 This is the first of two posts about defence spending, specifically whether Britain can afford to spend £4bn on two new Aircraft Carriers and £25bn on the Trident replacement programme.
So why does Britain need Aircraft carriers.
First let's review what is planned, two 65,000 Aircraft Carriers, able to carry up to 40 aircraft and planned to be in service for 30-40 years. They are a replacement for the 3 (normally 2 in commission at any one time) small Aircraft Carriers that can carry up to 20 aircraft. The cost is £4bn, and they are planned to enter service in 2016 and 2018 respectively.
So why should we go ahead with this, why should we not use the money to pay off debt instead?
There is the cost issue; we would be talking of saving £3-4gn over say 5-10 years, maybe about £3-400m a year. We are borrowing £175bn this year alone so saving a few hundred million is not going to make a significant difference. When you deduct from any potential savings the job losses across the country it would be even less so you cannot argue there would be dramatic savings.
If you did cancel them then what do you do? We will still need some form of Aircraft Carriers, unless we decide not to have a seaborne airpower all together. A lesson from history may remind us why we need this capability. In 1966 the Labour Government cancelled the last replacement conventional carriers. The Royal Navy was able to keep a small scale seaborne air capability through the Invincible class carriers. They have proved to be very effective ships and have served our country well but they have their limits. I’ll let this quote from a new book ‘Phoenix Squadron’ by Rowland White explain:
“It would have been nice to have had a few more Harriers but I’d have preferred it if we had the Ark Royal (*), but then again, if we’d had the old Ark Royal and all her aircraft I don’t think the Argentines would have invaded in the first place”
This was Corporal Stuart Russell, 2 PARA, speaking after the Falklands War. This was a war fought with minimal air cover and some cases a ‘damn close run thing’. Large Carriers would have allowed a different campaign to be fought and perhaps saved the loss of a number of other ships.
(* Ark Royal was Britain’s last fixed wing conventional carrier armed with Buccaneer and Phantom jets. ‘Phoenix Squadron’ is about an operation in 1972 when Ark Royal was despatched to deter an invasion of Belize (then a British colony). The threat of massive concentrated airpower did just that.)
Size does matter; if you are going to be in the business of seaborne power projection then big carriers are better. Bigger carriers mean bigger air groups and are more easily adaptable for future aircraft.
However most importantly what would it mean for our defence capabilities in the future if the carriers were cancelled?
Carriers are very flexible platforms; you can use them for a variety of scenarios.
For example: shows of strength to resist invasion (Belize 1972), helping to liberate territory that has been invaded (Falklands 1982), enforcing no fly zones in accordance with UN mandates (Beria Patrol in the 1960’s, no fly zones enforced over the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s), launching air campaigns to fight terrorist groups (Afghanistan – present), traditional war fighting campaigns (Gulf War 1 and 2) and of course they can be used to transport equipment for disaster relief or emergency evacuations (the US used them to evacuate people from Vietnam). Only Aircraft Carriers can fulfil all of these roles, no other ship or submarine can do all of this.
The problem with Carriers is it takes a long time to design and build them, we can’t just decide we don’t want them now and then pop along to Tesco in a few years and buy them when we can afford them. So a cut now would be short-sighted and may rob a future Government of an asset it needs.
Of course I recognise that all defence spending has to be paid for by the taxpayer, but to allow the years of Labour misrule and their debt burden to mean that we cannot provide the Navy with carriers it needs would be a mistake.
I do not believe our future is to stop our global role and to reduce our defence forces to mere coastal and homeland forces. We are a global nation, with interests which span the globe and potential enemies that span the globe also. We need to maintain the capability to meet these challenges and that means the Royal Navy need the Carriers.
If savings are needed from the defence budget then they must come from elsewhere. | 
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