it's definitely a head shaker.
or somebody in the tax raising department didn't get the gold memo.. hello?
meanwhile while do the brit-ish even bother. they have some of the poorest of the poor in the west, a totally shabby place for decades and decades since the end of the war, until they play dress up every now and then once more spending money on appearances like nobody's bidness... but, they like it I guess. another empire still on a suicide mission.
Now, witness the limited power of the Royal Navy’s ‘fully operational’ Death StarWhat Darth Vader has to teach us about Defence project management
Tom Sharpe
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02 November 2025 5:57am GMT
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I’m a backer of our Royal Navy aircraft carriers, but every now and then something happens that makes them hard to defend against the many – and there are many – who do not like them. I fear we are approaching one of these events now, which is annoying because HMS Prince of Wales and her task group are currently emerging out of the Suez Canal on the return leg of what has been an outstanding whole-of-defence effort to deploy to the Indo-Pacific.
The event I’m talking about is the imminent declaration of Full Operational Capability (FOC) for the F-35B fighter jets currently embarked in the aircraft carrier. In the navy, especially aboard the ships of a carrier’s escorting group, the carrier is often known as the “Death Star”. No doubt we all remember the bit in Return of the Jedi when Emperor Palpatine says “now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station”, and it turns out that the Death Star is in fact ready to fight well ahead of schedule.
Sadly the Royal Navy isn’t much like the Imperial Navy. We can declare our Death Star “fully operational”, but it won’t be true in any meaningful way.
The trouble is, someone has determined that to achieve FOC the ship must embark 24 jets… and that’s it. There’s no minimum period of time this must be sustainable, no requirement on how many jets can be sent out at once and no requirement to be able to keep combat air patrols directed by radar aircraft in the sky around the clock.
There’s also no requirement for our F-35s to have a full suite of weapons for all missions – which is just as well, as they don’t have that and won’t any time soon. There’s no requirement for the carrier air wing to be able to conduct air-to-air refuelling, which is likewise fortunate for the prospect of declaring FOC soon (this is something that always horrifies American carrier people). There’s no requirement for the Royal Navy to have a full group of supporting ships for the carrier (it doesn’t) nor for there to be a viable training and logistic pipeline ashore (there isn’t).
If the words “full” and “operational” mean anything like what they are generally thought to mean, all of these things would be necessary. But no, just get 24 jets onboard and that’s it. I do consulting work in various parts of the world – I recognise a thin KPI when I see one. This is even worse than it seems as the carriers were actually designed for 36 jets. They are somehow “fully operational” when they are one-third empty.
Two recent reports bring this issue into stark relief. The National Audit Office (NAO), the government value-for-money watchdog, dropped a stinging report in July 2025: this revealed that our F-35 fleet is understaffed, under-armed, and under-available to use. We’ve spent £11bn so far on just 37 jets (out of 138 planned), with availability at one-third of target due to spares shortages and personnel gaps. Whole-life costs will reach £71bn to 2069, far beyond initial estimates, thanks to problems with weapons integration and infrastructure. (The weapons integration issues result from our blind insistence on using non-US weapons whenever we can.) The NAO highlights the way in which affordability cuts – like pausing deliveries – saved pennies and allowed in-year budgets to be met, but racked up the pounds later. The NAO also gave a list of 20 ways in which goalposts have been moved to make reaching “FOC” easier, only some of which I mentioned above.
Now the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) – a cross-party group of MPs tasked with keeping a watch on the government’s finances – has published a savage follow-up. Building directly on the NAO’s findings, they hit out at the MoD’s “complacency and short-termism”. Examples? Delaying an Air Signature Assessment Facility saved £82m upfront but added £16m in extras and means we must use foreign facilities to verify Stealth until 2032 – which makes the insistence on partly-British-made weapons look even sillier. Naval infrastructure costs tripled to £154m due to procrastination.
PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown sums it up: “the F-35 deserves better”. Perhaps what’s been needed here is some Darth Vader style management troubleshooting: no doubt we also remember him arriving aboard the Death Star and saying: “you may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander. I’m here to put you back on schedule”. Would that someone like that had turned up at some point during our F-35 programme.
HMS Prince of Wales and her strike group are now returning from Operation Highmast, an eight-month Indo-Pacific odyssey. Leading a multinational force through the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and beyond, Op Highmast showcased UK power – conducting 79 replenishments at sea via RFA Tidespring, joint ops with Japan and other regional allies, and continuous flying in the Philippine Sea. We can do this stuff really well, but the achievement is devalued when it is exaggerated.
There is nothing but gloom ahead. The MoD currently faces another in-year savings round with each head of service being asked, nay told, to find cuts right now in 2025. Then we have the Defence Investment Paper (unironically abbreviated to the DIP), expected later this year. In theory this will at last map out the resources and details of June’s waffle-heavy Strategic Defence Review (SDR). Some things the Government is nominally planning for – 12 nuclear powered attack submarines, and some nuclear capable F-35A runway jets, for example – are going to be eye-wateringly expensive if they actually happen.
However, we have been here before – the Defence Command Paper was supposed to resource the Integrated reviews in March and July 2023 respectively and ended up doing nothing of the sort. A realistic DIP, I am sorry to say, would simply reveal that there isn’t enough money even just to keep doing what we’re doing now.
There is supposedly a ten year plan which will see core Defence spending rise to 3.5 per cent: but we are already claiming to spend more than 2 per cent on “core” Defence. The reality, according to the OBR, is that actual Defence spending for 2024-25 should come in at £37.5?billion – that’s around 1.3 per cent of GDP. The 2+ per cent claim includes pensions and various other not-actually-Defence spending – and this is “core” Defence, not even the “infrastructure” spending that will take Nato nations to a pretence of 5 per cent.
We tell ourselves so many lies on Defence spending now that the idea of any actual new money for actual Defence seems deeply unrealistic. Given what has happened over the last decade or so, the likelihood is we’ll just classify some more non-Defence stuff as being Defence.
Our carriers are a brilliant capability for the nation and I for one am glad we have them. But their introduction has been flawed and there is some distance to go before we can honestly declare that they or their air wings are fully operational. As we’ve seen, pretending that all is well in Defence when it is manifestly not is unhelpful.
Let’s at least start from a position of honesty. Otherwise, sooner or later, an external auditor will expose the truth even more brutally than these two recent reports.
That auditor is called the enemy. |
