Sea Control - Sea Control 233 - Evolution of British Amphibious Capabilities with Dr. Ian Speller

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Links1. "Neither Fish Nor Fowl Nor Yet Good Red Herring" - Joint Institutions, Single-Service Priorities, and Amphibious Capabilities in Postwar Britain, Dr. Ian Speller, U.S. Naval War College Review, 2020 Vol. 73, Nr. 4 (7).2. Sea Control 189 - Amphibious Operations in the French & Indian War with Dr. TJ Linzy.3.The Ambassadors: America's Diplomats on the Front Lines, by Ed Salo and Paul Richter, U.S. Naval War College Review, 2021 Vol 74, Nr. 1 (18).4. Understanding Naval Warfare, Ian Speller, Routledge, 2019.

Hey folks, Jared here. One significant note on the podcast feed before I talk about the content of this week's episode. So as we execute the site migration plan, we realize that there are two C-Control feeds out there. The legacy feed is labeled C-Control-SimSec. It's run through something called FeedBurner and we have no control over what populates in that feed. The current feed is labeled simply C-Control and includes the phrase SimSec's Flagship Podcast in its description. I would encourage you to follow the current Sea Control feed. If you follow the Legacy feed, you may have noticed Episode 228, which was Dr. Jerry Hendricks discussing his book to provide and maintain a Navy, had the incorrect audio attached.

Because we have no control over that feed, there's nothing we can do about correcting that. So if you want to listen to that episode, and I highly recommend it, it's posted correctly on our current feed. Head over there and check it out. Thanks for your patience as we clean up the last remnants of our site migration. This particular episode features Dr. Ian Speller, who works as a naval historian at a university in Ireland. He's discussing the evolution of British amphibious culture pre-World War II and then throughout the Cold War. This was edited by our very own Ed Salo.

You may recognize his name from the end of most of these podcasts, but Ed and his co-author, Paul Richter, just had a piece published in the Naval War College Review this week entitled, the ambassadors america's diplomats on the front lines it's linked in the show notes go check it out and support the sea control team as always i want to thank those of you who have donated to simsec whether during our right fight win holiday campaign or afterwards if you haven't donated yet and you'd like to you can still donate on the website or add us as your preferred non-profit on amazon smile so you can support us while you shop and finally i want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the simsec podcast network the bilge pumps you can find alex jamie

Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we are joined by Dr. Ian Speller, and we'll be discussing his article in the Naval War College Review, Neither Fish Nor Fowl Nor Yet Good Red Herring, Joint Institution, Single Service Priorities, and Amphibious Capabilities in Post-War Britain. Ian, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for asking me. It's great to be here. So you mentioned that you're dialing in from rural Ireland. Where exactly?

I'm in a little place called Kindergarten County, Westmeath, which is really right in the middle, down a beautiful country lane. Excellent. So could you begin by telling the listeners a little bit about your background? Sure. I'm a director in military history at Maynooth University, which is just outside Dublin. And I'm also director of the Centre for Military History and Strategic Studies, which manages our connection with the Irish Defence Forces. We do a lot of work with the Defence Forces in their military college. We provide an MA programme at the staff course, and we do various things with cadets and others. And before that, I was in the UK,

So I live in Ireland, but I'm not Irish. I'm British. And I was a senior lecturer at King's College London, working with King's College and also with the military at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College. So since really the late 1990s, I've been quite involved in military education. And my main interests, really, my main research interests are maritime strategy, naval history and, of course, amphibious operations, hence the article. What made you decide to write on this particular topic? I'd already had an interest in amphibious operations. It was the subject that I studied for my PhD way back in the early to mid-1990s. And in recent years, I've focused a lot more on naval operations, and particularly on navies and smaller navies within the European context.

And so it was just quite nice to go back to, I suppose, my first love, which was amphibious operations, and to dig around on things that I'd looked at 20, 25 years ago, but really hadn't thought about very much since then and in a way it was a little bit prompted by a request i got i was asked to give a talk at a nato conference in norway a few years ago where they were looking at command and control in a contemporary context but what they wanted me to do was talk about and the background and what had worked and hadn't worked in the past and having done that that just caused me to reflect a little bit on broader issues about the management of amphibious operations and and i just thought you know why not i'll go back go

back to what I used to do and write a little bit about this. And of course, the issue about joint operations is very current. So my article is an historical piece looking at Britain in the period after the Second World War. But I think ideas about the kind of joint institutions that you might need to manage tasks that can fall between the services, I think is very current. So my hope was I could enjoy myself and write about what I'm interested in, maybe also say something that might be useful to people. Thank you. So roughly 60% of our audience is American and has an American understanding of service relationships and culture. So I'd like to start with a brief discussion of British service culture. In the U.S., the Marine Corps, while it resides within

the Department of the Navy, is very much its own entity. It has representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You have multiple Marines serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or combatant commanders uh general dunford was recently chairman of the joint chiefs of staff so i don't think that stature though is the same for the royal marines could you explain her the status of the royal marines enjoy compared to the royal navy and the british army sure and before we begin i should um identify i'm biased on this issue when i was a young man in my 20s one of the first jobs i got at the staff college was teaching marines on what was called the advanced amphibious warfare course and i just found them to be the best students they were

well i felt so much smarter than everybody else really really um on top of the on top of the game and and i've had an affection for the for the role marines ever since so um i that's a disclaimer before i say any more the long list of battle honors and i think today represent an elite fighting force they are the best the british have the marines the sea soldiers but they're not equivalent to the us marines in terms of size capability or in terms of institutional clout they don't have that series of high-level appointments that you just noted in terms of the U.S. Marine Corps. Obviously, they're smaller. I think there's currently just under 8,000 Royal Marines organized into three commando brigade and supporting units. They're a subordinate branch

within the Royal Navy, led by the Commandant General, which was once a four-star appointment, but is now just a two-star appointment. No Royal Marine has ever been head of the Royal Navy. No Royal Marine has ever been Chief of the Defence Staff, which is the joint head of the UK Armed Forces. There have even been times in the past where their continued existence has been called into question. So they don't have the kind of status and profile that the US Marines have. And in recent years, they've been very heavily involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at the moment, rather like the US Marine, too, a greater concentration on a maritime expeditionary force. And then what was the role of the Royal Marines prior to World War II?

Up until the Second World War, their main role was manning the heavy guns of battleships and cruisers, which again is a role that the U.S. Marines also had. And they provided troops for minor landing parties, naval brigades, other sort of sundry military duties ashore. But they were not amphibious specialists. There were a number of occasions from the sort of 1900s right through to the Second World War where marine and naval officers would periodically raise the idea of turning the marines into a specialist amphibious striking force that will be available immediately for operations you know unforeseen operations that would would require a small fire brigade to go and deal with them

it got fairly lukewarm support from the admiralty from the navy and and pretty much no support at all from the army the prevailing notion was that minor operations didn't need a specialist force anybody could do them and major operations would have to be joint that you'd have to have the army involved and so there was no point having a specialist raw marine striking force and in that line it's notable that the first commando units the specialist british amphibious raiders raised in the second world war those first units were army units they weren't raw marines so how then did british amphibious culture develop prior to world war ii or was there an amphibious culture? It's an interesting question. You could argue that there wasn't

much of an amphibious culture, which is odd if you look back through British history, which for hundreds of years had revolved around the joint application of maritime and land forces, a point that's explored in the writings of Julian Corbett, who was a British maritime strategist. The culture insofar as it existed was overtly joint, meaning that no one service was responsible for amphibious warfare and that any major operations would involve both the army and the navy and from the british perspective that over the years together explored amphibious operations but in truth it wasn't the three it was the two because the royal air force didn't show an awful lot of interest they did that through the staff colleges they did it through joint

exercises and they did some very useful work but it wasn't as systematic as what you see in the united states particularly through the u.s marine corps but they developed a useful body of material that built towards an effective doctrine they developed some pretty effective prototype landing craft and in many respects britain is ahead of the united states in the 1930s in terms of the development of landing craft but it's not a high priority task there is no amphibious standing force there's no organization whose primary job it is to think about amphibious operations and there are certainly no forces ready to operate when you need them and amphibious operations in that sense it falls between two stools it's not the responsibility of anybody

in particular it's a joint task and it's not something that any service is giving a great deal of priority for and you get the same problem here that you would get so over the same period the 1920s and the 1930s air support but for the army is a joint responsibility that is just badly neglected the royal air force enters the second world war woefully ill-prepared to provide ground support to troops, woefully ill-prepared to support ships off the coasts of Britain. So it's not unique that this joint capability is ignored. That's surprising to me to hear based on historical study of the Falkland Islands, but we've also had, I'm trying to remember who it was that came on and talked with us about British amphibious operations in the French and Indian

War, where the fleet dropped anchor off the coast of Nova Scotia and practiced amphibious operations for 14 days before moving on to Lewisburg in Quebec. So you mentioned the staff college. How did the British professional military education system address amphibious operations? Amphibious operations were studied at the staff colleges, and they paid a significant amount of attention to them. The staff colleges themselves, so independent staff colleges,

would combine each year for an annual exercise period, which often focused on an amphibious problem. So they did think through amphibious operations, partly as a way of thinking about joint operations. And again, I say it wasn't as systematic as what you see in the United States with what the Marine Corps are doing, but it's not nothing. And it does lead to the development of pretty effective doctrine. By the late 1930s, there's an appreciation that something more needs to be done.

So it's agreed to establish a joint inter-services training and development centre, a very small little nuclear centre down in Portsmouth. And their job will be to travel round to the different British training establishments to try and teach ideas about amphibious operations, not just amphibious operations, but that is something that they focus on in particular, to try and teach those ideas and also to think about development, to think about the future, what they might need. But it's not really until the Second World War and the fall of France that you see the sea change, where there's a sudden realization that, you know, goodness, we're really going to need to be serious about this.

And then everything changes. Then you get the development of a really quite major combined operations organization with its own trailing establishments and schools and colleges to develop almost from scratch this capability that they're going to need if one day they're going to win this war. Yeah, which leads directly into my next question. So how did the first years of World War II change the British thinking on amphibious warfare? And then what did they do to reprioritize? Yeah, well, the first year doesn't do much to change it. 1939 to the spring of 1940, the position is we recognize that but it's not a high priority britain is expecting to refight the first world war it will devote its major major forces to france where they will fight alongside

the french on land against the germans and there simply won't be a need for major amphibious operations because where where would you land there is nowhere the germans have no overseas possessions that you can take and that narrow bit of german coastline in the north sea is filled with mines, submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft. There is no way anybody's going to put a fleet off there. So amphibious operations are a very, very minor requirement. And that remains true until the summer of 1940 when France is defeated. And it's difficult to overestimate just how much of a strategic earthquake that is for Britain. Everything is overturned. All of their pre-war planning is turned upside down by the defeat of France. And suddenly you're in a completely

changed environment britain stands alone against nazi germany its forces have been roughly ejected out of europe and now you have to start again and work out what we're going to do and that turns amphibious operations some really quite a minor issue to something that is of absolute profound importance and in two separate ways firstly i suppose most obviously if the british or their allies will one day return to europe they're going to have to go by sea on an unprecedented scale and those landings will be opposed so that requires you to develop a capability that at that time nobody has that to punch your way ashore and supplying to support an army of tens of thousands or armies eventually will grow a million strong so you have to build that new capability and there's

an understanding that that will take years and also you have to wait for the americans because this isn't something britain's going to do on its own so something's going to have to change before that operation can be any way viable but they set about the process of right what are we going to need in terms of equipment what techniques do we need what kind of doctrine do we need to develop how are we going to train our officers and in the summer of 1940 they established what becomes combined operations headquarters to begin the process of looking at those sort of draft doctrines and prototype equipment and turning them into a war-winning tool you've also got a really immediate priority which Churchill is strongly emphasising just to do something to hit back

and the Germans have this extended coastline from northern Norway all the way down to the Spanish border and you can use that to strike at the Germans and so there's a pressure from the very beginning almost immediately from the fall of France Churchill is pushing for amphibious raids which are very often minor very often little pinpricks against the French or the Norwegian coast. But it's just doing something that Britain cannot be idly. You have to maintain the fighting spirit of the army and you have to hurt the Germans. And so you get the formation of the commandos and again, the combined operations organization whose job it is to formulate ideas for raiding operations. So how did the services respond to the joint organization

that was established suddenly appearing in their midst at this scene between the Navy and the army? they were less than impressed i think and in particular the royal navy they had even before any prompting from churchill they had set up their own directorate of combined operations within the average of that because their vision was this was a response enable responsibility so so they sought to control that that wasn't the vision that churchill shared churchill had bigger ideas he wanted an independent organization that would stand outside the services i think really what he wanted was an organization that would prod these conservative organizations into more aggressive action. So he appointed his friend, Sir Roger Keyes, a retired admiral of the fleet,

a well-known firebrand, a well-known critic of the Admiralty's conduct of the war, and veteran of the Gallipoli and Stiebrugge amphibious operations in the First World War. And I think Keyes is there to really light a fire and get things moving, which doesn't work terribly well. Keyes was a little bit past his sell-by date, I think. He had a very, very difficult relationship with the first Sea Lord, the head of the Royal Navy, who had been Keyes' subordinate in previous years, which is not a situation that I think was likely to promote a good relationship. Keyes was not a man with great tact or a man with much intellect, and it was a failure in the role. He's then replaced in 1941 by Lord Louis Mountbatten, another Churchill appointment,

a flamboyant naval officer again promoted to admiral so he's got a stratospheric career trajectory and Mountbatten and for all his flaws of which there were many does manage to turn the combined operations organization into quite an effective group that actually does start to fulfill its remit to prepare for those major landings that will follow so there's a personality issue in terms of the navy that these people that they didn't choose that they wouldn't have chosen have been given control of an important organization but the wider issue is combined ops is doing something the navy thinks it should be doing is their role it's not a joint responsibility it's theirs and combined ops is putting pressure on the navy for material and

personnel and is competing with the navy in terms of priorities that's that's always going to be something of a difficult relationship you see emerging in the second world war a new navy a completely alternative navy one that didn't exist in 1939 one that's made up of hundreds of landing ships and thousands of landing craft that require tens of thousands of sailors and marines to crew these vessels and all of that puts pressure on the navy and it's not until late 1942-43 that the navy actually manages to get control of that fleet prior to that combined ops had their own private navy so there is something of a conflictual relationship that develops the navy is decommissioning battleships by 1944 so it can provide crew for landing craft it requires a

major sort of change in in mindset and in thinking and they're never really reconciled to the existence of this joint organization that does something that it thinks it should be doing well let me ask an off script question then is combined ops were they responsible for planning and an execution at Dieppe? And then how did, what was the aftermath of the Dieppe operation for Combined Ops? One of the things the Army and the Navy were very keen to ensure was that Combined Ops would not be responsible for the conduct of operations. So they were limited only to minor raiding using special service forces, essentially commando raids. And so Combined Ops are responsible for commando raids in places like Norway, but they're not responsible for

operations on the scale of diep what they do do is promote and advance the case for that operation which is then handed over to um the conventional services for the actual conduct but in driving forward the need for this raid and instead of refusing to allow the idea to die and rigorously pushing for it mountbatten um carries a lot of the blame for something that in retrospect just seems profoundly foolish. So post-World War II, the British have amassed substantial amphibious capability. What did the Ministry of Defense decide to do with that capability after the war and why? The British Navy, because the US Navy is so much bigger, that they hadn't had these fleets in 1939. And suddenly navies have an entirely extra navy, something that didn't exist, these

massive amphibious fleets and and the british one is not as large as the americans but it's still huge it's an enormous collection of ships and craft and a bewildering variety of ships and craft to land infantry artillery tanks supplies rocket support ships gun support ships you spend all day describing the bewildering collection of things that they've got there's a clear recognition in britain that they've made a mistake into war period that they'd gone into the second world war with no standing amphibious capability and that had cost them in a number of reasons it badly undermines the response to the german invasion of norway it hinders the evacuation from dunkirk and they know it's taken them years to generate the capability that they needed

so there's recognition don't make that mistake again but also recognition you can't keep this fleet in commission that it costs a fortune and is a huge manpower commitment and the country has to go back to peacetime norms the people want to go back to you know normal life and the country's bankrupt britain is literally bankrupt in 1945 so something has to give the plan therefore was to keep a carder capability to ensure that the armed forces as a whole understood amphibious operations and will be ready to conduct them if they were required and this carder would provide a training capability that you would train the entire army in amphibious operations and i talk about a carder But it's a big cadre. It's about 60-odd major ships, 130 or so major landing craft and a very, very large number of minor landing craft.

You maintain this cadre, you train the army and amphibious operations, and if war breaks out again, you expand from that capability. And to support all of that, the idea is you retain combined operations as an independent joint organization to promote the development of new equipment and techniques, to enable regular training and exercises, and also to maintain a liaison with the United States. and particularly the US Marine Corps. The Navy advanced the notion that the Royal Marines should become amphibious specialists. This wasn't really something the whole army needed to do. You could focus this on the Royal Marines, but that was rejected on the grounds that the Marines themselves could never provide the scale of force that would be needed. That the British are thinking in terms of Normandy. They're thinking of that scale of an operation. No specialist corps can

do that what you need is is the full weight of the army the romanies did retain a commando brigade and the army got rid of its commandos so they do have specialist amphibious focus that the army is lacking but the prevailing vision is keep a carder keep up to date in uh techniques and capabilities and if war breaks out again then at some stage during that war you'll regenerate what you had in 1944 1945 so you you've addressed this next question a little bit but i'm going to ask anyway uh it was interesting to me again maybe this is my american color showing here but it was interesting to see the army as the entity keeping the amphibious capability afloat uh in this time period what was the navy's objection to continuing to maintain these ships and craft yeah they're

coming from completely different positions the army uh favor amphibious operations because they think world war three will look a lot like world war two soviets will drive western forces out of europe britain will have to scurry back to be defended behind you know behind the barrier posed by the english channel the british empire and america will mobilize their resources and then at some ill-defined point in the future you rerun normandy and push the soviets back so that so for the army's perspective they think well we know we're going to need this and and that doesn't cost them anything because all the ships and all the personnel have been provided by the navy so the army are very keen to maintain a capability that costs them nothing

the navy on the other hand are the providers then they're less keen and they also think that the next war will look a lot like the previous one and that they will have to fight another battle of the atlantic this time against soviet long-range aircraft and submarines and that they are deep and minds they're deeply concerned about their capability to do that so from the naval perspective it's all sea control it's none of this matters if we can't maintain control of the seas and uh we need to do that and and it's also worth remembering in the it's not until the late 1940s that it's absolutely clear america will uh be part of this equation maybe britain will be on its own again for a period before you get there before the creation of nato there are a couple of years

where the british might have to think about you know 1940 scenarios again so the navy is all about sea control it's sea control first to kind of modern phrase and every cent they spend on something that's not sea control is begrudged so one of the during my research into this one of the things you find is combined operations headquarters identifying in the early 1950s that they're critically short of fire support craft and um begging the admiralty can you buy one one single ship from the united states if loads there's creeks full of old second world war rocket ships in the united states and combined ops want one just one because then they can practice um the techniques and they'll they'll know how to use these things when it comes to it

and the navy just point blank refuse because to bring a and the americans are going to give the ship for nothing to bring one ship across the atlantic would require them to decommission one frigate for a period and that's it the navy's not having it that so they're complete focus on sea control anything else is a waste and their reasoning is look we know amphibious operations will matter in the next war but that'll be years that'll be after we've survived and we need to get through the first difficult bit so you can understand where they're coming from so then there's a resurgence in interest in the 1960s to include new construction of the fleet that would eventually retake the falcon islands so what change that resulted in

the navy changing its views on amphibious operations i think there are two key things and the most important is that the strategic context goes through a profound change for the first 10 years after the war the british are anticipating if a war happens against the soviet union it will be broadly speaking similar to uh second world war there'll be a it'll be a major conventional conflict will be driven out by the soviets because the red army is just so large and but and then we will mobilize and fight back by the mid-1950s that's not really very credible once you get wider possessions nuclear weapons once you get the development of the hydrogen bomb the british assumption is by 1954-55 any war against the soviet goes new soviets will go

nuclear very quickly and and then will there be large-scale conventional war fighting can you rerun the normandy landings against a nuclear armed opponent and and the answer really is is that's not just not credible and also it's not going to happen because the soviets also know that any war in europe will go nuclear very quickly so you get the development of that mutually assured destruction deterrent situation so the british move from this assumption that they have to be ready to refight the second world war to thinking actually war in europe isn't going to happen and if it does everybody dies because we just go nuclear and what you need is not a huge static army sitting in Germany but mobile force is able to respond to unforeseen circumstances

beyond Europe you need to have a fire brigade that you can send out to places to deal with issues and that the need for that is demonstrated graphically during the Suez crisis in 1956 where it takes the British months to mobilize an expeditionary force to conduct a landing in Suez by which time the moment has gone if they could have reacted at the the day after the Suez Canal was nationalized, maybe they get away with it. But world opinion has moved to the point where British and French action is not acceptable. So the strategic context changes. And that's a problem for the Navy. The Navy has sold its case on refighting the Battle of the Atlantic against the Soviet fleet. And now nobody thinks that will happen. So the Navy has an urgent need to find

something else, another reason for it to have a future, really, to keep the full range of capabilities and they hit upon the expeditionary role they recognize that actually um okay probably we're not going to refight the battle of the atlantic but britain still needs to project power and as it withdrew from empire it was losing all of its overseas bases so there needed to be a new way for britain to be a global power and the navy just articulated um aircraft carriers and amphibious task groups that will allow us to put that fire brigade where and when we need to do so which they do very effectively in a series of crises um kuwait in 1961 off east africa in 1964 and the falcons in 1982 is kind of the last of that series and that's fought with the remnants of the

capability that they built during the 1960s so that's one point the second point is as this is going on the british idea about amphibious operations changes in 1944 the navy want the marines to be given a particular responsibility but that's refused because the notion is it has to be joint because we have to be ready for these massive normandy scale operations by 1944 54 55 nobody thinks normandy is happening again and so the royal marines are given that key position the navy and the marines are now the parent arm for amphibious operations joint elements remain british amphibious doctrine remains joint they keep joint institutions and structures but it's clearly now the navy in the driving seat so precisely the moment the navy finds an interest

it occurs at exactly the right time and and so combined operations limps on for a few more years but eventually it's replaced by a series of joint committees but it's the navy that becomes the driving force it's not it's no longer really the joint institutions so is that capability really shifted from the army over to the navy and the royal marines that have some negative effects in the falcons i realize this is off script but i'm remembering very clearly like uh there was some commentary after the sergal had incident that amphibiosity was not just something that people talked about it was really a mindset that you trained to i i think what the falcons demonstrates is the value is that amphibious operations are not just something you do

in addition to everything else they are inherently complex there are particular dynamics that you need to understand and the Royal Marines and the Navy do so in the Falklands conflict three commando brigade and Commodore amphibious warfare they've trained together they've exercised together they trust each other they understand each other they've done all the things that the Navy spent 30 years explaining why you know why this is important they're reinforced by the fifth brigade um which is an army unit and they don't understand the nature of these operations and fifth brigade make a whole catalogue of mistakes in terms of their activity in the falklands they don't keep uh commandant for this warfare properly informed about what's going on they have a very cavalier

attitude to the use of helicopters and landing craft and that sets up a a series of problems one of which results in the loss of Sir Galahad and many lives because they're not behaving like Marines. And they don't have to be Marines. They can be soldiers. They could be from the Air Force. But they have to understand the dynamics of amphibious warfare. And they don't.

They're on a ship in daylight, unprotected by air power. They're being advised by the Marine officer on board to get the hell off that ship because he knows what's coming. But they don't. And the result is a tragedy. The wider point is amphibious operations, particularly the Falklands campaign, they're the business of people that know what they're about. And you need an organization that knows what they're doing. That was the Royal Marines.

But that knowledge wasn't across the armed forces as a whole. And that's reflected in what happened. So in the case of amphibious operations, a joint organization properly supported by services with self-interest is able to maintain this capability over decades, even with some budgetary ebbs and flows. How did this differ from what happened with the Royal Navy's fleet air arm and its harriers? I think from my city of the period, the joint organization that existed in the post-war decade just about kept amphibious operations alive. But it didn't have the institutional weight to do much more than that. So when it fell into the lap of the Navy, amphibious operations prospered. You get the first time the construction of new ships, you get the Royal Marines developing as amphibious specialists and the results are positive.

because the organization has a driving interest in making this work in a way that the Royal Air Force has never had in terms of carrier-based aviation. The Royal Air Force have been strong opponents of carrier-based aviation from the very beginning. So putting them in charge of the Navy's fixed-wing aircraft was a bit like getting a wolf to guard a flock of sheep, that the end results aren't going to be pretty. And it's a long and complex story. The Harriers were gathered together in joint force harrier because it seemed to make sense the Royal Navy's harriers and the RAF's harriers can both operate off of the aircraft carriers there are similarities in terms of the equipment and there will be a great saving put them in a joint organization there'll be a great

saving the joint organization is run by the Air Force who have no interest in carrier-based aviation so it was it was not a huge surprise to most of us when the decision was taken to retire the sea harrier the RAF's the Navy's fighter aircraft early in order to prioritize the RAF's ground attack aircraft knows it a great surprise a few years later when a decision was made by the Air Force does it retire its land-based tornadoes or does it retire the Harrier the Harrier is retired largely against the wishes of the Navy because that's what Air Forces do and there's a similarity here a little bit the Navy spends the 10 years after the Second World War focusing on core tasks which is sea control the RAF has spent its entire history focusing on what it considers

to be key tasks, carrier-based aviation is not a key task for the Royal Air Force. The Joint Organization, in that sense, didn't do anything to protect those assets. If anything, it worked against them. So what do you think, then, is necessary for these joint capabilities to persist through austerity? I think, well, sort of two things. Ideally, they need the support of a powerful patron. They need the support of the providers. and that happens when the providers see a direct interest so in the first 10 years after the second

world war the navy did all it could to kill combined operations it under invested it sought to undermine the joint organization at every turn but by the mid-1950s when the navy recognized actually there's something in this for us that situation immediately turned on its head and amphibious ops had this powerful patron that maintained those capabilities even when everybody else was against them. Even in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the Ministry of Defence was moving against amphibious operations, the Navy defended that case and managed to retain just enough capability to succeed in the Falklands. So having a powerful patron helps. Joint institutions can also, of course, be hugely influential. And you see that in the Second World War, when combined

operations is a powerful organisation, it has a powerful head with the backing of the Prime minister then it can get things done that isn't the case for combined ops in the post-war period it's um a major general is in charge he isn't of equivalent rank to the chiefs of staff there is no powerful support coming from a strong central ministry of defense because there isn't a strong central ministry of defense and it can be be given be stiffly ignored but if you have different types of joint institutions as you have in the united states at the moment with individuals that have more institutional weight, that have direct access to Congress and things like that, then maybe that organization can be more equivalent to what you have in combined

ops in the Second World War than what you have in the post-war period. Well, thank you. That is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Ian Speller. Ian, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? I'm, but if you can, you can find me on the Manuf University website, or if you just Google ian speller and naval then you will get plenty of links to me what am i working on next i because i've been doing a little bit of stuff on amphibious operations recently what i'm working on at the moment is looking backwards at theories of amphibious warfare and i'm trying to find the equivalence of mahan and corbett in terms of amphibious operations so that's that's the way

i'm spending the covid lockdown well if you find uh if you find those documents we look forward to having you on again. But thank you again for joining us today. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Sea Control is edited and produced by Ed Salo, William McQuiston, and Jonathan Selling. Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Pulling on the shimbo now. A porter, oh, and a porter, kiddo. Way, hey, pulling the alley. A porter, white, both white and red, oh. Pulling on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Way, hey, pulling the alley.

Help me, Paul, I'm puttin' it out of the, puttin' out the shimbo now.