Scrapping our aircraft carriers would be a costly mistake

The ships are good value and strategically vital. Wargames alone are not a justification for their retirement

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A Strategic Defence Review is currently occuring. You can tell because, with metronomic predictability, knives are being sharpened for the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers. There is a small cadre of people within defence who loathe them with a logic-defying passion. These giant ships act as a totem, sucking in interservice insecurities and spitting them back out, often accompanied by a poor understanding of their actual utility, vulnerability and cost.
Describing the utility of an aircraft carrier is tough. Unless you’ve seen one at sea and witnessed the gravitating effect they have across the entire spectrum of defence operations, it is hard to grasp. There is nothing else in the MOD’s tool kit that gets close; from intelligence gathering, to defence diplomacy, to maritime leadership, to disaster relief, to all the mid-ranking tasks such as anti-submarine warfare in the North Atlantic (a daily threat to the UK), all the way up to strike operations and maritime conflict. 
They cover all and, best of all, do so in a location of our choosing. This is why all the major navies in the world either have them or are building them. The individual who says this is because navies are too slow to react isn’t being clever or forward-looking, they’re being arrogant, thinking they know more than the combined wisdom of around ten of the world’s navies. 
The second item that carrier haters overplay is their vulnerability. Again, it’s hard to overstate how hard it is to target a well-run carrier strike group, particularly in a shooting war when one is taking active measures to degrade the enemy’s targeting. Warships are vulnerable and always have been – the clue is in the name – but to say that hypersonic missiles have moved this dial to the point of obsolescence isn’t true. 
It will affect how and where you operate, and what countermeasures are required, but that has been the case since muskets, cannonballs, subsonic missiles, and torpedoes arrived. Again, there is an arrogance to assume that this hasn’t been studied in depth, using classified information, by the same people building and operating them. Using wargame findings as “proof” that they will be sunk is an impactful statement to the casual or uninformed observer but a pointlessly obvious one to everyone else. 
The final argument, as ever, is one of cost. Here our carriers are good value. £7.6 billion pounds for two that will last for 50 years compares well to the new US carriers which cost circa 16 billion dollars each. Also, these sums are now almost entirely sunk: scrapping one now would save almost nothing. 
The idea that if we hadn’t spent that money over the years the frigate fairy would have paid a visit and we would now be drowning in escorts is also false – it doesn’t work like that. In fact, the carrier justifies continued expenditure on escorts and submarines, not the other way around.
The running costs are not insignificant but at around 100 million pounds a year, this equates to 0.17 per cent of the total defence budget. Add the ship’s company and aircraft costs and this climbs, of course it does, but there are many, many things in defence that cost this much a year to run – boarding school allowance, for example. The idea that these ships are somehow draining the defence budget doesn’t stack up. 
There are, however, two strong counterarguments to consider. The first is that we have not configured our capability properly yet. We have shortcomings in jet numbers, air-to-air refuelling, airborne early warning and solid stores support at sea. Our escort fleet has atrophied over decades of defence parsimony and whilst the build programme for them is sound, the new ships are not ready yet. 
Operating with allies can mitigate much of this but there is no escaping the fact that carrier strike on a shoestring, which is what we have done to date, will leave you thin in certain areas, perhaps critically so in a high-threat environment. This can be fixed: it just needs to be resourced properly. There is still a massive amount these ships can do in the meantime, and one has to remember this is where ships spend 98 per cent of their time operating. 
The second is the number of sailors they need to run them. This is an area where the Navy is currently thin, and why the ships operate in readiness states. These range from R0 (immediate notice) to R9 (refit) and the two ships will move up and down these states, unseen by us, so they can manage the people between them as efficiently as possible. 
But these nuanced arguments and counterarguments can easily be drowned out by punchlines. Right now we have the potential future US Secretary of Defence (ex-Army) saying carriers have had their time based on “losing wargames”. Over here, we have had past ex-Army ministers actively briefing against them whilst in office. Look there to see a General on the Strategic Defence Review panel who has made his views clear. 
Hopefully, the SDR doesn’t get distracted by this kind of noise as it has some genuinely important strategic decisions to make. But if it is done in the spirit of its predecessors, meaning with no more money at the end of it, then it will fail because baked in inter-service bad behaviour to protect future capabilities will dominate strategic prioritisation. 
In the meantime, our carriers and supporting elements need more money spent on them so that they can thicken into the capability they should be. The idea of scrapping one now, based on limited knowledge of their utility, vulnerability and cost would be strategically incontinent given the current global environment. 
Defence expenditure has to increase now, of that there can be no doubt. And properly – no more sticking plasters. Our Government has the money to do so: it’s about political choices. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that led to an environment where each service was then able to articulate and cost its own requirements to complement the whole, rather than sniping at others?
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