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 from maritime presence 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
