they attract the same sort of controversy.
Britain’s membership of the carrier club is secured by HMS Queen Elizabeth, which completed her maiden operational voyage just before Christmas, returning to Portsmouth after 28 weeks and 26,000 miles at sea. Hot on her heels comes the second in the class, the Prince of Wales. Together, they earn us the respect of the Americans and put us up there with China and ahead of Russia, France and India. It’s about much more than military muscle. Boris Johnson, who inherited the building project from the Blair-Brown era, trumpets the new supercarriers as the embodiment of national prestige, flying the flag for Global Britain.
The ships are certainly impressive. Big Lizzie, as she is apparently nicknamed, is the largest and most powerful ship the Navy has ever built. She weighs 65,000 tonnes, is 280 metres long, and can carry up to 40 aircraft – notably the horrendously expensive American F-35 Lightning stealth fighter. The flight deck is the size of three and a half football fields. Her six engines generate enough energy to power a city the size of Swindon. And so on…
It adds up to an amazing feat of engineering, and it’s this aspect of the story and the human dynamics that go into making the whole enterprise work that fascinate film-maker Chris Terrill. He knows it inside out, having followed events since the first cut of steel in 2009 to last year’s deployment in the Far East, filming material for his BBC documentary Britain’s Biggest Warship. He’s an anthropologist and enthusiast who underwent the punishing training to qualify for the green beret of the Royal Marines at an impressively advanced age (he is 69).
His book is thus a detailed account of the challenges, trials and triumphs on the ship’s progression from dry dock to seagoing leviathan, and a portrait of the men and women who made it happen. He writes with affection, humour and understanding and you come away reassured that the Navy ethos is alive and healthy – despite having had to shape-shift nimbly, to adjust to changing times. One of Terrill’s characters is a genial veteran who featured in a 1996 TV documentary on the Navy, in which he held forth on his misgivings about the “fairer sex” serving at sea. Now women are everywhere on the Queen Elizabeth, and he confesses that he could not conceive of going to war without them.
Terrill is less concerned with the question that has dogged the supercarrier project since its inception. What are these ships actually for, and can they ever deliver enough value to justify the vast amounts of money that have gone into them, at a time when military budgets are so thinly stretched?
That piling of so many eggs into so few baskets has seriously alarmed Britain’s senior soldiers. General Nick Houghton, Chief of the Defence Staff from 2013 to 2016, declared: “We cannot afford these things. We will be able to afford them only with detriment to the balance of the surface fleet.” Each supercarrier needs a host of consorts to protect and sustain her, thereby draining capacity and manpower from the rest of the Navy.
For all their sophistication and power, they are also extremely vulnerable. Submarines, missiles and drones mount an ever-increasing threat that steadily reduces the carriers’ operational capabilities. According to a study by one Washington think-tank, in future wars American carriers would have to remain over 1,000 nautical miles away from the coastlines of a “capable adversary” like China to stay reasonably safe.
Terrill remains convinced that the supercarrier will become “our principle conventional strategic deterrent”. Let’s hope he is right. But the same was said of the battleship, which eventually fell prey to the mine, the torpedo and the bomb. Perhaps, in retrospect, the choice of name of the pride of the modern Navy was a little unwise. She is named not after the Queen but as the successor to an earlier HMS Queen Elizabeth, a 1913 Dreadnought, which, after a vastly costly career, was scrapped in 1948 – having never sunk an enemy ship.