What Cost a Photo? The Trump Visit and HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH

What price a PR opportunity? A question that has been asked a lot in the last 48hrs on social media over the suggestions that the UK is missing a trick by not inviting Donald Trump (POTUS) during his visit to the UK in July to go onboard HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH.

The argument put forward is that the UK is missing an opportunity to influence the President, and showcase QEC and F35 in front of the world, sending a strong message of Anglo-American co-operation during the run in to the NATO summit. Such a move would apparently visually impress POTUS and reassure him of the UK’s continued commitment to defence spending and burden sharing. The problem with this idea is that it involves an enormous amount of disruption without any guarantee that it would actually happen. This short article is an attempt to capture the challenges and risks involved.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

To start, the proponents of the plan seem to have assumed that QEC is available for this duty and it is okay to take her off the planned programme to be available. This would cause immense disruption to a carefully planned timetable of events currently in motion that see her prepare to sail for the United States shortly to conduct fixed wing trials, prior to visiting New York. 

To interrupt this programme to host a VVIP visit would instantly cause a real and major delay to the return to fixed wing flying. This is because the ship would need to be brought home, prepare for the visit and recover from it, and then sail again to pick up where she left off. One of the drawbacks of QEC is her size – putting her into Portsmouth and out again requires some fairly specific tidal windows and as such, she may have to spend several weeks alongside.

The initial ‘cost’ would be to disrupt all the essential helicopter and other trials work intended to get the final data ready to embark F35. This in turn could knock the programme back months, possibly into 2019 – depending on how much of a delay is incurred and its knock on impact to the trials programme. A small delay can often have an increasingly dramatic effect as it disrupts downstream activity.

The physical disruption to the ship would be substantial, as the United States Secret Service (USSS) would want to conduct thorough reconnaissance to prepare appropriate security plans and perimeters. The ship herself would need to be carefully prepared and cleaned, and made ready, and the wider dockyard would also go through the same experience. Depending on the arrival plans, this would cause significant disruption to the whole of HMNB Portsmouth.

The act of arrival is a big question mark. The QEC is not yet likely to be cleared to handle the Osprey or other Presidential aircraft, meaning there is no chance of MARINE 1 being able to land on until the trials and clearances are complete. The idea that the USSS would endorse POTUS flying out to a UK carrier at sea that has probably never done the trials necessary to host the Presidential airwing is vanishingly small. Similarly even landing on at Portsmouth would likely raise eyebrows – why endanger the President without good reason?

One of the reasons the USSS are so good at their job is their exceptional risk averseness and attention to detail. It is impossible to conceive of them signing off a plan to fly POTUS to QEC until she is in a position to safely launch, support and operate the airframes in question.

Its also worth remembering that the President does not fly alone – when Humphrey was in Washington last year, he saw MARINE1 come into land at the White House. There was a veritable aerial traffic jam of helicopters in the convoy, which would all need consideration. Moving the President by air in that sort of helicopter lift over the southern UK or out to sea would pose enormous challenges.

The alternative arrival is by car, but it is hard to envisage the current POTUS willingly travelling down to Portsmouth in ‘the Beast’ and its accompanying escort group for the sake of a quick photo opportunity on a carrier that is smaller than those of his own navy. What would he get from it?

For the RN the wider question is ‘what do you show the President’?  QEC is not cleared for flight operations with the F35 yet, so you can’t ‘just land one onboard’ as some commentators suggested. To do so would simply not be an appropriate or safe exercise – taking a £100m fighter jet and getting it to land on a platform not yet ready to host it is the height of foolishness.

Others suggested you could crane the aircraft on-board – a brilliant plan that ignores a couple of basic challenges like firstly getting RAF F35s to Portsmouth (they can’t take the train!) and then moving them onboard via a crane system that doesn’t really exist to put them on a flight deck not yet ready for them, and then return them the same way. The potential for catastrophe is significant, as is the reputational damage caused the moment someone takes a photo of the latest £100m ‘all weather strike fighter’ being craned onto the ship in the manner of a geriatric relative.

More widely, Trumps advisors are unlikely to approve the deployment of a fibreglass F35 onto the ship. Would a man known for his loathing of fake news want to take part in a photo op with a ‘fake plane’? To assume that he would do so is dangerously naive at best – its avoiding situations like this that is the reason why politicians have PR advisors. The moment they got wind that the Brits planned to stick a fake plane on deck, the visit would be cancelled or changed. 

You could put lots of helicopters onboard the flight deck – but this is unlikely to impress in the same way, and doesn’t really solve the underlying issue of messaging about the joint UK/US joint resolve, and POTUS is unlikely to be impressed by a fly past of F35s that he could see daily in Washington if he wanted to…

Whats in a Photo?

The fundamental question to answer in all of this is ‘what is the strategic effect achieved by putting POTUS on QEC’? If you are hosting a visit by a Head of State you have a finite time with them to negotiate and do business. Programmes are timed to the second, and if you inject a random visit to Portsmouth to see an aircraft carrier, you’ve suddenly lost half a day of the programme that could be used elsewhere

President Trump is an unconventional President to put it mildly, and is not one seemingly for travel or idle distractions. He is unlikely to welcome the idea of having his time wasted travelling around the south of the UK just to see a random aircraft carrier that isn’t as big as his own ones. There is no guarantee he’d actually want to do the photo opportunity, nor that he wouldn’t then send a tweet or three undoing all the hard delivered preparation work and destroying the point of the photo shoot in the first place.

It is also questionable as to the image you can get on QEC that would be credible and long lasting. The challenge with visits to aircraft carriers is that they are too big to scale to people – look at the images of Theresa Mays visit to HMS OCEAN in Bahrain in 2016 and you’ll see that they instead focus on  her speaking surrounded by people and Jackal vehicles – because the ship was too big to take in as a single image and still have the people in it. There is unlikely to be a spot where Donald and Theresa can pose for an iconic photo to send a message of credibility and deterrence, and plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong and less flattering images to emerge.

So, given this – if you have POTUS in town, why try to expend goodwill and political capital with his team to persuade them to persuade POTUS to do the photo when its unlikely to deliver the effect people think it will? At best you’ll get an image of two ill-matched and ill at ease leaders on a UK carrier that will be recognisably devoid of aircraft (thus perpetuating the ‘carrier with no planes’ line) and not really show anything that one of the thousands of images of QEC already out there can’t do much better. A far more powerful photo is the image of QEC and USS GEORGE BUSH together from last year – it is only when you zoom out with carriers that you appreciate the deterrence effect of having a UK and US carrier steam together.

Also – given the Secret Service protectiveness of their principal, the chances of their approving a photo opportunity of POTUS standing on a flight deck in the open surrounded by tall buildings and being hugely exposed to the public – well that’s about as close to zero as you can get. In other words the photo opportunity that would trigger this whole saga won’t actually happen in the first place due to security concerns.

Far better to spend the time doing business, doing deals and keeping POTUS focused on getting a good visit to the UK than a pointless photo op that would do real damage to the RNs ability to get F35 to sea in order to get a short visit to a President who probably couldn’t care less about the ship.

What would work?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

A far better way to illustrate UK / US co-operation, joint resolve and burden sharing is to instead send QEC to the US over the summer, conduct flying trials and then sail into New York with jets embarked. To see QEC next to the Statue of Liberty, ideally with British and American jets onboard sends an exceptionally strong message of UK/US co-operation, which is reinforced by a narrative of how the two nations work together so closely in defence matters that they are planning to embark US aircraft on a UK carrier from the outset – an outcome that no other nation enjoys. This image would become instantly iconic for all the right reasons – the pride of the Royal Navy in the United States, sailing near coastal fortifications designed to prevent the RN from raiding Manhattan and instead coming in peace with sailors and US marines embarked too.

If you want an exceptionally potent image of where deterrence really counts, and of joint UK/US co-operation and burden sharing, then don’t bother taking a visit to QEC and instead fly north to Scotland. There you could let both leaders visit Faslane and a VANGUARD class submarine and have their photo taken on the casing.

In the 50^th anniversary year of the first CASD patrol, this would be a fitting tribute to the work by UK and US submariners in the silent deeps and high north on their ceaseless patrols against the common foe and demonstrate the long term joint future commitment to the next generation of nuclear weapons and submarines. 

A very powerful image could be produced reiterating that the UK & US are the cornerstones of NATO, which is an alliance backed up by nuclear firepower provided by British and American submarines. This is a real co-operation that no other nation shares, and demonstrates the enduring deep, close and very special nature of the relationship between the UK and US and would be a hugely effective strategic message to send.