Webf,
Not hostile, just cynical. Besides which, I think you're living in the 1950s, before the withdrawal from Suez, and before the disappearance of a global threat. In Devon Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake may still seem like relevant role models, but the world they inhabited is not one I recognise today.
The sun has set on the glorious British Empire, old chap, and no-one is threatening these sea lanes upon which we supposedly depend so much more heavily than our neighbours and partners. (Nor, in my opinion, is today's RN remotely capable of keeping them safe on its own, it's simply too small). We could never afford the kind of Navy required for the role you outline, nor is that role the one outlined in SDR, 'Options or any other recent DWP. You must accept that the RN is incapable of autonomously performing the kind of global strategic role you outline and will always rely on co-operation with allied Navies. Why not rely on our Allies for Fleet Air Defence too, even if only for the brief time window before the arrival of JSF?
Moreover, there is no real global threat to the sea lanes, which is why the World's navies have shifted to an increasing emphasis on Littoral operations. The US Navy clearly believes that it no longer needs an AD aircraft with the range of the F-14, and is instead packing the decks of its carriers with more versatile and more useful F/A-18s.
Even if there was a threat, it's probably the case that land-based air power represents a more efficient and cost effective solution, with a land-based Nimrod able to cover massive areas of ocean in the ASW role, and with sea-skimming air-launched missiles (according to you) representing the worst case threat to surface warships.
And just for interests sake, our democratically elected government (not just this one but the last one too) have quite deliberately moved away from the belief that we need to be able to act autonomously. If we did need to do so, the first thing we should spend money on is decent SEAD so that all operations can be protected, not on a handful of SHars so that we can send a single carrier to sea with its own air defence, but with inadequate capacity to do anything else worthwhile.
This Government's policy (which I think is mistaken in this regard) does at least give the RN's carriers and JFH a role in expeditionary warfare, despite their lack of cost-effectiveness. You should perhaps welcome its commitment to the GR7/9 and the Harrier's shipborne role, and you should be overjoyed that they are even contemplating CVF and FCBA.
We're again guilty of delusions of grandeur and of emptily trying to punch above our weight, and cannot afford to maintain these relics of the Cold War and Corporate when there are other, more pressing priorities for the Defence budget. Yours is exactly the kind of attitude that has seen the RN consume a disproportionate amount of our limited defence budget for decades, and is as inappropriate and old fashioned as the 'Cavalry enthusiasts' who still think that we should maintain massed formations of heavy armour.
Last edited by Jackonicko; 24th May 2002 at 00:36.