Keep RN carrier strike going

Is there a way for the Royal Navy to keep carrier strike capable after ww2?
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, "It's the British economy stupid!" Though it would also help if the British military-industrial complex was capable of delivering equipment nearer to time and cost.

Have an even more austere Austerity period so that Eagle, Ark Royal and all 8 Centaur class are cancelled 1945-46 along with the third Audacious and the Malta class. Also between 1945 and 1950 have the Admiralty decide that the cost of rebuilding the Illustrious class was so great that it wouldn't be much more expensive to build new ships. They could tell the Cabinet and Treasury that their material condition was poorer than previously thought and that had made the cost prohibitively expensive.

Then built five or six 1952 Carriers from the early 1950 to about 1965. There would be no need to build the CVA.01 class in the 1970s because these ships would last until the 1980s and possibly longer if they are given a SLEP refit. So no 1966 Defence Review and no decision to phase the existing carriers out by the end of 1974.

I wrote 5 or 6 of the class because the RN asked for 6 strike carriers before the 1957 Defence Review and got 5. The withdrawal from East of Suez probably reduces the number of ships required from 6 to 3.

The RN will need another 10,000 men from the early 1970s to the end of the Cold War to man the ships. The British economy will have to be stronger so that HM Treasury has the tax revenue to pay for them. However, some "creative accounting" will be possible. For example the number of Phantom and Buccaneer squadrons in the RAF would be reduced and the number of squadrons in the FAA increased. As a maximum of 2 out of 3 ships would be available at any one time 2 air groups could be maintained instead of 3.
 

SsgtC

Banned
Probably not to cancel the Malta class. The UK made some really stupid decisions when it came to their carriers post war. It seems like they made the exact wrong decision each and every time. It really was a tragedy of errors. So complete the Malta class, cancel the Centaurs instead. Then retire the Audacious class once the Maltas are in service
 
Probably not to cancel the Malta class. The UK made some really stupid decisions when it came to their carriers post war. It seems like they made the exact wrong decision each and every time. It really was a tragedy of errors. So complete the Malta class, cancel the Centaurs instead. Then retire the Audacious class once the Maltas are in service
With hindsight I think all the light fleet carriers were a mistake and the RN would have been better ordering more Audacious class fleet carriers instead of the Colossus/Majestic classes and the cruisers ordered from 1941. I tried writing a thread about it.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-effects-on-the-smaller-navies-mark-2.395421/
 
Britain and France ignore the USA and call Russia's bluff in 1956 and continue the Suez op

Russia's threats of using her scores of Nuclear rockets was an actually empty threat (Russia had just 4 rockets) and perhaps have the USA realise this and not apply pressure on the UK and France.

So the canal stays open (once cleared of wrecks etc) and Britain retains an East of Suez capability into the 60s

I like Noms ideas as well - go full Austier from 1945 (or possibly in late 44) - halt all production in 1945 when the war is winding down and build 6 new '1952' style ships during the late 50s early 60s to replace the 6 Armoured carriers
 
Would you also need to find a way to reduce the RN/RAF "issues" that were present, and I suppose as well long term find a way to afford both the SSBN's and the Carriers and Escorts as well?
 

SsgtC

Banned
With hindsight I think all the light fleet carriers were a mistake and the RN would have been better ordering more Audacious class fleet carriers instead of the Colossus/Majestic classes and the cruisers ordered from 1941. I tried writing a thread about it.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-effects-on-the-smaller-navies-mark-2.395421/
I agree on the light carriers. Even during the war, aircraft size grew exponentially. Park a Sea Hurricane next to a Wildcat or a Corsair. There's a huge size difference. Everyone could see the direction aircraft were going. The RN should have cancelled the light carriers before they were laid down. Build an additional Audacious class then move on to the Maltas post war.
 
I think there are a few decision points that would drastically change the trajectory for the RN carrier forces after WW2.

A 1948-9 decision about how to deal wth the Soviet sub threat was decided in favour of escorts rather than offensive strikes on the bases by carriers. If this was reversed the RN would have accelerated its carrier building in the late 40s and early 50s, which would likely make the contributions to Korea and Suez different, with major positive results in the case of Suez.

Have the British take out a draw on their IMF funds prior to Suez, like the French did, so they withstand the run on the pound and achieve something positive from Suez. This results in CENTO being a success, Britain retaining its leadership in the Mid East, no stupid 1957 White paper. This is also the time when almost all major powers decided that a conventional WW3 was unlikely and focused instead on Limited Wars, where carriers and amphibious forces were crucial.

A different set of decisions in the 60s surrounding the development and cancellation of the HS681, P1154, TSR2 and CVA01 and the 1966 white paper and withdrawal from east of Suez. The commitment to Atlantic Strike Group 2 could be Britain's key NATO contribution and CVA01 and 02 could be built to meet this commitment.

Of course I imagine a gradual decline in ship numbers regardless of what course of action is taken, but Britain most certainly can afford to build and maintain 2 full size carriers from the 70s onwards.
 
Certainly France managed to maintain a CTOL carrier fleet right to the present day despite having a similar sized economy. The big difference is that they managed their economy better so there wasn’t the same cycle of Stop-Go that impacted in planning. To prevent this you need to have a complete change in economic policy and corporate culture, so that there’s more emphasis on investment and involving engineers more in the design.

I agree that many of the post war carriers should have been scrapped early on and either the Maltas or the 1952 carrier design built. While many British carriers weren’t that old by the mid 60’s, they were being superseded by the rapid pace of aviation technology. The Centaurs were way too small, Hermes commissioned in 1959 but couldn’t effectively operate the Buccaneer because her deck was too short, in truth she was better suited to service as a CVS or LPH.
 
At the heart of the matter is the need for better management of the British industrial economy post war. Britian exited WW2 with world class shipbuilding and aviation industries, capable of producing not just modern products, but ones at the very leading edge of technological progress. However two decades of subsequent mismanagement, and poor workforce relations all but completely destroyed both sectors.

I think two general descison greatly contributed to the lethality of this malaise. Firstly the desiscion to try and resuse as many second world war ships as possible. Whilst on the short term this would have seemed good for budgets, it essentiually repeated the mistakes of the treaty years by commiting the UK to long period of not building large warships, and thus inactive yards. This lead the loss of skilled workforce and increased costs later down the line as the worn out war vintage ships invetiabley did need to be replaced. Obviously whoslesale scrapping of everythign and starting witha clean sheet would not have been feasible, but there should have been a plan to support the naval shipbuilding industry with phased retirements and new builds.

Secondly was the loss of confidence the UK governemnts had in the British aircraft industry. It seems to have stemmed form the economic difficulties imemdiately post war that forced many British aircraft manufacturers to put their cutting edge design projects on hold. By the time money was available these aircraft were now often behind those being produced by the US, and due to a lack of ivenstment in production facilites were produced slowly. Despite this the indsutry perservered, and again surged ahead in the late 50s and early 60s. But by this time the governemnt had become covninced that British aviation comapnies were incapable of producing airraft of sufficient quality, realibility and cost comapred to the Americans. The descion was then made to buy almost exclusively American, dooming the British aviaiton industry to destruction.

Fundamentally at fault in these cases is I think an almost darwinist attitude held by the British government in regard to their defence manufacturers, and almost no understanding of the difficulties the industries were facing economically. In contrast to this behaviour, the American and French were highly protectionist and supportive of their defence industries, often restricting foreign products from competing with them, so as to preserve future capability. If Britian had done more of this it would proably have been in a far stronger position economically by the 70s and then military would not have been faced with the massive capability reductions it experainced OTL.
 
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I think comparison with the French shows that ultimately the problem is political.

While the British made a bunch of atrocious decisions, often lurching from positive to negative and back again, the French seemed to make continuous progress and improvement and not throw much of it away. About the only things I can think of that the French developed and threw away were the Mirage F2 & 3 and the Mirage G series, however they still built the F1 and the bigger Fs and the Gs were not in the same development/ordered/canceled league as the British.

In contrast the British decided in 1957 to be (unsuccessful) early adopters of guided missiles and then tried to emerge from this folly by way of NBMR aircraft the P1154 and HS681 along with the supersonic trainer in conjunction with the French, showing a major disconnect between political decision making and technical, industrial and financial reality.

About the only 'administrative' way I could see around this would be for the RN to decide on carriers rather than escorts in 1948-9 as the way to meet the emerging Soviet threat. This could mean the RN burn through the remaining lives of the WW2 fleet and light fleet carriers from 1949 rather than think about rebuilding them for the future. Furthermore using up these carriers from the late 40s, as aircraft development showed jets getting faster and heavier every year, might prompt HMG to supplement the newly completing/ed Eagle and Ark Royal with the 1952 carrier design instead of OTL Victorious and Hermes build/rebuilds.
 
I don't have the exact figures to hand, but in the 1950s the UK was spending about 10% of GNP on defence. This declined to about 7% in the 1960s following the Sands defence review and after the most of the remaining out of NATO commitments were given up under the Mason defence review of the middle 1970s British defence spending was about 5% of GNP to the end of the Cold War.

I don't see the British electorate tolerating higher percentages of GNP being spend on defence. So if more money is going to be spent it will have to be the same percentage of a larger GNP.

Then the British Government might be able to afford the aircraft carriers and their aircraft.

However, the government might not be able to recruit enough sailors to man them. It might have trouble recruiting as many as it did IOTL because a stronger UK economy probably means higher wages are paid by the civilian economy. A lot of the extra defence budget is likely to be absorbed by higher salaries so that a career in HM Forces is competitive with a job in "Civy Street" if they still use that expression.
 
First i'll say that @Ato's is probably the most comprehensive treatment of the issue so far, and to it I'd add the point that, along with keeping corporate budgets tight during the Age of Austerity, the other thing that delayed excellent British (civil especially) aircraft programs was a curse for British industry generally from the 1920s-30s on to the present. That was: you've got a limited pool of money, and there is an absolute demand that those old-school-tie shareholders over in the City get a substantial cut or they'll take their business elsewhere (this helped kill British textiles, long-term, back in the Slump when the "gentlemanly capitalists" as an old prof of mine, Anthony Hopkins -- the ex-Cambridge professor of British imperial history, not the Welsh-American actor -- termed them strongarmed their fellow public-school old boys in the National Government into not raising tariffs on Indian textiles bc said gentlemen had big investments in India that needed to be paid off by Indian mills turning out fabric at substantially lower rates than the UK ones, who were both paying their remaining workers relatively decently and had just spent large sums more or less inventing modern synthetic fabrics.) As a result R&D and product testing budgets were repeatedly raided to pay off investors, pushing projects to the right. But British governments of both left and right had very little understanding of, or patience with, that situation. The effort to prop up an ex-imperial class of globalized investors with things like an overvalued pound and the Sterling Area helped bleed out the potential pool of funds to invest in Britain's once-legitimately powerful high-tech sectors French-style.

It speaks to a fundamental difference in the long-term conceptions of the French and British states (one shared at that time by the US state, with the federal government effectively a "warfare state" built up by the Civil and World Wars plus the New Deal programs, though much of that has been abandoned in unsteady increments since about the Seventies.) France always valued a centralized state -- the Revolution reinforced that rather than reversing it -- and viewed both its political stability and its geopolitical power in nation-state terms, so it was more willing to use nationalist, protectionist, and nationally instrumentalist tools and methods to maintain a France with gloire (since, in De Gaulle's famous phrase, France without gloire was nothing.)

Britain still worked with the Magna Carta model, a mighty and often informal "parliament" of upper-class rentiers who controlled the economic and cultural levers of power, spread via the "independent" schools (let's just say public shall we? That's been one of the great Orwellian trends in "imaging," finding a new word to obscure what "public schools" means in British English) and a handful of ancient, select grammars, the senior universities, and on out into the Square Mile, the smoothest paths of entry towards standing for Parliament, corporate governing boards both private and quango, select senior professions like the law, and various cultural gate-keeper roles. They were unified in their Britishness (1) against the rise of any dominant continental power, whether French, German, or Russian, and (2) most unified in their role in Britain's political economy as a class of rentier investors. They never particularly liked the high costs of doing business at home, nor did they like how much you needed to pay out in order to maintain bleeding-edge industrial technology sectors, or the formal apparatus of state like large overseas garrisons, public welfare provisions, or protectionist policies to help domestic industries thrive. So far as they were concerned the Industrial Revolution was an accident in the backyard that made too many rough tradesmen into millionaires, and should be outsourced as soon as possible, which they promptly got on with throughout the 20th century. In the process what might have been the South Korea of Europe (outsized importance in high-tech industries and outsized military power) became the sick man of the West because being the South Korea of Europe was not where the easy money was for maintaining cultural and political dominance.

Probably not to cancel the Malta class. The UK made some really stupid decisions when it came to their carriers post war. It seems like they made the exact wrong decision each and every time. It really was a tragedy of errors. So complete the Malta class, cancel the Centaurs instead. Then retire the Audacious class once the Maltas are in service

This. Kill the Illustrious-class dead as worn out by active service and at the same time kill the Audacious-class ships prior to production as half a loaf. Build two Maltas and three rather than four Centaurs, in the process cancelling the proposed second Centaur batch just as IOTL. Recognize that those ships perform several useful purposes: (1) effective sea control in late-imperial shipping lanes important to the Sterling Area (that's how you sell it in Cabinet) and that support a retreat to informal Commonwealth-based empire rather than the costs of formal control, (2) effective surface-fleet command and sea control facilities so that the UK can remain a legitimate supporting partner of the US rather than just one of several worn-down Western European states with a slew of frigates, (3) that a combination of wide-ranging aircraft with more and more airborne ASW capabilities, allied to a larger force of submarines, is probably the most effective way to counter the Northern Red Banner Fleet's wolf packs (call it an "above-below" approach, smaller but more powerful surface groups centered on flat-tops with lots of aircraft to swat down anti-shipping bombers and drop sonobuoys and torpedos, plus beefed-up production runs of subs bc often the best way to kill a submarine is with another submarine.)

Malta
s get the big-war fleet command role, Centaurs center their work on the East-of-Suez areas. Then in the Sixties you ditch a Centaur, don't modernize the decks of the other two, and convert them to commando carriers. With the US getting involved somewhere (as I like to say, Butterflies and Trends, and the Trend was that by the Sixties the US were going to find someplace to sink costs in the anticommunist struggle) they will appreciate having an RN strong enough to spell them up in the North Atlantic -- frankly the USN has always valued the Royal Navy more than Her Majesty's Government or even the MoD post-1945 has. That lets your fleet generate a Malta task group for the North Atlantic (and possibly one or two small hunter task groups centered on whatever sort of Tiger-class cruisers emerge ITTL), and a Centaur commando carrier group for expeditionary issues (Norway, Cyprus, emergencies in the BOTs, etc.) Smaller surface escort fleet centered on those groups rather than on spreading the post-imperial butter too thin with a second- or third-rate frigate in every port, more subs especially SSNs in service, Island- or later Castle-class style ships in the BOTs and Hong Kong just armed up a bit (e.g. the moment Bofors builds a decent 57mm get a license for them and drill them into the decks of Castle-equivalents. This does not make them "warships," it means they can properly overmatch their security duties and if someone starts a war with you, can go down shooting which looks better in the papers if they're going to get sunk anyway.)

That probably lets beaten-down carriers (fleet and commando) slump into the Eighties, by which point they have been relevant somewhere on occasion (Suez, Malaysia/Indonesia escalates, chastising UDI, Belize, Cyprus, Falklands, take your pick.) At that point if there is any capacity, build a unitary class of three in, at the very least, CVA-01 range of dimensions (the early designs, not the fatally compromised later ones) with the intent to run a fleet carrier, a commando carrier, and a backup for either role in refit. At that point costs of technology as much as any fluctuations in the Cold War will drive down escort numbers, the key thing is to maximize what you've got. So invest in OTL-Type-23 style quieting and towed sonar, in phased-array radar when it's available, in vertical launch ASAP, in sea-launched cruise missiles, etc. Accept that cost spirals mean you have to trade quantity for quality if you plan to stay relevant and get out in front rather than dither while trying to have both and fall behind. That would preserve a basic strike carrier capability, allied to a real effort to get all of 3 Cdo Bde RM on shipboard and land it in a combat zone, right down to the present.
 
It's been discussed a few times on here before but the Malta Class wasn't the right choice for the RN - they were the last of the old pre-war engineering and design thinking designs before the lessons of WW2 had been learned and they'd have needed extensive and expensive modernisation. Better to let them go and design a new ship on a clean sheet of paper with the lessons of WW2's carrier ops taken into account (presumably with something like the planned 1952 design).
 
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