It looks as though the First Sea Lord is not the only one with reservations about being able to sustain operations against Gaddafi for more than six months without a drastic rethink:
Originally Posted by Financial Times 15 Jun 2011
Senior figures across Nato are expressing growing concerns that the alliance lacks the military capabilities to complete a successful mission against Colonel Muammer Gaddafi in Libya, despite the continuing degradation of his forces on the ground...
In Paris, Admiral Pierre-François Forissier, head of the French Navy, said the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, now deployed off Libya, would be “unable to play any operational role in 2012” if it was kept off Libya until the end of the year. In Brussels, General Stéphane Abrial, the man in charge of managing the alliance’s logistical capabilities, also said that the “resource issue will become critical” for Nato if the Libya operation continued for much longer.
Military experts say one way of gauging the lack of firepower in the Libya operation is to compare it to Nato’s 1999 air war over Kosovo. The Libya operation on Thursday entered its 78th day – exactly the length of time it took for Nato to remove Serbian forces from Kosovo. But Nato has flown only one-third the number of air sorties over Libya that it did over Kosovo – and hit only a fraction of the targets...
In France, some figures in the military establishment believe the British could do more. “The UK are not really putting enough assets into Libya,” says a senior French official. “We are daily putting between 30 and 35 aircraft into the operation but the British are putting in far less.”...
Ultimately, the fundamental question is whether anything can be done to ramp up European resources before the autumn, when a continuing mission is likely to be seriously questioned by politicians in the UK, US and France.
I'd be surprised if the French are giving any consideration at all to extending the carrier
Charles de Gaulle until the end of the year. Before she began contributing more than a quarter of the NATO strike sorties over Libya, she and her air group had been providing CAS for ground forces (mainly Brits) in Afghanistan since Oct 2010, her fifth such mission in nine years.
CdG and her air group have now achieved eight months of almost continuous flying operations and must be sorely in need of some maintenance and leave. The question is, what is going to fill the significant gap when she goes? The tragedy is that the RN doesn't have a carrier to relieve her. Even
Ark Royal with a dozen or more Harrier GR9s would have mitigated this situation enormously. If the performance of USS
Kearsarge and her Harrier AV-8Bs is anything to go by (before they were withdrawn from operations), the GR9s would have flown at least two sorties for every one flown by land-based aircraft. All we can offer now is our
only LPH with a few helicopters.
At least some NATO countries are stepping up to the plate:
Originally Posted by Wall Street Journal 10 Jun 2011
In the Libya operation, Norway and Denmark, have provided 12 percent of allied strike aircraft yet have struck about one third of the targets. Belgium and Canada are also making major contributions to the strike mission...