The UK aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is now in the Red Sea and getting closer to Yemen, with the Carrier Strike Group accompanied by 2 destroyers from the US.
https://xcancel.com/MT_Anderson/status/1928822008214589540#mThis article in the UK Telegraph anticipates a showdown —
You’ve read that aircraft carriers have been rendered obsolete by missiles. Now we find out
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/29/royal-navy-carrier-strike-houthis-red-sea-drones-missiles/The article is optimistic and says what will keep the carrier safe is a “layered defence.”
Make no mistake, the Prince of Wales is headed into a warzone. She’ll be well within the footprint of hostile missiles, a situation which the critics of aircraft carriers as an idea routinely claim is unsurvivable.
But all the American firepower does seem to have achieved something. On 6 May the Houthis agreed to “halt attacks on US warships and commercial shipping”. This sort of statement needs to be treated with due caution, but for now the Houthis appear to be mainly targeting Israel and leaving shipping alone, possibly because they have no other option. For now, the US is no longer striking the Houthis, in large part because they were getting worried about the rate at which they were using up munitions.
The other thing to bear in mind is that British warships have been running the Bab-el-Mandeb gauntlet and the Strait of Hormuz one (at the entrance to the Gulf) for many years…
In other words, there is nothing in this current transit that will come as a surprise, and the group will have trained for all of it.
What will keep the group’s High Value Units (HVUs – the carrier and supply ship) safe is layered defence.
The layers start a long way out and include intelligence gathering and all sorts of information collection, increasingly in the cyber domain…
