A crashed RN F35 on the seafloor.*
My readers knew all of this already; the Royal Navy will not be mission effective as a blue water navy after 2030 and the era of aircraft carriers is over.
Eight billion dollars for future fish apartments.
Eight billion dollars.
Kit Klarenberg goes into exquisite and painful detail on the lack of planning, shortsightedness and criminal negligence in being complete unaware of the Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA) that are foreshadowing surface navies quickly demolished and sunk by munitions a fraction of the cost of these doomed capital ships.
Western military hegemony will sunset in your life time and the sun set on the British Empire quite awhile ago.
On November 15th, The Times published a remarkable report, revealing serious “questions” are being asked about the viability of Britain’s two flagship aircraft carriers, at the highest levels of London’s defence establishment. Such perspectives would have been unmentionable mere months ago. Yet, subsequent reporting seemingly confirms the vessels are for the chop. Should that come to pass, it will represent an absolutely crushing, historic defeat for the Royal Navy – and the US Empire in turn – without a single shot being fired.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales first set sail in 2017 and 2019 respectively, after 20 years in development. The former arrived at the Royal Navy’s historic Portsmouth base with considerable fanfare, a Ministry of Defence press release boasting that the carrier would be deployed “in every ocean around the world over the next five decades.” The pair were and remain the biggest and most expensive ships built in British history, costing close to $8 billion combined. Ongoing operational costs are likewise vast.
He goes on:
As elite US foreign policy journal National Interest acknowledged in March 2024, “the Royal Navy remains unable to adequately defend or operate” its two carriers “independently” – code for the Empire being consistently compelled to deploy its own naval and air assets to support the pair. This is quite some failure, given British officials originally intended for the vessels to not only lead NATO exercises and deployments, but “slot into” US navy operations wherever and whenever necessary.
The Empire’s inability to outsource its hegemonic duties to Britain has precipitated a critical “carrier gap”. Despite maintaining an 11-strong fleet, Washington cannot deploy the vessels to every global flashpoint at once, grievously undermining her power and influence at a time of tremendous upheaval worldwide. In a bitter irony, by encouraging and facilitating London’s emulation of its own flawed and outdated reliance on aircraft carriers, the US has inadvertently created yet another needy imperial dependant, further draining its already fatally overstretched military resources.
Read the whole thing and you will find the captured defense journalism class won’t utter these words.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/collapsing-empire-rip-royal-navy?r=24rayn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
* The F-35 the Brits crashed was due to their failure to remove one of the inlet plugs, which the MOD calls “intake blanks.” It’s bright orange and covers the entire air inlet. Impossible to miss unless everyone was drunk or British. In this case, it wasn’t the F-35’s fault. The MOD clown posse admitted this in a report.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
