The Royal Navy’s Carrier Strike Group is headed out. Would it win in a fight?

On the other side of the ledger the group lacks the long-range surveillance capabilities of a fully formed US equivalent. The other matter in which it falls significantly short is in its ability to conduct strike missions, either ashore or against opposing ships. This will matter when they get to the Red Sea. 

The defence secretary’s statement yesterday makes the two aims of the deployment clear:

“This is a unique opportunity for the UK to operate in close coordination with our partners and allies in a deployment that not only shows our commitment to security and stability, but also provides an opportunity to bolster our own economy and boost British trade and exports”.

In other words, this is a matter of influence operations with trade engagement underpinning it: basically, what the Royal Navy has been doing for centuries. Trade with the Indo-Pacific reached £286 billion last year, 17 per cent of our total. Please tuck this away if you are having “the region is nothing to do with us” thoughts. 

Getting there will be interesting. Once HMS Prince of Wales is at sea (and by the way, 22 April is a sailing window, not a hard target) the ships will start forming up off Cornwall to embark aircraft and begin the process of integrating the group. This is harder than the Hollywood perception of military communications would have you believe, particularly when they get to the Mediterranean and start welcoming the other countries into the group. Shortly after this point they will plug into the large Nato exercise there called Neptune Strike. Actually, calling this the work-up phase is to diminish the impact and importance of it for Nato and European relations, but it will certainly provide a nicely graded preparation for what’s coming next.

The Red Sea involvement decision will be taken at the highest levels. It was conspicuously absent from yesterday’s announcement. Threat levels there remain high and commercial ships continue to avoid it and go around the Cape of Good Hope as they have done since December 2023. The US Carrier Strike Group currently there turned up the strike rate last month (with some tanking support from the RAF) but early signs are that it’s not making a huge difference to the Houthis and no difference at all to shipping. I have written previously on why I didn’t think a bombing strategy alone would work, no matter how severe. 

Nevertheless, this leaves those controlling the High Mast group with a dilemma. Do they a) scoot straight through and keep the beautifully crafted Indo-pacific programme intact, b) stop for a couple of weeks to join the USS Harry S Truman’s strikes – invaluable operational exposure but risks accusations of tokenism – or c) do they make this the new focus of the deployment and abandon the trade part in the Indo-Pac?

Most naval officers, like me, would always answer c) – operations trump influence. We are not diplomats but people who have trained to fight for our entire careers. It is, after all, a Carrier Strike Group not a Carrier Influence Group.

If only life were that simple, though. To start with, the mission against the Houthis is having very little effect even with US levels of resource. Our contribution wouldn’t tip the balance. The US Vice President calling us freeloaders while – us Brits alone among nations – are actually currently helping the US effort, well, that also has an effect. 

There is also the risk of operating there but this is where integrating properly with the US task group comes in. I wrote in January 2024 that HMS Queen Elizabeth should go there to assist so long as the US carrier group was there to mitigate our well known shortcomings. On that occasion we lacked the political risk appetite, and the ship didn’t go. I can see the same thing happening this time. The more political you are, or the less you understand how to mitigate risk in maritime operations, the more you might see this as just something to get through and get away from.

Once through this dilemma, the group will conduct a variety of exercises with India, Singapore, Malaysia and the US. There will be a major exercise with 19 partner nations off Australia. The presence of the group in those waters will make things such as the Aukus pact much more real.

The closer the group gets to China the more those who see the inevitable vulnerability of warships under a sky full of well-aimed hypersonic missiles will point out the folly of it all. What they are forgetting is that you cannot shoot a missile at a ship unless you have a good idea where it is and where it will be when the missile gets there.

The only reliable way to find a ship is to send a plane or ship of your own out there to find it: the “drinking straw” view offered by most satellites is not suitable.

But the Carrier Strike Group has airborne radar – albeit not the best, but it has it. Well operated airborne radar will inevitably detect probing Chinese ships and planes before they can find the carrier and finger it for a hypersonic missile.

And as well as eyes, the carrier has teeth. Twenty-four stealth fighters at sea at the same time is impressive even if as yet ours don’t carry the most powerful weapons. The Prince of Wales air wing cannot contend against the huge land-based air power of the People’s Republic, but out in the blue ocean her fifth generation planes would outmatch anything the current Chinese carriers – Liaoning and Shandong – could send against her. In a few years when the new Fujian is ready, or her enormous 120,000-ton successor, things will be very different. This year, however, would not be a good year for the Chinese to come out from under their land-based air and fight the Royal Navy in the deep blue.

This is the more so as the Carrier Group will be accompanied by an Astute class attack submarine. Chinese anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is not yet good enough to cope with probably one of the best and most dangerous attack subs in the world, and if the gloves came off, a lot of Chinese ships would wind up on the sea bed. On the flip side, China’s own subs are not yet advanced enough to threaten a task group protected by the best ASW operators anywhere – the Brits and northern Europeans.

Whether we detach a frigate or destroyer to sail through the Taiwan Strait as in 2021 will be an interesting indicator of where the thinking is on all this in a few months time.

For me, the greatest difficulty this trip poses is how to manage all the assets and people when they get back. We are so thin now, the sheer effort required to move something of this scale around the world comes with a long logistics and human tail. I still don’t think this is enough to stop them going, but it is a worry and will need careful management if it is not to become corrosive. There is no slack in any single element making up this task group.

Fatigue in the maintenance crews lost us a jet crashed into the sea during the 2021 deployment, so it’s interesting to see how many more support crews are embarking this time. Learning lessons is, of course, a key part of deploying like this and a very strong reason to keep doing it. The trip will also provide a great platform for testing new equipment such as cargo drones from 700X Naval Air Squadron, which will save a lot of helicopter hours by transferring small loads between ships. This is the direction of travel for maritime aviation and the sooner it can be normalised the better. 

This global deployment will be an adventure for all embarked. Something will change the plan at some point – that is an immutable law of maritime operations – but let’s hope it’s not like 2021 where Covid made the whole deployment much harder to manage and enormously unpleasant for those involved, imprisoned aboard their ships. Doing this every four years is not to take our eyes off Europe – we can do both and, on this deployment, we are. 

Bits of it will be tense, the Red Sea in particular, and how we manage that will give a clear indicator of our political appetite to use our carriers in the role for which they were built. It will also test if the mistaken but vocal “warships are now obsolete” crowd have got through to our decision makers. Videos of the Truman launching jets today should help, but let’s see. 

Finally, let’s not forget that while the 4,000 people number is impressive, that’s at least 4,000 families that are disrupted for eight months. For those embarked, it’s what you signed up for. For those left at home, not so much. I, and they, will be wishing Op High Mast fair winds and following seas for the duration of the deployment.