NETTING a £4.2bn contract to build and equip the two biggest aircraft carriers in Royal Navy history represents a medium-term gain leading to inevitable long-term pain for the workers at Britain's surviving shipyards.
NETTING a £4.2bn contract to build and equip the two biggest aircraft carriers in Royal Navy history represents a medium-term gain leading to inevitable long-term pain for the workers at Britain's surviving shipyards.
When HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are handed over in 2014 and 2016 - and there are serious doubts that the timetable can be met - the prospects for warship builders and 10,000 jobs from the Clyde to the south coast of England, largely dependent on defence orders, will be less secure than ever.
The surface fleet is due to sink from its current dangerously minimal level of 25 destroyers and frigates to as low as 21 vessels by 2012, a fact admitted by Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth in a parliamentary written answer last week.
Even when the six - originally supposed to be 12 - Type 45 destroyers come into service, they will be replacing only part of the retiring, Falklands-vintage Type 42s and anti-submarine frigates due for the scrapyard.
Despite the ministerial spin for cutting warship numbers on the grounds that the Type 45s are "vastly more capable than their predecessors", each ship can still be in only one place at a time.
As of June 25 this year, the RN had six destroyers, 14 frigates and six submarines available for tasking, with the rest in refit or at "reduced readiness", the Whitehall euphemism for being laid up because of fuel costs, lack of spares or crew shortages.
Beyond 2016, the only ship's lantern on the industrial horizon is the Future Surface Combatant, a small flotilla of stealthy, all-singing-all-dancing technological marvels as yet little more than a gleam in their designers' eyes. Major military projects, as a rule of thumb, take up to 15 years from drawing board to physical existence.
Industry sources say post-carrier government plans envisage future military construction of no more than 5000 tonnes a year - the equivalent of one and one-third frigates. In the meantime, the carriers and the US-designed and built Joint Strike Fighters chosen to provide them with striking power, will cost the British taxpayer a combined £14bn.
The carriers will give the UK global intervention capability, but will come at the expense of a new generation of armoured vehicles for an Army already fighting on two fronts with ageing, clapped-out equipment, an RAF whose overworked transport aircraft are operating on a proverbial wing and a prayer, and vital helicopter capability needed in Afghanistan to allow modest numbers of soldiers to dominate impossibly large swathes of territory.
While the Navy has mortgaged its future for carriers as high-profile symbols of power projection, it is worth pointing out that more than 90% of the food, fuel and raw materials consumed in Britain arrives by sea along vulnerable worldwide shipping lanes.
Until now, these have been guaranteed by the presence of patrolling RN destroyers and frigates rather than expensive floating airfields.
