I guess this is good news:
Commodore Michael Utley, Commander United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group, is reported by Save The Royal Navy here as saying that HMS Queen Elizabeth will be escorted by two Type 45 destroyers, two Type 23 frigates, a nuclear submarine, a Tide-class tanker and RFA Fort Victoria.
The ship will also carry 24 F-35B jets, including US Marine Corps aircraft, in addition to a number of helicopters.
Britain's gamble that France would essentially loan their carrier to Britain in a crisis will pay off. Britain will regain carrier capabilities without having to rely on France.
Although I qualified the good news because of the ships and submarine sailing with the carrier:
But it is true that the 2 [carriers] have soaked up so much money that there seems like there is too little of the rest of the Royal Navy to even escort the ships.
Is the entire Royal Navy to be built around supporting a single carrier deployment with nothing left for anything else? That's what it seems like, in this article about a joint US-UK-Dutch freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea planned for 2021:
Due to the small size of the Royal Navy, it is unlikely Queen Elizabeth or sister ship Prince of Wales will ever deploy without being part of a multinational naval coalition.
That issue is brought up in the initial article and the British answer--the carrier won't always need a full escort and when it does allies can fill out the escort--does not fill me with confidence.
I worry that the British have too many of their naval power eggs in too few carrier baskets.
