One carrier-sized dry dock creates a fleet-wide bottleneck

Should every naval yard be multipurpose?

Flexibility is desirable, but Britain cannot treat its only carrier-sized dry dock as general capacity because the fleet needs it available for carrier repairs.

Flexible shipyards are attractive in principle, but Britain cannot freely repurpose its only carrier-sized dry dock. That facility must remain available when Queen Elizabeth or Prince of Wales requires repair. The absence of an additional large dock at Portsmouth turns a local infrastructure decision into a constraint on national carrier availability. Resilience here depends on spare maintenance capacity as well as owning the ships themselves.