It's the 1930s again. Let's do what we did then and let the Royal Navy own its carrier planes

Telegraph

02-04-2025

Comparisons between now and the 1930s are rife these days. There's economic anxiety and global instability. There's a threat of war. There's hesitant rearmament here in Britain.
And, as in the 1930s, the planes which fly from the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers belong to the RAF – with disastrous consequences for the ships' effectiveness. Back then, the Fleet Air Arm was not a priority for the RAF, and the FAA had the unenviable distinction of being one of the few air forces still equipped with biplanes at the start of WWII.
Today the F-35B jump jet, the only plane which can fly from our carriers, is Britain's only modern fifth-generation fighter. As a result it is difficult to get the RAF to release any aircraft for carrier operations. Though the ships are designed for 36 planes, neither carrier has ever had more than eight British jets aboard. Usually they don't have any: in 2022, for instance, there were jets aboard ship just 5 per cent of the time.
In theory things will improve temporarily this year. HMS Prince of Wales will deploy to the Far East, apparently at least some of the time with an air group including 24 British jets – still only two-thirds of what she was built to carry, but better than eight as on the last real carrier deployment in 2021. And the Navy might get another go with the train set, why, as soon as 2029.
Even this year there are signs of trouble. An RAF source told me recently that plans are being put together to deploy five Voyager tanker aircraft in order to fly the F-35Bs off the Prince of Wales as she transits the Suez Canal, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden – apparently because the RAF is worried about the danger to the precious jets. Britain only has 34 of them altogether, and four are test planes kept in America.
The Navy has not heard of these plans, and this may be just a case of RAF staff officers putting something together informally at a low level in case it later gets asked for at short notice. But even the fact that such plans are being considered shows how inappropriate it is that the RAF owns the carrier planes. A carrier without aircraft is in hugely more danger than one with its air wing. The fighters are, in fact, the outer layer of defence for the entire carrier group. Removing the jets because of danger to the ship is madness. But at least some people in the RAF either don't know this, or perhaps worse, don't care.
This was belatedly realised in the 1930s. In 1937 Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for the Coordination of Defence, carried out a Defence review. His review said:
'When so much that concerns the air units depends upon the Naval element in the ship and in the Fleet, the Admiralty should be responsible for selecting and training the personnel, and generally for the organisation of the Fleet Air Arm.'
The Fleet Air Arm was duly moved into the Navy in 1939, and stayed there largely un-meddled-with until the year 2000. That year the RAF persuaded the RN that it would make sense to combine the Navy's Harrier jump jets with the RAF's land-based ones under a single organisation, Joint Force Harrier, later to be known as the Joint Strike Wing. This would be under the RAF, but a position for an admiral would be placed high above it in the RAF's upper echelons.
Senior officers are always pleased at the idea of another high-ranking job slot, and the plan went through. A few years later there was another RAF reorganisation and the admiral slot disappeared. Today, the jointly manned RN/RAF organisation which operates the F-35B still belongs firmly to the RAF: and I would suggest that this is why our aircraft carriers have never so far had more than a handful of jets aboard and usually have none. This is why at least some people in the carrier planes' parent service think it would be reasonable to take them off the ship if the ship is in any danger.
I would also say that the answer is the same as in the 1930s: simply hand ownership of the carrier jet force to the RN.
Managing personnel and training would be tricky but over time an enduring issue would be dealt with: that of RAF people who don't want to go to sea. This is not to blame them at all, rather to point out the fundamental reasons people join a particular service. The sort of person who wants to be a Royal Marine is different from someone who wants to be an aircraft technician. This sort of thing is often overlooked by those who wish to merge services, even all three of them, in the name of efficiency. In this case, very few join the RAF because they have a longing for the sea. Switch the F-35B fleet to RN-only (including RMs of course – as it happens one of the joint force's two squadron commanders is a Marine at the moment) and this source of long-term friction disappears.
And I would say an essential part of the scheme is that the F-35Bs are not just taken away from the RAF without replacement. Some argue that the reason Inskip's decision worked out in 1939 is because the rate of expansion of the RAF at that time gave them the mass and confidence to allow it.
In 1939 a European war was looming and most Americans could see no reason to get involved. Today there's a war underway in Europe and a threat that it will widen beyond Ukraine. America is reorienting towards the threat from China – and China is a threat to us too.
It is time for us to rearm and reorganise, and do so at pace and scale. The RN needs control of its carrier planes, yes: but we need a much stronger RAF too. If we are to have a decent chance of deterring a war we must have a decent chance of fighting one and winning. The planned increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP on Defence simply will not be enough.