It’s strategic incoherence, which is about the only thing we are really consistently good at these days. Rather than considering the carriers as items on their own, they should have been part of a fully integrated project that considered the carrier as the platform, the air assets as the delivery mechanism and the need for protection. If we have have considered these holistically, and I’m not convinced we have in any sense other than accidentally, I’ll be surprised. We certainly wouldn’t have had the cats & traps saga if we had, and we’re now tied into such an expensive platform that we can’t even man both carriers, will probably embark a small number of assets that numerically probably don’t need a carrier that size and we can’t protect it without stopping however many other task lines if it ever does get out of dock fully loaded.
But what I frankly find utterly baffling is the final statement that, in the context of BREXIT which is tying the country in knots to achieve full sovereign independence, we are spending billions on a capability that should in theory be a prime tool for exercising that sovereign independence, and yet we refuse to use it outside of the confines of an coalition - where it may actually even end up being under command of whomever is leading the coalition at the time.
You simply just just couldn’t make this stuff up. Can they even spell strategy in Whitehall let alone implement it effectively?