Prop0osed ships by the labour,s strategic defence review and the reality
there were the projects of the labour government and the rality,YES the amphibious capability have been improved and 2 real carriers will be built but the rest is not very good.
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The focus of this site is on the future of the Royal Navy and in particular its equipment projects. Please note that all opinions expressed and speculations made are entirely my own, they are in no way supported by the Royal Navy. Nor does this unofficial site have any connection with, or endorsement by, the Royal Navy.
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Grey Elephants?
23 May 2008
I have been following the progress of the Future Aircraft Carrier project (CVF) this and my previous websites ever since the much lauded Strategic Defence Review stated way back in July 1998:
"... we plan to replace our three small carriers with two larger carriers from around 2012. Work will now begin to refine our requirement but present thinking suggests that these might be of the order of 30,000-40,000 tonnes and capable of deploying up to 50 aircraft, including helicopters".
Overall it has proved to be a pretty depressing task - and frustratingly drawnnnnn out. Rumours of cancellation have constantly haunted the project. With affordability a key issue, huge efforts have been made since 2003 to to reduce costs, realistically this has resulted in just preventing any further cost growth rather than any cost reduction - although this is actually a significant achievement when compared to other major defence projects. The CVF manufacture phase is now expected to cost about £4.1 billion, this excludes the £600 million spent during the the previous Assessment and Demonstration Phases - in real terms the Royal Navy's two new aircraft carriers will cost double the "about £2 billion" being suggested in 1998 when the mantra was "steel is cheap and air is free".
The difficulty in getting hard news has often been teeth-grinding to say the least. At first the competing BAE Systems and Thales PR teams were fairly co-operative, but they shut up shop in January 2003 when the Thales/BMT design concept was selected for further development. Since then all questions have been referred to the MOD - who's vow of silence would honour a monastery. In recent years French sources such as the website Mer et Marine have often been better informed about the status of CVF than any UK based journalist or defence analyst.
On 20 May 2008 the Ministry of Defence fed us the latest occasional drip of CVF news:
"The Ministry of Defence today gave industry the green light that it was ready to go-ahead with contract signature for the two new super aircraft carriers. ...we are moving closer [emphasis added] to signing the contracts for the manufacture of the carriers."
There seems to be good grounds for believing that the main contracts for the manufacture of the now 65,000 tonnes carriers - to be called HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales - will finally be signed soon, perhaps as early as 18 June - by which date the time elapsed since SDR will be almost exactly that required for the defeat of Germany in two World Wars.
The actual contract signature will be justification for a "splice the main brace" spirit in RN establishments, but the celebration should be muted for the services senior officers. There is little doubt that over the last few years the consensus opinion within the MOD's portals has become negative towards CVF, with a belief that the money could be better spent elsewhere - although the Army and RAF have rather differing views on exactly where! The survival of the CVF project in recent years has not been due not to the fervent arguments of four successive First Sea Lords since 1998 - and their enforced offering of sacrifices elsewhere - but rather due to the intervention of the Prime Minister Gordon Brown whose constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath neighbours the Rosyth dockyard where the carriers will be completed, thus maintaining some 2000 jobs for five years.
As I've pointed out many times in the recent past, the construction of the CVF's without adequate provision for their air group's is a rather ludicrous situation - building aircraft carriers without embarked aircraft is rather like building hospitals with no doctors.
A picture of the 27,000 tonnes HMS Hermes in the late 1960's
A graphic of the 65,000 tonnes HMS Queen Elizabeth set some time after 2017. At the moment it seems that her flight deck will rarely be so crowded
Originally CVF, Future Carrier Borne Aircraft (FCBA) and Future Organic Airborne Early Warning Aircraft (FOAEW) were lock-stepped towards a simultaneous 2012 in service date - but that sensible approach has been long been dropped. Old hands watching the current ITV2 series Warship featuring HMS Illustrious will have struggled to reconcile the frequent references to her "strike carrier" role with a flight deck and hanger empty of all but a few Merlin helicopters. She does actually briefly embark four Harrier GR.7's of the Naval Strike Wing, but that's hardly a daunting force to most possible enemies of the UK. When HMS Queen Elizabeth enters service in 2014 (or more realistically 2015 or 2016), it can only be hoped that the similar number and type of aircraft likely to be initially dispersed over her vastly larger bulk doesn't quickly result in many 'white elephant' (grey elephant?) media stories, particularly when compared to her ambitious mission statements such as to be "a coercive presence that can promote conflict prevention through deterrence".
Maybe the RAF (including the Naval Strike Wing) will indeed eventually own enough operational F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to fill a CVF to its capacity (36 JSF's plus 4 helicopters), but if that actually happens only once every ten years the bean counters will have an obvious target when more economies are being demanded now. If and when the two new carriers are completed - will they have then served their political purpose and be candidates for early retirement, like so many other Royal Navy warships in recent decades?
The emphasis on the new aircraft carriers has also led to a worrying neglect by the Royal Navy - at least in public - of its need for other capabilities. In recent years independent groups (e.g. the UK National Defence Association) and union led efforts (e.g. Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign - KOFAC) seem to have been more vocal and possibly more successful than the Royal Navy in justifying why the UK has to retain strong and broadly based maritime military capabilities.
Depressingly the combination of urgent operational demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, a hopelessly inadequate defence budget and the preservation of CVF seems to have made the Royal Navy proportionally the biggest loser in Planning Round 08. The latest equipment cuts include one Astute-class nuclear attack submarine and two Type 45 destroyers. To anyone used to the much larger Royal Navy of yore that doesn't sound too bad - but the axed Astute represents a 14% cut in the non-deterrent submarine force and the Type 45's a 25% reduction in the destroyer force. The dropped Astute also means a binning of the promise made in the 2006 Defence Industrial Strategy to maintain a 22-month 'drum beat' of submarine construction.
It's perhaps worth comparing the new fleet being promised to the Royal Navy by the Labour government in 1998/9 with the actual current situation:
Project Situation 1999 Situation 2008
Num. planned In service date Num. planned In service date
Ships
CVF 2 2012-2014 2 2014-2016
CNGF / Type 45 12 2007-2015 6 2010-2014
FE / FSC 20 2012-? ? 2019-?
Astute / FASM 10 2005-? 6 2009-?
PCRS / JCTS 2 2005 0 N/A
Aircraft / helicopters
FCBA / JCA 60 (RN owned) 2012 ? (RAF owned) 2017
FOAEW / MASC 12 (for planning) 2012 ? 2022
FASH / FRC (lift) 70 2010 ? ?
The Royal Navy had 35 escorts in service (aka commissioned frigates and destroyers) in 1998 and SDR promised a long term strength of 32. The Royal Navy currently has an actual strength of 24 and by 2018 it will have at best 19 escorts in service - 6 new Type 45 destroyers and 13 aging Type 23 frigates. By comparison, the RN averaged nearly 70 destroyers and frigates in service during the 1970's - many of these were smaller than their modern counterparts, but three small ships can be in two more places than one large ship.
A sheer lack of numbers now cripples the Royal Navy's. Four years ago (with 31 escorts left) the Royal Navy still made a valiant effort to patrol the worlds oceans with destroyers and frigates assigned to seven geographically widely dispersed "directed tasks". Those days have now gone. Indeed, in recent months it has become clear that Royal Navy is no longer able or even expected (that would justify the RN asking for additional funding) to perform once fundamental activities such as the protection of UK flagged merchant ships from piracy. In the future the top priority when allocating very scare operational escorts will inevitably be escorting the ready carrier and the amphibious task group, other deployments will have to be rationed to requirements deemed in extremis worthy of a short term surge effort.
