Future Carrier (Including Costs)

[WE Branch Fanatic]

Originally Posted by Asturias56

WEBF - did you mention the F-35 loss in this long running thread? Surely it should be there for completeness of all thing RN?

No - but others did. I seem to recall a dedicated thread. Are you saying the commitment of a carrier to NATO as Flagship is not noteworthy?

The ship is due to sail tomorrow, raising the curtain of a demanding year in the waters of the Atlantic, northern Europe and Mediterranean.

“This year, as the NATO Command Ship, we will spend over 200 days at sea operating globally with our allies. We are ready to lead UK carrier operations for NATO over the next 12 months,” said Captain Steve Higham, Prince of Wales’ Commanding Officer.

Originally Posted by KiloB

Well he did mention a Report headed “Ready for Takeoff”!!!

The article from RUSI drew attention the importance of the carrier(s) to NATO.

The return to United Kingdom carrier operations therefore presents opportunities for the RN and RAF to 'take some of the slack' from their U.S. counterparts, either by deploying the CSG within Europe or by taking up station elsewhere—for example, in waters off the Middle East—to help free up a U.S. task group for operations in other parts of the world.

It also comes as Russia continues to develop and deploy capabilities intended to deny NATO access to waters and airspace off Norway in the event of a conflict (so-called 'anti-access, area denial'), securing Russia's northern bastion and approaches and making any Allied reinforcement of Norway a more complicated and risky undertaking. Russia's naval and air forces similarly hope to contest NATO's access and control as far as the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, directly threatening the SLOCs of the North Atlantic that lie beyond. These waters are vital to NATO's broader strategy and resilience, enabling the safe and timely movement of troops and materiel from North America to reinforce the European theatre in the event of a crisis or full-blown conflict.

On the same note, the recording of the talk by the late Professor Eric Grove both underlined and explained why carriers and their aircraft were key to NATOs operational concepts in the 1980s, and that they still are critically important to NATO, including for both air defence and ASW,

talk by the late Professor Eric Grove

You might also like a look at this paper on 1980s US Naval strategy.