A Royal Navy aircraft carrier is inside a hostile missile footprint. Can it survive?

Telegraph

2 days ago

Right now, the ships of Operation Highmast – the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales and her group – will be headed for the Bab-El-Mandeb chokepoint at the south end of the Red Sea. This eight nautical mile wide gap has been the focus of international attention since 19 October 2023 when the Iranian-backed Houthis started firing missiles and drones at shipping in the area out of 'solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people'.
International warships have been patrolling nearby ever since, often in the thick of the hottest naval combat for many years. The US Navy in particular fired more air defence missiles in the next 18 months than they had in the previous 30 years. The Royal Navy and others have also engaged in the defensive missile battle, to no avail. Merchant shipping is still avoiding the Red Sea.
In an effort to change the situation, March saw President Trump order a surge in counter-strikes that has now cost the US more than a billion dollars in munitions, plus several MQ-9 Reaper drones shot down. The operational tempo has been such that two US Navy F/A-18 fighter jets were lost due to deck handling and landing accidents. There were also some perilously close calls as US jets were targeted by Houthi surface-to-air missiles. In a previous assault against ISIS in Somalia, the USN had already delivered the biggest carrier air strike by weight of munitions that the world has ever seen.
Make no mistake, the Prince of Wales is headed into a warzone. She'll be well within the footprint of hostile missiles, a situation which the critics of aircraft carriers as an idea routinely claim is unsurvivable.
But all the American firepower does seem to have achieved something. On 6 May the Houthis agreed to 'halt attacks on US warships and commercial shipping'. This sort of statement needs to be treated with due caution, but for now the Houthis appear to be mainly targeting Israel and leaving shipping alone, possibly because they have no other option. For now, the US is no longer striking the Houthis, in large part because they were getting worried about the rate at which they were using up munitions.
The other thing to bear in mind is that British warships have been running the Bab-el-Mandeb gauntlet and the Strait of Hormuz one (at the entrance to the Gulf) for many years. The Strait of Hormuz was often seen as more dangerous in the past, as it is threatened by thousands of Iranian fast attack craft and missiles that only had one job, and it wasn't port visits. You can't go through the Strait of Hormuz without being rushed by multiple Iranian boats and jet skis – but it doesn't make the news.
Even back in the day the threat in the Bab El Mandeb was often deemed higher than Hormuz due to the possibility of a suicide attack (which would be Iranian sponsored but easier for them to deny). Since the current shooting started, we have had a Type 45 destroyer in combat there, and a Type 23 frigate briefly, successfully destroying drones and missiles and feeding back lessons from those engagements into the system.
In other words, there is nothing in this current transit that will come as a surprise, and the group will have trained for all of it.
What will keep the group's High Value Units (HVUs - the carrier and supply ship) safe is layered defence.
The layers start a long way out and include intelligence gathering and all sorts of information collection, increasingly in the cyber domain as covered lately in these pages. This could be as simple as a Yemeni teenager posting a selfie on social media that happens to have a drone launch rack in the background – geolocate the picture, and that's a marker on the big map. When more complex methods are used, this is often one of the ways that the carrier group's accompanying submarine does its job. Drones and electronic warfare aircraft – such as EA-18 Prowlers from the US carrier – are also sniffing the electronic wind over a vast area.
The next ring is radar detection of drones or missiles in flight, which can be done at long range no matter how low the threats may be flying by high-flying radar platforms. Advanced warning of an attack could be provided from the US carrier's Hawkeye or a Crowsnest radar carried by a Merlin helicopter launched from the Prince of Wales. Much is made of our strike group's deficiencies in this regard, and correctly so, but in this case, the area will be well and truly saturated.
The first line of active defence is fighters flying Combat Air Patrol, in this case F-35Bs launched from the carrier. These can shoot down cruise missiles or drones while they're still far away from the HVUs. Our F-35Bs today can use the powerful AMRAAM missile to take out airborne targets far beyond visual range, and the first test flight has already been conducted with the even further-reaching Meteor. This sort of capability creates a huge killzone for enemy weapons to fly through. Often overlooked is how capable the F-35 is at contributing to the outer two layers as well – intelligence and surveillance. As I say, this area will be saturated for the duration of the transit.
The ships themselves will form into what's called a screen, with the HVUs in the middle and the escorts in rings around them. Where you put your air defence destroyers and your anti-submarine frigates is nearly infinitely flexible depending on water space and the threat, but that is the principle.
This is roughly how they will be formed up now as they head down the Red Sea. At this point the general Speed of Advance becomes important. It's an unfortunate reality of the Suez canal that everyone knows when you leave it so the last thing you want to do is set a straight course at 12 knots because then everyone knows when you will be at the chokepoint. Being unpredictable is a fundamental of maritime operations, one that the Russian cruiser Moskva ignored in the Black Sea with fatal results.
Supposing that the Houthis nonetheless manage to locate and track the carrier, and supposing that some kind of massive strike made it past the CAP fighters (they'd probably reinforced by quick-reaction alert birds arriving supersonically from the carrier) the next line of defence comes from the group's dedicated air defence destroyer, with its long range radar and missiles creating another kill zone for the Houthi weapons to fly through.
And finally, if a lonely drone or missile or two survives to close in on one of our ships, there is close-in defence from short-range missiles or guns mounted on every vessel. These automated systems can bring down fast-flying missiles and are almost invariably effective against slow-flying drones.
Between the destroyer HMS Dauntless and frigates HMS Richmond, Mendez Nunez (Spain), Ville de Quebec (Canada) and Roald Amundsen (Norway) there are a great deal of overlapping air, surface and subsurface capabilities within the group. Interestingly, they came through the canal with two formidable Arleigh Burke class American destroyers in company – although it's not clear if they will stay with them for the duration of the Red Sea or peel off to join the US carrier Carl Vinson, currently in the area. A Burke carries SM-3 and SM-6 defensive missiles that can bring down even high-end ballistics or hypersonics.
As you close the chokepoint itself, you want to ensure that nothing short-range is being set up for your arrival, be that surface or subsurface drones or even mines. Here intelligence is key but also the jets, helicopters and the submarine can be used to spot brewing threats far ahead of the HVUs.
One of the problems with a chokepoint like the Bab el Mandeb is that your carefully crafted screen gets squeezed as you approach it. Range is your friend at sea and geography takes it away, made worse by a traffic separation scheme that you have to pass through to let the multitude of ships heading the other way pass safely. It's not quite Suez Canal levels of predictability, but it's not far off it. Now it becomes doubly important to be able to see inland and if necessary, shoot the archer first because once the arrow is flying, reaction times are short.
At some point as they approach the gap the ships will close up to Action Stations, the highest state of readiness for a warship. This involves all sensors, weapons, machinery and damage control positions being fully stood-to. Fire retardant clothing and anti-flash hoods are donned, the latter hiding the game-faces. You can't sustain this indefinitely because everyone is awake, so timing is key.
If that all sounds a bit dramatic, it really isn't, certainly not if you are just passing through. As I say, this is normal operating procedure for high-risk transits and will have been practiced to death in the group and done for real many times elsewhere by many of those aboard.
So far so defensive – what about strikes?
I would love to see the carrier's strike capability used, but there are factors militating against it. One is the fact that the only air-to-ground weapon our F-35Bs can currently deliver is a basic smartbomb, meaning that they'd have to fly very close to their target. Another is the known surface-to-air threat from the Houthis.
Probably worst, however, is the current ceasefire between the US and the Houthis, if not between the Houthis and Israel. It would probably annoy the Americans rather than please them if we kickstarted that war again: they're now known to be trying to build up their weapons stocks in case of trouble with China.
If the Houthis were still firing every day the calculus would be different and I'm sure the Royal Navy, and certainly the fast jet pilots, would want to get involved. It is, after all, a Carrier Strike Group.
But as it stands today, I would expect them to transit through and head off. If they are fired at, they can always go back into a defensive screen once in the relatively open waters of the Gulf of Aden and strike back from there, as the US Navy has done on many occasions. It's also worth noting that a US carrier has been operating here and up in the Red Sea, nearly continuously since early 2024, sometimes with only one or two destroyers in the screen. Prince of Wales will have far more ships and because the transit is short they will be more focused. In other words, there isn't much to fear for our boys and girls in the strike group.
Fair winds and following seas to the ships of Operation Highmast. My hope is they'll get through safely, fall out from Action Stations, clear the Houthi missile envelope and immediately start spinning slightly exaggerated yarns about it all.