“How 13 Whitehall mandarins crippled
Britain’s aircraft carriers – and how to fix them.”

The chain of events that weakened the UK’s most critical defence system.

By Lewis Page, Sunday Telegraph, 17 July 2022.

1. Two weeks ago, at a Nato summit, Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, pledged a strong commitment by the UK to defend Eastern Europe against Putin’s Russia. “I think we’ll dedicate one of the carrier groups to it,” Wallace commented.
2. The suggestion that Britain has more than one carrier group is, bluntly, absurd. It’s faintly absurd to suggest that we have even one.
3. Consider Operation Fortis last year. This was a massive effort by the Royal Navy, in which our new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabethwas sent to the Far East. The idea was to demonstrate the reach of Global Britain and make China think twice about invading Taiwan. HMS Queen Elizabeth was designed to operate with an air group including 36 combat jets and four radar aircraft. She can carry up to 60 aircraft in total.
4. For Op Fortis, sailing right into China’s backyard, she carried just 18 jets and a motley assortment of 14 helicopters. Three helicopters had been equipped as “Crowsnest” radar aircraft, but the project had suffered delays and Crowsnest was not fully ready for service. It is not expected to be properly ready until next year.
5. Radar aircraft cover is essential, as the Royal Navy learned at terrible cost in the Falklands. The French and the Americans use radar planes, not helicopters: planes can fly higher and further than a helicopter, delivering hugely better capability.
6. Xi Jinping probably wasn’t impressed by Operation Fortis. And indeed, the picture gets worse. Just eight of the Queen Elizabeth’s shrunken jet force last year were British service aircraft: the other 10 were from the US Marines. Britain has only a tiny handful of carrier planes.
7. Under current plans this situation will improve only very slowly and will never be fully sorted out. According to numbers given to Parliament by my old RAF comrade Air Marshal Dicky Knighton in April, one day in the 2030s it might be possible to send a single British carrier to sea with say 24 British jets – still nothing like what she was built to carry.
8. The idea of two viable carrier groups is fantasy. The notion that we have even one today is so far from reality as to be untrue.
9. How can this be? Britain has the fourth largest defence budget in the world. We comfortably outspend both France and Russia. Both those nations have deployed aircraft carriers with more than 30 warplanes aboard.
10. Our problems are self-inflicted. They stem from a stupid decision made in 2011 by three very senior bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence, and a campaign by these three and 10 of their subordinates to push that decision through. These 13 Whitehall mandarins crippled our carriers.
11. The problem is that the Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship Prince of Wales, unlike US and French carriers, have no catapults to launch planes and no arrester wires to catch them on landing. This means that the only aeroplanes our ships can operate are “jump jets”, ones equipped with vertical thrust. The famous Harrier was of this type, but it has long been out of production. Britain sold off its Harriers in 2010.
12. The only jump jet available to buy today is the B version of the F-35 Lightning. This F-35B is the only warplane our carriers, as now configured, can use. It is the first aircraft ever to combine stealth, supersonic speed and vertical thrust all in one. It is one of the most complicated aircraft in the world and it will never be bought in large numbers.
13. This lack of production scale means that the F-35Bis, and will remain, extremely expensive to buy and to fly. Its heavy, bulky vertical thrust machinery also means that it cannot carry much fuel or weaponry: it is not a particularly good warplane, despite its horrific cost.
14. The eye-watering price of the F-35B is one reason our carriers don’t – and won’t – have anything like a proper complement of jets. Ships which should each be more powerful than many national air forces, delivering enormous clout for Britain, will instead serve mainly as feeble helicopter platforms.
15. It doesn’t have to be this way.
16. It wasn’t going to be like this. From 2010 until 2012, it was planned that the Royal Navy would get carriers with catapults. In time, those carriers could have operated the F-35C, the catapult F-35, which the US Navy is slowly introducing.
17. Unburdened by vertical-thrust equipment, the F-35C is not only a much better warplane than the F-35B: it is also significantly cheaper to buy and fly.
18. But that wasn’t the best part of the Royal Navy catapult plan. The great thing about a catapult carrier is that it doesn’t have to use expensive F-35 stealth planes at all. Instead, we would have started out with a normal catapult jet.
19. This could have been the Rafale M from France: but in fact by 2012 our pilots were learning to fly the F-18 Hornet aboard US carriers. This is the same jet which takes centre stage in the new blockbuster film Top Gun: Maverick.
20. The Hornet was, and is, excellent value for money. It is the mainstay jet of the mighty US Navy and many allied nations, and will be through the 2020s and beyond. Because hundreds have already been made and it remains in production, it is very affordable.
21. Once the Royal Navy had a catapult carrierit was inevitable that we would get some F-18s at some point, rather than leaving our new ships empty except for helicopters and a handful of expensive F-35s – as we now are.
22. This would have had implications beyond the Navy. The F-18 doesn’t have to fly from a carrier: it’s quite happy working from a land airbase, as indeed it is used by most nations that have it.
23. The F-18 is in the same performance class as the RAF’s main combat plane, the Eurofighter Typhoon. The Typhoon was conceived as a pure air-to-air fighter and the process of adding air-to-ground bombing capability has been ridiculously expensive and prolonged. Even now that some RAF Typhoons are finally upgraded for ground attack (many others have been permanently mothballed) they remain extremely expensive to fly.
24. If we had some F-18s we would tend to use them for most tasks, even if the carriers were not required at all. It would be much cheaper than using Typhoons.
25. Indeed, if we had a force of F-18s, we might justifiably wonder whether we really need the RAF’s beloved Typhoon at all – especially as Typhoons would be rendered completely obsolete by fully capable (that is, non-jumpjet) F-35C stealth planes arriving at some point, as they would if we had a catapult carrier. Would we worry about air-to-air without Typhoons?
26. Well, the F-18 is the air-to-air fighter which protects the US Navy’s nuclear supercarrier groups and various top-20 economies such as Canada, Australia and Switzerland. Fully capable, non-jumpjet F-35s will protect those carriers and nations in future.
27. It would seem clear that the same aircraft are good enough for us, especially when we recall that for many years our primary air-to-air fighter was the laughing-stock Tornado F3.
28. So, the catapult carrier plan, with its more-or-less-inevitable force of F-18s soon and proper, non-jumpjet F-35C stealth jets in future, was a terrible threat to the Typhoon.
29. The stakes were – are – very high. The British Government will spend tens of billions operating combat jets out to 2040. In the absence of a catapult carrier, the great bulk will go on Typhoons.
30. The jumpjet F-35B, crippled by its vertical lift machinery, cannot be Britain’s primary strike plane and will never become affordable like other, proper F-35s. Provided we never get a catapult carrier, Typhoons continue to have a future well beyond 2030.
31. If on the other hand we get a catapult carrier, F-18s and proper non-jumpjet F-35Cs will inevitably take an increasing slice of all those billions. In that scenario it would be hard to see the expensive Typhoon remaining for long.
32. We might also wonder, given the bloodsucking histories of the Typhoon and Tornado F3 before it, if we really want their successor, the Tempest, either.

Leaks and misinformation.

33. Going back to 2010 it was clear that the catapult plan would be simple and affordable. The design of the Queen Elizabeth class is actually titled “Adaptable CVF”, with the word “Adaptable” specifically meaning that the option is there to install catapults and arrester gear: not only during construction, but at any time afterwards.
34. The builders stated this in a fact sheet, since suppressed: “Great care has been taken to ensure that CVF could be adapted for conventional carrier aircraft … each ship can be altered later in its service life to accommodate catapults and arrester gear.”
35. The Royal Navy website, indeed, said then that the CVF class had an “adaptable design that, while configured to operate [jumpjet] aircraft, can be altered later in its projected 40-50-year service life to accommodate catapults and arrester gear”.
36. One should also note that the two carriers cost us £6.2bn. It is undisputed that £1.6bn of this results from the government purposely slowing down their construction: the normal cost would have been £4.6bn.
37. In other words, if another entire new carrier were ordered the cost could not be more than £2bn: new, special shipyard facilities and other one-off costs were included with the first two.
38. Despite all this, soon after the catapult carrier plan was announced, mysterious sources began telling the media that adding catapults to the ships would be – literally unbelievably – expensive. The unattributable suggestion was that it would cost £2bn to fit the first carrier with catapults and £3bn for the second.
39. In other words, someone was suggesting that adapting Adaptable CVFs – as they had been specifically designed to be adapted – would cost more than just building entirely new ships from scratch.
40. That was not believable. Nonetheless the leaks appeared in the media unquestioned, attributed to “defence insiders”.
41. At first the whispering campaign achieved little, as then defence secretary Liam Fox was resolute in defending the catapult carrier plan. But then, late in 2011, Fox was forced out after MoD permanent undersecretary Ursula Brennan decided that his conduct in office was “not appropriate”
42. As soon as the new defence secretary Philip Hammond arrived, some defence insiders sat him down and told him about the huge supposed expense of the catapult plan. It was agreed that prime minister David Cameron and the National Security Council should be briefed on the supposed £2bn costs early in 2012, with a view to cancelling the catapults and reverting to the F-35B jump jet.
43. At this point it was necessary to show how it could possibly cost the same as building an entire new ship to adapt an Adaptable carrier. It was also necessary to show that the greater cost and weaker capability of jumpjet F-35Bs, as compared to catapult F-35Cs, would not simply wipe out the saving from cancelling the catapults.
44. Most impossibly of all, it was necessary to somehow get around the existence of the cheap, excellent, ready-to-go F-18 Hornet: no possible catapult saving, however inflated, could bridge the difference in cost between a fleet of feeble futuristic jumpjets and one of Hornets.

Enter the 13 mandarins.

45. The 13 chosen mandarins achieved these impossible accounting miracles by making sure that nobody else, even inside the MoD, knew what they were doing.
46. The triumvirate controlling the group of 13 were Ursula Brennan; General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff; and Bernard Gray, chief of defence materiel. They made sure that only they and their 10 picked subordinates were allowed sight of the briefing they prepared for the National Security Council.
47. In theory, one MoD minister other than Philip Hammond was also allowed to see the figures – Sir Peter Luff, minister for defence procurement – but I have interviewed him since and he says nobody told him anything.
48. This secrecy was fortunate for Richards, Gray and Brennan as the figures they produced to support the £2bn-for-catapults leaks were not credible at all.
49. Firstly, the mandarins inflated the cost of the US-made catapult equipment by more than £300m, despite written US cost guarantees. It was also asserted that purchase of this US equipment would mean paying substantial sales tax – but this was British VAT!
50. Not only would British VAT not cost the Treasury anything, it didn’t have to be paid anyway: under the VAT Act, a simple international agreement, one which the US would have gladly signed, would have removed the liability.
51. Apart from these fictitious “costs”, the quote from the shipbuilders for adapting one of their “adaptable” ships suddenly jumped by 60pc from the 2010 figure. Even all this was not enough to reach £2bn, however: the total then stood at £1.766bn.
52. At this point the 13 mandarins decided that they needed to add a substantial figure for inflation that might occur before the catapult deals would be inked, inking which they simultaneously insisted was imminent. The mandarins settled on a figure of 13.25pc inflation. This, in 2012.
53. This meant that the new estimated cost of adapting an Adaptable carrier came out at – good lord – exactly £2bn. Not £1.999bn, not £2.001bn: £2.000bn precisely. The exact figure that had already been leaked by “defence insiders” many months before the 13 mandarins even started their work on this estimate, in fact.

A remarkable coincidence.

54. The 13 mandarins didn’t limit themselves to this. With an unexplained stroke of the pen they significantly narrowed the difference in cost between F-35B and C versions. By setting these wildly lowballed costs against the wildly inflated, fictitious £2bn catapult bill, it was just possible to claim that cancelling the catapult scheme would save money.
55. An inconvenient report by the MoD’s research bureau just then, marked SECRET – UK EYES ONLY, was simply ignored. The report stated that a much larger number of jumpjets would be required to achieve the same combat power as a given number of F-35C catapult planes.
56. I’ve been able to have a look at that report since, and it also says that the whole-life cost of an F-35C catapult fleet would be more than £2.4bn cheaper than the F-35B jumpjet – more than wiping out even the comical £2bn estimate for catapults.
57. Richards, Brennan and Gray forgot to include any of that report’s findings in their briefing to the prime minister.
58. Even all this creative accounting couldn’t possibly make a no-catapult carrier with jumpjets seem cheaper than a catapult carrier with F-18 Hornets, so the 13 mandarins seemingly discounted the existence of the F-18 (and the French Rafale). These planes were not even mentioned in the briefing to the prime minister and National Security Council.
59. When the 13 mandarins were later asked why these facts had not been included they replied tellingly that they had “ruled out these alternative jets because they would require catapults and arrester gear”.
60. Open and shut. Richards, Gray, Brennan and the rest of the 13 mandarins were not, in fact, trying to save money, except perhaps in the very short term. They were trying to kill the catapult carrier project: and in this they succeeded – at least, so far. In May 2012 the catapult cancellation decision was announced.
61. As a result, last year the Queen Elizabeth, several escorting ships and 3,700 sailors, airmen and marines went into harm’s way almost unarmed.
62. Lord Richards, Sir Bernard Gray and Dame Ursula Brennan did not respond to requests for comment.

Unpicking the detail.

63. There are some other points that should guide those now addled with this mess.
64. First, the Typhoon is assembled by BAE Systems. Thirty years ago under its former acronym BAE, this company had 127,000 UK employees. Today, despite colossal revenues from the UK taxpayer ever since, it has barely 30,000. Buying things from BAE does not preserve British jobs, let alone create them.
65. Second, the “Eurofighter” Typhoon is not British, nor is it even European. Like almost all advanced Western military equipment it contains controlled US technology and is dependent on US tech support. It cannot even be sold to anyone without US government approval. Eurofighter Typhoon does not deliver any independence or sovereignty for the UK. Why not just buy US directly? Why not buy the F-18 Hornet?
66. Third, BAE Systems plc is the prime shipbuilder for the Adaptable CVF carriers. The suddenly increased 2012 shipyard cost estimates for adapting the Adaptables should be viewed in the context of the damage a catapult carrier would do to BAE’s hugely more lucrative Typhoon business. A BAE spokesman said: “As part of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, we played a leading role in delivering the two Queen Elizabeth Class carriers as per the requirements of the Ministry of Defence.”
67. Fourth, it remains a fact that the Queen Elizabeth class Adaptable CVF carriers were specified, designed and sold from the outset with the ability to have catapults fitted at any point in their lives. It’s not believable that fitting catapults could cost anything like as much as an entire new ship. That option is still there. We could swap our handful of F-35Bs to the US Marines and get F-35Cs instead – and, better, buy a powerful force of affordable F-18 Hornets to fill up the rest of our carriers’ huge empty decks and hangars, using a small fraction of our planned combat-jet spending.
68. What we do about all this is up to us, but China is watching.
69. Many of the facts in this article come from the National Audit Office report “Carrier Strike: The 2012 reversion decision”. The report doesn’t name the 13 mandarins but does list them by job title, emphasising that “access to information was limited to a small group” and that this was a “unique governance structure”. General Richards’ memoir ‘Taking Command’ is also informative.

Lewis Page is editor-in-chief at capital.com. He is a former Royal Navy officer and author of the book ‘Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs: Waste and Blundering in the Military

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