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 became characterized as “Soviet naval diplomacy.” 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,
