The German Navy will have two ‘flight deck frigates’, as it calls them, to overcome the protocol that prevents it from giving them their real name
Although it cannot name them as such, by virtue of a protocol that prevents it from having aircraft carriers, what the German Navy intends to operate in the middle of this century are two ships of this type, although under the name of flight deck frigates. The circumlocution is reminiscent of Japan’s helicopter destroyers Izumo and Kaga, so similar to aircraft carriers that, de facto, they have already been converted to accommodate F-35B fighters. Both Germany and Japan have tried to silence their militaristic pasts after the harsh consequences of World War II, until they have recently opted for a shift in their defense strategy trying to face the tensions of the new conjuncture, in the face of Chinese expansionism, in the case of Japan, and in the face of the Russian threat. In Germany.
In the case of the German plans, revealed by Rear Admiral A. Scherz, head of the newly created Task Force Flugdeckfregatte at the Naval Command within the framework of this project, the intention is to acquire two of these ‘flight deck frigates’ with an approximate displacement of 75,000 tons, similar to future new generation aircraft carriers (PANGs) already being developed by France.
To wade through the current ban on ships of this type, lawyers for the German Federal Ministry of Defense have pointed out that the aforementioned protocol only vetoes ship designations, but not their tonnage. In this way, the designation of a flight deck frigate “this problem becomes quite simple”, according to the words of Scherz, collected by the local specialized media Hartpunkt.