ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the increasing external pressures on the Ministry of Defence to come to a decision over the aircraft carrier, and a short indication of the intense inter-service rivalries that framed the increasingly acrimonious bureaucratic fighting. The potential costs of the Indonesian Confrontation were also impacting on plans for the Defence Review. Regarding manpower, the Board members felt that the findings of the Templer Report -the addition of new inducements to airmen -if implemented would resolve this issue. Cassels saw cancelling the carrier as essential to free up money to maintain army forces East of Suez. The Chief of the Air Staff then attempted to counteract one of the main arguments in favour of aircraft carriers as against land-based air power: that an aircraft carrier is a mobile air base free from political restrictions and operating in international waters.
