As Labour presents the public with large tax rises and cuts in services, Britain’s armed forces are wasting billions of pounds of public money on projects with no practical use in present or potential future conflicts.
It would be nothing short of a scandal if they are given more taxpayers’ money to spend.
Prime candidates for the chop, and an immediate target for the government’s promised Office for the Value of Money, should be the two aircraft carriers: HMS Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales – the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy.
Independent analysts are starting to question the future of the carriers, something that was unthinkable not so long ago. There is speculation that at least one could be mothballed.
Shortly after he retired as chief of the defence staff, General (now Lord) David Richards described the ships as “unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”. They were “behemoths”, he told me.
But we should not expect any brave proposals from the government’s defence review.
Its panel consists of Lord George Robertson, Tony Blair’s defence secretary and former Nato secretary general; Fiona Hill, former advisor to Donald Trump described by the government as a “foreign policy expert”; and General Sir Richard Barrons, former deputy chief of the defence staff.
None of them are likely to rock the boat.
‘Cats and traps’
One of David Cameron’s first proposals when he became prime minister in 2010 was to get rid of the carriers.
He was told it would cost more to cancel the contracts with the shipbuilders, led by BAE Systems, than to continue building them.
Rory Stewart, a former Conservative minister, wrote in his memoir that Cameron “pushed ahead with buying two aircraft carriers that we didn’t need, had no carrier groups to escort, and for which we could not afford any planes”.
The MoD then abandoned its original plan to construct carriers with catapults and arrester gear – “cats and traps” – on the grounds of cost.
It chose, instead, the alternative and cheaper short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) “jump jet” version.
The decision was taken even though the MoD admitted that the “cats and traps” system was much more efficient for launching aircraft with a “longer range and greater payload”, something it had earlier described as “the critical requirement for precision-strike operations in the future”.
The MoD is now considering whether to provide the carriers with “cats and traps” after all, to launch drones – thus providing the cheapest, most effective weapons with a large, hugely expensive, and vulnerable floating base.
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Pork barrel politics
The carriers were championed by Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, a commitment, perhaps more than any other, that belies his reputation as a “prudent” chancellor of the exchequer.
They were built in Rosyth, neighbouring his Scottish constituency. When Brown’s predecessor, Tony Blair, signed off on the carriers in 2006, they were estimated to cost £3.9bn.
I wrote a number of articles reflecting the worries of the few government officials prepared (on condition they were not identified) to share their concerns that the ships would be an extravagance that the country could not afford and the armed forces did not need.
A former senior naval officer got in touch with me opposing the decision to build the carriers.
Speaking privately, he described the decision as a “combination of naval vanity and pork barrel politics”. The Royal Navy, he added, was “moving in the direction absolutely contrary to the strategic developments of our time”.
Yet serving admirals and MoD spokespeople persistently brushed aside any criticism of the decision to build the carriers.
By 2008, their cost had risen to £6.2bn.
Leaky
Ever since they put out to sea, both the Queen Elizabeth, the navy’s flagship, and the Prince of Wales, have been plagued with serious and hugely embarrassing mechanical problems.
These have forced them into dry dock for extensive repairs and prevented their participation in Nato exercises designed to demonstrate the reach of Britain’s sea power.
The Prince of Wales broke down in August 2022, a day after setting sail for the US, as a result of a broken propeller shaft which was misaligned when it was first installed.
The ship, commissioned in 2019, had already been flooded twice in its first year of service. It was taken to Rosyth for repairs which took nine months.
Another problem with a propeller shaft was identified early in 2023 with the MoD declining to tell MPs the cost of the repairs.
Similarly, in 2017, a leak flooded the Queen Elizabeth. This year, the carrier had to pull out of a major Nato exercise, Steadfast Defender, off Norway after a problem on one of its propeller shafts was discovered.
The Prince of Wales was about to replace it before a new mechanical fault was found on it too.
What was described as a “planned overhaul” was postponed and temporary repairs were hurriedly fixed to allow it to replace the Queen Elizabeth.
The MoD has repeatedly declined to say who would be responsible for paying for the repairs. By 2012, the cost of repairing the carriers already amounted to at least £39m.
Maintaining and repairing serious faults in the new ships has now cost nearly £1bn, according to a freedom of information request.
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Sitting ducks
The carriers are imposing a significant financial cost on an already pressed military budget, and divert other ships from much more important roles.
In any potential hostile environment, the carriers would need protection from a fleet of escorts including anti-submarine frigates, a nuclear-powered submarine armed with conventional sea-to-air missiles, an oil tanker and a supply vessel.
All these are ships which the Royal Navy is desperately short of.
The carriers would also be vulnerable to armed drones, including underwater drones that proved so successful in Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
They have such large radar signatures and are so slow that they would be increasingly vulnerable to fast, long-range missiles being designed by China and Russia.
China is developing over-the-horizon anti-ship missiles like the DF-21D, with a range of more than 1,500 nautical miles.
The carriers would be sitting ducks.
Tellingly, Rishi Sunak’s government recently decided not to send the Prince of Wales to the Red Sea to protect merchant ships from Houthi missiles fearing that it was too vulnerable from attacks.
‘Imprudent’
The carriers were built to host up to 36 American-made Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets.
These are the world’s most expensive warplanes, and have been beset with software and design problems.
The estimated price of each plane has escalated to more than £90m.
In 2018, the Ministry of Defence decided to buy a total of 48 – some land-based and flown by the RAF – at an overall cost of more than £13bn over 30 years.
Asked by MPs on the Commons Public Accounts Committee how many F-35s would eventually be bought, Stephen Lovegrove, the MoD’s top official, replied: “It would be imprudent to put a number in the public domain which would inevitably be wrong”.
Delays in procuring F-35s for the carriers, partly for reasons of cost, have meant that relatively few have been carried by the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, with US Marine Corps planes taking their place.
Flying the flag
Lord Patten, a former Conservative minister and the last British governor of Hong Kong, asked the MoD earlier this year: “What is the purpose of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales; and what assessment they have made of the extent to which that purpose has been achieved?”
The Earl of Minto, then a defence minister, told him their purpose is “to provide the UK a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) capability. A CSG is a secure, versatile, agile and survivable, well-found sovereign operating base that exerts global influence through power projection, which, enabled by sea control and with minimal risk, delivers strike warfare against targets ashore”.
He added in a classic Whitehall response replete with vague assertions and wishful thinking: “The UK CSG has made steady progress towards becoming a fully operational force, with Initial Operating Capability of Carrier Strike declared in 2021, and the milestones for Full Operating Capability are being reviewed.”
The carriers will sail around the world to “fly the flag”, say Royal Navy spokespeople. The navy is currently planning to deploy the Queen Elizabeth around the world, leading what is being called “Carrier Strike Group 25”.
It would have to sail through the Red Sea, a vital strategic shipping lane threatened by Houthi missiles which the navy has not enough ships to patrol.
It would also be entirely dependent on a US carrier group for supplies, fuel, and airborne early warning – Britain’s Merlin helicopters’ Crowsnest radar is not fully operational, years behind its original completion date.
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All at sea
Such an extravagant deployment to the Indo-Pacific would provide little more than a gratuitous provocation of China.
Deployments to the Indo-Pacific would also leave few ships to defend Britain and its surrounding waters in the North Atlantic and North Sea.
There, ships are needed to track Russian submarines and surface ships, considered by senior defence officials to be the most serious threat to the country’s security.
Britain does not possess the air defence systems its allies have. Nor does the navy have enough relevant ships.
Grant Shapps, the former Conservative defence secretary, gave the game away when he announced plans to build new ships for the navy. What was needed, he emphasised, was “multi-purpose ships”.
He added: “We’re learning from what’s happened in the Black Sea in Ukraine and learning what’s happening in the Red Sea currently to make much more flexible ships capable of carrying out a lot of different types of tasks.”
In other words, precisely not aircraft carriers.
Status symbols
The carrier “strike force” and Trident nuclear missile system are Britain’s most expensive military projects.
Neither are relevant to the real threats facing Britain: terrorism, cyber attacks, drones in overseas operations and other forms of “asymmetric” warfare.
Even expensive surface ships have been criticised as being a waste of money.
Referring to attacks in the Indian Ocean, Lord Richards remarked to me: “We have £1bn destroyers trying to sort out pirates in a little dhow with RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) costing $50, with an outboard motor [costing] $100.”
One respected commentator has gone as far as suggesting: “Do we really need a navy any more?” Far from being useful weapons systems, the carriers, like Trident, are little more than status symbols.
Labour’s defence secretary, John Healey, has echoed his Conservative predecessor by emphasising the need for more agile, technically advanced and flexible armed forces.
He has said they are not “ready to fight a war” and the military had been “hollowed out”.
Continuing to spend many billions of pounds on aircraft carriers is a dreadful waste of public money that will do nothing to help Britain’s armed forces combat the most serious existing and future threats facing the country.
