WI: no Queen Elizabeth class?

[griml0ck122]

As much as I love the Queen Elizabeth class carriers (I even trekked out to see them once), the more I look at the current Royal Navy, the more I think they were a mistake. Them, and their air wing seem to have become a black hole sucking in the entire uk defence budget. So, say the UK says no to the QE design, where do they go next? How does this affect the rest of the RN and UK as a whole?

My 2 cents is that you end up with smaller carriers, possibly with a foreign design like CdG or Juan Carlos, but on the flipside you get a more built-out RN escort fleet. In addition, without the requirement for a huge f-35b fleet, the Uk might go all in f-35a and actually get a proper fleet.
Anyway, what do you all think?

 

[Antonio]

Juan Carlos

Juan Carlos I is just a CVE, it served well under Armada Española commitments, but falls definitely short under the more ambitious RN needs. I think CdG is in a better suited position.

 

[Yellow Palace]

You need to understand where the requirement for the carriers came from; that's tied up in the 1997 SDR and the liberal interventionist foreign policy of Blair.

If the UK wants to pursue an interventionist foreign policy, it's going to see carriers as necessary, and the design process that lead to the QUEEN ELIZABETH class convinced the UK's institutions that smaller carriers were poor value for money. So realistically, it's big carriers or no carriers.

Giving up carriers means giving up the expeditionary option. Might be a difficult sell for a UK that retook the Falklands just fifteen years earlier, but possible. That means a lot more than just no carriers - it probably means a focus on in-area (i.e. NATO) operations. Which, in the mid-1990s, means defence cuts, since peace has broken out.

My guess is, then, the RN's destroyer & frigate force goal is smaller than in OTL through the late 1990s and early 2000s, but larger than the current force.

 

[Rule of cool]

Carriers are a once in almost a lifetime decision whereas decisions about surface escorts and combat aircraft are made every decade. I can see why the argument is made that the QEs are hollowing out the RN, however the Falklands showed how difficult it is to bulk up a smaller but balanced force.

 

[Archibald]

CdG is nuclear, plus too small and cramped for RN needs. It can be considered as an atempt to cram a (shortened) Nimitz C-13 catapult into a Clemenceau "hull package" stretched to its limits. Plus nuclear power, of course.

Unfortunately from 1986 onwards it locked the French navy into either a) getting a perfect twin, or b) face the logistics of two extremely different carriers : one small nuclear and one big not nuclear Q.E. Would have looked like Laurel and Hardy.
Other than that: CVF was a fine design, at least it had the CATOBAR to justify its 65 000 tons. Unlike the Q.Es.

 

[zen]

This trope again?
Naval budget was going to get squeezed no matter what, when one is intervening in Afghanistan and invading Iraq.
There is an argument that the Type 45 numbers or Astute might have progressed better.
FE to FSC to GCS to Type 26 was inevitable under the conditions regardless of CVF.

As for alternative carriers, the CVF process was extensive and No.11 (Treasury) deliberately delayed and the same question (can we do this with smaller cheaper) asked repeatedly to expensive (studies) answers that always came back with something like CVF. Eventually No.11 had to relent or face the SDR naval element completely revised in public to massive scorn from media and opposition.

F35 killed FOAS which was doomed anyway since domestic design teams were wound up for Eurofighter in 1985 (precise date ?).