MPN11 asks if we will have enough air defence warships to defend the carriers.
It's a fair question and it's worth being clear about this because there are some hoary old memes that keep appearing in forum discussions and article comments. One is that we don't have enough escorts to escort the carriers, the other is along the lines of "shame the carriers won't have any aircraft har har"
On aircraft, HMG is committed to having around 40 F35B airframes on the books by the time of FOC at the end of 2023, to give the ability to field 24 in two front line squadrons. The ambition for IOC at the end of 2020 is rather lower - probably around 8-12 airframes at that point. So whatever your views on the merits of the aircraft itself, the repeated suggestion that there won't be any is cobblers.
As to escorts, the RN has 19. There are 6 air defence destroyers plus 13 frigates. That number is forcast to stay the same until "the 2030s" from which time HMG plans to increase the number, via additional T31s.
As a rule of thumb, for long term sustainability you can deploy around a third of your escorts on a continual basis, with the rest at different stages in the cycle. So that means around 2 Type 45s and around 4 - 5 frigates at any one time. In peacetime the escort group for a carrier might comprise a T45, a T23, and typically one vessel each contributed by the US and France to demonstrate collaborative working. Clearly that's manageable and we could add a hull or two to that if needed, subject to how many vessels we need to deploy elsewhere. But clearly there's not much left in the tank, and the RN could do with a few more escorts because we're in "minimum we can get away with" territory at present.
In a crisis you can "surge" to a higher deployed figure on a short term basis. The figure broadly doubles, so with a bit of luck and ideally a bit of notice we might be able to deploy 3-4 T45s and 8-9 frigates if say "doing a Falklands" or something comparable. Given that all the vessels are far better armed that they were back in the early 1980s, that would represent a pretty reasonable task force.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no apologist for HMG and I believe the RN needs more escorts in order to do what we expect of it. It's just that the hoary old memes really piss me off and I wanted to inject a bit of balance.