The carrier decision emerged from the post-Cold War assumptions of the 1998 Strategic Defence Review. Eurofighter and its eventual successor programme constrained what other aviation projects could appear to compete with RAF priorities. The earlier CVA-01 struggle taught the Navy and Air Force that attacking each other's programmes could give the Treasury arguments to cancel both, making inter-service accommodation central to the new carrier project. An apparently technical carrier choice therefore depended on Treasury incentives and the services' memories of earlier defeats.
Chapter · 13:20-18:00
CVA-01 and the politics of inter-service compromise
Protected RAF programmes and the memory of CVA-01 encouraged inter-service compromise around the new carrier programme.