A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells
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