Or alternatively, the Royal Navy's blinkered and selfish insistence on proceeding with the carriers and a sub-launched Trident replacement have (as was always predicted) distorted the defence budget and diverted funding away from more useful and core capabilities.
No-one would diminish the contribution made by JFH in current operations, but that's the aircraft, the pilots (RN and RAF) and the groundcrew. In land-locked Afghanistan, the utility of the carrier is, shall we say, rather less clear.
As has been pointed out again and again, you have to go back to 1982 to find an occasion when carriers were essential rather than merely nice to have.
And yet capabilities that we need every time that we go on operations have been slashed or eliminated to pay for the vainglorious pet projects of the Sea Lords.
And now we're trimming back the core role of defending the UK to help pay for these white elephants.
The F3 force does a useful job, and does it cheaply and cost-effectively, which differentiates it from carriers. Cutting the F3 early will save 'piddling' amounts of money.
In an ideal world, with sufficient SH and a 24 squadron FJ force, I'd be leading the campaign for carriers as being a useful niche capability. That's not the world we're in, and tough choices need to be made.