We're all at sea over our new aircraft carriers The only snag was that, for such aircraft to operate from Britain's two 60,000-ton Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, both would need to be fitted with a catapult system to enable the aircraft to take off and land. When Labour commissioned the carriers, no such provision was made, because the parsimonious Gordon Brown decided we could make do with cheaper Harrier-like jets, which can take off from a shorter deck and land vertically. Since Mr Brown opted for the F-35B, the Harrier-style version of America's new Joint Strike Fighter, the first question that arises is why Labour insisted on building the two massive carriers - the Royal Navy's biggest ever warships - when the more modest Invincible-class ships, which have served us so well from the Falklands to Iraq, would have sufficed. The answer lies in Mr Brown's pork-barrel approach to defence procurement, which focused more on winning votes in the Govan shipyard, where the carriers are being built, than on Britain's defence requirements. In his enthusiasm, however, Dr Fox appears to have paid scant regard to the cost - at least if the MoD briefers are to be believed. He thought the ships could be adapted for less than £1 billion. His successor, Philip Hammond, having applied his rigorous business acumen to the issue, believes the total could be twice that. At a time when the MoD's budget is under severe strain because of the £38 billion black hole inherited from Labour, the cost of fitting the catapults is prohibitive. To proceed would mean cancelling many other vital projects, which is why all three Service chiefs have decided that the Government needs to undertake yet another U-turn, and go back to Labour's plan of fitting the carriers with vertical take-off fighters. All of which means that, 18 months after the Coalition promised to restore some semblance of order to the MoD, we are facing yet another vastly expensive procurement fiasco. Assuming David Cameron accepts the Service chiefs" advice - and the suggestion is that he will - the recriminations will inevitably focus on Dr Fox's bold but costly decision to upgrade the carriers" strike capability. But at the heart of this issue lies a fundamental misunderstanding about why we are building the carriers - a debate not helped by the Coalition's lamentable inability to articulate a convincing vision of Britain's future role in world affairs. The Royal Navy may once have ruled the waves, but with just 19 operational warships, its role has now diminished as that of Britain. The notion that we would ever contemplate using one of the huge new carriers to attack a country like China or India is fanciful in the extreme. For a start, any such state-on-state conflict would most likely be fought in cyberspace rather than by conventional military means. The reality is that we will be using the new carriers for the same types of conflict that we used the much-lamented fleet of Invincible-class ships - which, despite being a third of the size, performed perfectly well in the Falklands, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Iraq, and were sorely missed in Libya. When the carriers finally become available, they are more likely to be used to tackle Islamist insurgents in Yemen and Somalia, or keep the Suez Canal and Strait of Hormuz open, than to confront emerging superpowers. Consequently, it would be far better to stick with the Harrier/carrier formula that has served us so well. Which makes you wonder why, when building the new generation, we opted for such oversized ships without the aircraft to put on them in the first place.