Escort numbers for a three-carrier Royal Navy

What escort force would support a third Queen Elizabeth-class carrier?

The older planning basis was about nine Type 45s and sixteen to eighteen frigates for three carriers, and today the practical requirement may be higher.

Keeping three carriers available would require a substantially larger escort fleet than the Royal Navy now possesses. The earlier planning basis called for roughly nine Type 45 destroyers and sixteen to eighteen frigates, effectively increasing destroyer numbers by about half and frigate numbers by roughly a third. Those figures describe a fleet able to sustain carrier operations rather than assigning every escort to one permanent group. The calculation emerged from the post-Cold War belief that future wars would be discretionary and widely spaced. Because events disproved that assumption, a force intended to keep three carriers useful under modern demands might require still more escorts and supporting capacity.