Despite the grounding, repair was possible. And the cost of "Phantomizing" Eagle prior to the fusion-boosted inflation of the "Barber boom" was just £5 million, a pittance even then. The fundamental thing, and we tend often -- despite the repeated memoirs of the more down-to-earth sorts of senior officers and every defense secretary/minister or their deputies -- to underestimate both the depth and pettiness of inter-service (and indeed in
tra-service, like say Abe Abrams' pooch-screwing of the organizational structure of US Army special operations by creating battalion-sized Ranger units intended in his vision to be super-butch light infantry rather than direct-action commandos, motivated altogether by his armor-officer loathing for both the 82nd Airborne and Special Forces) rivalries. The fix was in from the Sixties, despite the fact that the fix -- which, to the dear late Denis Healey's credit was actually a solution, not the one I would've chosen but a rational and structured choice -- had been blown out of the figurative water by devaluation, leaving in the end only a series of bodges and the shortened legs -- one can indeed largely blame the Germans and to a lesser degree the Italians there -- of Tornado. That was, since the V-bombers were out of the deterrent business, and the RN had Polaris, the RN would have Polaris but not carriers because the "strike" mission would go to the F-111K Merlins and to either an Anglo-French Tornadoish aircraft, or when that fell through (shades of Typhoon/Rafale) to the actual Panavia Tornado. That was the deal to fluff the ruffled egos of the top men who Knew Things and had their own bar tabs at the In and Out, and if Woy hadn't come back saying "nope you can't have the F-111K and its Hawker-Dassault little brother after all" it would have made political and a
little bit of military sense.
(As for the V-bombers, at least the excellent Vulcans of which the B.2s were quite young at the time -- even by the Falklands they were a little over 20 years old and given the lives of American B-52Gs, much less B-52Hs which like giant snapping turtles seem destined to outlive many actuarially normal humans --they could've played a continued role. That is, had the US not spent the entire Seventies arsing around with the AGM-86 design only to come back with what they called the "B" version to the
original design prior to all the Air Force angst about their precious B-1s -- the B-1A was a brilliant
conventional bomber, it was essentially an F-111 on steroids, only problem was you already had the F-111 and if you'd built everything to the Australian F-111C standard [used the engines and intakes from the F if possible but used the long FB-111 "SACvark" wings like the RAAF model which had more range and could carry a little more ordnance] then you
really didn't need the B-1, because the BUFFs esp. the H version could haul
twenty AGM-86Bs with a 1500+ mile range so you could hit Moscow launching over the Oslofjord, or actually duel with the outer layer of Soviet domestic air defenses and hit the Urals, which meant the only aircraft the USAF had as big a hard-on for as the F-15 was a jet without a mission. So, fucking around over the B-1 meant a design detour for three or four crucial years in which the size of the AGM-86 shrank to fit the B-1's bomb bays, then lengthened again to the original design which fit the B-52 just fine. And not only did it fit the B-52s, the doughty but relatively slender missile, which kept its wings folded until after release as the motor kicked in, with some fairly straightforward mods you could have put two AGM-86s in the bomb bay of every Vulcan, and had a strategic "dyad" which would've been to Britain's very great advantage because you send the Vulcans -- subsonic but actually surprisingly maneuverable, like a number of slower but tighter-handling aircraft like for example the F-5s that the USAF used in its "aggressor" -- read "imitation enemy" -- squadrons, the Vulcans actually outmaneuvered American F-15A/Bs in some NORAD bomber-penetration exercises because the zipper-suited thunder gods' beautiful dogfighter chariots were so damn fast they couldn't corner as well -- and have them launch their low-altitude, terrain following cruise missiles from over Norway and Central Europe and hit Moscow
underneath the ABM gauntlet, freeing Polaris to launch a "countervalue" holocaust of European Russia's other main population and industrial centers without obsessing over getting Polaris warheads through the ABMs onto Moscow.)
That mighty parenthetical detour gets at the other problem created by the "but we had a deal!" atmosphere coming out of the Sixties, married to Ted Heath's huffy "pragmatism" that associated carriers with Empire when what he was all about was Europe. And that was Chevaline. Ah, Chevaline. That. Fucking. Chevaline. The grand plan to make extant Polaris payloads get through the ABM gauntlet around Moscow (because that was the only target that
really counted -- I have a sense that Establishment elitism played a role in such fixation on destroying the Soviet capital in retaliation for the
destruction of civilized life throughout the United Kingdom, rather than taking the French approach of pointing big warheads at as many Soviet cities as possible, on the sensible grounds as one French admiral put it that "France is not a prize worth fifty million Russians.") In the end Chevaline (1) took a decade, (2) cost a
billion fucking quid pissed up a wall, (3) reduced the warhead/megatonnage total deliverable by the UK deterrent by a third by reducing each Polaris payload from three warheads to two and (3) was never, ever the option that the Royal Navy wanted. The RN wanted either to outright buy Poseidon missiles (next step up from Polaris, slightly longer range and flooded a target with ten smaller warheads, which would defeat an ABM system and because of their improved accuracy as well reduced the need for higher yield-per-warhead by a factor of four (the joys of Armageddon math) or, if that was too pricey, to buy at the individual warhead level because you could get at least six (rather than ten) of the Poseidons' warheads inside the nosecone of a late-model Polaris, which was still enough to guarantee some penetration of Moscow's ABM layer. Instead a God-botheringly large sum of money was essentially burned on the sidewalk outside Main Building (MOD headquarters on Whitehall) to get a baroque solution that had several definite downsides and only lasted about a decade in service anyway before new boats that could carry Trident came along. That sum of money could have done a very, very large number of things, in particular paid
easily to "Phantomise" the healthy and robust HMS
Eagle and indeed paid for the extensive maintenance that HMS
Ark Royal was going to need to last into the Eighties. But both carriers, even the rickety
Ark,
could have lasted into the Eighties for a fraction of the cost of Chevaline -- and despite the AGM-86 delays, a late-Seventies bid to get -86B for the Vulcans, modding their bomb bays, would still have been maybe five percent the cost of Chevaline. Trouble there was that you had (1) a Labour Party close to civil war over nukes, with a number of senior people in power up to Sunny Jim himself who would've gone for it if the US had been quicker to deliver -86B, and a number of other people including his successor who would've died in the last ditch to prevent acquisition of more weapons of mass destruction and (2) then John Goat-Buggering Nott, a man who roasts on the same spit in Hell as Geddes and Sandys.
On the issue of Those Islands, I am a firm subscriber to the view that all Argentine planning, since they had avoided their own Iran-Iraq-in-miniature war with Chile over the Beagle Islands in '78 and so "learned nothing and forgotten nothing," was their reading of intent on the part of the UK. And I don't even mean Nott's defense review, I mean the specific British government attitude
towards the Falklands and South Georgia themselves. Based on that, they would believe that London would accept the matter as one more late-imperial embarrassment and write the kelpers off. Or, failing that, that digging in troops and having the largest (at that time, larger even than Brazil's) and arguably most modern air force in South America, would between them deter any military adventurism. They would write off even two carrier groups, boasting two dozen Phantoms armed to the teeth in dual role and thirty-plus Buccaneers, and they would be deadly wrong to do it. But based on numbers and
macho they would. "Carriers would stop the Falklands from happening" is a red herring; ironically, keeping dear little HMS
Endurance (I) on station stood a better chance, as a statement of British interest.
As for the carriers themselves, the crucial time really was the Heath administration, now that the effects of devaluation had settled in and, for a brief period, there was actually breakneck growth (leading, like Arthur Burns essentially burning Fed money in the streets to get Nixon reelected, to the inflationary spiral of 1973 even
before the OPEC embargo.) That was when you needed something to cause a U-turn in policy wrt the carriers. That might have been easier from the start with three
Audacious-class as in the OP. Indeed, having three fleet carriers in hand might have stopped what I have come to view as the
folie de grandeur of CVA-01, when admirals used to running the second-most powerful navy in the world asked for just a little too much rather than conserving what they had in hand, and ended up losing it all (even up to these genuinely beautiful new ships that have piddling VSTOL jets slated for them. I would remind fans of both the Superbug -- an excellent aircraft in its way -- and the F-35B that the A-6E Intruder and the Blackburn Buccaneer, two of the most bullfrog-ugly -- so ugly they were kind of cute -- hunks of metal ever to achieve flight, were (1) built like tanks, (2) carried a larger weapons loadout than either the Super Hornet or the -35B, and (3) had a combat radius of roughly a
thousand miles. That is precisely what's needed with a carrier attack aircraft and no one, not even the more respectable Rafale-M, has managed it since.) Three carriers might do it if you agreed to cut to two, sacrificing the maintenance-intensive
Ark to maintain parity with the French at two fleet carriers (TTL's
Audacious plus
Eagle). Likewise two might survive if one of two things happened:
- A Democrat defeats Nixon in '72: most of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, including OG Cold Warriors like Clark Clifford, were behind deeper defense cuts than Nixon's, in which case getting Britain and France each to provide two fleet carriers both of which could outclass the Soviet Kiev-class (and the RN's Buccs and soon the Marine Nationale's Super Etendard-plus-Exocet combo could outrange the onboard missiles that were the Kievs' real weapons powerhouse, not their twelve Dinky Toys Yak-36s) takes the pressure off deeper reductions in the US carrier force
- Someone like Schlesinger lasts longer at Defense, and isn't dealing for so long with someone like Zumwalt who's banging the drum about creeping inferiority of American seapower, so that again you get either a holding at post-Vietnam figures rather than the bids (successful in the end) for a larger American carrier force by the Eighties, or further reductions to save money, because what Schlesinger and the establishment Dems had in common, interestingly enough, was an echo of 1960s British logic: a bigger SSBN fleet was the real "power core" of the navy, especially once you brought Trident and the Ohios on line, not the number of its carriers, and getting allies to "do their bit"/cover gaps caused by US reductions in force would matter
As late as '73-'74 I think it's possible, just, to save a British force of two fleet carriers, but you'd need either that third
Audacious-class in order to keep two (you're going to lose
Ark if you have three carriers in hand and she looks like, well, the maintenance hog she was), or some variation of my bullet points.
