WEBF,
I note you didn’t really engage with the important point that the timeline has favoured the attacker for some time. It’s very well for your analyst to say that it’s better to engage the launch aircraft - that’s obvious - the question is how without needing an unsustainable number of aircraft airborne on screening CAPs. Which navies have sustained a high-speed interceptor capability in the F14 mould?
So carriers are too vulnerable as there is too high an air/missile/submarine threat, but are not need to counter theses threats as other assets will? Is it me?
I think you’re misunderstanding my post, the point of which is to show that *in the scenarios which are of sufficient importance to justify potential UK investment in carriers*, air defence can be provided adequately by other assets which have fewer acute vulnerabilities or greater redundancy or shorter recuperation times. Saying that we couldn’t rely on allies in a NATO Art V scenario just isn’t going to wash.
1. Perhaps the US Navy and the PLAN are bad examples. What about France, Spain, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore.....?
I don’t disagree that carriers are an effective statement of military strength, and most or all of those nations also have the same industrial imperatives as the UK. It doesn’t mean it’s the best use of their money, though, especially in the Europeans’ case (France can’t even meet its airlift requirement for national operations, which they rely on allies to fulfil through arrangements much less binding than Art V). And please don’t try to tell me that sluggish AV-8Bs provide an effective response time to incoming attackers!
3. The evidence suggests that without the carriers, that idiot Cameron would have demanded that another five frigates be cut. If same that idiot had not been a cowardly weasel and allowed the RN an uplift of 1500 or so bods as part of SDSR 1500, we would not be having many manpower issues. The argument that they have called the cutting of other ships, or personnel, does not hold water.
You won’t find disagreement here that the really big decisions are taken in No10 with the thinnest veneer of knowledge, more care for industrial politics than military capability, and maybe a few words of partial advice from a favoured Service chief acting outwith the MOD. That’s why I drew attention to the views of the PM’s senior adviser way back in the post which started our exchange.
Would losing an LPD full of marines, or a couple of STUFT/charted vessels full of troops and there equipment be any less shocking to the UK or NATO?
Yes, and more easily replaced than dozens of F-35 with crews and engineers. Indeed both of your examples happened to us in 1982. Sorry to be blunt but we are talking about a major war.
Times are changing, and Western nations must once again look to protect their ability to protect both normal seaborne commerce and crisis response shipping. NATO still depends on trans-Atlantic resupply, the global economy depends of moving things by sea, and any response to a crisis will involve shipping.
An interesting sign of the times is the US-China trade war. Trump has clearly identified asymmetric trading conditions as a threat to US national security in the widest possible (jobs/societal) sense and other western nations will have to face up to similar ideas in future as automation and AI increasingly undermine existing models of work and welfare. I think we will one day flip an old tenet of maritime security on its head and say to exporters “you want us to buy container-loads of your cheaply-manufactured products? YOU take responsibility for getting them safely to us then, and increase your prices accordingly”. That’s called alignment of incentives. Why should the West invest heavily to protect the ability of exporters to undercut its domestic industries? Building the costs of ‘delivery’ into retail prices (rather than hiding them in the Defence budget) would go a long way to levelling the playing field.
Incentives are admittedly slightly different with natural resources, but consumer nations acting globally to protect their economic interests risk conflict and avoid development of alternatives. The most obvious example is external military support to the GCC states, which has acted as a perverse incentive for tensions with Iran and dependence on Gulf oil to continue. A different strategy would encourage the GCC either to reduce tensions with Iran, to massively increase pipeline capacity bypassing Hormuz, or to invest more in its own navies. Yes, the price of oil would increase in the latter cases, which would be precisely what's needed to exploit other sources of energy (whether shale oil or non-fossil alternatives). More generally, we'd have to face up to the true geopolitical implications of dependence on resources such as Chinese rare earths. You want capable modern electronics, dear voters of the West? Then either learn to live with China's superpower status and its differing views on the world, or find ingenious (expensive) ways to make electronics with other materials, or be prepared to pay (and fight if necessary) to preserve the status quo. And I can't see the 'woke' modern West running an effective repeat of the colonial era with rare earth metals taking the place of tea, spices, silk and precious stones.