WEBF, please let this die because neither you nor anybody else are not going to change the decisions that have been made. I wish it was different, but denial is not an effective course of action.
And suggesting things like renting AV8s is just a nonsense (we don’t have any training on the aircraft’s systems, the UK doesn’t have any of the weapons that those systems are optimised to employ and don’t forget that we have a bunch of mothballed GR9s already lying around: so why pay a 3rd party the money to borrow extra aircraft?).
We could certainly benefit from having fixed wing assets closer to Libya than where they are, but the boys and girls are coping and in a cash-starved military that’s no bad thing. Justifying the flying of fixed wing aircraft from one or more carriers just to train a few deckhands is a false economy – that would be the most outrageously wasteful means to give fixed wing carrier experience to those few who would be in service when we (hopefully) get the F35 in 9 years’ time.