HMS Queen Elizabeth and Thoughts on the Royal Navy

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Aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth commissions
HMS Queen Elizabeth

Today, Queen Elizabeth commissioned. This 70,000 ton aircraft carrier is the most powerful warship the Royal Navy has ever possessed and, full of modern features, would be valued by any navy fortunate enough to have her. However, in many ways she marks just how far Britain has fallen.

Despite building the world’s first aircraft carrier (Argus in 1918) and conducting the first carrier raid (on the Tondern Zeppelin field in 1918), Royal Navy has been without an aircraft carrier since Illustrious (along with her Sea Harrier aircraft) was decommissioned in 2014. For the past three years Royal Navy sailors have instead been forced to train on board the numerous super carriers and assault ships of the United States, a former British colony.

With the scrapping of the Sea Harrier fleet, Britain also lost her last domestic fighter aircraft (Tornado and Typhoon were the result of multi-nation coalitions) and Queen Elizabeth will rely on the American F-35B instead. This dependency is driven home by the fact that she will not be conducting flight training off the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth, but off the United States base at Norfolk, Virginia.

Even after Queen Elizabeth has commissioned, she will continue to serve as a reminder of how the Royal Navy has been starved of funding - despite having space and weight for catapults and arrestor wires, she will posses neither and instead make do with the far less capable ski jump and vertical landing. This system will render Britain’s new carrier arguably less effective than those of India, another former colony. Adding further insult to this comparison is the fact that India has been continuously operating carriers since 1961.

Thus, the Royal Navy and all of Britain should pause after today’s celebrations and reflect on the fact that where they once boasted of a Navy larger than the next two combined, they now have a fleet that is smaller than those of the United States, the Peoples’ Republic of China, Russia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and India. This decline was not inevitable but the result of deliberate policy - there is no reason that an island nation with a proud naval history and the world’s fifth largest economy should have the world’s seventh largest fleet. Placing behind the world’s 12th largest economy (Russia) and a pacifist nation (Japan) should be a national embarrassment for the kingdom that once ruled the waves.

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