PUBLISHED on August 16, 2025, 5:20 PM EDT – Key Points and Summary: The Royal Navy’s two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, despite their £6 billion price tag, are “expensive monuments to political hubris” and are “too vulnerable to use” in a real war.
-Lacking sufficient F-35B fighters, escort ships, and logistics vessels, the carriers are routinely sunk in war games against peer adversaries.
-Plagued by a token air group and an inadequate support fleet, these symbols of “strategic decline” are ill-suited for modern combat against threats like hypersonic missiles and drone swarms, rendering them expensive targets rather than effective deterrents.
Queen Elizabeth-Class in 2 Words: Giant Mistake
Far from being the crown jewels of Britain’s Royal Navy, the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers are the glittering pyrite of a nation in strategic decline and denial.
As much as anything, the aircraft carriers in 2025 remain what they were when first launched: expensive monuments to political hubris, made almost irrelevant in a fight against any likely future adversary.
Queen Elizabeth-Class Aircraft Carrier: Why Build This?
Marketed to the British people as evidence that the United Kingdom remains a great power, even if she no longer “rules the waves,” HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales instead stand as seaborne icons of the chasm between national ambition and operational reality—floating ecosystems of political symbolism acutely vulnerable in a battlespace increasingly dominated by hypersonic missiles, unmanned naval vehicles, and swarms of aerial drones.
Crewed by too few sailors, protected by too few escorts, supplied by too few logistics ships, and launched in the service of a hubristic grand strategy, they are prestige projects that make little sense in today’s actual threat environment.
The Cost of a Floating Airport
Of course, at around £6 billion each, the ships themselves are marvels of British industrial design and engineering: the largest, most sophisticated warships the country has ever built. But bigger is not necessarily stronger or more survivable. At war games against near-peer, peer, or beyond-peer adversaries, both QE-class carriers are routinely lost in opening salvos, victims of missile barrages or drone swarms launched from outside their own strike envelope. If the UK faced a modern, capable naval adversary tomorrow, the carriers of the Queen Elizabeth-class would almost certainly be among the first ships to go down.
This statement is not hyperbole but the cold arithmetic of 21st-century naval warfare, acknowledged in private within Whitehall and among senior defence officials and confirmed through independent analysis. As high-value units, they are “too valuable to lose, too costly to build,” but most damningly, “too vulnerable to use.” Instead, the logic goes, they are fated to be mothballed or at least in mothballs during the very wars they were designed to deter.
Carrier Air Groups
The balance of the air groups deployed to the carriers only compounds the indictment. At present, the UK has just 34 F-35Bs, and that total will rise to 48 before the end of the year—numbers too low to outfit both carriers at the same time and meet training and maintenance requirements ashore. The result has been deployments with token fixed-wing contingents, often no more than a dozen aircraft apiece.
This is not a strike group; this is a parade formation with camouflage paint. While Merlin helicopters fill necessary anti-submarine and airborne early-warning roles, the Crowsnest AEW sensor system has only just reached full operating capability and is mounted on a relatively small number of aircraft. The UK lacks a coherent, purpose-built strike wing for these carriers—just a grab bag of stopgaps.
The same can be said of the proposed support fleet, with each element currently leaving more questions than answers. A carrier strike group that cannot be reliably and securely resupplied is a short-lived sideshow. Britain’s Fleet Solid Support programme is meant to address this need with three new supply ships, but the first will not be operational until 2031, years behind schedule.
Until then, the extent to which the carriers can be used for sustained operations far from friendly ports will rely heavily on allied logistics and thereby undermine the whole point of their independence. Even after the Fleet Solid Support programme is complete, the scale of the plan will struggle to support more than one carrier group in contested waters for any significant period.
The number and type of escort ships is no better: just six Type 45 destroyers, of which only a portion are deployable at any given time, and an ageing force of Type 23 frigates soon to be replaced by an under-provisioned Type 32 programme. Taken together, in practice, the Royal Navy lacks the surface combat power to credibly protect a carrier group, meet its existing global commitments, and maintain a sustainable reserve against combat attrition.
This lack of support is more than a logistical issue—it is strategic. For years, the two carriers have been sold as symbols of expeditionary reach and evidence that Britain could still “punch above its weight” from the South Atlantic to the Pacific. But this narrative was cut in another era.
The UK’s most pressing maritime challenges are in the North Atlantic and the approaches to home waters—zones in which survivability against peer threats is the true measure of military capability. By that standard, the Queen Elizabeth-class, in their current configuration and with their current support structure, are simply not built for the fight the UK is most likely to face.
Defenders of the carriers and the current approach counter that shortages of escorts, supply ships, and aircraft are as much a problem of the Royal Navy as a whole as just the carriers themselves. They argue that to retire a ship would damage the credibility of NATO as a whole and Britain’s special status as Europe’s leading naval power.
But prestige is not preserved by clinging to a façade; it is earned by fielding capabilities that can fight and survive in the crucible of combat. A carrier group that cannot be properly crewed, fully escorted, or even effectively resupplied in contested waters is not a deterrent; it is an expensive target. Any competent adversary will see this as clearly as Britain’s own planners do.
A Total Waste of Time and Money?
This is not to say the carriers are of no value. Reimagined and reconfigured for new missions, they could still make a meaningful contribution to Britain’s defence posture. Whether as alliance reassurance packages, crisis-response platforms, or even modular hubs for unmanned systems, the carriers could be repurposed to meet the challenges of modern naval warfare.
Expanding trials like Project Vixen and Mojave could pivot their role away from traditional strike and air superiority roles toward Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR), electronic warfare, and stand-off strike capabilities that rely on fewer F-35Bs, can be more effective in contested environments, and fit better with emerging ideas of distributed maritime operations. It would be a politically awkward and operationally challenging path, but at least one that would give the carriers a more credible future.
Selective deployment is another option. In low-threat environments, they can still provide flexible air support, humanitarian relief, and diplomatic presence.
But that path requires both political honesty about the ships’ limitations, and the will to admit that in a high-intensity conflict with a peer or near-peer adversary, they could not operate without extensive allied protection, nor likely field more than a token escort and support fleet of the size and strength the Royal Navy currently possesses. Without that candour, London risks committing these ships to tasks they cannot practically execute and survivability standards they cannot meet.
The Floating Monument
As they stand, the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers are anachronisms: prestige projects built for a strategic era that no longer exists. That they remain afloat is less a function of their operational relevance than political vanity and institutional inertia.
The UK now faces a choice: either invest heavily in reimagining them as platforms purpose-built to the demands of modern warfare, complete with the necessary supporting force structure to fight alongside them in a variety of realistic scenarios, or come to terms with the fact that they will always remain expensive morale boosters and floating monuments to a bygone age.
The future of British sea power will not be measured in the square footage of a flight deck but in the fleet’s ability to survive, adapt, and win when it matters most, against a peer or beyond-peer adversary, under fire from state-of-the-art weapons, in the very arenas where the next great contest will most likely be fought.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for National Security Journal.
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