What should Britain aim to achieve by deploying Carrier Strike Group 2025 to the Indo-Pacific?
The Big Ask | No. 35.2025
The Royal Navy’s Carrier Strike Group 2025 (CSG2025) is currently undertaking a three-week visit to Japan, having arrived at Yokosuka Naval Base on 11th August. Since reaching the Indo-Pacific in June, CSG2025 has conducted multinational exercises with Britain’s allies and partners in the region, including the United States (US), Australia, India, Japan and South Korea, as well as port visits to Singapore and Indonesia.
The deployment of CSG2025 to the Indo-Pacific highlights the region’s growing geostrategic significance, as well as the United Kingdom’s (UK) increasing interest in maintaining a local presence. Alongside the power projection which dispatching such substantial maritime capability to the other side of the world demonstrates, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked six experts: What should Britain aim to achieve by deploying Carrier Strike Group 2025 to the Indo-Pacific?
Maritime Sector Chief Information Security Officer and Head of Cyber Security, BAE Systems, and Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy
My focus at BAE Systems is on maritime, which means supporting and protecting significant maritime programmes and builds, both during construction and once delivered. My colleagues and teams will take a keen interest in the deployments into operational theatres in the Indo-Pacific.
How heavy metal works at sea is key, and CSG2025 running bilateral and multilateral test operations with key allies in the Indo-Pacific, testing the security of maritime deployments with like-minded allies as partners, has not been lost on industry. CSG2025 isn’t just about naval diplomacy and photogenic backdrops for the UK’s senior politicians and naval officers; it’s about capabilities which Primes and many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in a complex maritime defence supply chain are seeing tested in an operational theatre.
My personal top priority from the CSG2025 deployment is securing a critical understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and what improvements should be made. For a Prime, I opine the top aim is about understanding the threat space and operational hostile threats at sea, with service personnel, governments (as the customer, plural if bilateral or multilateral) and the international defence sector pulling together under the first-class diplomacy, vision and operational support which Britain might bring alongside Indo-Pacific countries in securing a safer region.
The UK’s economic security rests on a secure, free and open Indo-Pacific. Industry is a critical part of providing that capability, as is helping allies address the threats they will face in a multi-domain operational theatre.
Founder and Principal of Barrier Strategic Advisory, Adjunct Fellow in Naval Studies at UNSW Canberra and Expert Associate at the ANU National Security College.
Despite capability gaps from years of underinvestment, Britain remains a global power by virtue of its permanent membership on the United Nations (UN) Security Council and nuclear status. This standing is reinforced by its economic and cultural equities in the Indo-Pacific. While the region is not the UK’s primary focus, it remains strategically important for Britain to maintain influence there.
A key strength of naval power lies in its versatility, persistence, and self-sustaining nature. The recent deployment of the CSG2025 to the Indo-Pacific demonstrates all these qualities. Such a deployment serves multiple purposes: it showcases capability to the region while also signalling friendship, reliability, and a commitment to shared interests through its presence and port visits. These elements are vital to reinforcing the UK’s equities in the region and should remain central objectives for future deployments.
Such deployments do not occur in a geopolitical vacuum, and signalling to Beijing is a key element of their purpose. They reinforce that aggressive behaviour in the maritime and other domains is unacceptable, and that the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) expansive maritime claims are in breach of international law. Sustaining this message requires continued Royal Navy participation in activities such as Taiwan Strait transits, demonstrating commitment to upholding the free and open international order.
This underscores that despite constraints, Britain retains meaningful capacity to generate influence in the Indo-Pacific and to signal its commitment to regional stability and international maritime law.
Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Arkansas State University
Britain’s CSG2025 deployment to the Indo-Pacific reflects classic naval strategy, echoing the Great White Fleet of 1907–09. It shows that the Royal Navy can still project power globally while strengthening interoperability with allies, all the while gaining vital operational familiarity with the region.
On paper, this operation also reminds the world of Britain’s historic maritime legacy. For the US, CSG2025 offers strategic dividends in a time when the current wisdom is that the US is less reliant on allies. It shows that European allies are assuming greater responsibility in Indo-Pacific operations, answering long-standing US calls for burden-sharing. The deployment also signals to the PRC and other competitors that free and open nations’ forces are not only present but highly interoperable, enhancing the combined lethality and credibility of future deterrents. This message directly supports Washington’s emphasis on allied contributions and warfighting readiness.
Most importantly, CSG2025 provides a counterweight to claims of disunity among free and open nations, which are exacerbated by Russian and Chinese disinformation. Amid tensions over trade disputes and diverging policies on Ukraine and Israel, the sight of a British aircraft carrier working alongside US and regional allies sends a powerful signal of cohesion. It is both a military exercise and part of an information campaign, reinforcing the message that the partnerships stay strong and capable of meeting today’s challenges.
Research Fellow (Indo-Pacific Geopolitics), Council on Geostrategy, and PhD Student, Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science
The Indo-Pacific is home to waters which are both critical to global prosperity and highly contested, chiefly by the ever-assertive PRC. One goal of a CSG deployment to the region should be to uphold freedom of navigation rights, provided for by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The Royal Navy must practice what ministers preach.
In this sense, CSG2025 has had some successes. On 18th June, when the CSG had arrived in the region – HMS Spey, already permanently deployed to the Indo-Pacific – conducted a navigation of the Taiwan Strait and subsequently a Freedom of Navigation Assertion through the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.
These welcome activities, however, have been undermined by a recent report that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has objected to the Ministry Of Defence’s (MOD) plan to sail a frigate through the Taiwan Strait as the CSG2025 returns home, on the grounds that it would upset Beijing. The decision was passed to Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister.
Whatever the arguments may be around the appropriate frequency of transits and the type of vessel used, the publication of this story now puts British credibility on the line. Sir Keir has previously said the CSG deployment was about ‘sending a clear message of strength to our adversaries’. Failure to send a frigate through the Taiwan Strait in the coming weeks would send precisely the opposite message.
Minister of the Indo-Pacific (2022-2024) and Secretary of State for International Trade (2021-2022)
The Royal Navy has sent ships out across the global maritime commons for centuries. In times of peace to assure freedom of navigation – keeping open shipping lanes for the UK’s imports and exports; and in times of disorder or war, to defend those shipping flows and fight off those who wanted to cut off British supply lines. From the first Elizabethan age of exploration and trade expansion, to defending the North Atlantic from German U-boat attacks in order to protect critical food supplies – remember that in 1939, the UK was importing 70% of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of its fruit and 70% of its wheat. Without those naval protectors, the UK would have starved.
Right now, Britain is not under direct attack, but we have seen the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea on oil and gas tankers, which affected UK-flagged vessels and others delivering goods to Britain. We are watching the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) drive around its neighbourhood without due regard to the international maritime norms, bullying and threatening Filipino vessels, and circumnavigating Australia without demonstrating expected notifications. The Russians are covertly shipping oil — despite global sanctions — in old tankers, creating shipping and environmental risks.
So why is the UK taking its aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales and an associated task group of British and allied ships across the oceans? Because the UK’s economic security as a nation, and as a group of like-minded democracies, rests on the global waterways remaining safe. To ensure that Britain demonstrates its capabilities for all to see — providing a deterrent effect to those who would wish to bully or stop normal trade.
Research Assistant, Defence and Security Institute, University of Western Australia and Associate Fellow, Council on Geostrategy
The ‘Global Britain’ of Boris Johnson and chest-thumping of Liz Truss which accompanied the CSG2021 deployment differs substantially to the ill-defined ‘progressive realism’ worldview of Sir Keir and David Lammy, Foreign Secretary, which looms over CSG2025.
To this author, neither is the correct approach for Britain in the Indo-Pacific. Johnson and Truss isolated partners whose main concern was not great power competition, at times hamstringing British engagement unnecessarily. As a result, CSG2021 was seen by some as pompous and even antagonising. Conversely, the empty rhetoric, and at-times seemingly hypocritical actions of Sir Keir’s government are raising concerns that Britain is less committed to regional security than it claims, a feeling compounded by His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s recent emphasis on expanding commercial opportunities in the region with dubious national security implications.
But what both approaches emphasise correctly is the increasing importance of Britain’s allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. This has seen both CSG2021 and CSG2025 be successful in enhancing interoperability between the Royal Navy and regional partners, and also in securing diplomatic gains and general acceptance of the UK’s refreshed Indo-Pacific presence. This is what CSGs should ultimately aim to achieve.
There are two angles to these goals. One is centred around building upon and maintaining diplomatic relationships with smaller partners, such as in the South Pacific. Where deployments such as CSG2025 should adopt a more humanitarian focus, engage in capacity-building initiatives, and use the UK’s technological prowess to aid local demands.
The other is centred around Britain’s hard power, and potential role in an Indo-Pacific contingency. Where participation in multi-national exercises, such as the Australian-led Talisman Sabre, proves invaluable for the Royal Navy, and where the UK should engage in frank conversations around Indo-Pacific security with key partners such as Japan, India and Australia. Participation in these exercises also contributes to regional deterrence.
In summary, CSG2025 should foster deeper defence-orientated relationships where desired, and engage in defence diplomacy where appropriate.
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