A second large aircraft carrier planned for the navy – the Prince of Wales – would make “little sense” unless enough money could be found to provide it with planes to fly from it and ships to protect it, a cross-party group of MPs warned on Tuesday.

The verdict, at a time of intense financial pressure on Britain’s armed forces, is contained in a Commons defence committee report, entitled Rethinking Defence to Meet New Threats.

It is particularly significant as the Commons defence committee usually praises unequivocally even the most ambitious military project. Bringing the Prince of Wales into service “will involve very considerable additional costs, additional manpower, extra aircraft and the considerable amount of support and protection needed to make it viable”, say the MPs.

They add: “ It makes little sense to maintain an additional aircraft carrier without aircraft to fly off it and the necessary aircraft, surface ships and submarines to protect it.”

David Cameron appeared at last year’s Nato summit to quash speculation about the Prince of Wales’s future by saying the navy would go ahead and commission it. There had been widespread reports it would be sold abroad or mothballed.

The Prince of Wales is due to be completed at Rosyth dockyard in Scotland in 2017. Its sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, was launched there last year. Both ships are designed to carry 40 aircraft but the Ministry of Defence has so far ordered a total of just 14 American F-35B strike aircraft for them.

The estimated cost of building the two large aircraft carriers has almost doubled to more than £6bn. The F-35 programme, meanwhile, has faced serious technical problems and the cost of the aircraft has spiralled to an estimated £70m each.

Britain’s order of 14 planes is expected to cost £2.5bn if running costs are included. The original plan was to buy 138 F-35s. To save money, the MoD dropped plans to buy the “cats and traps” – catapult launch and arrester wire landing – version of the F-35.

But the short takeoff and vertical landing version the government has chosen is not as capable – they cannot fly as far, or carry as many weapons, as the “cats and traps” variant.

Moreover, French jets, which use catapults, will not be able to use the British carriers, as originally hoped, as part of new UK-French defence cooperation treaties.

Some defence commentators have said the carriers will prove vulnerable to new generations of long-range missiles and are of little use against new threats such as those from violent extreme jihadist and terror groups.

However, others say that the ships could carry a wide range of aircraft, including helicopters and pilotless drones in a wide range of operations involving the armed forces of a number of countries. It has been suggested that the US Marine Corps could use a British carrier for some of its F-35 aircraft.

“It will be more of a waste of money not to use (a second carrier)” Elizabeth Quintana, senior research fellow for air power at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said. She added that it could be used in coalition operations facing a range of threats.

Witnesses who gave evidence to the committee emphasised the need for “spooks, geeks and thugs” – intelligence services, cyber experts and special forces – to combat modern security threats, Tuesday’s report says.

sumur : http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...e-sense-report