Originally Posted by
Asturias56
"
It will assess the impact of ongoing financial pressures and determine its defence priorities, including whether it can fund all the original roles of Carrier Strike" which suggest even the basic missions are at risk 
It’s worse than that. All it takes is for the high-end warfighting missions to be formally stripped away for affordability reasons (which seems quite possible given the expense associated with comprehensive defence of flagship assets against ballistic missiles and submarines) and suddenly Carrier Strike is much more vulnerable to portrayal as a legacy of Blair-era interventionism. Which is *desperately* out of fashion politically: shaping most of the RN’s and a good deal of the RAF’s fighting power around a ‘Sierra Leone‘, ‘Yemen’ or ‘Somalia‘ type scenario just won’t cut it. I think hanging onto the high-end roles (or giving the impression they’re being hung onto) is crucial to the whole edifice.
Fudge, anyone?