Repulse wrote: ↑23 Mar 2024, 19:22I agree with everything here. What I can’t understand is why you don’t also agree that the carriers are key operating platforms for SFs and also a crucial part of ensuring sea control in the North Atlantic alongside SSN/T26/MPA assets.SW1 wrote: ↑23 Mar 2024, 16:46As I have mentioned before my choice is national requirements around air defence, maritime security and counter terrorism/eod. Beyond that our contributions to coalitions would be around submarines, strategic transport, aar, airborne ISR and special forces (under which I included the RM and paras). All the rest up for discussion based on how much budget is left.
You have generally responded this means isolationism to which I have disagreed.
I don’t want to turn this into another discussion about aircraft carriers but my answer to that is I’m not sure they are crucial it can be done without them. We spent 5 times too much with a crew requirement 4 times too much based around a fast jet sortie requirement out of all proportion to anything we are realistically going to need on a ship. As a result the rest of the navy force structure was decimated and significant infrastructure issues ignored to chase a fantasy.
If you want to do a surface ship contribution to asw sea control in the North Atlantic if you put 9 Merlin’s on HMS ocean at the centre of 4 type 23 frigates you do that job today.
If you want to support SF up close you can put chinook/pavehawk/merlin/apache/wildcat choose your combination on HMS ocean as happened off Libya and the gulf and she could does that job no problem. But it cost £300m and needed a crew of 280.
Do we have a need to put more than 4-8 fastjets at sea 99% of the time no. We should of built on the huge success we achieved with HMS Ocean and if there was a desire to keep fastjets at sea as part of the airgroup the closest thing around today I see to my idea of how an evolved HMS ocean may look is the Italian cavour. But instead we are disarming ourselves by of over specifying and over specialising equipment in to many areas and just demanding the answer is more money.