WEBF,
You are right. No one with a hint of sense has ever disputed the concept of organic air defence. We all agree with you. I am not suggesting that organic air defence is not required, we will have it again in the not too distant future.
Your point, made over and over again, is just as valid as it was when you first made it. Retirement of the Sea Harrier before a replacement capability was in place is a risk. Again, we all violently agree with you but there are ways to mitigate the capability gap. Not ideal but that's the way it is.
Your unwavering belief that the lack of organic labour and manpower intensive CAP, whether on alert or airborne, is somehow the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to survivability is passionate but staggeringly narrow minded.
Do some simple maths. Work out how many sorties would need to be flown to maintain 24 hour CAP IVO of a 6 ship task group. I'll do it for you. You'd need a minimum of 4 jets airborne at any one time, (to cope with the apocalyptic ASMs you seem to always find in the depths of Jane's Defence Weekly.) Do you allow the organic aircraft to use land based AAR or is that just too joint? I hope you do because if not, we need 64 sorties per day to man a 4 ship CAP. If you (dare) to allow the light blue to help out, drop that to 24 sorties per day. What do you think, a 180 day deployment? 11520 sorties with no port visits and no AAR. 7680 sorties if you assume 60 days off task. 2880 with AAR. Not a very strong arguement is it?
The self licking lollipop is alive and well with more than half of projected CVF sortie generation purely for defence of the TF in the pure organic case. (All figures above generated from open source info.) How about we focus defensive investment in a 24 hour per day, 365 day per year long range SAM capability allied to the already in service systems? Maybe we could then allow the expensive and capable multi mission JCA to break away from a 50nm radius of the TF and actually contribute to the joint fight. That would be a novelty.
Is it your intention to string this crusade out until the first JCA squadron is operational?