A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells
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