Originally Posted by
FODPlod
The reason the French carrier Charles de Gaulle needs a maintenance period is that she and her air group had been providing CAS for ground forces in AFG (mostly Brits in Helmand) since October 2010, her fifth such mission in nine years. She only had a couple of weeks in Toulon before providing over a quarter of the NATO strike sorties over Libya to date. US Navy carriers have been providing CAS and ISTAR in AFG continuously since 2001.
So if we have been in the Stan all these years without our own carriers, being ably assisted by our allies with theirs you have to ask why do we need any of our own at all
