![]() Marine Corps F-35B fighter jets filling in empty slots on the flight deck. The Queen Elizabeth held its first seven-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific last year with nearly a dozen U.S. In Pentagon terms, every carrier needs three smaller ships as a defensive perimeter in treacherous waters and 65 to 70 carrier-fired jets. The problem is that Britain doesn’t have enough assets to create what Washington would recognize as a proper carrier strike group. assets, other nations providing units that assist in the protection of the flagship,” said Ian Feasey, the captain of the Queen Elizabeth. “We are the center of a layered defense system protected by all Type 45 destroyers, Type 23 frigates, submarines, and not just sovereign assets but, you know, U.S. ![]() Sitting at the far edge of the Hudson River last week, drawing glances from New Yorkers in lower Manhattan, the British carrier was alone, with only small boats servicing it with new conference-goers throughout the day. So if you don’t have the rest of that force … the carrier becomes a wasting asset.” Carriers are the ultimate power projection source. “If Great Britain’s going to reemerge as a sea power, they’re going to need more than just the carriers,” said Jerry Hendrix, a retired U.S. supercarriers that can fire F-35 fighter jets into the sky with an electromagnetic catapult.īut the question for the Royal Navy going forward, experts told Foreign Policy, is not how hard it can hit but, with just a fledgling fleet around its two carriers, whether Britain will be able to build enough ships around them with the Treasury’s purse strings getting tighter. amphibious assault ships, which only support aircraft with vertical takeoff, than U.S. The Queen Elizabeth more closely resembles U.S. and Chinese navies, the two largest fleets in the world. “The Royal Navy, although much smaller than in its heyday, is downsized to an appropriate level where they can still contribute punch above their weight with two aircraft carriers.”Įven if the British navy can punch above its weight, it is in a different weight class from the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet, responsible for Europe and Africa, and who now leads the Center for Maritime Strategy at the Navy League of the United States. They do live-fire missile shots, they do anti-submarine warfare, they do maritime interdiction operations, humanitarian assistance stuff, rotary wing from one ship to the next, cross-checking of personnel,” said James Foggo, a retired admiral who commanded the U.S. But experts who watched the 65,000-metric-ton HMS Queen Elizabeth, sporting a flight deck the size of three football fields, drop anchor near the Statue of Liberty saw hope for London’s promises to reemerge as a global naval superpower, pledging to have 24 surface ships underway by the first half of the next decade. Once the world’s largest navy, Britain had just 19 destroyers and frigates-and no aircraft carriers-after parliamentarians took a scalpel to the defense budget in the mid-2010s. After years of seeing ship numbers dwindle, the Royal Navy is trying to prove it is back on the uproll, parking its flagship carrier in New York Harbor last week for the world to see. ![]() ABOARD HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH-It wasn’t your father’s decrepit, old Royal Navy.
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