Читать книгу A Tale Of Two Navies - Anthony Wells - Страница 10
ОглавлениеOrganizational Change and Strategic Priorities Impact the US Navy and the Royal Navy
In 1960 the US Navy and the Royal Navy were emerging from a fifteen-year post–World War II period that had solidified the Cold War in geographic, political, military, and economic boundaries. Both navies underwent major organizational changes in ways that have influenced their development ever since.
Before exploring the detail of the various postwar organizational transformations, it is important to understand and evaluate some fundamental differences in the political systems of the United States and the United Kingdom and how these impact their navies. The United States is a republic with separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and financial provider, and the judiciary. The United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy in which the legislature and the executive are one and the same thing, with a cabinet system of government. The executive is formed from the winning party at election time, with the elected leader of the winning party becoming prime minister after Her Majesty the Queen invites that person to form a government—a constitutional nicety at one level but part of the United Kingdom’s unwritten constitution. The monarch is the titular head of state, the head of the Church of England, and also, significantly, the Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy.
By contrast, the elected president of the United States, after the popular state-by-state votes have been converted to Electoral College votes, nominates his or her selected cabinet officers for confirmation by the Senate—not always an easy experience for those nominated and by no means automatic. The relevant committees of record will decide whether the person nominated to be Secretary of the Navy and the Under Secretary and Assistant Secretaries of the Navy will be voted upon for confirmation by the full Senate of the United States. Once confirmed those appointed officials report through a well-defined chain within the Department of the Navy and the Department of Defense to the president. For their part, British political officials within the Ministry of Defense are members of the House of Commons or, much less often nowadays than previously, of the House of Lords. They answer through the secretary of state for defense to the prime minister, but, and this is very significant, they also answer directly to Parliament as sitting members of the House of Commons or House of Lords.
In the United States, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence are responsible for approving all expenditures for all defense- and intelligence-related activities. In the United Kingdom, the sitting elected members who are also appointed to political positions within the Ministry of Defense present their budgets and programs for confirmation in the House of Commons as part of the defense vote within the UK parliamentary budget process. This is a completely different process than that of the United States. As a result, there are very considerable differences in budgetary and military outcomes for the two countries’ navies and in how they are politically managed and financed. US Navy political appointees have to cross the Potomac River from the Pentagon and answer to the above House and Senate committees of record for their budget needs and also for the execution of funds across all naval domains, from personnel to acquisitions, force levels, and the underpinning strategy that is the argued basis for the annual budget process.
Committee staffers are critical in this process—the men and women who support the committees as professional staff members and in the offices of each individual representative and senator. The latter have direct interests not just at the national level, in terms of the proper funding and execution of US defense policy, but also with respect to the crucial impact on individual districts and states (for congressional representatives and senators respectively). Defense and intelligence budgets affect local jobs, bases, repair facilities; these staffs are concerned that large acquisition programs offer contractor employment in as many states as possible. The sensitive dialogue among both committee and representatives’ and senators’ staffs and Navy officials is therefore very subtle and important, totally unlike how the Ministry of Defense and the Royal Navy do business in the United Kingdom. Until very recently postwar US defense funding was characterized by what is colloquially termed “pork barrel” funding, whereby individual representatives and senators secure projects for their home districts and states. From a solely political perspective, sitting on one of the powerful defense subcommittees (parts of the all-powerful House and Senate Armed Services Committees) is a major political advantage for politicians whose home areas have significant or growing defense work, bases, or infrastructure.
The impact on the US and Royal Navies of the above major differences significantly affects how the senior uniform leadership interacts with the political and ultimate controlling arms of government. The Chief and Vice Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant and Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps appear regularly before the key congressional committees to explain and support their funding requests alongside the political appointees—the Secretary of the Navy himself and his assistant secretaries. They may be also called to account for any other relevant matter that Congress determines appropriate. Three- and two-star US Navy officers regularly appear before both full committees and subcommittees to explain their plans, policies, and programs. The Congress has many ways to influence the US Navy, and its toolbox is full of subtle political means to influence programs and outcomes.
The United Kingdom has very different processes. Elected ministers represent Royal Navy interests in the houses of Parliament (the House of Commons and the House of Lords), and senior officers are expected not to interact politically at any level unless specifically instructed by the appropriate elected minister. Senior Royal Navy officers do not have working relations with members of Parliament similar to those of their US counterparts. The British civil service supports ministerial positions and budgets with inputs from the senior naval leadership. During our period the permanent secretaries in the Ministry of Defense and their large civilian staffs (career civil servants selected by open competition and trained at the national level) yielded considerable power as the key interfaces with ministers, as the elements of continuity in policy and programs, and sources of key ministerial guidance that in the case of the US Navy is provided directly by the staffs of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. This is a very significant difference. A four-star admiral in the Royal Navy has nothing like the political influence, access, or interaction that his equivalent does in the United States. In our fifty-five-year period, British First Sea Lords and Chiefs of Naval Staff have rarely been seen to exert their rights of access under various constitutional niceties that devolve from Her Majesty the Queen being the Lord High Admiral. One of the most significant consequences for the Royal Navy is the inability to exert direct political influence on the budgetary process and resulting programs. It has nothing like the access that the US congressional committee structure affords the senior leadership of the US Navy.
A rare exception occurred in 1982, when Admiral Sir Henry Leech, the First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff (the direct counterpart of the US Chief of Naval Operations) marched from the Ministry of Defense across Whitehall to 10 Downing Street via the Cabinet Office and directly approached the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, without any prior approval from the secretary of state for defense. He simply told her that the Royal Navy and Royal Marines were standing by and were capable of retaking the Falkland Islands after the Argentinian invasion. Somewhat astounded, she immediately rose to the occasion and gave Admiral Leech an answer to his implied request in the affirmative. Admiral Leech had the full support of the Chief of the Defense Staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin. Admiral Leech knew that unless he made his mark directly with the prime minister there could be delay, vacillation and, in the worst case, compromise in Whitehall’s highly bureaucratized decision-making process.
Other keystones of the countries’ systems of government—and reflections of their democratic and common-law traditions—are their respective legal systems. The judiciaries of the two countries are appointed very differently. In the United States, federal judges and members of the Supreme Court are nominated by the president for confirmation by the Senate Judiciary Committee before a full vote in the Senate. There is therefore a definite political flavor to the judiciary at the federal level. In the United Kingdom there is more judicial independence; the barrister profession, whose members reside in the four Inns of Court, provides members of the higher judiciary via a professional and increasingly transparent process of selection by independent bodies of professionals. Judicial appointment recommendations are followed by confirmation by the Lord Chancellor after nomination to the Crown. Judicial independence in the United Kingdom has been a cornerstone of the separation of politics and political parties from judicial interference.
The above sets the stage for the fundamental changes that occurred in both countries in their post–World War II defense establishments. What follows has had significant influence not just on critical issues of strategy but also on defense and intelligence activity at every level and, therefore, on how the United States and the United Kingdom have conducted their national security programs and operations and, ultimately, made decisions to go to war.
The US National Security Act of 1947 had a profound effect on the US Navy. The Navy had been a separate department of government, established by act of Congress in 1798. The 1947 act and equally important the amendment to that act in 1949 created the US national defense establishment. The offices of secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense were created, with the Secretary of the Navy subordinate to the former. The 1947 act also created the US Air Force, separating it from the US Army. The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, had been Secretary of the Navy prior to the act, and he had opposed the changes. Since 1947 the Office of the Secretary of Defense has multiplied in size many times, with a large number of political appointees. In 1986 the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act strengthened the statutory framework created by the 1947 and 1949 acts. Joint service for aspiring general and flag officers effectively became mandatory. However, the office of the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps remained intact, and their staffs remained unimpaired. The US Navy assigned from 1947 onward officers within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide centralized support, advice, and direction to the secretary and his various staffs. The secretary of defense sits on the National Security Council, unlike the Secretary of the Navy. Until 1949 the Secretary of the Navy was a member of the president’s cabinet but after the changes became third in the secretary-of-defense succession, highlighting the historical position of the Secretary of the Navy. In modern times but before our period begins in 1960, there were many outstanding secretaries—Frank Knox (1940–44) and James Forrestal (1944–47) took the US Navy through the challenging years of World War II and to final victory.
The US National Security Act of 1947 also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council. The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was head of both the CIA and the US intelligence community until April 21, 2005, when the DCI lost his community-head role to the new position of director of National Intelligence (DNI) and his staff. The DNI also replaced the DCI as the principal intelligence adviser to the president. The DNI also became a member of the National Security Council. The CIA director continues to manage all aspects of the work of the CIA and to be responsible for the clandestine operations of the agency through the National Clandestine Service, which replaced the former Directorate of Operations.
All of the above changes persisted through our period and may be characterized as centralization, additional organizational structure and manpower, and a lengthening and deepening of the chain of command at all levels, whether operational, acquisition, political-military affairs, or personnel. The goals for these changes and outcomes will be addressed shortly. The US Navy that emerged from World War II as a distinct and independent government department, with its politically appointed leader a member of the cabinet, went through significant change. By 1960 the US Navy had worked extremely hard and diligently to comply with and be a team player within the ever-growing Pentagon bureaucracy that stemmed from the changes of 1947 and 1949—an Office of the Secretary of Defense and a large staff that supported the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Navy sought to maintain its distinctive identity and to represent the strategic significance of maritime power. The Marine Corps in the Korea conflict added further distinction to its extraordinary battle honors and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, together with the Chief of Naval Operations, committed himself to making the relationship with the Joint Chiefs of Staff work as intended. However, the US Navy of 1960, as a national-security entity, had lost the preeminent position that it enjoyed at the end of World War II. Centralization and jointness had subsumed the Navy created by Congress in 1798. How well this has all worked in our fifty-five-year period bears close scrutiny and analysis, not for criticism’s sake and certainly not to hark back to past glories in some arcane nostalgic way, but to analyze what the impact has been, how well it has all worked, and what the future may bring.
Before we address these issues, let us turn to developments in the United Kingdom, so that a side-by-side comparison and analysis can be made. The UK Ministry of Defense as we know it today was not formed until 1964. Its creation was based on a perception that there was a requirement for greater cooperation and coordination between the three British armed services—the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. The Royal Navy has always been regarded in the United Kingdom as the senior service and referred to as such. The Royal Marines are part of the Royal Navy, and the Commandant of the Royal Marines enjoys the same status and prestige as the Commandant of the US Marine Corps. However, the Royal Marines have always been a fraction of the size of the US Marine Corps and therefore have not enjoyed the level of national recognition rightfully enjoyed by the Marine Corps in the United States. A Chiefs of Staff Committee had been formed much earlier, in 1923, though the idea of a unified ministry had been rejected by Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1921. In 1936 a cabinet-level position of minister for the coordination of defense was created to provide oversight for rearmament in light of growing Nazi aggression. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940 he created the office of minister of defense, in order to coordinate defense matters more effectively and to have direct control over the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It is important to note that Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty (the civilian political head of the Royal Navy, equivalent to the US Secretary of the Navy) from 1911 to 1915 and from 1939 to 1940 (the famous “Winston is back” period after war was declared in September 1939) before he became prime minister. It is equally important that the position of First Lord of the Admiralty was created in 1628, the Earl of Portland being the first incumbent. The list of First Lords of the Admiralty reads like a litany of hugely distinguished Britons; the last two incumbents, Lord Carrington (serving 1959–63) and the Earl of Jellicoe (1963–64) very much representative of their illustrious predecessors.
Winston Churchill assumed the joint role of prime minister and minister of defense for the duration of World War II. In 1946 the government of Clement Attlee (the Labor Party won the 1945 general election) introduced into the House of Commons and passed the 1946 Ministry of Defense Act. Prior to this the First Lord of the Admiralty had been a member of the cabinet. The new minister of defense supplanted the First Lord, the secretary of state for war (political head of the army), and the secretary of state for air (the political head of the Royal Air Force) in the British cabinet. Between 1946 and 1964 there was a hybrid organization in the United Kingdom, with five separate departments of state running defense: the Admiralty, the War Office (army), the Air Ministry (Royal Air Force), the Ministry of Aviation, and the nascent Ministry of Defense. In 1964 a monumental change occurred in the United Kingdom—the above departments were all merged in a single Ministry of Defense, and the historically powerful position of First Lord of the Admiralty was abolished. One final event occurred in 1971, when the Ministry of Aviation Supply became part of the Ministry of Defense. The first secretary of state for defense was Peter Thorneycroft, who was short-lived in office, from April 1964 to October 1964, in the Conservative government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home. In the new Labor government of Harold Wilson the position was occupied by Denis Healey, from October 1964 to June 1970, a very significant period. He was followed by Lord Carrington in the Conservative government of Edward Heath from June 1970 to January 1974. The ten-year period from 1964 to 1974 witnessed the full solidification of British defense policy under a single minister and a very large bureaucracy. We will examine the impact on the former Admiralty structure and personnel shortly.
The civilian bureaucracy grew exponentially. The permanent secretary (the most senior civil servant) at the Ministry of Defense became very powerful, as did the civil service assistant secretaries, all of whom were expected to be apolitical. The growth of the Ministry of Defense civil service added costs that had not existed at the height of World War II.
The former Chiefs of Staff Committee became immersed in the Central Defense Staff (CDS), and the incumbent Chief of the Defense Staff was made the professional head of all British armed forces, and the senior uniformed military adviser to the secretary of state for defense and the prime minister. The First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff in the United Kingdom retained his position and title as the military head of the Royal Navy, but his political lead—the First Lord of the Admiralty, a cabinet member—was gone.
The Chief of the Defense Staff therefore became an increasingly important figure in British defense. There followed a pattern of succession whereby the first incumbent, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir William Dickson (1959), was followed by Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1959–65), who was followed by Field Marshal Sir Richard Hull (1965–67). The trend for many years was to follow the succession of Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and British Army until 1977, when an airman, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Neil Cameron, broke the pattern. Since September 1979 the Royal Navy has had only three Chiefs of the Defense Staff: Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin (served 1979–82), Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fieldhouse (1985–88), and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce (2001–3). The Royal Air Force has had the same number of Chiefs of the Defense Staff (three), and the army has had seven. The latter number indicates significantly what happened in British defense between October 1982 when Field Marshal Sir Edwin Bramall succeeded Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin and 2015, with General Sir Nick Houghton becoming Chief of the Defense Staff in July 2013. The British Army had seven Chiefs of the Defense Staff to the combined Royal Navy and Royal Air Force six.
Before we examine and analyze the implications of these organizational changes and then compare and contrast the US and Royal Navies’ places in the new order of things, let us look at the changes that occurred in the respective intelligence organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom. The key reason to do so is that intelligence has played a vital role in the development and operations of both navies during our period. The historical antecedents in World War II set the stage for why and how intelligence sharing between the two countries developed during the Cold War and in the twenty-six years since 1990. The dialogue between hard technical and scientific intelligence and the development of foreign navies’ capabilities is not just axiomatic—it is at the heart of why both navies developed very specific capabilities, force structures, deployment strategies, bases, and logistics to meet the emergence of various threats to national security interests. How US and British naval intelligence fitted into the wider tapestry of both countries’ other intelligence departments and agencies is as important for both navies as are the other organizational changes that occurred.
The World War II intelligence organizations of both countries were lean and mean. Growth occurred in the United States after the emergence of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. In the United Kingdom, the crown jewels during the war were the brilliant minds at the code-breaking center at Bletchley Park. In the United States their counterparts were in the Office of Naval Intelligence. The hugely significant roles of both entities have been extensively documented. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) and the vital code breaking associated with reading the enemy’s traffic were central to the Allies’ victories. The work of the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services) in the United States and the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6) and SOE (Special Operations Executive) in the United Kingdom was geared to human intelligence (HUMINT). It was geared also to clandestine operations to thwart the enemy in multiple ways on the ground in highly sensitive covert operations, often linked to collaboration with the various European and Asian resistance organizations and groups. The leaders of these wartime organizations, such as Harry Hinsley, R. V. Jones and J. C. Masterman, influenced the various reorganizations after 1945. They trained the postwar recruits in the United States and United Kingdom in the various intelligence arts and sciences, so that by 1960 both countries had very capable cadres, mixtures of those with wartime experience and the new generation. The older generation was there to guide the new. Personnel recruited in the 1960s have now largely retired, with a few exceptions. Your author is one of the survivors from the 1960s—mentored by stalwarts like Sir Harry Hinsley and Vice Admiral Sir Ned Denning. Hinsley was at Bletchley Park working Enigma for predominantly naval operations, and Denning was in the Royal Navy’s famous Room 40, at the heart of operational intelligence.
Post–World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom followed largely parallel tracks in terms of developing the organizational, skill, and experience bases inherited from World War II. This was generally so until the recent, post-9/11, period. Neither country went the centralization route, with the exception of the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States and the Defense Intelligence Staff in the United Kingdom. This observation is very important for what follows.
The various departments and agencies were kept separate based on functionality—primarily SIGINT, HUMINT, counterespionage, and later space-based intelligence systems and operations. These functionalities corresponded to the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ—the lineal successor to Bletchley Park), to the CIA and SIS, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterespionage department, and the Security Service (or MI5). Later the unique National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) would be established in the United States as the only truly unacknowledged (until relatively recently) intelligence organization in the United States; the existence of the NRO was classified for many years. Within the above organizational milieu lay the naval intelligence organizations of both navies, headed by a director of naval intelligence. There were distinctive parallels in both navies, and the cooperation between both entities was never closer during the fifty-five years of our period; that closeness was perhaps equaled by the extraordinarily strong relationship between GCHQ and NSA, within which resided very important naval elements. Throughout this whole period the working relations between British and US naval intelligence and between GCHQ and NSA have been simply outstanding. The connections at the personal level, the cooperation developed and the abiding friendships made by successive staffs, meant that both navies were probably better served than any other single department of state in either of the two countries. The latter testifies to the bedrock created by their World War II predecessors.
The only main organizational difference between US and British naval intelligence was that the British did not recruit and train specialist intelligence officers. The British selected their intelligence officers from what the Royal Navy calls the “General List,” the equivalent of career “unrestricted line” officers in the US Navy. The British argued that their naval intelligence officers should have a wide naval background before being recruited to intelligence and should in due course return to the regular Royal Navy. The US Navy by contrast had during our period specific separate personnel structures and career paths for designated intelligence and cryptographic officers. The same applied to Royal Navy ratings and US Navy enlisted personnel; the Royal Navy chose from the broad manpower base, while the US Navy had specialists trained within designated personnel codes. The US Navy considered the value of deeply trained and experienced personnel to be greater than did the British system, where intelligence officers were in post for shorter periods than in the US Navy. The Royal Navy believed that a too-institutionalized intelligence personnel structure would possibly encourage a too-ingrained view of intelligence issues and a personnel structure separate from the mainline navy, with the danger that what happened “behind the green door” would be the preserve of just a few. The Royal Navy liked its intelligence officers to be grounded in experience at sea. The US Navy ensured sea experience by creating a wide range of seagoing intelligence billets in key locations, such as fleet flagships and major units. Whatever the pros and cons of the two systems, both navies cooperated to a degree above and beyond any other known US-UK relationship, fortified by the special navy-related operations at NSA and GCHQ.
The US and UK naval intelligence organizations faced similar challenges in the creation of centralized defense intelligence agencies: the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the United States and the Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) in the United Kingdom. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the US Navy’s DNI survived integration and remained totally separate, reporting to the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations. In the case of the Royal Navy the British director of naval intelligence and his staff were subsumed under the DIS, who had his own organizational hierarchy and chain of command to a Deputy Chief of the Defense Staff for Intelligence (DCDS [I]) under the Central Defense Staff controlled by the CDS. This was a significant change in naval intelligence that the United States never experienced. Much to the chagrin of many in the United Kingdom, the position of director of naval intelligence was replaced by a lower grade post of Commodore (Intelligence), a one-star position. During World War II Vice Admiral John Godfrey was a three-star officer with immediate access to Winston Churchill, the prime minister. As a result of these centralizing changes, which occurred in parallel with the overall defense organization changes described earlier, the Royal Navy’s intelligence arm found itself part of a highly bureaucratized central staff, with civil servants occupying many of the key posts. The one value of the latter was that the civilian staffs maintained continuity while the officer corps turned over.
Where the World War II special relationship endured most, after the above centralization processes had been put in place and the new hierarchies established, was in the very closely held, highly secretive operations conducted by and under the umbrellas of both countries’ navies and their naval intelligence organizations. Because of the very nature of these operations, both navies were able to preserve their separation from the new central organizations, with access to the political leadership that no other service or intelligence agencies enjoyed. Furthermore, both navies were entwined in these operations. Such operations often required special, highly classified presidential executive orders or, in the case of the United Kingdom, orders signed by the prime minister. Everything and everyone in between was out of this loop. One very important element drove this requirement: the US Navy and the Royal Navy were forward deployed during the whole of this period, and globally. They were present where no other assets or intelligence entities could go. Even after space-based systems became significant, only naval assets could perform certain real-time intelligence functions based on persistent presence. There continues to this day a major requirement for forward-deployed naval intelligence assets; we will explore and analyze it later. Security and need-to-know are the guardian angels of these operations.
Let us return to the overall picture of post–World War II centralization, what this meant, and how it impacted both navies. We should also address absolutely core questions of whether the vast changes that occurred were indeed necessary: Were there better ways to do things? Would both navies be in better or worse shape today without them? Are the national security interests of both countries, individually and collectively, well served by the organizational changes since 1960? Now that you can appreciate the changes that occurred with the new organizations, let us form an analytical framework for looking at these questions.
The Western democracies have based their national-security policies on clearly identifiable values and strategic considerations. Primary among them has been the need to protect citizens from invasion and threats that challenge their core geographic and political integrity and identities: the right to live in peace and harmony; the right to make choices via cherished democratic institutions; and the right to exist as an independent nation, free from oppression or threat. Deep-rooted historical, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and economic factors bond such nations. The strategic requirements that arise from the efforts of each and every nation to maintain its national identity and self-determination vary across time and geographic space. These factors have determined, for example, the reactions by the United States and the United Kingdom to a changing balance of power, whereby the status quo of free, well-established, independent states has been threatened.
A central generic lesson of the first half of the twentieth century may be summarized as the need to anticipate and prepare for defense when imminent threats indicate that the world is changing in ways that cause deep concern for future security. The clearest and best example of this is the rise of the Nazi Party and the German elections of 1933, leading to Germany’s ever-increasing belligerence from 1936 to the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. Unpreparedness may lead to a perception of actual weakness and embolden an aggressor to challenge the status quo. The latter in today’s environment may not be classical territorial violations, with invasion the worst-case scenario, but economic and resource challenges, acquisition of monopolistic trade in key raw materials, or the exploitation of cyberspace, water, and energy-source rights. The ultimate expression of this primary strategic requirement is national survival.
Second, nations have developed, mainly but not totally since the nineteenth century, the need to ally themselves for self-protection with other nations. Conversely, nations with belligerent and often expansionist intent have allied with nations where they perceived opportunities for gain. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Nazi-Japanese-Italian Axis, and the later denouncement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact by Germany are good twentieth-century examples of realpolitik played out by adversary nations who perceived gain in making and breaking alliances.
Third, the leading twentieth-century democratic powers, the United States and the United Kingdom, have led in the exaltation of self-determination and, in the case of the United Kingdom, decolonization and the right of self-government. President Woodrow Wilson was the father of the post–World War I League of Nations, and both nations were at the heart of the founding of the United Nations organization and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The former was conceived to foster international cooperation and allay future wars, the latter to preserve peace in ways that built on the lessons learned from the failure of the League of Nations to maintain international order. NATO’s strength lay in its military cohesion, organization, and military capabilities, which aimed to deter, not threaten.
The cultural underpinnings of the United States and the United Kingdom and the need to show strength by clear military capability, national resolve, and cooperation in well-organized alliance structures point to a clearly definable thread that runs through American and British strategic thinking. It is that preparedness for a changing threat environment is paramount. The United States and the United Kingdom have found that the tools of international-security diplomacy and the use of power in the pursuit of peaceful outcomes constitute a very mixed bag. The former includes diplomatic pressure and multinational applications of economic sanctions, isolation, and restrictions on the flow of goods, materials, and capital. Where they have failed, the use of force has tended to be the tool of last resort, whether in the shape of blockade, mining, increased levels of war preparedness, or, in the worst case, open and declared war.
In certain cases the United States and the United Kingdom have been constrained in the use of these tools, because the overall strategic situation and balance of power were not in their favor. The Soviet invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan showed how a combination of circumstances can render the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies impotent—an unhealthy state of affairs. The sphere of influence of the Soviet Union in all three cases was such that NATO could not react in any meaningful way, only protest. There is a deep and abiding lesson in those three points, not least that military power as an instrument of foreign and overall national-security policy has limits. Understanding those limits is crucial.
Let us now return to the issue of US and UK centralization and the impact on both countries’ navies. World War II was undoubtedly the greatest conflict fought in human history. What is quite astounding about it is that neither the United States nor the United Kingdom fundamentally changed its fundamental defense organization during the conflict. There was tighter control and enforced cooperation, but none of that was opposed, let alone resisted, by any of the military services. World War II was complex for the British and Americans at every level—particularly the quite amazing necessity to build in short order a massive industrially based war machine and to innovate technologically on extraordinarily short time lines. But one thing is very clear: the system worked. Nothing is perfect, but the US and UK World War II defense organizations performed brilliantly. Changes were made on the fly; bureaucratic inertia went out the window, and those who stood in the way of change or defied direct orders were soon removed. Any form of incompetence or inability to perform was rectified.
The question therefore arises, why change now? Furthermore, why did change, from individual service centricity to centralization, take place? None of the US and UK military services during or after World War II can be accused of not being team players—at the worst, of playing service politics in pursuit of self-serving goals. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The political leadership and the service chiefs and their staffs agreed on grand strategy and then allocated service resources required to execute it. Interservice rivalry was a matter not of deeply fought-over divisions of the resource pie but of rivalry to perform, to excel, indeed to show worthiness in all regards—a hugely healthy state of affairs. The US Navy and the Royal Navy were never in bitter contentious battles with the other services over resources and who would do what to execute the grand strategy. During the Battle of the Bulge, General George Patton’s Third Army was never so pleased as when it saw the US Army Air Forces appear to provide air-to-ground support once the weather was clear enough, and on countless occasions surface naval forces heralded overhead Liberators or Short Sunderlands to attack surfaced U-boats. Interservice rivalry was about combined mutual effectiveness, not internecine competition.
World War II proved three axioms about defense organizations: they have to be relevant, they have to be efficient, and they have to be effective. What emerged from World War II was a desire for greater integration and top-level control, because centralization would lead to greater efficiency and less rivalry and inefficiency. What happened in reality, however, was that a massive bureaucracy with a significant political overlay was placed on top of the existing structure. Both countries’ defense infrastructures grew. Once the basic political changes took place, underpinned by legislative action, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the chiefs of staff structure in the United States and, later, the Ministry of Defense and the Central Defense Staff in the United Kingdom all grew exponentially. These changes incurred massive costs. The key question, again, is: Was it all worthwhile if what both countries had during World War II, aside from some lessons learned, worked well?
Several prominent post–World War II figures were centralists. In the United Kingdom the greatest advocate on integration was, perhaps surprisingly, Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Louis Mountbatten. He personally oversaw the creation of the Central Defense Staff. How could this be? Admiral Mountbatten genuinely believed that greater efficiency could be achieved by centralization. He believed firmly in interservice cooperation, not rivalry. He had been Chief of Combined Operations from 1941 to 1943 as his first major flag-officer appointment, and there he had been an advocate of joint operations. In the Far East he saw the great value of interservice cooperation as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia from 1943 to 1946.
Lord Louis Mountbatten (June 25, 1900–August 27, 1979) was unique in all regards: a second cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth and an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth. His family pedigree was impeccable: he was the youngest child and second son of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse. He entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne in May 1913. In 1914 his father became First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff. A very sad blight on the Battenberg family was the removal of Prince Louis from office because of anti-German feelings in the United Kingdom (the family’s name had to be changed to Mountbatten because of its deep German relationships). The young Mountbatten overcame this heritage to achieve the highest military offices, as First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff from April 1955 to July 1959 and as the first Chief of the Defense Staff from 1959 to 1965, making him the longest-serving Chief of the Defense Staff. He and his father made Royal Navy history by both being First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff.
Lord Mountbatten had, therefore, enormous influence. The 1950s witnessed the Korean War, intensification of the Cold War, the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, and the growth of nuclear rivalry after the detonation of the first Soviet weapon in August 1949. Mountbatten unequivocally believed that the British services needed to be one, not just in not name but in actual organization. He began to work systematically with the governments of Harold Macmillan (January 1957–October 1963), Alec Douglas-Home (October 1963–October 1964), and Harold Wilson (October 1964–June 1970) to transform the organization of British defense. In effect, he dismantled the historic organization of the Royal Navy, in terms of its political-military structure. The direct representation in Parliament of the Royal Navy as a service by the First Lord of the Admiralty, a member of the cabinet, was now gone. This single fact had dramatic and long-term consequences to which either Lord Mountbatten was oblivious or did not consider important, assessing that change was necessary. The essence of this change can be summarized as follows.
The Royal Navy no longer, as noted, had separate and independent representation in Parliament and direct access at the cabinet level. The Admiralty as an organization of state was subsumed by the Ministry of Defense, although the Naval Staff, headed by the First Sea and Chief of Naval Staff, still existed in its prior form. The key directorates of Naval Plans, Operational Requirements, and Operations and Trade remained intact. These key Naval Staff directorates, along with the Controller of the Navy’s staff (which headed acquisitions and procurement) and the chief of naval personnel had always been lean organizations, renowned for their hard work and efficiency and never bureaucratic or overmanned. The Directorate of Naval Intelligence had been similar. With the loss of direct political access and influence the Naval Staff now had to work through a Central Defense Staff structure. This structure had new and what many perceived as duplicative coordination staff functions, functions that in prior decades had been handled through the Chiefs of Staff Committee, a similarly lean organization that was now expanded within the Chief of the Defense Staff ’s organization.
The latter replicated at the joint-staff level the individual functions that in the case of the Royal Navy were embodied in the highly effective Naval Staff. The latter had a historic record of high performance through two world wars in the twentieth century. The four-star leaders in the Navy now found themselves bereft of direct political access and of a reporting chain to a Central Defense Staff in a unified Ministry of Defense. There was now a Chief of the Defense Staff hierarchy and Deputy and Deputy Assistant Chiefs of the Defense Staff for all the main defense functions: policy, plans, operations, intelligence, personnel, and acquisition (including research and development, R&D). There was therefore an enormous layer of added staff function, with attendant manpower and bureaucracy, placed on top of the former Admiralty structure, one that had functioned well not just for decades and both world wars but indeed for centuries. The culture shock was not inconsiderable. In addition, the Royal Navy suddenly found itself working with and through not just these new defense hierarchies but also with a growing and, over time, entrenched civil-service bureaucracy, adding process and cost to the business of running the Royal Navy.
The possible long-term organizational impact of these changes was not fully analyzed or understood in 1964 or in the years leading up to them. Centralization and jointness were considered good for their own sake, in the names of greater service cooperation, integration, and planning to meet the security challenges posed by the Cold War. The Royal Navy over the fifty-one years from 1964 to 2015 faced competition in this new environment, and not just for resources vis-à-vis the other two services. The Royal Navy no longer had direct political representation in the formulation of maritime strategy. This was transformational, because since Nelson’s time the Royal Navy had regarded itself as the self-evident and nationally accepted embodiment of British grand strategy through sea power, typified most of all by maritime expeditionary warfare.
In the 1960s, following Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous “Winds of Change” speech, the United Kingdom began systematic and wholesale decolonization, particularly in Africa, Asia, and the West Indies. The Labor government of Harold Wilson and his minister of defense, Denis Healey, saw the independence movements in the last vestiges of empire, beginning with Indian independence, as a reason to draw back to Europe. “Withdrawal” became an operative word in UK defense parlance, particularly with regard to the Far East and the British Far East Fleet, based in Singapore and Hong Kong. Defense Minister Healey saw no need for a fleet of the size that the United Kingdom had maintained through the 1950s into the early 1960s. He did not articulate a maritime policy or indeed any strategy that melded the Royal Navy into the new global maritime Cold War environment, other than that the nation was to become North Atlantic focused. The United Kingdom systematically withdrew from its historic domain of the Mediterranean; the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet became “Flag Officer Malta,” until the Malta naval base was closed and the continuous presence of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean finally ended. This pattern continued with the downgrading of the Far East bases to support facilities and the eventual lowering for the last time of the Commander Far East Fleet’s flag in Singapore.
This process was driven not just by budgetary and foreign policy considerations but also by the structural changes in defense organization. The new defense organization had created a totally different political-military environment for decision making. The new Ministry of Defense had many conflicting priorities at a time of colonial retrenchment and withdrawal. Not least of these were the balancing of conventional forces against strategic nuclear defense and the perceived need to support NATO in Europe with ground forces through the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), as UK forces in West Germany were termed. Alongside these often conflicting claims for resources lay other underlying problems. Not least was the growing rivalry between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.
After the historic meeting between Prime Minister Macmillan and President John F. Kennedy in Bermuda in December 1962, the United States agreed to share its nuclear-submarine and strategic nuclear ballistic-missile technology with the United Kingdom. The Royal Navy would build both nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) and SSBNs—the latter becoming the core, and today the mainstay, of UK national strategic defense through nuclear deterrence. The Royal Air Force competed for resources to maintain its nuclear-capable “V-bomber” force of Vulcan, Victor, and Valiant aircraft, with nuclear-bomb capabilities similar to those of the US Air Force’s B-52 aircraft of Strategic Air Command. These were resource-intensive requirements and capabilities. Denis Healy associated withdrawal from the former UK territories as akin to withdrawal from maritime presence and forward deployment. This fact confronted a Royal Navy that had been globally disposed. Healey saw in withdrawal major cost savings, a downsizing of the Royal Navy, a focus on European defense via the deployment of the British Army and Royal Air Force to Europe, and the concentration of the Royal Navy in northern European waters. The latter would contribute to the NATO challenge to the burgeoning Soviet Northern Fleet, which increasingly sought access through the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap to the Atlantic and the oceans beyond. The overall strategy was driven by available resources rather than by deep analysis of the United Kingdom’s primary strategic goals, beyond the need for a national, independent strategic nuclear deterrent based on US support and technology. The Royal Air Force wanted to maintain roles in the air defense of the United Kingdom in addition to Europe, plus maintenance of its role of maritime patrol.
The Royal Navy found itself in an unenviable position when the decision to replace the major fleet aircraft carriers reached Denis Healey’s desk. The Naval Staff now had not just to compete with the Royal Air Force but do so in a central staff environment focused on not only strategy but also cost saving. The least factor considered was UK vital national strategic interest, other than nuclear deterrence. The core concept of maritime expeditionary warfare was not addressed in a global context as an alternate to a European focus.
Secretary of State for Defense Denis Healey was an intellectual. He achieved first-class honors at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1940. He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in the British Army and served from 1940 to 1945 in the North African and Italian campaigns, distinguishing himself at Anzio, and leaving the Army as a major. However, from 1937 to 1940, while at Oxford, Denis Healey had been a member of the Communist Party, leaving after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. After the war he joined the Labor Party and worked his way up through the party hierarchy. His intellectual commitment to defense thinking was demonstrated by his positions as a councilor at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948–60, and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1958–61. Healey became one of the key thinkers in the postwar Labor Party. He had declared views on aircraft carriers, thinking them far too vulnerable to torpedo attack from the new nuclear-powered attack submarines and characterizing them as floating slums for their sailors. His analyses went no further and did not explore how the new hunter-killer submarines would in the future protect the aircraft carrier battle groups. He chose to not recognize that the Royal Navy’s surface force was being configured around antisubmarine warfare to protect the carriers and amphibious assault ships as well as merchant shipping, with new air-defense missile systems. The strategic value of mobile fixed-wing strike from the sea was not in Secretary of Defense Healey’s strategic lexicon. The scene was set therefore for a major challenge to British naval aviation, the like of which the Royal Navy had never witnessed. The new political-military structure would not help the Royal Navy in the debate about the replacement-carrier program. It is rather striking, if speculative, to contrast the situation of Secretary Healey with his counterpart in the United States in the 1960s—probably no one who had been a member of the Communist Party, whatever their later change of heart, could ever have acceded to such a position there.
The fixed-wing aircraft carriers HMS Victorious, Hermes, Eagle, and Ark Royal had well-understood service lives. Two light carriers, HMS Albion and Bulwark, had been converted to helicopter-operating commando carriers for the Royal Marines. The Royal Navy lost the battle for a replacement fixedwing carrier program, a setback that would culminate in the end of Royal Navy major fixed-wing aviation until approximately 2020. HMS Ark Royal was the last large carrier to leave service in 1979, her service stretched as far as possible by the Naval Staff. Her squadrons of F-4s, Buccaneers, and Gannets were then either transferred to the Royal Air Force or scrapped. The Naval Staff set about planning a short-term recovery from what many naval and independent strategic experts regarded as a monumental error of judgment by the Ministry of Defense and the Central Defense Staff, one that will have taken fifty years to correct. The strategic and tactical implications will be addressed in due course.
The process by which this CDS decision occurred was very typical of the Whitehall environment within which the Royal Navy now had to operate. Without direct representation at the cabinet or parliamentary levels, the Navy lost access to political influence and debate in ways that had been traditional. The new central staff and ministry functions placed the Naval Staff out of the mainstream, beyond its own immediate service functions. The First Sea Lord was no longer the primary player in a historic Admiralty but a service chief who was increasingly required both to champion his cause and be a team player in a Chief of Defense Staff structure. The First Sea Lord had to recognize not only that his voice was just one of four at the table (the three service chiefs plus the Chief of the Defense Staff) but also that his naval staff had to contend with a powerful civil service secretariat and a Central Defense Staff, only a third of the members of which were Navy at best, often on a rotational basis among the three services. None of this was conducive to formulating or articulating maritime strategy or to convincing government of the need for a primary strategy based on the well-founded historical role of the Royal Navy as the guardian of the United Kingdom’s security. The Royal Navy’s ability to compete for the primary place was diminished.
The new Central Defense Staff became characterized as a process-driven organization in which intense highly bureaucratic committee work, balancing of conflicting interests and constant attempts to meet each service’s requirements and funding requests by compromise, became the order of the day. In this process the core and vitally important functions of debating, deciding, and agreeing on grand strategy based on vital national security interests were often lost. The UK Strategic Defense Reviews (SDRs) of the recent past decades have been described as emblematic.
As we move through this book readers should consider the impact of the above on the other key themes that we will address, in addition to the issue of strategic decision making, which we will review shortly. Meanwhile, let us return to the US Navy and address how the key changes that faced the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations played out. We will then be in a position to compare and contrast the respective organizational changes between both navies.
The US Navy was most fortunate from 1960 onward in one critical regard when compared with the Royal Navy. The very nature of the political system and of the Constitution of the United States helped maintain the enduring influence of the Navy after the organizational changes described earlier. Two factors were paramount. First, the legislative and the executive in the United States are separate, and second, the position and role of the Secretary of the Navy remained intact and unchallenged, even though the secretary lost his seat in the cabinet in 1949 and the new secretary of defense was all-powerful, in a hierarchical sense. Seven secretaries, Franke, Connally, Korth, Fay, Nitze, Ignatius, and Chafee, from 1960 to 1972, still enjoyed autonomy to act in the best interests of the US Navy via well-established constitutional channels. The Chiefs of Naval Operations during this period—Admirals Burke, Anderson, McDonald, Moorer, and Zumwalt, from 1960 to 1974—never faced the dilemmas confronting the First Sea Lords and their staffs during the same period. Both the naval political and uniformed leaderships had well defined and legally correct means to access the Congress at several levels and by multiple means. They had ways to represent not just their programmatic and funding interests but also core strategic issues that drive the annual defense budgets.
The open forum of public unclassified hearings served US Navy interests well. The personal strengths of successive Chiefs of Naval Operations shone through in open questioning in the House Committee on Armed Services (HASC) and the Senate Committee on Armed Services (SASC), as well as in the classified hearings, to which the public and press were not admitted. Key strategic issues were aired in public—hotly debated, often with rigor, candor, and good humor but sometime also with aggressive and well-placed direct questions by members and senators, who had been well briefed by extremely competent and knowledgeable committee and personal staffs. The chairman and ranking members of these committees were hugely powerful. The US Navy therefore had constant opportunities to state its case for resources, in thoroughly staffed congressional presentations. The staff of the Chief of Naval Operations has its own congressional liaison staff, which can legitimately interface with congressional committees and influence the defense debate and make the case for programs, manpower, ships, submarines, aircraft, weapons, and key Operations and Maintenance (O&M) funding.
Another element in this process is that of industrial-naval relationships, with the contractors who seek naval business at every level of production and service. These contractors, their lobbyists, and the very representatives and senators in whose districts and states they reside and run their businesses, have closely interwoven relationships by which they pursue programs in which they have crucial employment and other interests. The corresponding Appropriations Committees of record on both sides of the Congress control the purse strings for naval funding—the HASC and the SASC may authorize, but only the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees can legally appropriate funding. These committees are all-powerful, sounding at one level the bell of success for a program or, by ending appropriations, the death knell of a failed program. The constitutional ability of the US Navy to influence this process is well defined, well understood, and practiced with great expertise. Senior flag-officer success in part rests on an ability to perform on Capitol Hill. Three- and four-star officers have their days on the Hill, often with the Secretary of the Navy sitting between the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. The Royal Navy has no such privileged constitutional process to make its case in Parliament or to seek funding by direct influence.
Culture and relationships are factors that run deep, and often silently, in US Navy and congressional relationships. Many members of Congress have served in the US Navy, several with great distinction. In recent times, Sen. John McCain from Arizona and Sen. John Warner of Virginia are distinguished Navy veterans. There are countless others. Many members of Congress have served on both sides of the Potomac, in the Pentagon and on the Hill. As a result they not only understand the process but have predisposed loyalties and views on what is what and how things should be done. Their personal loyalties to the US Navy are ingrained, and they understand the Navy’s strategic arguments. Their staffs fill in any gaps in technical knowledge and work with the uniformed Navy to obtain briefings and documentation from the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations. This is a healthy, dynamic, and ever-changing political-military dialogue between the executive and legislative branches of government. The system in the United Kingdom is very different indeed and does not serve the interests of the Royal Navy well in an era of defense cuts.
Nothing is perhaps more representative of the fundamental political-military differences between the environments in which the Royal Navy and the US Navy have to do business than in the very nature of their top political leadership and their leaders’ constitutional positions. In the United States, several presidents have had prior experience in the Congress—they have seen the other side of government, and from a different perspective. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been an Assistant Secretary of the US Navy earlier in his career, just as Prime Minister Churchill had twice been First Lord of the Admiralty. Several post–World War II presidents have been US Navy veterans; Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and G. H. W. Bush were all distinguished examples. Several were highly decorated, with extraordinarily commendable war records. They all understood the Navy: how it works, what the Navy does and why, and the strategic significance of sea power. By contrast, only one British prime minister since World War II has served in the Royal Navy: Prime Minister James Callaghan (1976–79), who served in World War II from 1942 to the war’s end. His father had been a Royal Navy chief petty officer. Prime Minister Callaghan joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as an able seaman, completing the war as a lieutenant, RNVR, with very creditable service. However, the UK top leadership has enjoyed nothing like the deep personal knowledge and experience of the listed US presidents, several of whom experienced intense combat operations. This factor makes a significant difference when the US commander-in-chief faces difficult decisions and choices—that is, they know the face of battle and the consequences of their decisions. Moreover, regarding the equally critical aspect of budgetary allocations and priorities, a former Navy president was likely to understand and respect what the service was asking for and why. In the spring of 1982, Admirals Lewin and Leech had to provide Prime Minister Thatcher overnight a naval primer following the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. She had zero prior knowledge; most fortunately, however, she was a very quick study and under the most expert guidance of these two fine World War II veterans grasped the plans they laid before her. Twenty years earlier, in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John Kennedy needed no such instruction in the use of naval power to thwart Soviet intentions and operations.
Let us now analyze and appraise the strategic significance of these changes to both navies. The changes in both countries were quite monumental with respect to the status quo of World War II. Two things become clear from the above review. First, the US Navy came out of them with a consistent and enduring ability to make its case directly to the Congress and argue for the resources required. The Royal Navy, by contrast, became politically constrained and found itself in the position of a second cousin, once removed—a member of the family but with no real direct standing with, or access to, the family leadership. One key observation needs to be made before we get into more detail. It is that inherent in the system in which the US Navy operates, constituting its backbone, are the US Constitution and the very culture and modus operandi of government that enables the Navy to work through bureaucratic and organizational change. The Royal Navy enjoys no such bountiful privileges. The changes described above stymied a service that had been used not just to being the senior service but to operating in an environment and ways where its case could be both constantly heard and understood. Centralization, jointness, and political concentration of power in a highly civilianized bureaucracy and process-oriented Ministry of Defense and Central Defense Staff rung the death knell of a tradition-bound Royal Navy that had enjoyed centuries of political access.
The 1960s witnessed strategic challenges. The United States faced in 1962 its greatest challenge since World War II and the Korean War—the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was followed in 1963 by the assassination of President Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War during the presidency of his successor, Lyndon Johnson. As a backdrop to these events, the Cold War intensified and US-Soviet rivalries played out across the globe, not least in the oceans of the world, where the US and Royal Navies faced the Soviet and Warsaw Pact navies on a daily basis. Allies and client states of both the United States and the Soviet Union became parts of this great game, which persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union (or USSR). The June War of 1967 between Israel and the Arab nations of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan saw a crisis erupt that Secretary of State Dean Rusk regarded as more threatening than the Cuban Missile Crisis. By the end of the decade the European situation had deteriorated even further—the Central Front that separated Western Europe from the Warsaw Pact and NATO’s FEBA (forward edge of the battle area) was a zone of heavy military presence, constant exercises, and readiness events. Within the NATO military structure, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), always an American four-star general, was the guardian of retaliatory plans that relied on an underlying nuclear deterrence posture of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD). All this created a military balance across the Iron Curtain that made no sense in terms of a conventional invasion of Western Europe: the avowed policy of NATO was to respond with nuclear weapons if the FEBA collapsed and the Red Army made inroads. The MAD doctrine was, therefore, well named. When the Soviets occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968, after intense protests by the Czech leader, Alexander Dubcek, it was transparently clear that NATO could make no response, given the military balance and overwhelming threat of escalation.
The one domain where the Soviet Union and the West could play out their intense competition for global influence and the contest between communism and democracy was at sea, and in countries ripe for economic and ideological penetration that had maritime access. With regard to the Soviet Union, this process of influence by the growing Soviet navy became characterized as “Soviet naval diplomacy.” It was on the oceans of the world that the Cold War was truly fought.
NATO responded with the creation of a naval command structure centered on the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT), in Norfolk, Virginia, always led by a US Navy four-star admiral. Within this structure the strength and power of the US Navy was critical, as embodied in the “numbered fleets”: the Second Fleet in the Atlantic and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The Third and Seventh Fleets, in the Pacific, were important as countervailing forces to Soviet naval power in that theater, but geography and other geopolitical factors inhibited the growth of the Soviet navy in the Pacific comparable to that of its Northern Fleet, based on the Kola Peninsula, and the Fifth Eskadra, based in the Black Sea. The growth and operational activities of the Northern Fleet and its associated Warsaw Pact allies, together with the roles and missions of the Baltic Fleet, based in Leningrad (St. Petersburg today), challenged NATO in a sea war that was as real as any conflict could be, short of open hostilities. This maritime conflict, which endured for the life of the Soviet Union, was undoubtedly, with the benefit of hindsight and analysis, strategically far more significant than the land situation in central Europe, because at sea the Soviets had real opportunities, outside a nuclear umbrella, to expand and to influence and undermine the West. It was the task of the US Navy and its allies to prevent this. The strategy to achieve all this was complex, challenging, evolving, and highly technical.
Before delving into how the above played out in the NATO context, let us review where the United Kingdom was in its military-political posture and the fundamental strategy that drives thinking and policy. The United Kingdom experienced a decade-long identity crisis in the 1960s as decolonization reached a peak and then subsided, under what was termed an “east of Suez” policy. The military strategy that supported this policy was based primarily on a naval strategy of forward presence and basing that aimed to support the United Kingdom’s allies and British economic interests east of Suez by naval forces—surface, air, subsurface, and amphibious. The United Kingdom’s confrontation with Indonesia in the 1960s in support of its former colony, Malaya (now Malaysia), was hugely significant—it demonstrated that naval and marine forces, together with special operations forces (the Special Air Service and the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Section [SBS]) could contain in the jungles and rivers of Borneo (East Malaysia) inroads by Indonesian regular and paramilitary forces. The Royal Navy and the Royal Marines worked together in fighting a war reminiscent of operations of the British Fourteenth Army in the jungle war against Japan and of the post–World War II operations against communist insurgency in Malaya. The Borneo campaign was in retrospect an example of how to conduct a jungle war against insurgent forces. British textbooks on such campaigns have been written with first-hand experience in Kenya against the Mau Mau, on Cyprus against the Greek-Cypriot nationalist organization EOKA, and in the Middle East, in the region that today comprises the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Aden, Muscat and Oman.
The planned withdrawal of the British Far East Fleet, the reduction and later closure of the major facilities at the Singapore and Hong Kong naval bases, signaled not just the demise of empire but a shift in strategic thinking. The latter was no longer maritime or global. The polices of the Wilson government and Defense Secretary Healey were Europe focused and equated to a “maritime withdrawal” without a broad and deep analysis of the implication of not being a global maritime power any longer. The United Kingdom was, in fairness, resource constrained, and after several economic crises and devaluations of the pound the nation was in no position to support three services in global deployments. Foreign policy based on decolonization indicated a withdrawal to Europe and a concentration on the Central Front, the North Atlantic sea lines of communication, and the creation and maintenance of an independent nuclear deterrent.
The political-military reorganization analyzed earlier played to a highly bureaucratized process-driven view of defense. Significantly absent in the 1960s Ministry of Defense were the words “grand strategy.” The case for a maritime strategy based on understood and extraordinarily well documented and analyzed concepts of maritime power were lost in a turmoil of NATO and nuclear jargon that produced a huge bureaucratic compromise. This was nowhere more evident than in the annual defense budget exercise, where the pie was cut to satisfy the needs of the three services within an environment driven by a Europe-centric view, not a global maritime view.
Psychology was as important, perhaps, as the economic realities that faced the United Kingdom in the 1960s. In retrospect, what happened was the balancing of an oversimplified equation: withdrawal from empire equals withdrawal from global maritime presence. Within this equation lay the seeds of decades-long strategic discontinuity in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom in essence forgot its heritage as a maritime power, a heritage based not on colonization, but, very simply, on trade. The United Kingdom has always been since the time of the first explorations a maritime trading nation. In order to survive the United Kingdom must not just trade but to use the sea to do business. The daily prayer in many British schools for “Those who go down to the sea in ships and do their business in Great Waters” was not a patriotic curiosity. It was a real and abiding reflection on the basic economic fact that Britain depended on the sea to survive, first as an agricultural and later as an industrial nation.
Furthermore, the Royal Navy had not just been the protector of these trading, and indeed survival, interests, but the main military instrument for British foreign policy, through forward presence and operations to support political-economic interests. The United Kingdom’s involvement in major land campaigns had historically been with “citizen armies,” not large, regular, and permanently maintained ones. The latter was true of Henry V’s army at Agincourt, that of John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, at the battle of Blenheim, and that of Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, in the Peninsular War during the Napoleonic era. It was just as true of General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army at El Alamain and General William Slim’s Fourteenth Army at Kohima. All were citizen armies recruited and trained for the duration of conflict by a much smaller cadre of peacetime professionals. The Royal Navy was different—it was a large and permanent body of highly trained and experienced professional officers and men, sailors in the widest sense. When Denis Healey made the monumental decision not to replace the Royal Navy carrier fleet he was, in essence, disavowing centuries of well-conceived and well-executed British maritime strategy. It was indeed ironic that in the 1960s, while distinguished academics like Professor Bryan Ranft were teaching maritime strategy and naval history at the Royal Naval College Greenwich and in the war and staff colleges, the central staffs of the Ministry of Defense were systematically disestablishing centuries of successful exercise of both.
By contrast, the US Navy went in a diametrically opposed direction in the 1960s, in spite of the political-military organizational changes. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 showed how a president who had served in the Navy during World War II could use naval power to avert a national crisis. The blockade of Soviet naval delivery of a panoply of nuclear missile capabilities into Cuba was one of diplomacy underscored by heavy-duty naval force—the power and strength of the US Navy to stop Soviet operations at sea in their tracks. Without the perception and physical reality of that power, backed by the avowed intent of the president to use it if need be, the outcome would undoubtedly have been very different. Furthermore, President Kennedy was able to offset the somewhat frightening countervailing recommendations of such members of his military staff as General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force by the use of naval power. As a naval man, Kennedy kept his hands firmly on the tiller; without the power of the US fleet he might not have been able to bring Premier Nikita Khrushchev to the negotiating table or keep at bay the extreme hawks within his own military establishment. The use of nuclear weapons in 1962 by the United States may seem in retrospect not just outrageous but somewhat unbelievable; however, the fact is that it was an option, one that had advocates, who pointed to certain circumstances moving out of control against US interests. President Kennedy remained cool, calm, and collected, in spite of intense pressure and used his Navy with great skill.
The Cuban Missile Crisis encapsulated US naval strategy in the 1960s. Resources were never a serious issue. The Navy received what it wanted for its well-documented requirements in support of its well-articulated maritime strategy. This book will later immerse readers in the more detailed aspects of the implementation of US naval strategy in the 1960s and beyond and of the role the changing face of the Royal Navy played in the emerging North Atlantic Cold War campaign. In addition to actual operations, and certainly US Navy combat operations in the Vietnam War and those of the Royal Navy in East Malaysia, there were some aspects that were not given analytical prominence at the time but have significance for contemporary events and certainly future naval operations.
A US Navy helicopter observes a Soviet submarine during Cuban quarantine operations. US NAVY
One such consideration comprised basing and base facilities. The Royal Navy had historically enjoyed a chain of naval bases and other related facilities, such as wireless stations and, in the days of steam, coaling stations. Their names reel off the tongue without effort—Hong Kong, Singapore, Gan in the Maldive Islands, Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Masirah near the entrance to the Persian Gulf, Aden, Bahrain, Diego Garcia, Mombasa, Mauritius, Simonstown, Gibraltar, Malta, Bermuda, bases on Canada’s eastern seaboard, a whole group of West Indies facilities, and the Falkland Islands (Port Stanley) in the South Atlantic. This was an impressive logistics chain, one that spanned the globe and involved reciprocity with Australia and New Zealand for port access. Without fixed bases and refueling, victualing, and maintenance facilities a navy faces serious problems unless it uses nuclear power and has a replenishment-at-sea capability that can be sustained in a transoceanic environment without recourse to land bases. Crews need rest and recreation, and port visits have always played a major role in diplomatic and trade relations. Access to port facilities on a guaranteed and regular basis is a must for a global navy.
Such facilities, or lack thereof, dramatically affect transit time, time on station, rearming, and crew morale. These are critical factors. Even a nuclear-powered attack submarine en route from Pearl Harbor to the South China Sea has to spend a long time in transit, and although its nuclear reactor will provide nonstop fuel, electricity, and fresh air and water, the crew’s stamina is a major factor, as are such considerations as rearming in the event of hostilities, and routine and emergency maintenance. When the United Kingdom withdrew primarily to the North Atlantic, with occasional forays to other parts, sadly, it disengaged from its historical bases without due diligence as to what the future might hold. Decolonization and independence for countries where these bases existed did not necessarily preclude future usage, but once the knots were cut it would become increasingly difficult to reengage and proportionately important for a major ally, such as the United States, to engage in lieu.
Fortunately, time and international realignments have favored the United States. Outside the NATO theater the US Navy has established good relations in places such as Singapore and Bahrain, taking up the slack from the Royal Navy. The United Kingdom wisely granted to the United States base rights on Diego Garcia, a pivotal Indian Ocean location. Because Naples in Italy and Rota in Spain remain available the British closure of Malta has not affected US operations in the Mediterranean; though there were early fears that potential belligerents might seek access, none of their attempts have amounted to date to anything significant. Base relations become really important in the forging of navy alliances on a basis of mutual cooperation. This was never more true than during the Cold War, with northern European and Mediterranean port visits. Today the burgeoning relations in Asia between the US Navy and the Royal Malaysian Navy and with those of Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and Japan all speak to one fact—that underpinning joint operations and exercises are port visits and the facilities that go with port visits. These make up the cement in the building blocks of naval cooperation in Asia today.
Rearming, refueling, and victualing at sea are major seamanship skills—they are acquired by practice and require the best technology to meet the needs of challenging and dangerous conditions. The US and Royal Navies are past masters of these skills. Both navies developed substantial fleet-replenishment capabilities—indeed, constituting a navy within a navy without which the fighting forces would not be able to function. Even nuclear-powered aircraft carriers need to replenish aviation fuel, rearm with munitions, and resupply. These tasks should be borne in mind in the chapters ahead. Without the “fleet train,” as the British dubbed the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (its replenishment ships) and its American counterpart, the US and Royal Navies could not have achieved entire success in the Cold War. Conversely, the Soviet Union was at an enormous disadvantage because of its slowness in developing and mastering at-sea replenishment. The great work of the American Marvin Miller (1923–2009) at the US Naval Station, Port Hueneme, California, in the development of advanced underway-replenishment systems and technologies was never equaled by the Soviet navy.
Strategic technology exchange and intelligence cooperation and sharing between the US Navy and the Royal Navy became third and fourth critical dimensions in the 1960s. We will look at these dimensions in more detail in later chapters. Suffice to say here that the impact of both in the 1960s did, at the most important levels of daily operations and long-term acquisitions, save the Royal Navy from a slippery slope of retrenchment after the policy of withdrawal started to bite.
The Nassau Agreement, as a treaty negotiated by President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan and signed December 22, 1962, provided the United Kingdom with the Polaris ballistic-missile capability, using British warheads, and the US Navy with a long-term lease arrangement for a submarine base at Holy Loch in Scotland. The meeting in the Bahamas also meant the end of the US AGM-48 Skybolt nuclear missile program, a system that the Royal Air Force would acquire as a result of an earlier agreement between Macmillan and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Royal Air Force maintained a tactical nuclear capability with its V-bomber force and later with the Tornado aircraft. However, the Royal Navy was now the lead service for the independent deterrent. This was in spite of earlier misgivings by such senior Americans as Robert McNamara and Dean Acheson, who had questioned the wisdom of the United States enabling the United Kingdom to have a viable deterrent. They pointed to the failures of the UK Blue Steel standoff missile system and Blue Streak intermediate-range ballistic missile, as well as to technical difficulties with the AGM-48 Skybolt system, which the United Kingdom planned to purchase.
As the Cold War heated up, the two navies became closer and closer in collecting, analyzing, and sharing intelligence and providing information for not just operational use but also, equally critically, the task of staying ahead of the technological curve and ensuring that the acquisition process received the very latest high-level threat inputs. The intelligence staffs of both navies created in the 1960s a bedrock of highly classified cooperation at all levels of the intelligence space. Nowhere was this more evident than in the underwater domain.
Intelligence sharing went hand in glove with technology exchange. The Royal Navy was the recipient of enormous largesse by the US government and especially the nuclear navy created by Admiral Hyman B. Rickover: nuclear submarine technology, which augured the beginning of the longest US-UK industrial relationship, that between the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics at Groton, Connecticut, and Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering (later acquired by British Aerospace) at Barrow-in-Furness. Underscoring this exchange was the extremely sensitive trading of acoustic intelligence (ACINT) and other special intelligence (SI). We will address this in detail later; the point here is that the impact on both navies’ defense postures, and indeed on the nations’ prime strategic posture at the national level, was such that the two services would march in step not just for the duration of the Cold War but also for the quarter-century after the Berlin Wall was torn down.
In spite of all the changes in both countries’ defense organizations and all the turmoil of the UK withdrawal from east of Suez, the US Navy and the Royal Navy remained at the end of the 1960s tightly bound. This was a unique institutional relationship within two separate institutions, indeed constituting a state within two states, built not just on agreements and high-level security arrangements but equally on personal relationships, trust, and the abiding connectivity brought by at-sea operations, by facing a common threat on a daily basis. No such relationship has ever been enjoyed by other US and UK institutions or within the much wider context of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or other major international agreements, treaties, and alignments that the two countries have.
