When HMS Queen Elizabeth departs the UK later this year to begin the deployment of the country’s renewed carrier strike capability to the Indo-Pacific region, it is worth remembering that a decade will have passed since the decommissioning of HMS Ark Royal in 2011 and the sudden gapping of fixed-wing carrier aviation.
That the capability gap has managed to be filled at all is testament to a multitude of efforts behind the scenes in the MoD, RN and industry. External factors too will have played a role in convincing the UK that it needed to be able to perform naval