WEBF,
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I doubt that there are many posters here who don't fundamentally agree with you. Yes, it would have been more sensible for GR9 / GR9A to run on with ARKR and LUST to seamlessly transition to the QE Class with Dave-C and cats'n'traps.
And to make sure we had two full airwings with 120 RN Dave-Cs.
And to have 4+ E-2Ds on order. And 4 C-2 CoD birds. And 6 more T45s, an FF/DD force of 32 - 35 hulls, around 12 Astute SSNs .... oh, and some of those Nimrod MPA thingys would probably help maritime picture building stuff and whatever else it is that they were supposed to do, too.
And, and, and... and quite a lot of other things that it is pointless talking about because it simply isn't going to happen. Did you not read SDSR?
Specifically on CVS.
Q: In real world terms, how effective would 8 FA2s and 8 GR9s off a CVS BG be today?
S41's Cynical Answer (and I'm delighted to be corrected):
A: Well (other than depending how warm it is outside, how much land-based tanker support you need, how much offensive EW kit you could carry and how much offboard cueing you required) it'd be fine if you were going to take a crack at someone without an IADS, with targets quite close to the coast and preferably where it doesn't get too hot (all that ambient temperature for bring-back malarky).
It's no good harking back to the "glory days in the Adriatic" unless you appreciate the amount of support that the CVSs received from land-based jets in Italy, France and Germany. This isn't to say that Fisheads and WAFUs don't do a good job - they do - it's merely to gently point out that CVSs were so small that they were very limited in what they could do - and the RN wrung every last ounce of capability out of these limited platforms, but they were still limited.
In other words, at best, a nice to have.
We stopped funding the majority of "nice to haves" quite a long time ago, and have been cutting real capability left and right for several years - or did you miss that. This is the major reason I have a problem with Trident replacement - it's a really expensive "nice to have" that is costing lots of real capability (and will continue to do so for another decade or so.) And yes, as I've said before, I'd bin the Reds to make this point.
S41