Letters | 24 July 2010

Carrying the fight

Sir: Your leading article (Military matters, 17 July) suggests that aircraft carriers are vulnerable to missile and suicide attack. I am not sure where you have sought your military advice, but those who think along these lines usually know very little about carriers.

We should reflect on carriers’ invulnerability, not their vulnerability. The last time that a British serviceman was killed as a result of enemy action in an RN aircraft carrier was in 1945. The contrast with our deployed operating bases in Afghanistan and Iraq could not be more stark. Recently, an RAF Regiment Officer told me of an occasion in 2008 where the British base at Basra was mortared over 60 times in one hour; this was not an isolated event.

If we judge that future threats to our armed forces are more likely to come from non-state actors, the invulnerability of aircraft carriers can only improve. They are hard to find, and even harder to attack. Provided they are handled intelligently, only state actors can threaten them and, as our experience in the Falklands war showed, even they find it difficult.

As we reflect on Afghanistan and Iraq, we may come to question whether it is wise to conduct ‘open-heart surgery’ with large bodies of western boots in the lands of Islam. And if we chose to move to interventions that are more ‘key hole’ in nature, aircraft carriers would play a central role, at much reduced political cost and with much reduced expenditures of blood and treasure — no bad thing in an age of austerity.

Commodore Steven Jermy
Cornwall


 
Second third man

Most popular

The Spectator

Watch: Douglas Murray on Israel’s plight and the plague of western guilt

Sir: Lord Mandelson’s bold assertion of being a ‘good role model’ for gay politicians (‘What Mandy didn’t say’, 17 July) inevitably brings to mind a famous remark by Winston Churchill about an earlier gay Socialist peer, Tom Driberg, MP for Barking until 1974, when he became Baron Bradwell.