Britain’s aircraft carrier may need French escort

 A British aircraft carrier may need to be escorted by a French warship if it is deployed to the Middle East.

HMS Prince of Wales has been placed on advanced readiness, with the crew told it must be ready to sail with five days’ notice.

However, with most of the Royal Navy’s major warships unavailable or undergoing maintenance, protection would probably need to be provided by allies such as France, the US and other European countries.

A typical carrier escort group includes two to three destroyers or frigates and an attack submarine.

The Royal Navy has six destroyers, but only HMS Dragon is known to be ready for action and is due to sail to the eastern Mediterranean very soon to protect the British sovereign base areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus.

Of the fleet’s seven frigates, only HMS Somerset and HMS St Albans are understood to be available. The rest are undergoing maintenance or struggling with defects.

Britain also has six attack submarines, but only HMS Anson is active and she is deployed in Australia.

James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, said: “Labour’s talk of putting a carrier on greater readiness is a distraction from the real question: why didn’t Starmer plan properly and move naval assets weeks ago, when a major US operation was clearly coming?

“The truth is Labour have prioritised welfare over defence, leaving an under-funded Ministry of Defence forced to make £2.6bn in cuts this year.

“That’s why there are no Royal Navy warships in the Middle East and why even if a carrier were deployed, there would be serious questions about escort ships.”

In addition to responding to the crisis in the Middle East, the Royal Navy also has to maintain other Nato commitments, such as countering the threat from Russia.

Earlier this year, Sir Keir Starmer pledged to send HMS Prince of Wales to the north Atlantic and the high north Arctic region as part of Operation Firecrest following the US president’s threats to Greenland.

Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, said: “If we were to deploy, how would we cover Operation Firecrest and how would we fulfil our Nato Standing Maritime Group One flagship commitment?”

Britain’s other aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is currently undergoing a dry-docking period in Rosyth, Scotland.

If deployed, HMS Prince of Wales would most likely be sent to the eastern Mediterranean, where a drone believed to have been fired by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, hit RAF Akrotiri on March 1.

Protection could be provided by HMS Dragon when it arrives, but it would also need help from warships sent by France and other European countries.

The nuclear-powered French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its escorts entered the Mediterranean on Friday.

Charles de Gaulle’s Rafale fighter jets and Hawkeye radar aircraft could provide a defensive screen for HMS Prince of Wales, as could air defence systems on board the two destroyers and one frigate accompanying the carrier.

France also sent the frigate Languedoc to Cyprus in response to the attack on RAF Akrotiri and has begun deploying land-based missile defence systems on the island.

Spain has announced it will send the frigate Cristóbal Colón to accompany the Charles de Gaulle, while the German frigate FGS Nordrhein-Westfalen arrived at the Cypriot port of Limassol on Sunday.

Italy has said it will send the frigate Federico Martinego to the island, Greece has sent two frigates and four F-16 fighter jets, and a total of six Turkish F-16s are due to arrive on Monday.

The USS Gerald R Ford and its escorts had been in the eastern Mediterranean launching aircraft in support of US-Israeli attacks on Iran but it has now transited through the Suez Canal and entered the Red Sea.

Tom Sharpe, a former Royal Navy officer, said deploying HMS Prince of Wales to the Mediterranean now that the USS Gerald R Ford had left the area “would make me nervous”.

“Removing the protective blanket the USS Ford provides makes me less comfortable sending Prince of Wales there,” he said and added: “We should still do it though.”

If deployed to the Gulf of Oman or the Arabian Sea, HMS Prince of Wales’s protection would likely need to be provided by US assets in the region, such as the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group.

Lord West, the former head of the Royal Navy, warned that Britain “should be concerned about the size of the Navy”.

He told The Telegraph: “It is ridiculous how few ships we have. We have cuts to defence for years and years and years, and now it has come home to roost.

“We have not built ships quickly enough so inevitably we have gaps in what we’ve got.”

The Ministry of Defence declined to comment on escorts needed to protect HMS Prince of Wales.

A spokesman added: “HMS Prince of Wales has always been on very high readiness and we are increasing the preparedness of the carrier, reducing the time it would take to set sail for any deployment.”