and a very large bureaucracy. We will examine the impact on the former Admiralty structure and personnel shortly.
The civilian bureaucracy grew exponentially. The permanent secretary (the most senior civil servant) at the Ministry of Defense became very powerful, as did the civil service assistant secretaries, all of whom were expected to be apolitical. The growth of the Ministry of Defense civil service added costs that had not existed at the height of World War II.
The former Chiefs of Staff Committee became immersed in the Central Defense Staff (CDS), and the incumbent Chief of the Defense Staff was made the professional head of all British armed forces, and the senior uniformed military adviser to the secretary of state for defense and the prime minister. The First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff in the United Kingdom retained his position and title as the military head of the Royal Navy, but his political lead—the First Lord of the Admiralty, a cabinet member—was gone.
The Chief of the Defense Staff therefore became an increasingly important figure in British defense. There followed a pattern of succession whereby the first incumbent, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir William Dickson (1959), was followed by Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1959–65), who was followed by Field Marshal Sir Richard Hull (1965–67). The trend for many years was to follow the succession of Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and British Army until 1977, when an airman, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Neil Cameron, broke the pattern. Since September 1979 the Royal Navy has had only three Chiefs of the Defense Staff: Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin (served 1979–82), Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fieldhouse (1985–88), and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce (2001–3). The Royal Air Force has had the same number of Chiefs of the Defense Staff (three), and the army has had seven. The latter number indicates significantly what happened in British defense between October 1982 when Field Marshal Sir Edwin Bramall succeeded Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin and 2015, with General Sir Nick Houghton becoming Chief of the Defense Staff in July 2013. The British Army had seven Chiefs of the Defense Staff to the combined Royal Navy and Royal Air Force six.
Before we examine and analyze the implications of these organizational changes and then compare and contrast the US and Royal Navies’ places in the new order of things, let us look at the changes that occurred in the respective intelligence organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom. The key reason to do so is that intelligence has played a vital role in the development and operations of both navies during our period. The historical antecedents in World War II set the stage for why and how intelligence sharing between the two countries developed during the Cold War and in the twenty-six years since 1990. The dialogue between hard technical and scientific intelligence and the development of foreign navies’ capabilities is not just axiomatic—it is at the heart of why both navies developed very specific capabilities, force structures, deployment strategies, bases, and logistics to meet the emergence of various threats to national security interests. How US and British naval intelligence fitted into the wider tapestry of both countries’ other intelligence departments and agencies is as important for both navies as are the other organizational changes that occurred.
The World War II intelligence organizations of both countries were lean and mean. Growth occurred in the United States after the emergence of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. In the United Kingdom, the crown jewels during the war were the brilliant minds at the code-breaking center at Bletchley Park. In the United States their counterparts were in the Office of Naval Intelligence. The hugely significant roles of both entities have been extensively documented. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) and the vital code breaking associated with reading the enemy’s traffic were central to the Allies’ victories. The work of the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services) in the United States and the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6) and SOE (Special Operations Executive) in the United Kingdom was geared to human intelligence (HUMINT). It was geared also to clandestine operations to thwart the enemy in multiple ways on the ground in highly sensitive covert operations, often linked to collaboration with the various European and Asian resistance organizations and groups. The leaders of these wartime organizations, such as Harry Hinsley, R. V. Jones and J. C. Masterman, influenced the various reorganizations after 1945. They trained the postwar recruits in the United States and United Kingdom in the various intelligence arts and sciences, so that by 1960 both countries had very capable cadres, mixtures of those with wartime experience and the new generation. The older generation was there to guide the new. Personnel recruited in the 1960s have now largely retired, with a few exceptions. Your author is one of the survivors from the 1960s—mentored by stalwarts like Sir Harry Hinsley and Vice Admiral Sir Ned Denning. Hinsley was at Bletchley Park working Enigma for predominantly naval operations, and Denning was in the Royal Navy’s famous Room 40, at the heart of operational intelligence.
Post–World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom followed largely parallel tracks in terms of developing the organizational, skill, and experience bases inherited from World War II. This was generally so until the recent, post-9/11, period. Neither country went the centralization route, with the exception of the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States and the Defense Intelligence Staff in the United Kingdom. This observation is very important for what follows.
The various departments and agencies were kept separate based on functionality—primarily SIGINT, HUMINT, counterespionage, and later space-based intelligence systems and operations. These functionalities corresponded to the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ—the lineal successor to Bletchley Park), to the CIA and SIS, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterespionage department, and the Security Service (or MI5). Later the unique National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) would be established in the United States as the only truly unacknowledged (until relatively recently) intelligence organization in the United States; the existence of the NRO was classified for many years. Within the above organizational milieu lay the naval intelligence organizations of both navies, headed by a director of naval intelligence. There were distinctive parallels in both navies, and the cooperation between both entities was never closer during the fifty-five years of our period; that closeness was perhaps equaled by the extraordinarily strong relationship between GCHQ and NSA, within which resided very important naval elements. Throughout this whole period the working relations between British and US naval intelligence and between GCHQ and NSA have been simply outstanding. The connections at the personal level, the cooperation developed and the abiding friendships made by successive staffs, meant that both navies were probably better served than any other single department of state in either of the two countries. The latter testifies to the bedrock created by their World War II predecessors.
The only main organizational difference between US and British naval intelligence was that the British did not recruit and train specialist intelligence officers. The British selected their intelligence officers from what the Royal Navy calls the “General List,” the equivalent of career “unrestricted line” officers in the US Navy. The British argued that their naval intelligence officers should have a wide naval background before being recruited to intelligence and should in due course return to the regular Royal Navy. The US Navy by contrast had during our period specific separate personnel structures and career paths for designated intelligence and cryptographic officers. The same applied to Royal Navy ratings and US Navy enlisted personnel; the Royal Navy chose from the broad manpower base, while the US Navy had specialists trained within designated personnel codes. The US Navy considered the value of deeply trained and experienced personnel to be greater than did the British system, where intelligence officers were in post for shorter periods than in the US Navy. The Royal Navy believed that a too-institutionalized intelligence personnel structure would possibly encourage a too-ingrained view of intelligence issues and a personnel structure separate from the mainline navy, with the danger that what happened “behind the green door” would be the preserve of just a few. The Royal Navy liked its intelligence officers to be grounded in experience at sea. The US Navy ensured sea experience by creating a wide range of seagoing intelligence billets in key locations, such as fleet flagships and major units. Whatever the pros and cons of the two systems, both navies cooperated to a degree above and beyond any other known US-UK relationship, fortified by the
