A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells
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