short time lines. But one thing is very clear: the system worked. Nothing is perfect, but the US and UK World War II defense organizations performed brilliantly. Changes were made on the fly; bureaucratic inertia went out the window, and those who stood in the way of change or defied direct orders were soon removed. Any form of incompetence or inability to perform was rectified.
The question therefore arises, why change now? Furthermore, why did change, from individual service centricity to centralization, take place? None of the US and UK military services during or after World War II can be accused of not being team players—at the worst, of playing service politics in pursuit of self-serving goals. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The political leadership and the service chiefs and their staffs agreed on grand strategy and then allocated service resources required to execute it. Interservice rivalry was a matter not of deeply fought-over divisions of the resource pie but of rivalry to perform, to excel, indeed to show worthiness in all regards—a hugely healthy state of affairs. The US Navy and the Royal Navy were never in bitter contentious battles with the other services over resources and who would do what to execute the grand strategy. During the Battle of the Bulge, General George Patton’s Third Army was never so pleased as when it saw the US Army Air Forces appear to provide air-to-ground support once the weather was clear enough, and on countless occasions surface naval forces heralded overhead Liberators or Short Sunderlands to attack surfaced U-boats. Interservice rivalry was about combined mutual effectiveness, not internecine competition.
World War II proved three axioms about defense organizations: they have to be relevant, they have to be efficient, and they have to be effective. What emerged from World War II was a desire for greater integration and top-level control, because centralization would lead to greater efficiency and less rivalry and inefficiency. What happened in reality, however, was that a massive bureaucracy with a significant political overlay was placed on top of the existing structure. Both countries’ defense infrastructures grew. Once the basic political changes took place, underpinned by legislative action, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the chiefs of staff structure in the United States and, later, the Ministry of Defense and the Central Defense Staff in the United Kingdom all grew exponentially. These changes incurred massive costs. The key question, again, is: Was it all worthwhile if what both countries had during World War II, aside from some lessons learned, worked well?
Several prominent post–World War II figures were centralists. In the United Kingdom the greatest advocate on integration was, perhaps surprisingly, Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Louis Mountbatten. He personally oversaw the creation of the Central Defense Staff. How could 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
