A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells

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.