Two weeks ago, at a Nato summit, Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, pledged a strong commitment by the UK to defend Eastern Europe against Putin’s Russia.
“I think we’ll dedicate one of the carrier groups to it,” Wallace commented.
The suggestion that Britain has more than one carrier group is, bluntly, absurd. It’s faintly absurd to suggest that we have even one.
Consider Operation Fortis last year. This was a massive effort by the Royal Navy, in which our new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth was sent to the Far East. The idea was to demonstrate the reach of Global Britain and make China think twice about invading Taiwan.
HMS Queen Elizabeth was designed to operate with an air group including 36 combat jets and four radar aircraft. She can carry up to 60 aircraft in total.
For Op Fortis, sailing right into China’s backyard, she carried just 18 jets and a motley assortment of 14 helicopters. Three helicopters had been equipped as “Crowsnest” radar aircraft, but the project had suffered delays and Crowsnest was not fully ready for service. It is not expected to be properly ready until next year.
Radar aircraft cover is essential, as the Royal Navy learned at terrible cost in the Falklands. The French and the Americans use radar planes, not helicopters: planes can fly higher and further than a helicopter, delivering hugely better capability.
Xi Jinping probably wasn’t impressed by Operation Fortis. And indeed, the picture gets worse. Just eight of the Queen Elizabeth’s shrunken jet force last year were British service aircraft: the other 10 were from the US Marines. Britain has only a tiny handful of carrier planes.
Under current plans this situation will improve only very slowly and will never be fully sorted out. According to numbers given to Parliament by my old RAF comrade Air Marshal Dicky Knighton in April, one day in the 2030s it might be possible to send a single British carrier to sea with say 24 British jets – still nothing like what she was built to carry.
The idea of two viable carrier groups is fantasy. The notion that we have even one today is so far from reality as to be untrue.
How can this be? Britain has the fourth largest defence budget in the world. We comfortably outspend both France and Russia. Both those nations have deployed aircraft carriers with more than 30 warplanes aboard.
Our problems are self-inflicted. They stem from a stupid decision made in 2011 by three very senior bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence, and a campaign by these three and 10 of their subordinates to push that decision through. These 13 Whitehall mandarins crippled our carriers.
The problem is that the Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship Prince of Wales, unlike US and French carriers, have no catapults to launch planes and no arrester wires to catch them on landing. This means that the only aeroplanes our ships can operate are “jump jets”, ones equipped with vertical thrust. The famous Harrier was of this type, but it has long been out of production. Britain sold off its Harriers in 2010.
The only jump jet available to buy today is the B version of the F-35 Lightning. This F-35B is the only warplane our carriers, as now configured, can use. It is the first aircraft ever to combine stealth, supersonic speed and vertical thrust all in one. It is one of the most complicated aircraft in the world and it will never be bought in large numbers.
This lack of production scale means that the F-35B is, and will remain, extremely expensive to buy and to fly. Its heavy, bulky vertical thrust machinery also means that it cannot carry much fuel or weaponry: it is not a particularly good warplane, despite its horrific cost.
The eye-watering price of the F-35B is one reason our carriers don’t – and won’t – have anything like a proper complement of jets. Ships which should each be more powerful than many national air forces, delivering enormous clout for Britain, will instead serve mainly as feeble helicopter platforms.
**It doesn’t have to be this way**
It wasn’t going to be like this. From 2010 until 2012, it was planned that the Royal Navy would get carriers with catapults. In time, those carriers could have operated the F-35C, the catapult F-35, which the US Navy is slowly introducing.
Unburdened by vertical-thrust equipment, the F-35C is not only a much better warplane than the F-35B: it is also significantly cheaper to buy and fly.
But that wasn’t the best part of the Royal Navy catapult plan. The great thing about a catapult carrier is that it doesn’t have to use expensive F-35 stealth planes at all. Instead, we would have started out with a normal catapult jet.
This could have been the Rafale M from France: but in fact by 2012 our pilots were learning to fly the F-18 Hornet aboard US carriers. This is the same jet which takes centre stage in the new blockbuster film Top Gun: Maverick.
The Hornet was, and is, excellent value for money. It is the mainstay jet of the mighty US Navy and many allied nations, and will be through the 2020s and beyond. Because hundreds have already been made and it remains in production, it is very affordable.
Once the Royal Navy had a catapult carrier it was inevitable that we would get some F-18s at some point, rather than leaving our new ships empty except for helicopters and a handful of expensive F-35s – as we now are.
This would have had implications beyond the Navy. The F-18 doesn’t have to fly from a carrier: it’s quite happy working from a land airbase, as indeed it is used by most nations that have it.
The F-18 is in the same performance class as the RAF’s main combat plane, the Eurofighter Typhoon. The Typhoon was conceived as a pure air-to-air fighter and the process of adding air-to-ground bombing capability has been ridiculously expensive and prolonged. Even now that some RAF Typhoons are finally upgraded for ground attack (many others have been permanently mothballed) they remain extremely expensive to fly.
If we had some F-18s we would tend to use them for most tasks, even if the carriers were not required at all. It would be much cheaper than using Typhoons.
Indeed, if we had a force of F-18s, we might justifiably wonder whether we really need the RAF’s beloved Typhoon at all – especially as Typhoons would be rendered completely obsolete by fully capable (that is, non-jumpjet) F-35C stealth planes arriving at some point, as they would if we had a catapult carrier.
Would we worry about air-to-air without Typhoons?
Well, the F-18 is the air-to-air fighter which protects the US Navy’s nuclear supercarrier groups and various top-20 economies such as Canada, Australia and Switzerland. Fully capable, non-jumpjet F-35s will protect those carriers and nations in future.
It would seem clear that the same aircraft are good enough for us, especially when we recall that for many years our primary air-to-air fighter was the laughing-stock Tornado F3.
So the catapult carrier plan, with its more-or-less-inevitable force of F-18s soon and proper, non-jumpjet F-35C stealth jets in future, was a terrible threat to the Typhoon.
The stakes were – are – very high. The British Government will spend tens of billions operating combat jets out to 2040. In the absence of a catapult carrier, the great bulk will go on Typhoons.
The jumpjet F-35B, crippled by its vertical lift machinery, cannot be Britain’s primary strike plane and will never become affordable like other, proper F-35s. Provided we never get a catapult carrier, Typhoons continue to have a future well beyond 2030.
If on the other hand we get a catapult carrier, F-18s and proper non-jumpjet F-35Cs will inevitably take an increasing slice of all those billions. In that scenario it would be hard to see the expensive Typhoon remaining for long.
We might also wonder, given the bloodsucking histories of the Typhoon and Tornado F3 before it, if we really want their successor, the Tempest, either.
This decision goes back even further than 2011. Back in the early 2000s it was decided that the existing carrier size would be maintained into the future and that the upgrade to the Harrier would be jointly developed with the USA as the F35. The F35 was meant to be a modern but relatively cheap jet in comparison to the Typhoons but would have similar capabilities to the harrier to short take off and land vertically.
But at some point we decided replace with large Carriers and drop the existing small Carrier designs, but maintained a lack of catapults to save money, this limited them to the F35Bs. Part of it was that the F35B never got to the same short take off capabilities as the Harrier, it missed its spec by quite a way as it was never a priority for Lockhead Martin. The UK cut how many we were going to buy considerably have with Austerity spending and it become even less important to Lockhead. Most of the choices that led to the current problems originated in the Ministry of Defence and the defence ministers reduction in force spending, anything to save a few million.
*The Telegraph* used to be an extremely reputable paper – even if you weren’t conservative, you could rely on it for the facts. It was the paper my father read daily in the 80’s, and I doubt he voted tory once in his life.
But these days you can’t trust it – this whole article is about how a bunch of civil servants sabotaged and undermined the construction of the new carrier fleet, and a paragraph that supports this is:
> Liam Fox was resolute in defending the catapult carrier plan. But then, late in 2011, Fox was forced out after MoD permanent undersecretary Ursula Brennan decided that his conduct in office was “not appropriate”.
This is a short paragraph, and it would be easy to overlook it, but it serves to lend weight to the whole argument – its implication, in the middle of this whole big article about malfeasance by civil servants, is that Liam Fox did nothing wrong and he was ousted by this undersecretary for spurious or nefarious reasons.
In fact, Liam Fox was the guy who invited [his best mate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Werritty), who did not work for him and who lacked security clearance, into the Ministry of Defence, into official meetings and on official business trips with him.
Wikipedia describes their relationship as being of “uncertain nature”, like Fox is maybe believed to be cheating on his wife with the bloke but nobody wants to say it. That is the most charitable interpretation of the relationship – inviting some random into Ministry of Defence meetings is actually more innocent if they’re just fucking and infatuated with each other than if Werritty was a spy or if there was some financial gain to be made by one or both of them.
It was absolutely right that Fox should have been sacked (pressured to resign), and making out that he was a champion who was underhandedly wronged by the civil service calls the whole article into disrepute. *The Telegraph* is just a shitrag these days – it tells tories what they want to hear.
I can’t say I read all that but, seemingly the UK isn’t even that great militarily anymore?
Concerning considering how the global situation seems to be going in.
Hey u/MGC91, can I get an actual sensible summary. While I’d can see the point about AWACs capabilities, I’m not convinced the F35B is all that anaemic in what it’s capable of
I’d say the current issues with UK Lightning aren’t the capabilities of the aircraft itself, but the lack of airframes and general half-arsed approach. It doesn’t matter if the kit is capable, if you only have ~25 of them to spread across land-/carrier-based (and OCU) taskings.
Not all of that is the fault of the MOD, as covid hit production rates in the US, but slashing our projected order total isn’t great either.
Flying hours per pilot are also very low (and sims still can’t fully replace live hours in terms of training value), the UK OCU is working at a snails pace, and we don’t have any decent stand-off weapons to deliver from them either, to really harness the LO capabilites of the aircraft.
Over all, the aircraft itself should be very capable, but the half-arsed approach to the UK force is what’s holding it back. This is obviously an air-focused answer, as I’m no expert on the naval stuff.
9 comments
Two weeks ago, at a Nato summit, Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, pledged a strong commitment by the UK to defend Eastern Europe against Putin’s Russia.
“I think we’ll dedicate one of the carrier groups to it,” Wallace commented.
The suggestion that Britain has more than one carrier group is, bluntly, absurd. It’s faintly absurd to suggest that we have even one.
Consider Operation Fortis last year. This was a massive effort by the Royal Navy, in which our new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth was sent to the Far East. The idea was to demonstrate the reach of Global Britain and make China think twice about invading Taiwan.
HMS Queen Elizabeth was designed to operate with an air group including 36 combat jets and four radar aircraft. She can carry up to 60 aircraft in total.
For Op Fortis, sailing right into China’s backyard, she carried just 18 jets and a motley assortment of 14 helicopters. Three helicopters had been equipped as “Crowsnest” radar aircraft, but the project had suffered delays and Crowsnest was not fully ready for service. It is not expected to be properly ready until next year.
Radar aircraft cover is essential, as the Royal Navy learned at terrible cost in the Falklands. The French and the Americans use radar planes, not helicopters: planes can fly higher and further than a helicopter, delivering hugely better capability.
Xi Jinping probably wasn’t impressed by Operation Fortis. And indeed, the picture gets worse. Just eight of the Queen Elizabeth’s shrunken jet force last year were British service aircraft: the other 10 were from the US Marines. Britain has only a tiny handful of carrier planes.
Under current plans this situation will improve only very slowly and will never be fully sorted out. According to numbers given to Parliament by my old RAF comrade Air Marshal Dicky Knighton in April, one day in the 2030s it might be possible to send a single British carrier to sea with say 24 British jets – still nothing like what she was built to carry.
The idea of two viable carrier groups is fantasy. The notion that we have even one today is so far from reality as to be untrue.
How can this be? Britain has the fourth largest defence budget in the world. We comfortably outspend both France and Russia. Both those nations have deployed aircraft carriers with more than 30 warplanes aboard.
Our problems are self-inflicted. They stem from a stupid decision made in 2011 by three very senior bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence, and a campaign by these three and 10 of their subordinates to push that decision through. These 13 Whitehall mandarins crippled our carriers.
The problem is that the Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship Prince of Wales, unlike US and French carriers, have no catapults to launch planes and no arrester wires to catch them on landing. This means that the only aeroplanes our ships can operate are “jump jets”, ones equipped with vertical thrust. The famous Harrier was of this type, but it has long been out of production. Britain sold off its Harriers in 2010.
The only jump jet available to buy today is the B version of the F-35 Lightning. This F-35B is the only warplane our carriers, as now configured, can use. It is the first aircraft ever to combine stealth, supersonic speed and vertical thrust all in one. It is one of the most complicated aircraft in the world and it will never be bought in large numbers.
This lack of production scale means that the F-35B is, and will remain, extremely expensive to buy and to fly. Its heavy, bulky vertical thrust machinery also means that it cannot carry much fuel or weaponry: it is not a particularly good warplane, despite its horrific cost.
The eye-watering price of the F-35B is one reason our carriers don’t – and won’t – have anything like a proper complement of jets. Ships which should each be more powerful than many national air forces, delivering enormous clout for Britain, will instead serve mainly as feeble helicopter platforms.
**It doesn’t have to be this way**
It wasn’t going to be like this. From 2010 until 2012, it was planned that the Royal Navy would get carriers with catapults. In time, those carriers could have operated the F-35C, the catapult F-35, which the US Navy is slowly introducing.
Unburdened by vertical-thrust equipment, the F-35C is not only a much better warplane than the F-35B: it is also significantly cheaper to buy and fly.
But that wasn’t the best part of the Royal Navy catapult plan. The great thing about a catapult carrier is that it doesn’t have to use expensive F-35 stealth planes at all. Instead, we would have started out with a normal catapult jet.
This could have been the Rafale M from France: but in fact by 2012 our pilots were learning to fly the F-18 Hornet aboard US carriers. This is the same jet which takes centre stage in the new blockbuster film Top Gun: Maverick.
The Hornet was, and is, excellent value for money. It is the mainstay jet of the mighty US Navy and many allied nations, and will be through the 2020s and beyond. Because hundreds have already been made and it remains in production, it is very affordable.
Once the Royal Navy had a catapult carrier it was inevitable that we would get some F-18s at some point, rather than leaving our new ships empty except for helicopters and a handful of expensive F-35s – as we now are.
This would have had implications beyond the Navy. The F-18 doesn’t have to fly from a carrier: it’s quite happy working from a land airbase, as indeed it is used by most nations that have it.
The F-18 is in the same performance class as the RAF’s main combat plane, the Eurofighter Typhoon. The Typhoon was conceived as a pure air-to-air fighter and the process of adding air-to-ground bombing capability has been ridiculously expensive and prolonged. Even now that some RAF Typhoons are finally upgraded for ground attack (many others have been permanently mothballed) they remain extremely expensive to fly.
If we had some F-18s we would tend to use them for most tasks, even if the carriers were not required at all. It would be much cheaper than using Typhoons.
Indeed, if we had a force of F-18s, we might justifiably wonder whether we really need the RAF’s beloved Typhoon at all – especially as Typhoons would be rendered completely obsolete by fully capable (that is, non-jumpjet) F-35C stealth planes arriving at some point, as they would if we had a catapult carrier.
Would we worry about air-to-air without Typhoons?
Well, the F-18 is the air-to-air fighter which protects the US Navy’s nuclear supercarrier groups and various top-20 economies such as Canada, Australia and Switzerland. Fully capable, non-jumpjet F-35s will protect those carriers and nations in future.
It would seem clear that the same aircraft are good enough for us, especially when we recall that for many years our primary air-to-air fighter was the laughing-stock Tornado F3.
So the catapult carrier plan, with its more-or-less-inevitable force of F-18s soon and proper, non-jumpjet F-35C stealth jets in future, was a terrible threat to the Typhoon.
The stakes were – are – very high. The British Government will spend tens of billions operating combat jets out to 2040. In the absence of a catapult carrier, the great bulk will go on Typhoons.
The jumpjet F-35B, crippled by its vertical lift machinery, cannot be Britain’s primary strike plane and will never become affordable like other, proper F-35s. Provided we never get a catapult carrier, Typhoons continue to have a future well beyond 2030.
If on the other hand we get a catapult carrier, F-18s and proper non-jumpjet F-35Cs will inevitably take an increasing slice of all those billions. In that scenario it would be hard to see the expensive Typhoon remaining for long.
We might also wonder, given the bloodsucking histories of the Typhoon and Tornado F3 before it, if we really want their successor, the Tempest, either.
This decision goes back even further than 2011. Back in the early 2000s it was decided that the existing carrier size would be maintained into the future and that the upgrade to the Harrier would be jointly developed with the USA as the F35. The F35 was meant to be a modern but relatively cheap jet in comparison to the Typhoons but would have similar capabilities to the harrier to short take off and land vertically.
But at some point we decided replace with large Carriers and drop the existing small Carrier designs, but maintained a lack of catapults to save money, this limited them to the F35Bs. Part of it was that the F35B never got to the same short take off capabilities as the Harrier, it missed its spec by quite a way as it was never a priority for Lockhead Martin. The UK cut how many we were going to buy considerably have with Austerity spending and it become even less important to Lockhead. Most of the choices that led to the current problems originated in the Ministry of Defence and the defence ministers reduction in force spending, anything to save a few million.
*The Telegraph* used to be an extremely reputable paper – even if you weren’t conservative, you could rely on it for the facts. It was the paper my father read daily in the 80’s, and I doubt he voted tory once in his life.
But these days you can’t trust it – this whole article is about how a bunch of civil servants sabotaged and undermined the construction of the new carrier fleet, and a paragraph that supports this is:
> Liam Fox was resolute in defending the catapult carrier plan. But then, late in 2011, Fox was forced out after MoD permanent undersecretary Ursula Brennan decided that his conduct in office was “not appropriate”.
This is a short paragraph, and it would be easy to overlook it, but it serves to lend weight to the whole argument – its implication, in the middle of this whole big article about malfeasance by civil servants, is that Liam Fox did nothing wrong and he was ousted by this undersecretary for spurious or nefarious reasons.
In fact, Liam Fox was the guy who invited [his best mate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Werritty), who did not work for him and who lacked security clearance, into the Ministry of Defence, into official meetings and on official business trips with him.
Wikipedia describes their relationship as being of “uncertain nature”, like Fox is maybe believed to be cheating on his wife with the bloke but nobody wants to say it. That is the most charitable interpretation of the relationship – inviting some random into Ministry of Defence meetings is actually more innocent if they’re just fucking and infatuated with each other than if Werritty was a spy or if there was some financial gain to be made by one or both of them.
It was absolutely right that Fox should have been sacked (pressured to resign), and making out that he was a champion who was underhandedly wronged by the civil service calls the whole article into disrepute. *The Telegraph* is just a shitrag these days – it tells tories what they want to hear.
I can’t say I read all that but, seemingly the UK isn’t even that great militarily anymore?
Concerning considering how the global situation seems to be going in.
Hey u/MGC91, can I get an actual sensible summary. While I’d can see the point about AWACs capabilities, I’m not convinced the F35B is all that anaemic in what it’s capable of
I’d say the current issues with UK Lightning aren’t the capabilities of the aircraft itself, but the lack of airframes and general half-arsed approach. It doesn’t matter if the kit is capable, if you only have ~25 of them to spread across land-/carrier-based (and OCU) taskings.
Not all of that is the fault of the MOD, as covid hit production rates in the US, but slashing our projected order total isn’t great either.
Flying hours per pilot are also very low (and sims still can’t fully replace live hours in terms of training value), the UK OCU is working at a snails pace, and we don’t have any decent stand-off weapons to deliver from them either, to really harness the LO capabilites of the aircraft.
Over all, the aircraft itself should be very capable, but the half-arsed approach to the UK force is what’s holding it back. This is obviously an air-focused answer, as I’m no expert on the naval stuff.
This is such a terrible article. There’s a rebuttal [here](https://thinpinstripedline.blogspot.com/2022/07/challenging-stupid-thoughts-on-lewis.html) which is pretty spot on.
TLDR… was it Oranges or Chinese people in Whitehall?
should the headline have read “… mandarins crush Britain’s…” It would be a much juicier story 🙂