It keeps getting smaller. Will it even be able to protect Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales once they are completed?
Under current plans, the Royal Navy circa 2020 will be a very strange force. There will be just six high-end warships to protect two 65,000-ton super-carriers, plus a mixed flotilla of old Type 23s and FSCs numbering just over a dozen. It'll be a top-heavy force with too few destroyers to escort the carriers into a shooting war, and too few frigates to perform day-to-day patrolling during peacetime. It's a fleet optimized for nothing.Posted by armand at March 2, 2009 01:32 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Military Affairs
It's a fleet optimized for joint exercises with the USN, sounds like. I'm not sure they'd actually, y'know, want to fight a war with it or anything.
Posted by: jacflash at March 2, 2009 08:45 PM | PERMALINKThis looks like it's more about prestige than projecting power. But when was the last time somebody fired a missile at a warship? Falklands War?
Posted by: Morris at March 3, 2009 02:08 PM | PERMALINKHey, that's threat enough: they better install some missile defense right away!
Posted by: moon at March 3, 2009 05:05 PM | PERMALINKUmmm, no. I presume it was last year off the coast of Georgia. I believe the Russians sank at least one Georgian ship through a missile strike.
Also since the Falklands you've got Iraq hitting USS Stark (1987) and Operation Praying Mantis (US sinking Iranian ships - 1988).
Posted by: Armand at March 3, 2009 05:08 PM | PERMALINKAnd Hezbollah shot some stuff at an Israeli warship off the coast of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. If I remember correctly, it hit, and gave the (small) Israeli navy fits.
I think Morris might be right; its likely more prestige than anything else. If you can't protect the carrier (and that projection of what ships are available means you won't be able to), it is pretty much useless. Moreover, why does Britain need a carrier? What force projection are they doing, such that a carrier battlegroup is appropriate? That's the part I can't get over; they don't have global reach or global responsibilities anymore - they don't need a carrier.
Prestige, I think.
Posted by: baltar at March 4, 2009 08:32 AM | PERMALINKUnless they are operating under the assumption that any serious naval shooting war they get into will involve us by their side. Which means . . . wait for it . . . now is the perfect time to invade the UK!!!
Posted by: moon at March 4, 2009 09:14 AM | PERMALINKThanks for the corrections, I guess I need to spend a little less time watching the bitchy bachelor and more time watching the history channel.
Posted by: Morris at March 4, 2009 09:46 AM | PERMALINKInvade the UK? A country whose thousand years of empire were driven by its people's collective wish to go somewhere, anywhere, where it was not raining? Doesn't really seem like a tempting target, old chap.
Posted by: jacflash at March 4, 2009 02:30 PM | PERMALINK