The UK says aircraft carrier strike formations ready to be deployed. Chinese government and military are watching the development very closely.
After decades of absence, aircraft carriers make a great re-entry into the Royal Navy. Britain’s aircraft carrier groups are heading towards Indo-Pacific. On Monday, The Royal Navy announced that the Cartier Battle Group had achieved critical operating capacity. The 65,000-ton carrier monster is being prepared for power projects across the world.
HMS Queen Elizabeth
The announcement of readiness means, the 65,000-ton carrier, air assets, escorts are fully ready for mission mode deployment. And the deployment will begin within 5 days of receiving orders from the authorities.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth weighs 65,000 tons, the largest warship in the UK’s inventory. Carrier consists of a super stealth fifth-generation F-35 Joint strike fighter as its primary weapon. Accompanied by helicopters and others onboard for flawless operation behind the enemy line. Massive 65,000-ton carrier escorted by destroyers, frigates, supply ships, and submarines forming defense envelope.
The announcement of readiness will be watched keenly by China. It is expected that the first wartime deployment for HMS Queen Elizabeth will be in the Indo-Pacific regions. And directly restricting China’s aggression in the region.
The commander of the carrier strike group, Commodore Steve Moorehouse, touted his unit’s readiness in a Twitter post.
“In practical terms, my Strike Group is now at Very High Readiness, meaning we are at 5 days’ notice to deploy, if required, in response to global events & in defense of British interests,” Moorehouse tweeted.
In a follow-up tweet, he hinted at what is to come. Carrier strike group staff are planning for the Queen Elizabeth’s first operational deployment, which Moorhouse said would encompass the Royal Navy’s largest peacetime task group in 25 years and be proof of Britain’s commitment to maintaining worldwide security — “a visible demonstration of Global Britain,” Moorhouse called it.
Specific dates for the first deployment have yet to be announced.
The carrier would take its contingent of state-of-the-art F-35 stealth fighter jets into a region where “China is developing its modern military capability and its commercial power,” Williamson said in an address to the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.
But the presence of any foreign warships in the South China Sea is frowned upon by China. Beijing claims almost all of the 3.3 million square kilometers (1.3 million square miles) of the South China Sea as its territory.
Even ahead of Monday’s Royal Navy readiness announcement, Chinese military officials were warning London against interfering in the region.
“We believe the South China Sea should not become a battleground for big power competition, or a sea full of roaming warships,” Senior Col. Tan Kefei, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry, said at a December 31 news briefing reported by the state-run Xinhua media agency in a posting on the Chinese military’s official English website.
Foreign powers sending their warships to the South China Sea, where China has built military bases on man-made islands, were behind the “militarization” of the waterway, Tan said.
“The Chinese military will take necessary measures to protect national sovereignty, security, and its developmental interests, as well as safeguard peace and stability in the region,” he said.
NATO Powers and the Chinese threat
Tan’s comments followed a report published late last year from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), of which Britain is a major player, calling the rise of the Chinese military a threat to the alliance.
“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft. It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region,” the NATO report said.
“China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
Yet a British presence in the South China Sea is not without precedent. In 2018, the Royal Navy amphibious assault ship HMS Albion steamed closed to the Chinese-claimed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea in what Beijing called a “provocative action.”
US Marines complete pre-flight checks in an F-35B jet aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth at sea on September 28, 2020.
The UK-US cooperation is expected to continue with the carrier’s upcoming deployment to the Asia-Pacific.
When Queen Elizabeth held large-scale exercises in the Atlantic last fall, US Marine Corps F-35B fighter jets and Royal Navy F-35s were on board — forming the largest concentration of fifth-generation stealth fighters ever at sea. That same aircraft contingent is planned for the Pacific deployment.
As those exercises for the carrier strike group began, Moorhouse, its commander, noted the significance.
“Protected by a ring of advanced destroyers, frigates, helicopters, and submarines, and equipped with fifth-generation fighters, HMS Queen Elizabeth can strike from the sea at a time and place of our choosing; and with our NATO allies at our side, we will be ready to fight and win in the most demanding circumstances,” he said in a statement last fall.
Source: CNN, UK Royal Navy, Twitter
