Britain May Not Deploy an Aircraft Carrier to the Middle East After All

Downing Street plays down the possibility of the government deploying one of Britain’s two aircraft carriers to assist the defence of allies and British citizens in the Middle East, over a week after military strikes against Iran began.

Ten days into Operation Epic Fury and the United Kingdom still hasn’t deployed a warship to the Middle East, with air warfare destroyer HMS Dragon still days away from even leaving Britain, and the government now rubbishing the notion of sending an aircraft carrier.

While Downing Street spokesmen were happy to encourage speculation over the weekend on a potential deployment of HMS Prince of Wales — one of Britain’s large, modern supercarrier-size ships — they have now spun on their heels over the matter, deflecting away from the idea. The Portsmouth Evening News, which covers the home of the Royal Navy at the Portsmouth Naval Base, states Downing Street gave clear signals it wasn’t to happen.

The spokesman is reported to have said the decision to move the carrier up from 14 days readiness to sail to five on Saturday was not “linked to the Iranian activity”, and that “there is no decision taken to deploy her”.

More broadly, they claimed the government’s recent deployments to the Middle East had been “significant”: something that would come as a surprise to Britain’s allies in the region which have expressed alarm and dismay at Britain’s failure to deliver on the security they feel they are owed.

The UK has two carriers, the largest ships the Royal Navy has ever operated and some of the largest warships in world history. The first in class, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is now at the tail-end of a scheduled seven month refit in Scotland and may leave dry dock as soon as this month, but is unlikely to be ready to deploy for months after as it works up again after being out of the water since last summer.

Her sister ship, HMS Prince of Wales, has recently returned from an eight month deployment to the Indo-Pacific. While she remains the on-duty carrier, the stresses of the deployment has seen her alongside in Portsmouth for basic maintenance tasks before going to sea again. Parts of Prince of Wales’ flight deck were covered by large marquees and scaffolding in recent weeks but were in the process of being struck down over the weekend in the wake of the ship being put on heightened alert.

British state media the BBC reports that at this stage, according to their government sources, that Prince of Wales is actually to join a forthcoming NATO exercise in the Arctic.

That the Iran strikes came as the UK’s available carrier was being spruced up and re-provisioned at the end of a major deployment was “particularly inconvenient”, retired Royal Navy Commodore Steve Prest told armed forces news network BFBS, while observing there’s so much “hazard and tension” in the world, such an eventuality could have been foreseen.

Cdre. Prest observed the Royal Navy had lost around 1,500 trained sailors in the last year, enough to man ten frigates, and the United Kingdom is in a position where “even if we did have the hulls available, we probably don’t have the sailors to crew them”.

Indeed, even if the left-wing Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer now decided to send an aircraft carrier to the Middle East or eastern Mediterranean, such capital ships are extremely vulnerable without their attendant screen of escorts, and evidently the UK is presently struggling to generate those, too.

After decades of savage cuts to the military, as the government persistently found other priorities to for taxpayers’ money — health and welfare account for a third of the whole national budget — the Royal Navy has a skeleton force of destroyers and frigates. Indeed, of the just six destroyers in commission, not one was available to immediately deploy, and the supposed date of departure for Type-45 air warfare destroyer HMS Dragon continues to slip back.

Various reasons have been proposed for this delay, and the Armed Forces Minister Al Carns has even claimed, incredibly given air defence is the ship’s primary purpose, that the “vessel was being fitted out for a different task. We’ve now completely re-rolled it”, and this was taking time. Dragon spent days at the Portsmouth Upper Harbour Ammunition Facility last week — an isolated artificial island away from Portsmouth city and the dockyard, where the dangerous task of provisioning a ship can happen in comparative safety — and is reportedly back there today.

The Portsmouth Evening News notes no sailing is likely for days, meaning it is unlikely the Royal Navy will have an air warfare ship close to Britain’s allies in need of assistance defending themselves from Iranian drones for over two weeks after the conflict began. In 1982, the Royal Navy was able to pull together an armada of over 100 ships at short notice to retake the Falkland Islands from an Argentinian invasion.

The British newspaper of record The Times reported last week on the sense of outrage among Britain’s allies, who in some cases the UK has arrangements to maintain military bases on their land in return for an understanding over collaborative defence, and in others where large numbers of British expatriates live. There are two British bases on the island of Cyprus, although they are sovereign British territory, rather than being inside the political entity of the nation of Cyprus, and has military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

The paper cites a source in the UAE who is stated to have reflected: “There was a feeling that the prime minister had to be dragged there… It obviously reflects badly in the eyes of the Gulf Cooperation Council.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has been most excoriating of all, calling Britain a “once great ally” and reflecting it’s now too late to send ships. President Trumps said: “we don’t need them any longer… We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”.