Future Carrier (Including Costs)

[WE Branch Fanatic]

You were not the only person to get hung up over the word 'Europe'. Euro Atlantic would be better - that is the North Atlantic, North Sea and Norwegian Sea and into the High North, and also the Mediterranean.

With regards to ASW and the role of carriers in countering the submarine threat, Professor Grove talked about this in his RUSI talk. At 50:15 he suggests that the thing hostile submarine captains dread most of all is the dipping sonar - and that an airborne radar flooding an area will keep the hostile submarines down. He then describes witnessing an ASW exercise in which a number of NATO submarines transmitted Soviet levels of noise, and every one was covered by either an ASW helicopter or an MPA.

Since then the frigate sonars have got more advanced with a much greater range, and the helicopters have greater range and endurance, and more sophisticated sonar and radar themselves. If the technology improves, then it follows tactics also change. Much of the public information about ASW is more than a few years out of date, and some of us have fallen into the trap of thinking that as we had x cabs in the 1980s we still need that number. I have tried to acknowledge that I have fallen into that trap - when the CO 0f 820 NAS said he could protect the Carrier Strike Group on a 24/7 basis with less cabs than in the CVS/Sea King heyday, that was good enough for me - and enough information for me. According to this news report, the ASW did work and kept tabs on Chinese boats, as well as Russian ones in the Mediterranean.

The story about the Russians in the Mediterranean also mentions the F-35B Lightnings from HMS Queen Elizabeth doing intercepts of Russian jets.

One of the things that worries me is the way some people think carriers are only about attacking land targets, which was certainly not the case during during the Second World War or the Cold War, or the Falklands, and never has been as far as NATO is concerned. I even started an ARRSE thread all about this with links to now declassified documents about the air defence and ASW roles that the carrier was expected to play in the NATO environment - Late 1970s US Congress Report - The US Sea Control Mission (carriers needed in the Atlantic for Air Defence and ASW - both then and today).

Anyone would think that the Naval leadership knows better than the tabloid critics or those that uncritically accept the propaganda from Moscow and Beijing.