In late July the Royal Navy popped the bubbly when the government announced a key approval for ordering two ‘Future Aircraft Carriers’ (CVF) – but the resulting hangover could be painful.

It now seems almost certain that these impressive and potentially immensely powerful warships will be built (much of the work going to politically very convenient locations), but their £1.9 billion average price tag can only be justified when they are fully delivering on the statement on the MOD’s website: “This vessel will be the UK's mobile air-base… Carrier Strike lies at the heart of the UK Armed Forces ability to project offensive air power in support of military operations.”

However, the new carriers are only one part of the 'Carrier Strike' capability.  Quoting the MOD again, “Carrier Strike is a joint (Royal Navy and Royal Air Force) capability, comprising the Joint Combat Aircraft, Future Carrier, Maritime Airborne Surveillance Capability and other fighting forces. [A] number of other project developments will maximise the Carrier Strike capability [including] future support ships”

An inspection of the current status of the non-CVF components of Carrier Strike quickly mutes any celebration, revealing all too mix of delay, uncertainty, arguments over costs and funding, and out right misinformation.  Progress must now be made on these other projects, or the reality is that the new carriers will be very expensive follies when they enter service.  The versatility of the new carriers is being heavily prompted, however there are often much cheaper ways of achieving the same capability than risking a 65,000 tonnes “capital ship.  For example it’s regularly pointed out that they will have considerable utility as a large landing platform helicopter (LPH), supplementing or replacing HMS Ocean, but a dedicated replacement could be built for under £300 million – indeed France has just built two similar ships, FNS Mistral and Tonnerre, for €685 million (about £450 million, or £225 million each).

Perhaps the most worrying problem is finding aircraft for the new carriers to operate. Currently the Royal Navy simply does not regular access to UK operated fast jet aircraft to operate from its designated high readiness strike carrier, HMS Illustrious.  Disastrously the Sea Harrier FA.2 is now long gone and the sole operational naval air squadron (800 NAS) re-equipped with the Harrier GR.7/9 is about to deploy [again] to Afghanistan, providing land-based close air support to NATO forces there. In order to maintain some level of experience in the operation of fixed wing aircraft, HMS Illustrious recently operated 14 American (US Marine Corps) AV-8B Harrier s for an exercise and will soon embark Spanish Navy Harrier’s for another.  Although the MOD has tried to put a positive spin on these deployments, the underlying desperation is impossible to hide.

Looking to the future, the RN’s plans to buy 60 Future Carrier Borne Aircraft (FCBA) dedicated to carrier operations have long been history, subsumed in to the RAF dominated Joint Combat Aircraft (JCA) programme - the RAF originally wanting 90 aircraft.  The MoDs latest equipment plan (EP07) slips the aircrafts entry in to service from 2014 to 2017 (it was originally 2012), meaning that the new carriers will be limited to carrying Harrier GR.9's for strike operations until at least 2018 and probably 2019.  Leaks from America indicate that just 80 carrier capable F-35B Joint Strike Fighters may now be bought by the UK for both land- and carrier-based JCA operations, perhaps equipping four front line squadrons with 9 aircraft each - two of these squadrons hopefully forming the Naval Strike Wing by the end of the next decade.  Although each CVF could embark and operate all 36 front-line F-35B’s, the suspicion from recent experience is that even 9 will be hard to find on a regular basis.

Moving on, the outlook for the Maritime Airborne Surveillance Capability (MASC) project is perhaps even more depressing, the aspiration in 2001 was to have the system in service by 2012; six years later the aspiration seems to be 2018!  The project was essentially robbed of its budget years ago, and has since consisted merely of a few very low cost studies initiated by the CVF Project Team. The current Sea King ASaC.7 platform will now be kept flying as long as practical – and soon their aircrew could be the grandsons/daughters of the aircrew flying the same helicopters in the 1970’s.  It seems all too likely that the RN will eventually have to make do with yet another cobbled together solution to meet its vital AEW&C requirements, the suspicion being that this will consist of reluctantly released and converted Merlin HM.1 ASW helicopters, fitted with Searchwater radars and Cerebus mission systems taken from the ancient Sea King's and refurbished.

The next major element of the Carrier Strike puzzle is the support ships. For years Military Afloat Reach and Sustainability (MARS) has been trumpeted as the solution, but it’s become clear that the c.£2.5 billion needed to complete the 11 ships planned for completion between 2011 and 2021 has not been allocated in the MOD’s latest equipment plan. Immediate thinking is now focused on a low cost partial solution of ordering 4 or 5 double hulled tankers from an overseas shipyard (in the Far East?) using a commercial design.  However these are likely to be too slow for efficient operation with a carrier battle group, and the RN thus also wants to have from 2016 (when HMS Queen Elizabeth becomes fully operational) at least one new fast fleet tanker to a design optimised to support CVF. It remains to be seen if this tanker will ever be more than a wish.

Finally building the CVF’s, and later Future Submarine, is going to require about £1 billion a year for the whole of the next decade – this represents a huge chunk (at least half it would seem) of the Royal Navy’s current share of the MOD's equipment budget.  As the chance of additional funding for the Defence Equipment & Logistics (DE&S) “Sea” cluster at the expense of “Joint”, “Land” or “Air” clusters seems disappearing small, even without cost -runs these two programmes are inevitably going to badly squeeze almost every other major programme.  For example, the Future Surface Combatant (FSC) project is once again showing interesting signs of life, but several times before the project has reached the point of requiring the commitment of significant funding and been knocked back several years.  If FSC is to replace the Type 22 Batch 3 frigate's then funding will again be need to be ramped up soon, alternatively the T22B3's could be declared no longer needed and FSC can again be delayed by a few years.

The Royal Navy has reluctantly made many sacrifices since 1998 to obtain its two new aircraft carriers, and seems likely to have to make more before in HMS Queen Elizabeth (2014) and HMS Prince of Wales (2016) are finally in service.  It can only be hoped the continuing draining of financial life blood from rest of the service will indeed prove to be justified in ten years time.
 
 

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