CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The First Sea Lord could not disguise his satisfaction over the latest carrier commitment. It was, he suggested, ‘one of those generational decisions’. As significant, in its way, as the CVA-01 decision the year before he had joined the Navy.
The admiral was standing on the quarterdeck of HMS Ark Royal in Portsmouth harbour, just after the announcement, as he thought these thoughts and uttered these words. Not far away across the naval base was the sadly empty shell of Invincible.
In his mind, he also believed that this was important for the sailors in the Navy now. This announcement implied, as far as he was concerned, that for as long as those currently serving need worry, the Navy would be a global player. This was the Navy’s totem. And that was important.
There may still have been uncomfortable echoes of CVA-01 – the long political battle, the unease that the Navy was being too ambitious, the fact that the carrier proposal was tied to a joint RAF/Royal Navy aircraft. But there were plenty of differences as well. One was that this time, compared to the 1960s, the senior leaders in the Navy seemed more committed to and united around the necessity of carrier air power than had been the case before, even though none of them were aviators, and some were from that traditionally sceptical branch, the submariners, like James Burnell-Nugent, and his successor as C-in-C Fleet, Mark Stanhope. And then there was the First Sea Lord himself.
While the dormant Invincible and HMS Ark Royal were in Portsmouth as the latest carrier commitment was made, the middle sister, Illustrious, was three thousand miles away. She was cruising off the east coast of the United States. On her bridge, Captain Tim Fraser looked out as, just a few hundred metres away, two of the US Navy’s 100, 000-ton giants manoeuvred to keep station on his ship, one on each beam. It made him feel rather humble. But as he gazed across the water at these two American behemoths, he had another thought. Britain’s two new ships, he reflected, would in future represent something close to that level of capability. He knew why these vessels would add so much to Britain’s defence capabilities even as, back in Britain, many others were still Parading their doubts.
Tim Fraser had been just three years old when CVA-01 was cancelled. He joined the Navy in January 1982, straight from school, just weeks before the Falklands War. Julian Oswald, who was then just a few years away from becoming First Sea Lord, had joined Dartmouth to escape Latin. Young Fraser had similarly felt that he did not want to pursue the academic life any longer. He wanted to join the services. It might have been the Royal Marines. In fact, it was the Navy. But he and his fellow new entrants would watch as the ship that they were supposed to go aboard for their sea training, HMS Fearless, sailed off to war.
Now, twenty-five years later, he had also felt the lift in spirits aboard his command, the Fleet flagship, following the latest news about the long-promised new carriers. Many of his ship’s company had been involved with the planning for the new vessels. For many of them, it had already seemed like a very long road.
But they also had plenty else on their minds just at that time as well. For the past ten days, the ship had been a hive of activity. They had some unusual visitors – fourteen US Marine Corps Harriers and their pilots and support personnel, some 200 people in all.
It was a bitter-sweet experience for the Commander (Air), Henry Mitchell, a former Sea Harrier pilot and erstwhile commander of the now-defunct Sea Harrier force. This was a chance really to put Illustrious through her paces with a full complement of aircraft. And there had not been too much opportunity for that lately. But it was thanks only to the Americans.
Of course, there was a war going on, and the British Harrier force was much in demand in Afghanistan. But there was also a sense among the Navy’s aviators that the RAF now had more than its fair share of say over what the Harriers did in the new joint set-up, and that it was not being at all co-operative about getting the planes to sea.
For now, though, Henry Mitchell had an enthusiastic group of pilots aboard Illustrious, and a contingent of Harriers that were better equipped in many respects than anything now in the British inventory. But this was not just making the best of a bad job. It was unreservedly good in the sense of making a reality of multinational co-operation that would increasingly be the order of the day. For as long as people could remember, British and American naval aircraft had ‘cross-decked’ on each other’s carriers, but never on this scale – an entire air group of foreign jets. Illustrious would carry out similar trials in the months ahead with Spanish and Italian naval Harriers as well. Perhaps the Royal Navy did not have to be beholden to the RAF after all, even without its Sea Harriers any more.
Illustrious’ cruise off the eastern seaboard of the United States in the summer of 2007 offered another alluring window onto another possible future. In the calm waters, there hove into view what was for the entire crew a totally unfamiliar shape. As it came in to a hover over Illustrious’ rear flight deck, it looked awkward and ungainly. This was the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor, making its first landing on a British ship – a machine that can take-off and land like a helicopter, but fly as fast and as high as a conventional propeller-driven aircraft. It had suffered a prolonged and troubled birth, and had seemingly faced more attempts to kill it off than the Royal Navy’s carrier force. It remained controversial.
The Royal Navy certainly coveted the Osprey, particularly as a replacement for its ageing Sea Kings in the airborne surveillance role. It had plenty of advantages over helicopters, but it was also painfully expensive. And money was so tight that the Navy still could not count absolutely on its new carriers.
Such was the scale of the defence funding problem that late 2007 had seen an unprecedented revolt of five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, stridently calling for increased spending. But, even given the growing anxieties among the general public about the conditions in which service personnel were both fighting and living, the appetite for more defence spending was limited, especially as the general economic climate was turning decidedly unsettled after a long period of sustained growth.
With the budget increasingly overloaded, the tribal survival instincts of the individual services were inevitably re-asserting themselves over the imposed ethos of jointness. In Whitehall, as out at sea on Illustrious, the Navy at the highest level would observe that the RAF was being less than fully helpful or enthusiastic about the joint Harrier force. The agreement that Jock Slater had set such store by ten years earlier was certainly fraying at the edges, although both he and his chief assistant then and successor now, Jonathon Band, would insist that they did not regret the move.
Hostility and resistance to the new carriers was also still evident in other parts of the Ministry of Defence. The strange irony was that what seemed to keep the project alive was the backing from the new occupant of Ten Downing Street. Gordon Brown’s style on the world stage may have been a sharp contrast to that of his predecessor, and he may have had more of an inclination towards the developmental, softer side of power projection. But, as an old-style, power-broking sort of politician, he also seemed to see the value of what the carrier could bring to the diplomatic negotiating table.
But, with the lingering Iraq and Afghanistan commitments, the urgent demands to equip troops on the front line clearly took priority. Equally clearly, it still left the Naval Staff with a dilemma about how far and how hard to press its own agenda.
In fact, Admiral Band and his colleagues were presented with multiple frustrations: irritation at the continuing attacks from inside and outside the Ministry of Defence on the new carriers; disappointment at what they saw as the apparent public failure to recognize that the Navy really was doing its bit in operations; and dismay that the sacrifices that the Navy had already made in its ship numbers, and even more the support of those that were left, seemed to have been forgotten already. ‘I think it’s very, very poorly understood,’1 observed Mark Stanhope. He had just taken over at the Northwood headquarters. He had been based in the United States as the deputy NATO commander for transformation. Now that he was back, he really noticed the shrinkage that had taken place in the Navy while he had been away.
The cuts in maintenance, to help support the Army, were also having an impact. ‘Over the last three or four years the Fleet has become more fragile. ’2 Those words from the admiral had found substance in the tribulations of HMS Illustrious, which had just had to delay her latest deployment to the Middle East and Indian Ocean, codenamed Orion 08, because of various equipment failures.
There was certainly, from the Navy’s point of view, still plenty to do, that was stretching it thin. There were the patrols in the Gulf, and also to help with maritime security in the Indian Ocean. There were commitments to NATO, in the north and south Atlantic, and in the Caribbean. The Navy had at one stage been supplying more than half the forces in Afghanistan, with Royal Marines, helicopters, and its share of the Harrier force. It would be preparing to do so again: Admiral Stanhope was having to find 400 Royal Navy personnel – two frigates’ worth – to retrain for operations ashore, to help fill the gaps. But that was certainly not attracting public attention.
The Royal Navy, and indeed all navies around the world, suffer in the age of instantaneous media communication and short attention spans. Being engaged over the horizon, and with long-term presence as a key function, have become structural weaknesses, especially when daily firefights in Afghanistan’s Helmand province are beamed into living rooms.
Even the mighty US Navy was feeling it, and grappling with similar issues to the Royal Navy, albeit on a much larger scale. For Britain, the basic choice is whether to be in the carrier business or out of it. For the United States, it is how many carrier strike groups to have. By 2008, the core Pentagon budget, plus the extra money for Iraq and Afghanistan, had reached over 700 billion US dollars. And yet the US Army was at breaking-point. The US Navy, and the US Air Force, faced withering fire in the US Congress over the extravagance of their programmes and ambitions. And all the services were bracing themselves for that time in the indeterminate future when the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns would start to decline, but so too would the budgets, and the feeding frenzy for funds would really begin. To prepare the ground, in October 2007, the US Navy and its sister services
– the US Marines Corps and the US Coastguard – unveiled a vision for the future: ‘A Co-Operative Strategy for 21st Century Sea power’. 3 It would have as many messages for those beyond the United States as it would for its domestic audience.
It began with the familiar – the potency of maritime forces as levers of deterrence: ‘preventing wars is preferable to fighting wars’, and ‘peace does not preserve itself’. It clearly inhabited the same world of globalization as the Royal Navy, in which ‘the maritime domain … carries the lifeblood of a global system that links every country on earth’.
The forces it envisaged were clearly familiar too, if not necessarily the way that they might be employed. Even major wars might not be conventional. Climate change, weak governments, population movements, expanding economic frontiers and appetites, and terrorists and pirates, all represented threats to the stability of the system. A powerful fleet gave the United States the edge in terms of being able to respond, and the ability of maritime forces to project soft power for humanitarian relief gained added significance in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
This document was clearly meant to underpin the argument for rebuilding the US Navy from fewer than 280 ships to its goal of 313. But it concluded that not even the United States alone could police the sea lanes. So this was also a call for partnership. The original slogan had been co-operation in a ‘one-thousand-ship navy’. Perhaps the overtones of that sounded too menacing, but some re-branding had produced ‘the Global Maritime Partnership initiative’.
The real spectre for the US Navy, even if it was not mentioned in its new document, was China. That emerging competition was also part of a broader picture of a dynamic maritime region that seemed to be leaving the traditional European naval powers like Britain somewhat floundering. Japan, India, and South Korea all seemed to ‘get it’ as far as the utility of maritime power, and maritime influence, were concerned, and were all building up navies bigger than the Royal Navy.
That obvious focus for the US Navy on a particular region, and the explicit acknowledgement of the limits of US power, were significant for the Royal Navy in the post-Iraq world. What the broader fallout would be for maritime forces from the Iraq and Afghanistan nightmares was still unclear.
These interventions seemed to highlight the passing of the ‘uni-polar moment’, when the United States was dominant as the world’s only superpower. Instead, the world was becoming non-polar, with a chastened United States in relative decline, but no other power or power bloc in a position to assert its own authority or influence. 4 For Britain, the alternative power centres of the European Union and NATO looked fragile.
The new United Kingdom national security strategy reaffirmed that Britain would in most cases act in future as part of NATO or in coalitions. But it also recognized the need to maintain an independent capability. And the premium on that could increase with the new uncertainties over who may or may not be willing to take the lead in the next crisis. In that context, new aircraft carriers – rather than being a trap that would suck the country into somebody else’s intervention – could provide a significant instrument of leverage. They would help maintain a critical link with the United States, a form of power projection that the United States clearly understood and respected, and one which could even make a real difference to the increasingly overstretched US maritime forces. They could impress and influence the new regional powers who were seeking aircraft carriers of their own. But mostly the new British carriers, perhaps in conjunction with the French, could provide the kernel for an independent European military intervention capability, so that Europe would not be beholden to Washington in an intervention of its choosing.
Of course, there are other military instruments or statements of intent that potential partners set just as much store by, not least that of ‘boots on the ground’. But the true cost of that has also been brought home. ‘Navies are very expensive to build and invest in initially, but actually they’re quite cheap to run in comparison to armies when you deploy them,’ observed Admiral Stanhope. ‘If you build a credible deterrent in a naval sense, and operate it, that’s a lot better, a lot cheaper on the balance sheet in the end than not having a deterrent posture in the first place and having to deploy armies to sort your problems out. We know how expensive armies are to deploy, we’ve been seeing it for the past five years. ’5
At one level, the Iraq experience did seem to validate a lot of what navies said that they were about. And deterrence was one of those elements. The early intervention with minimum political risks, the ability to remain on hand with low exposure on the ground, in a global political environment where friendly host nations were becoming even harder to find. The pendulum may have swung too far towards the land-based contingency. An adjustment in the other direction, not least to secure the carrier programme and restore a reasonable balance to the rest of the Fleet, might seem justifiable. But to respond to the quagmire by saying ‘never again’, and trying to push the pendulum in the direction of a purely maritime strategy, would probably be neither wise nor politically possible.
Both in Iraq and Afghanistan experience seemed to teach everyone the lesson that to have real impact, military force is not enough. The US Navy seemed to lead the way in reminding people that maritime forces were excellent vehicles for the delivery of soft power as well as hard power. Its deployment of the giant hospital ship USNS Comfort on a humanitarian mission to Latin America in 2007 became an emblem of what could be done.
Again, how far to take the new hearts and minds ethos in the construction of a navy, at the expense of what fighting capabilities, would be a difficult balance. In terms of latent capability, of course, the bigger the ship, the better. A key part of the Royal Navy’s approach to its new prize, the CVF, was always to emphasize its flexibility. ‘I can’t tell you whether the driver is going to be another fifteen years of doing aviation in the Middle East,’ Admiral Band would reflect. ‘Or whether it’s a case of taking all the jets off and putting on lots of helicopters and doing a huge humanitarian “tsunami mark five”, which is what this carrier can do. ’6
That did not stop the critics rolling their eyes with the thought that the Navy’s answer to every question was two aircraft carriers. But the admirals were also getting tired of pressing home the argument of just how useful these ships could be, and just how many policy doors and options that they would be able to open. After all, while the British prevaricated, others were going ahead with their plans. The Italians, the Spanish, and the Indians have all been building or buying bigger ships than they already have, albeit not on the scale of the British ones. The Chinese were pursuing their carrier ambitions, while the Russians said that they wanted to start building up their carrier fleet again. Even the Japanese, so long precluded from the carrier business, found the logic of the move for their burgeoning fleet irresistible, and were gingerly stepping on to the ladder of aircraft-carrying warships.
As the debate and delay in Britain continued, one of the protagonists from the battles over CVA-01 re-entered the fray. Michael Quinlan, who went on from the job of private secretary to the Chief of the Air Staff to become the top civil servant at the Ministry of Defence. He had not changed his view that aircraft carriers ‘are an expensive way of providing a modest amount of air power’. 7
But surely the details of the case were rather different now. In Michael Quinlan’s day, the Air Staff zeroed in on HMS Hermes, which could carry only between five and seven Buccaneer bombers, against a much larger potential array of RAF aircraft. Now, the thirty or so JSFs that the new ships could carry would amount to just about as much as Britain would ever contemplate deploying in the future. That was perhaps one of the reasons why the RAF seemed to be getting edgier again about the prospect of the new ships.
The bill is certainly high, including for the aircraft. But a significant number of them would be needed anyway, with or without the carriers. And the cost of the two ships, although not small, would be less than one new US carrier. The vulnerability question would not go away. The continuing proliferation of new precision weaponry tipped the scales one way, but the likely absence of a general war at sea and the increased protection issues of exposed land bases, assuming they would be available at all, tipped them back the other way. Indeed, the biggest threat to these ships would probably always be in the corridors of Whitehall.
Still, on 3 July 2008, a historic event took place on board HMS Ark Royal in Portsmouth harbour. A government minister finally signed a production contract for the two new CVFs, HM Ships Queen Elizabeth and Prince Of Wales, to be delivered in 2014 and 2016. It was ten years since the intention to build the ships had been announced. It was fully sixty-six years since the orders were placed in the depths of the Second World War for Britain’s last two big sister aircraft carriers, HMS Eagle and the previous Ark Royal.
But it was not quite history turning full circle. For that to happen, the two new carriers would have to be fully at sea under the White Ensign. And the questions persisted. The total bill for the ships alone was 3. 9 billion pounds. The country and the global economy were heading for a severe slump. The Ministry of Defence’s budget still looked massively over-extended, and the cries about the opportunity cost of the carriers in terms of urgent equipment needs for the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan would not go away. At the same time, there was even less appetite, across any major part of the political spectrum, for a significant boost in overall defence spending.
Even the Navy’s own day-to-day presence on the world’s oceans seemed even more under threat. Just days before the carrier order, confirmation came that the almost equally cherished new destroyer class, the Type 45, would be limited to just six ships – half the number originally envisaged in the SDR. The Type 45’s own mushrooming costs hardly helped matters. But the news also looked like a sacrifice on the twin altars of the carriers and the immediate operational requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of Navy frigates looked destined to sag to even more strikingly low levels, even if there was still a faint hope of some revival if the FSC programme could eventually deliver on the promise of a more affordable escort ship.
There were also still question-marks over the aircraft that the carriers are designed to operate, the JSF. Was that programme affordable? When would the JSF actually arrive? And was the country even ordering the right version?
But, for all the questions, the carrier advocates maintained that, if Britain still wants to be a major international player able to project real power, there is no better or more flexible military instrument, especially if the stomach for interventions on the Iraq and Afghanistan models is now in doubt, and with a new debate to be entered on just how Western democracies can and should employ their armed forces and apply military power in the future. Within weeks of the CVF order, a small but bitter war in the Caucasus between Russia and Georgia was also a not-so-gentle reminder that this is not just the world of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Just when and how the presence of a British aircraft carrier might be decisive is difficult to predict, but then experience has suggested that scenario planning has always been an imperfect guide to actual need, and that was one of the striking lessons of HMS Invincible’s career.
There were at least three ages of Invincible. She was born as a hybrid, established a distinct role for herself in her early years, and then began a slow and tortuous transformation into something that she was never designed to be. She started life operating with five jets, and ended up carrying sixteen. She was tested at the outset, when she was on the disposal list, and she emerged with flying colours as the most recognizable ship in the Royal Navy. Her Falklands fame kept her name in the news, and she also kept busy in the Balkans and the Gulf. In so doing, she helped make a case for the new carriers.
The Navy squeezed more out of Invincible and her sisters than it ever expected, and so kept the carrier concept alive. In that sense, the ships were a great success for the Navy. But it then became trapped by their limitations. Others would argue that it has become trapped by its aspiration for something more.
This particular carrier battle has been going on for over fifty years. The baggage of history and inter-service animosity weighs heavily. Whatever her origins, Invincible was a proud ship. One way or another, hers will likely be a pivotal period in the saga.