A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells
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