Key Points and Summary – The United Kingdom’s two new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, despite being magnificent symbols of power, are a “catastrophic strategic blunder” that have left the Royal Navy weaker, not stronger.
-Their ruinous cost has become a “black hole” for funding, cannibalizing the budget for the rest of the fleet and leaving other warships tied up in port.
-Critically, the Royal Navy lacks enough escort ships to properly protect these carriers, turning the multi-billion-pound vessels into massive, floating targets. They are a “Potemkin fleet”—a 20th-century solution to 21st-century threats.
The Queen Elizabeth-Class Aircraft Carrier Mistake
On the world stage, nothing projects power quite like an aircraft carrier.
They are the massive behemoths of naval diplomacy, steel islands of sovereign territory that can bring overwhelming airpower to bear on any coastline on Earth.
It is an exclusive club, and with the commissioning of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, the United Kingdom announced its dramatic reboot into this class of warships. These are the largest warships in British history, magnificent symbols of a nation determined to maintain its status as a global military power.
But are we drinking a little too much of the Royal Navy’s kool-aid? Take it from me: when you peel back the layers of pomp and circumstance, you find a story not of strategic foresight, but of profound imperial overreach.
These aircraft carriers, for all their technological marvel, are a Potemkin fleet. They are a catastrophic strategic blunder, two hollow crowns for a navy that can no longer afford the kingdom that comes with them.
The decision to build these ships was a triumph of political ambition over fiscal and strategic reality, and it has left the Royal Navy dangerously unbalanced and arguably weaker as a result.
The Price of Prestige: A Budget-Breaking Gamble in Queen Elizabeth-Class
To understand the folly of the Queen Elizabeth-class, you first have to understand the staggering cost.
The initial budget for these two carriers was pegged at around £3.5 billion. The final bill ballooned to well over £6.2 billion, and that’s just the price to build the ships themselves. It doesn’t include the cost of the aircraft they are meant to carry, the F-35B Lightning II—the most expensive weapons program in history—or the small fleet of support ships required to form a credible strike group.
For a nation with a defense budget that has been systematically hollowed out for decades, this expenditure is nothing short of reckless. For the price of these two carriers, the UK could have funded a whole new generation of frigates, submarines, and patrol vessels—the very workhorses a modern navy needs to perform its day-to-day tasks of protecting sea lanes, hunting submarines, and maintaining a global presence.
Instead, the Royal Navy has been forced to cannibalize itself to pay for its flagships. The carrier program has become a black hole for funding, sucking in resources that should have gone to maintaining the rest of the fleet.
We have seen the absurd spectacle of brand-new Type 45 destroyers, some of the most advanced air-defense ships in the world, tied up in port for lack of sailors to crew them or spare parts to fix their chronically unreliable engines. This is the direct consequence of a vanity project that the nation’s finances simply cannot sustain.
The Naked Emperor: An Aircraft Carrier Without a Fleet
An aircraft carrier never fights alone. A credible carrier strike group requires a protective screen of destroyers and frigates for air and anti-submarine defense, along with supply ships to keep it fueled and armed. This is where the UK’s strategic failure is most starkly exposed. The Royal Navy lacks sufficient escort vessels to protect its prized assets adequately.
Let’s look at this situation a little deeper. The Royal Navy currently operates just six Type 45 destroyers and a dwindling fleet of aging Type 23 frigates. Due to maintenance cycles and global commitments, it is a struggle for the navy to put more than a handful of these ships to sea at any given time. Assembling a full strike group for even one carrier strips the rest of the globe of British naval presence. Sending both carriers out at once would be a logistical impossibility.
This creates a nightmare scenario. A multi-billion-pound carrier, with 1,600 souls and dozens of F-35s aboard, could be forced to deploy with a skeleton escort, making it dangerously vulnerable to attack from a peer competitor like Russia or China. From simulations I have been a part of, it’s clear that a carrier without a robust, multi-layered defense is not a strategic asset; it is a massive, floating target. The decision to build the carriers without first funding the fleet needed to protect them is a strategic absurdity of the highest order.
Queen Elizabeth-Class: A Solution in Search of a Problem
Beyond the fiscal and logistical impossibilities, there is a more fundamental question: what is the strategic purpose of these carriers? The era of Britain as a global colonial power, needing to project force against non-state actors or smaller nations, is long over. The primary threats facing the UK today are from peer-state adversaries with advanced anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.
In a potential conflict with Russia in the North Atlantic or China in the Indo-Pacific, a British carrier strike group would be operating in some of the most contested waters on Earth, under constant threat from hypersonic missiles, stealth submarines, and long-range bombers. The argument that these carriers are essential for power projection rings hollow when the environments they would be sent into are precisely the ones where they are most vulnerable.
The uncomfortable truth is that these carriers are a relic of a bygone era, a solution in search of a problem. They were conceived in a moment of post-Cold War optimism, but born into a world of renewed great-power competition where their utility is highly questionable. The UK has bet its naval future on a 20th-century concept of power, while its adversaries are investing in the 21st-century weapons designed to sink it.
The Queen Elizabeth-class carriers are magnificent feats of engineering, but they are a strategic dead end.
They are the product of a nation clinging to the symbols of global power while neglecting the substance. The United Kingdom has built itself two beautiful, expensive, and ultimately hollow crowns, and in doing so, has risked the future of the Royal Navy itself.
More About Harry Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) is Editor-In-Chief and President of National Security Journal. He was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
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Michael Ibbotson
August 24, 2025 at 10:34 pm
I have been saying this for a long time now but thank you for sounding the alarm. Extreme folly and hubris is what we are witnessing!
Where are the resources for pay, housing, the RFA, infrastructure, carrier escorts, research and development, other vessels including submarines? Oh yes, all sunk into two stupid, vanity projects! Ludicrous in the extreme: someone’s head should roll. Welcome to the terminal demise of a once proud navy. Winston must be turning in his grave (and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert too BTW).