I wonder what THINK DEFENCE, GvG, Marcase and other European readers think about this...via the Financial Times...This is a snippet...read the whole thing here...
The first is to offer the second carrier to Nato, designating it a Nato asset with the modifications and operational costs underwritten jointly by all Nato countries, in the way that the Alliance’s Awacs fleet is operated today. The Royal Navy could supply the crew, or the carrier could be manned by a multinational Nato crew. Cost-sharing, the crewing arrangements and deployment patterns would present challenges, but not insuperable ones. A month after the alliance reaffirmed its commitment to common defence at the Lisbon summit, this may be an idea whose time has come. Sharing a carrier’s costs would project Nato’s power in defence of the sea lanes and would be striking affirmation of its purpose. It would be a way of challenging Nato members whose defence spending falls short of the target of 2 per cent of GDP to take a fairer share of the strain. This option is one that Nato defence ministers could discuss at their meeting next March.A second option would be to share the carrier with France. The UK/France summit in November at which David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy signed might make this viable. The carrier would need to be configured to take French naval planes as well as JSFs; and both countries would need to agree that when either had its exclusively national carrier in refit the second carrier would be immediately available as a replacement.A third option is sharing the carrier with America. The huge budget deficit confronting the Obama administrationmakes cuts to the US defence budget all but inevitable. The US navy’s carrier fleet is a likely target. One way of easing the strain on both US and UK naval budgets would be to share the second carrier, perhaps for a year at a time; perhaps with a UK starboard crew and a US port one. This would be a bi-national variation of the two-crew system currently used by each nation when deploying Trident submarines.
Hi Sol,
ReplyDeleteYes, an interesting proposal but it will have the old admirals huffing and puffing at double time!
The political challenges would be significant but nothing is beyond the realms of the possible and we have already announced or have a number of biltaeral arrangements, as the article says, the most notable of which is with France.
There is no doubt the current government are in favour of greater European integration no matter what they say and the French option would be the most likely I think. The French are in a need of a second carrier, have shallow pockets and have contributed several hundreds of millions of pounds to the CVF design already. The CVF is more or less identical to their new carrier aspiration.
I have always maintained the cost and capability arguments on the switch from B to C were a load of hot air, its all about politics and sharing. If we had stuck with the B, despite it being our best option, we would not have had the option to share the second, unwanted, CVF
Switching to cats and traps allows the third to form the joint UK/French '2nd carrier'
Although the new build would likely form the French first team player with CdG operating as the spare
Interesting times we live in eh!!
First of, I'm all for it to keep that second carrier afloat. So although these are all nice ideas, they probably won't work.
ReplyDeleteBack in the '80s there was an idea to man a NATO frigate with a multi-national NATO crew (a US Knox class was offered IIRC). So the medical staff could be, say, Belgian, the ASW division could be Norwegian, and a British helicopter detachment etc.
That idea fizzled and died, and instead there are now individual exchanges during joint NATO (fleet) deployments which have a temporary character.
Regarding the carrier, there's the financial aspect first. Right now NATO is unwilling to jointly fund the (NATO approved art.5) mission in Afghanistan - THE reason why there are still not enough Euro-NATO troops over there. Funding an expensive joint carrier would be a bridge too far.
Jointly funding a carrier would also mean having a say in its deployment, and strategic needs still differ too much; some Eastern European countries are still nervous about Russia, and other European nations still see NATO as a pure defensive alliance, not a power projection, out-of-area one (another reason why some Euro-NATO countries don't want to get involved in far away A'Stan).
The NAEWF Awacs deployment to the US after 911 was a watershed move for some pure defense-minded countries who always figured those joint assets would never leave European airspace(!)
So it's a sympathetic idea, but would only work in a French-UK-US trilateral deal (with some countries adding small dets), if training and maintenance and interoperability issues can be solved.
Btw, French Rafales use a different cat & trap (Auto Carrier Landing) system than the US, so that still has to be solved.
Don't Rafales train on U.S. carriers?
ReplyDeleteThey did:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2050348/posts
However, it takes some considerable training and interoperability adjustments to make them truly combat effective. The US CVN combat center can't upload digital nav/target data to the Rafale for one. Different munitions (storage), spares, tools etc. etc.
Bad weather ops is another issue, as the Rafale still requires true hands-on flying during a US CVN carrier landing (F-18s have ACLS).