Deploy HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Red Sea now, ex-Navy commander says
A leading Navy expert has told Forces News the UK's Defence Secretary should deploy HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Red Sea.
As a result of the continued Israel-Hamas war, trade routes in the Red Sea continue to be threatened.
Now, Tom Sharpe, a former Royal Navy commander, told Forces News that Defence Secretary Grant Shapps should "get the carrier out the door".
"Make that part of the conversation. Don't see it as escalation," he said. "I sense from the Foreign Office, perhaps, they're not quite sure how to do this without showing signs of escalation.
"That, to me, is a failure to understand how carrier operations work.
"You've got to get them out the door."
He went on: "They'd take a couple of weeks to get there, do that now, get her through the Red Sea, get her in position and then thereafter, by the time she gets there, many parts of this jigsaw will have resolved themselves and she'll be in a position to assist."
"We've got these billion dollar assets, they're great, we've got a very high-readiness carrier in HMS Queen Elizabeth – if not now, then when?"
Mr Sharpe did, however, say any deployment on which HMS Queen Elizabeth is sent should be carefully considered, of high importance and effective.
"If you sail a ship of Queen Elizabeth's size out of turn, which this very much would be, you do need to treat that very, very seriously," he said.
"You need to make sure that whatever she's sent to do is worthwhile and meaningful. It's the difference between bad operations and good operations.
"Bad operations would be to sail her to the central Mediterranean and wait. And she steams around drilling holes in the ocean for weeks on end, working up jets and wondering what to do there whilst getting political accusations of assisting the US in Israel. That would be bad.
"Good operations would be to punch through Suez, get through the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden, assist the Eisenhower Group who's already there and could provide all the protection that she needs and be ready to strike."
He added: "You can't just dispatch them across the world and hope for the best because we're so short of people we can't afford to lose the ones we've got."
The UK recently condemned "destabilising" attacks from Houthi rebels, with HMS Diamond already deployed in the region.
Asked whether more warships could join HMS Diamond in the region, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said "no decisions have been made".
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