the aircraft carrier club 75
launching of the Queen Elizabeth class. Once the last STVOL carrier is
decommissioned, the Royal Navy will have no carriers in its possession for
several years.
The Invincible, the Illustrious (both recently decommissioned), and the
Ark Royal have been among Britain’s most conspicuous contributions to
international military operations over the last few decades. During the
Kosovo campaign, for example, the Invincible was ordered to join NATO
forces while it was on its way home following a long deployment in the
Persian Gulf. The frustrated homebound crew were baffled by this decision
given the limited contribution the Invincible was able to add to the war ef-
fort: “There is a limited role for us. They have more vehicles and more
aircraft than they know what to do with and our role is more political....
There are better located jets and better equipped jets in Italy” (Lyons and
Roberts 1999 ). In fact, despite the televised fanfare, the Invincible was able
to offer a force of seven Sea Harrier fighters poorly suited for missions of
close air support that were the mainstay of the Kosovo campaign. The ad-
ditional value of seven Harriers is especially questionable, since at the time
of the ship’s arrival, NATO already had hundreds of fighters in convenient
ground bases around the fighting zone (Lyons 1999 ). Yet the arrival of the
Invincible in the Adriatic received extensive media coverage. The BBC, for
example, described the carrier group as “a floating fortress” (BBC, April 11 ,
1999 ). Such hyperbole is particularly striking given the modest size and
capabilities of the carrier.
The contrast between the image of the carrier and its actual strategic
contribution is not unique to the Invincible or to Kosovo. In July 2002 the
French carrier Charles de Gaulle returned to France after completing a six-
month deployment, one of the longest ever for a French carrier, as France’s
chief contribution to the war in Afghanistan. According to French assess-
ments, throughout these tumultuous six months, the Charles de Gaulle
dropped or fired a total of thirty- six bombs or missiles. It took a crew of
over two thousand men and women and a three- billion- dollar nuclear-
powered vessel to fire thirty- six bombs at a relatively defenseless country
like Afghanistan. Similarly, the deployment of the Charles de Gaulle to the
Middle East was the most notable French military response to the 2015
terror attacks in Paris. During its mission, the carrier launched ten to fif-
teen attacks a day against ISIS, attracting significant media attention. Yet
France already had fighters in the region that were carrying out attacks
without much fanfare long before the arrival of the carrier (Gordon 2015 ).
As in the case of the Invincible, when we ignore the hyperbole and the
