Oral evidence - Modernising Defence Programme - 1 May 2018
Interesting - not sure if it has been posted or not eg
Mrs Moon: You could say that the aircraft carriers were a valid decision to project force, given the level of capability we had at the time, to use that projection effectively. The problem is that we now have the capacity to project force, but not a lot to back it up or even to protect it.It worries the Committee that we will have these two nice, new, shiny aircraft carriers with nothing to put on them and not a little gap in our capability to protect them. There seems to be a lack of financial, political and, quite honestly, strategic recognition of that gap, especially when we are told that the money that is there, if you play around with it a little more, will fill the gap. It will not. We are going to have to spend more to fill the gap.
Sir Mark Sedwill: With respect, I am sitting here rather relieved I am not the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence.
Chair: Why?
Sir Mark Sedwill: Because I know—some of this is probably more for Defence themselves. On the carriers, if I may just answer that point, we will be one of only about, I think, six countries in the world that have this kind of strategic projection capability, when the carriers are fully operational. But it is our intention, because of that, to use them with allies. It’s really important that we keep allies in play in our thinking here, so I would expect, particularly if they are in a contested deployment, that there would be allied capabilities—ships, aircraft, whatever—as part of those groups. We will see what happens in the circumstances, but that is part of the thinking about the use of the carriers.
It’s projecting them as a British sovereign capability, but one that will almost inevitably—I would actually say “inevitably”—be used in the context of allied operations of some kind, if used in a contested environment.