Guys, I get the sentiment and as SkipRat says, we've already drawn ourselves closer to Asia/Pacific by joining CPTPP. That's economics right?
But militarily, nobody can lay a glove on the yanks still.
We probably spend the most on defence and we have as a result the most powerful military capability in Europe. We have recently invested in building two carrier strike groups. But let's put that into context.
The QE carriers ARE the largest and most advanced ships ever built by the royal navy. Between them in a crisis situation they can deploy probably a max 30-40 aircraft each, which will probably amount to 40 F35Bs plus a mix of attack, defence, early warning and troop transport helicopters. They can also deploy about 1,500 royal marine commandos each in a war time situation.
France has one aircraft carrier that is comparable to the QE class.
Italy has 2 light aircraft carriers. These are comparable to the old invincible class anti submarine carriers that the royal navy used to run.
And that's it. That's all folks for the whole of western Europe.
You want to cosy up to Asia/Pacific countries?
Great, you can add in Japan, South Korea and Australia. They run 6 helicopter carriers between them.
Japan recently converted her two helicopter carriers to be able to accept F35Bs but the ships are much smaller than the QE and it is likely that an F35B taking off and landing from these shorter helicopter carriers would not be able to carry the full fuel and payload that they would when being launched and recovered from the QE class carriers. You're also not going to be able to carry or maintain in combat a full air squadron like our carriers can, with the airlifts, maintenance and engineering bays which were designed to maintain a fixed wing airwing in sustained combat operations where aircraft might be returning damaged and require patching up and relaunching without returning to port.
The Japanese FYI are forbidden by their constitution for maintaining a military for offensive purposes therefore they don't have carrier strike capability (I.e. they haven't built the support ships necessary to support and defend the carriers in hostile waters as that is a "force projection" design and therefore forbidden.
The Japanese navy is designed to operate in coastal waters around Japan.
Why am i saying all of this?
Well te context is in all of that, that we add all those countries force projection capabilites together and we still come up short versus the US marine corps force projection capability. Yes, not their navy. Their marine corps, who run STOVL carriers carrying the F35B and all the supporting shebang with it.
Only France and us have force projection capable nuclear weapons, i.e. submarine launched, multi-warhead ICBMs capable of hitting any target on the globe.
So distancing ourselves from the Yankee doodles in the face of a newly aggressive Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is, I would say kind of "have a word with yourselves" talk.
