The Prime Minister does not agree with 1SL, CGS, or CAS:
David Cameron rebukes Armed Forces chiefs
Presumably he seems no problem in us losing the fixed wing carrier capability, and then having to build it up again from scratch.
Since he talk a lot about the US and France helping us, what would happen if the US Chief of Naval Operations or the Chief of Staff of the French Navy also told him that losing the carrier capability and then regenerating later in the same decade it is both daft and dangerous?
The issue of the last minute ripping up of the SDSR, and it being distorted purely for
PR reasons will not go away,
as noted here in
The Economist.
And had the SDSR not decided that Britain could take the risk of going a decade without an aircraft-carrier, the already decommissioned HMS Ark Royal and its Harrier jets would have joined carriers from France, Italy and America off the Libyan coast. Able to respond more quickly than the Tornados that are flying from Italy, the Harriers would have been especially handy for attacking Muammar Qaddafi’s tanks and mobile rocket-launchers. It turns out that much of the “legacy equipment for which there is no requirement”—to quote the SDSR—is still pretty useful.
This leads to an important question:
The basic question for British strategy is whether the ways and means implied by the SDSR can support the government’s still-ambitious military goals. Or, to put it another way, whether the government’s eyes for embarking on high-minded adventures of the Libyan kind are bigger than its stomach for resourcing them.