In July, the Royal Navy launched HMS Queen Elizabeth II, the first of two new carriers. She and her sister HMS Prince of Wales mark a return from the low point reached when Britain’s previous large-deck carrier, HMS Ark Royal, was decommissioned in 1979. By that time the Royal Navy was buying three small Invincible-class carriers, each operating a few Sea Harrier short-takeoff/vertical-landing (STOVL) attack aircraft/fighters, but all three together did not replace the capability being abandoned. Even these were nearly canceled; they were saved only by the Falklands War, which demonstrated just how important a carrier could be in an out-of-area situation. In effect the two new carriers represent an admission that out-of-area will be more and more the rule in the future, and that without carriers the United Kingdom cannot play its desired international role. Even so, while the project for the new carrier proceeded, the British government scrapped the Sea Harriers and retired the small carriers before the new one could be completed.
Like other countries, the United Kingdom was hit hard by the world recession. Under such circumstances, interservice rivalry becomes acute. Large projects such as the carriers come under intense scrutiny. In the past, the Royal Air Force has often (frequently successfully) bitterly fought investment in aircraft carriers. Its arguments, which may seem familiar, are that air power should be unitary and that the considerable cost of building and operating carriers undercuts investment in aircraft. That two successive British governments have both supported the carrier project is remarkable. But over the past two decades, as the carrier project has run (beginning in 1997 with a Strategic Defence Review), the ships have proven their special value. The project began after a single small British carrier generated more sorties in the war against Serbia than a vast complex of NATO air bases ashore. The reason was simple. Weather was treacherous, so the land bases were often out of action. The ship could maneuver to place herself in favorable weather. Moreover, she was much closer to the targets, so her aircraft could shuttle back and forth quite frequently.
For the British, another formative experience was the war in Libya. NATO strike aircraft were assigned to support the insurgents fighting Moammar Gadhafi. This was a very different role from that executed against Serbia. Serbian targets were preassigned and fixed. What counted was the simple ability to fly. This is the classic air-power role. In the Libyan war, targets became significant because of the way in which the fighting swirled. Something unimportant at one moment might suddenly matter because, for example, it could be a position used to attack the rebels. Target identification might be slow because of poor communications.
Strike aircraft could not be launched to hit fixed targets. Instead, they had to be available near potential targets so that they could attack as ordered. The key was not so much the availability of airplanes as the time they could spend over Libya. Long-range aircraft can certainly be afforded greater loiter times through air-to-air refueling, but pilots’ physical and mental endurance is limited. Our own experience in and over Afghanistan suggests that forcing pilots to fly longer and longer missions results in problems such as friendly-fire incidents.
All About Access
Libya was certainly within range of land-based attack bombers in the United Kingdom, and at first the British government probably did not understand that “in range” was not a good way to evaluate air availability. It meant that a bomber could fly from a British base and hit a preassigned target in Libya, then return home. The bomber could not loiter for long in Libyan airspace waiting to be assigned a pop-up target; only an airplane much closer to Libya could do that. The British did not have a light carrier on station, and much of the air war was prosecuted from Italian land bases. Fortunately, the weather cooperated.
The lesson was that future British operations abroad could not be supported from the air without either a nearby land base or a nearby carrier. Generally the argument in favor of carriers has two elements. One is that we are more and more likely to be operating in places where land bases are not available. Foreign governments, including our allies, do not always support the operations we consider essential. If they can veto particular operations by denying basing, they often come under intense pressure to do so.
U.S. experience has been that such vetoes often evaporate when we show that we can conduct operations without the bases in question, thanks to our carrier force. That was the case with Saudi bases during the run-up to the first Gulf War in 1990-91. At that time Saddam Hussein applied pressure to the Saudis to keep us out, even though we were offering the Saudis vital air-defense assistance. Carriers made it possible for us to prevent the Iraqis from invading Saudi Arabia regardless of whether the Saudis welcomed U.S. land-based air forces. Once those forces had been allowed in by the Saudis, they could be built up to a far more powerful level than the carriers had offered. That experience demonstrated how symbiotic sea- and land-based air arms can be. The Libyan example showed that in some cases politics may be irrelevant: There may not be any nearby base, due to geography.
A second point is that a carrier can strike at multiple places. To provide the same capability near different locations, a land-based air force has to distribute aircraft among numerous bases. Transfer from base to base is not a trivial matter. The airplanes can certainly hop from place to place, but for them to operate effectively they need considerable infrastructure, such as mountains of spares and qualified maintainers. Those are far more difficult to shift around. A carrier combines the aircraft and their support facilities.
Obviously the mobility and the facilities are expensive. Moreover, the carrier is not alone. To survive in a hostile world, she needs expensive support in the form of other ships and also offboard support. Much of how we evaluate the carrier depends on what sort of world we think we will be facing over the next few decades. Will it be like the Cold War, with a single well-equipped adversary, or will it be more like the last few decades, fighting a distributed and somewhat amorphous enemy plus a few well-equipped local powers? Most likely we will face some combination of the two.
We cannot afford the fixed global base structure we enjoyed during the early Cold War. Moreover, those bases could suddenly evaporate. The United States invested heavily in the vast Wheelus Air Base in Libya, only to lose it when Colonel Gadhafi came to power. For years our strategy in Southwest Asia was based on the Shah of Iran, who suddenly fell in 1979. The great-post Cold War lesson is that even when land basing seems to be in the vital interest of a host country, that country may still deny us access.
Getting There, Staying There
The Libyan and Serbian experiences seem to have brought these lessons home to the British government, which may well not have realized the extent to which its air strategy still depended on wide access to bases. That was certainly true in the imperial past, when there were numerous British bases around Eurasia. Then it was rational to rely on the land-based Royal Air Force to strike land targets. In stark contrast to the U.S. Navy, the Royal Navy was strictly limited to attacks on naval targets. The transition from empire did not seem to change circumstances, because the British governments of the 1970s and 1980s concentrated on NATO problems, where land bases were also assured. Their one great surprise was the Falklands War, which had to be fought far from any land facilities. To some extent, too, the British governments of the Cold War neglected the reality that land-based aircraft could not support ships well out to sea, just as they cannot support troops at a great distance. In each case, what matters is not range but rather endurance on station.
About the turn of the present century the British government (not the services) sought to rationalize tactical air power by creating a single force of short-takeoff/vertical-landing strike aircraft, capable of operating from either an improvised land base or a carrier. Initially it was equipped with Harriers (from the RAF) and Sea Harriers (from the Royal Navy). The RAF disliked the idea, and it succeeded in retiring its Harriers (they were sold to the U.S. Marines). The Royal Navy’s Sea Harriers were scrapped. The idea of the joint force seems to live on in the decision to build the carriers to operate only STOVL aircraft, in this case F-35Bs. Originally it had been planned to provide the ships with catapults and arresting gear. Because the British carriers are powered by gas turbines, they cannot use steam catapults; the plan was to adopt the electromagnetic launch-and-retrieval system the U.S. Navy is now buying. But this system was deemed too expensive, and, it was feared, would involve excessive delays.
Several British writers have pointed out that as a carrier strike aircraft the F-35B is inferior to the catapult-launched F-35C. However, a British government interested in operations from improvised airstrips ashore might find the STOVL capability extremely attractive. Limited to small numbers of aircraft, the British may well feel that they want an air force that can support troops and then go ashore with them. The U.S. Marines have exactly that kind of air arm in their Harriers, which can operate from large-deck amphibious ships and then go ashore as the supporting air arm. The Marines’ F-35Bs will preserve this capability.
The logic of close air support has apparently also been accepted by the Australian government. A few years ago Australia bought two large amphibious ships—the largest warships in its history—from Spain. Initially the Australians purchased them as pure helicopter carriers, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) claiming that it could always provide close air support using aerial refueling. This year the Australian prime minister announced a study to see if the ships could carry small numbers of strike aircraft. They already have ski jumps, and STOVL aircraft do not require further adaptation (they do need sufficient deck strength, but so do big troop-carrying helicopters). Assuming that the prime minister’s decision stands, Australia will presumably buy F-35Bs to complement the F-35As the RAAF is already buying.