Sea Control - Sea Control 549 - The Royal Navy During the Cold War with Edward Hampshire

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Links1. The Royal Navy in the Cold War Years, 1966-1990; Retreat and Revival, by Edward Hampshire, Naval Institute Press, 2024.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Edward Hanfeyer, and we're going to be discussing his new book, The Royal Navy in the Cold War Years, 1966 to 1990, Retreat and Revival. Ed, welcome, and could you please tell the audience a bit more about yourself? Right. I'm Dr. Ed Hampshire. I currently work at the Naval Historical Branch of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence. I'm also a member of the UK Naval Staff's Red Team, so I'm involved not only in historical work, but do a certain amount of policy analysis as part of my role. Prior to that, I worked at the UK Joint Staff College at Shrivenham

and at the Army's Officer Academy, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. And before that, I spent a number of years at the UK's National Archives. So I've got a mix of experience from professional military education and archives and history and war studies. And I gained my Master's and PhD from King's College London, the War Studies Department. So yeah, that's me. Great, great. Thanks. And as a reminder, all opinions are our own

and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So I'm going to jump right into it and just ask you, why did you choose this time period and what makes it so important for the Raleigh? Well, for me, it's a fascinating period.

You've got a whole range of different things occurring in this sort of late Cold War period from the mid-60s through to the very end of the Cold War, 1990, 1991. So if you look at Cold War as a whole, you have a series of technological revolutions in sea power, a maritime capability. And we're talking here from nuclear submarines, ballistic missiles launched from nuclear submarines, guided missiles, developed much more sophisticated sonars, radars, so on and so forth. Okay, so there's a sort of a a technological um background to that you've got a fascinating period in terms of the cold war

itself shifting from detente to what's been called the second cold war under reagan and then glasnost perestroika and um a shift uh to the end of the cold war and the collapse of the soviet union but specifically for the royal navy um the united kingdom at this time you have got probably the navy in its most i suppose insecure and defensive position since i'm politically since on the 17th century actually you have the end of empire the decolonization across africa and southeast asia or other parts of the world and that is then combined with a shift away from forces or naval forces that are in southeast asia in the indian ocean mediterranean the caribbean to a much more european or euro-atlantic focus and this happens in the

uk much more so than it does with france france takes itself out of the structures of nato and it sees itself as continuing to be a great power and part of that is having an international presence around the world in some of its smaller territories in the south pacific in the indian ocean in the caribbean and so french navy is actually spread quite broadly around the world often in penny packets and you could talk about the capabilities but they still have that worldwide reach and in with the royal navy in the late 1960s and 1970s you have an attempt to do something quite different to shift to a navy that is very very focused on home waters the english channel the north sea irish sea and eastern atlantic and focusing on a role tied quite tightly to

nato missions um against the soviet union and warsaw pact um so this sort of shift from a worldwide role is very unusual you just say you'd have to go back probably to the early 17th century to see uh the royal navy so focused on what's going on in its local waters and let's say shifting away from any involvement the mediterranean very little involvement in the caribbean and outside of places like the indian ocean and so on so um yes and that comes and probably not surprisingly, with an element of quite painful decisions being made over aircraft carriers, over the size of the fleet, over how much money is spent on the Navy compared to the other two services.

The interesting thing for me, though, with this is that in the 1980s, and partly as a result of the Falklands campaign in 1982, but also for other reasons, you get a modification of that. Not only does the Navy gain self-confidence from the Falklands, it's demonstrated that you can't tightly tie down what campaigns you will or will not be involved in. In my book, I call it a strategic myopia, in the thought that if you don't have any more commitments around the world, you've slewed off your commitments to colonies, former colonies, newly independent states, then you only have to focus on one thing.

And in the British Ministry of Defence in the 1970s, there was this feeling that what you were focusing on was the Central European Front and a land air campaign. And that was sort of all that was needed. And so the naval side of the equation was seen as very much secondary and supporting. The Falklands Campaign and other commitments like the commitment to the Gulf after the Iranian Revolution and the tanker war and the requirement to have shipping there demonstrates you can't control um where you focus um your your your strategy you can't live in a world where only one thing matters um strategically and therefore all your forces are only focused on doing one thing in one theater so you might have your expected enemy for example the soviet union undertaking operations in unexpected theaters like the u.s faced with the cuban missile crisis 1962 Or you might have an unexpected enemy, like the Argentinians in 1982, in a very unexpected theatre in the South Atlantic. And there's no way you can get around that. And so, for example, the commitment in the Gulf, as I mentioned earlier, is another one where even if you're saying we're only focusing on Europe, the UK could not escape from the fact that its oil, a certain amount of it, or at least the oil price was dependent upon the ability to get oil out of the Gulf and into the global markets.

with the tanker war going on, you had to provide a form of support to those sorts of vessels, at least British-flagged vessels or Hong Kong or Bermudan-flagged vessels. And that then belies this feeling that you can actually deliberately box in what you need to do, and so strategically you only need to think about one thing. And I think the 1980s is broadening out, and this isn't just the Falklands, it's also the U.S. maritime strategy helps the Royal Navy as well

return to a global perspective to some extent. always secondary to the NATO role, does help the Navy quite a bit. So for me, it's a fascinating period. It's a period of, as it says in the books, a decline and revival. It's a period of a certain amount of soul-searching for the Navy. It loses its fixed-wing carrier capability, which does limit what it can do in terms of global operations. And it partly gains some of that capability back,

but it's not until probably the last decade or so that it's got that full carrier strike effectiveness back again. so um yeah i think i think that probably covers it and i i suppose the other side of it is i i've studied this area for what 20 odd years uh my phd covered the first couple of chapters of this book i've written articles and lectured on areas in the the rest of the book for most of my career as an academic so uh yes and not not only is it important for the raw navy it's also been what i've been looking at for for most of my career so yeah awesome thanks so your book opens with the cancellation of what would have been the queen elizabeth class carrier and as a result of

the result in 1966 and white paper can you tell the listeners why this cancellation was so important for the royal navy and how did it affect it yeah sure um yes it there were plans in the mid-1960s to build at least two large 60,000 tonne strike carriers to replace the existing Royal Navy carrier strike fleet, all of which had been at least begun in the Second World War. Most of the ships had ended service in the 1950s. So they were coming up to the end of their service lines expectedly in the 1970s. So these two carriers were needed to keep the carrier strike capability. So the cancellation of these carriers in February 1966, not only meant that those two vessels were cancelled, it meant inevitably that the Royal Navy's carrier strike capability

would fade away. And it was expected that it'd be replaced by a dependence on a land-based air capability provided by the Royal Air Force. And this obviously removes huge amounts of flexibility in terms of operations. The Royal Air Force inherits a large number of aircraft that have been planned for the Royal Navy, re-engined Phantoms and the Buccaneer strike aircraft, both of which were designed for carrier operations, were then transferred over time to the Royal Air Force. And they theoretically would operate from land and provide the maritime strike, the air defence capabilities that the carriers had provided in the past.

In practical terms, there are a whole series of problems with this in terms of the total number of aircraft that the Royal Air Force were able to provide, the fact that it limited you to a certain distance away from land air bases. So as a result, it curtailed what the Navy could do in a high-threat environment, either in offensive operations or in defensive operations in the Eastern Atlantic against what was an increasing Soviet threat through the 1970s, the air threat from the backfire bomber and an increased surface fleet threat from a from a growing and a much more effective soviet surface navy um so yes it is extremely important and without the carrier air power you you have a whole series of changes in the navy afterwards um the fleet air arm at the

time the part of the navy that provided the the air crews airmen and so on was quite a significant part of the navy and then suddenly it once it disappeared um the strike carrier the last one remain in southern to 1978 but it shrank dramatically in size quite quickly and by 1972 you've only got one strike carrier left so you have what had been a very large part of the navy had provided a lot of the officers within naval staff significant part of policy making a trunk very quickly indeed so you've got a shift here and a shift in priorities um the first sea lord and the head of the navy who takes over after the carry has been cancelled and the previous first seal to resign because of the cancellation. He tries to focus on the submarine capability

and on the capabilities of the smaller parts of the service fleet, frigates, destroyers, and the building of a couple of new cruisers. But yes, it is, I think, a huge trauma for the Royal Navy and something which I suspect it probably never really got over. And you can see the clue there in the name of the carrier that was cancelled, HMS Queen Elizabeth. It's not accidental that when the Royal Navy returned to building strike carriers in the 2000-2010s that they resurrected exactly the same name that would have been given to the ship that was cancelled in 1966. And yes, certainly those naval officers who are aware of their history in the Royal Navy are very aware of that cancellation in 1966. Some of them put

it down to the perfidy and the bad behaviour of the Royal Air Force. There might have been a bit of that um um but it certainly had rankled for many years and it from the perspective of a navy that had seen itself as central to the defense of the united kingdom that had been central to the main air power sorry rather than air power than the empire and to the maintenance maritime trade and so for in the 1930s for example lord like admiral chatfield could threaten to resign and the government would back away they would not want a first seal of resigning in 1966 when hbs queen elizabeth was cancelled um they were perfectly happy for the first seal to resign they knew the government could probably take it um and that in itself is a demonstration

the shifts in terms of perceptions of how important the navy was to the united kingdom and to its defense so yes a really interesting period and i think it's it's it's it's the Falklands campaign that shifts that back again it gives the self-confidence back to the Royal Navy they spent large chunks in 1970 trying to get a minimal carrier capability back again with a small invincible class three ships and the Harrier V-stall aircraft but I think it's the Falklands that marks a real shift back again to that self-confidence that you might well have had in the 50s and the early 60s so yes you've got a whole range of factors that make the cancellation the queen is important it's the end of carrier air power in the royal navy or at least full-on

strike carrier capability at least until relatively recently it creates a dependence on the royal air force for the effectiveness of the surface fleet using land-based air power and i think it's for the navy itself and its staff officers it's it's a trauma that takes it takes a long time to recover from so yeah so well you mentioned the movement back to your near shores Can you talk about how the changing defense priorities of the U.K. affected the Freeth mission and its composition? Yeah. So, and this is one of the factors that's going on around about the same time that the carriers are cancelled, is what's called in the U.K. and by historians only, is the withdrawal from east of Suez. So from capabilities east of the Suez Canal.

And so by that, you're talking about the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, Singapore, and to some extent, all the capabilities have always been quite limited in the Pacific as well. And that withdrawal started, you could argue, probably in the early mid-60s, or at least British government thinking about that. The inevitability of the various colonies and territories getting their independence. A whole series of counterinsurgencies had been fought in the 50s and early 60s, first in Malaya against communist insurgents. That essentially came to an end in the early 60s. And then a whole series of counterinsurgencies supporting Malaysia in Borneo against the Indonesian government forces. And that ended in 1966. You have the ending of the British military commitment in Aden in 1967, a retreat there.

And as a result, you get a situation where these countries are gaining independence. Some of them continue to want to have a defence relationship with the UK. But at the same time, back domestically, the United Kingdom is economically under quite considerable strain. In 1967, for example, you get the end of what's called the sterling area. It's the end of the British pound being a reserve currency. Up until that point, as a reserve currency, a whole series of other countries, many across the world would have held very large amounts of pound sterling some countries like australia and new zealand even had the pound sterling as their own currency after 1967 and a

devaluation of the fixed exchange rates that operated under bretton woods you then have the end of the sterling area you have the end of that protection that being a reserve currency gives you in terms of debt for example and and already at that time the existing government had been a lot of economic pressure for a whole range of reasons. So as a result, there are attempts here to fix the economy, to improve the living standards of the British public. That politically is what they want. You have a Labour government in power from 1964 to 1970, aiming to deliver to some extent the expansion of the welfare state. And you have that combined with this sort of economic crisis situation. So it doesn't seem economically viable to keep a defence capability east of Suez.

Another factor that makes retaining such capability in, for example, Singapore much more difficult is from 1967 to 1974-75, the Suez Canal is blocked. And for European powers to get their way to South East Asia and the Indian Ocean, it takes a lot, lot longer. You have to have many more ships to do it because of what's called the rule, keeping ships on station for certain amounts of time. So it's much more expensive to keep a capability, say, for example, somewhere like Singapore or in the Gulf, when you've got to spend so much more time getting there, getting back, and therefore you've got to allocate more ships, more costs. So the accident, I suppose, of the 67 six-day war in Israel against Egypt

and Syria, which results in the canal being blocked for seven or eight years, makes things even more difficult for the navy in particular to sustain its capabilities in this part of the world so the withdrawal from east to suez begins gradually it's pushed quite quickly from 66 through to decisions are made between 66 and i suppose 68 and once the decision is made the assumption was okay well we'll keep forces there to 75 but again the economic strains continue the the amount of sterling that's being leached out of the sterling area and spent in other areas And again, this is a problem in terms of maintaining that exchange rate. Those fixed exchange rates were in place at the time.

Much more difficult. So it speeds up. And so by the end of 1967, there's an agreement that we withdraw from Singapore, most forces, by 1971. Not quite a withdrawal. There are some naval forces kept there through until 1976. But this is quick. This is very, very quick. If you looked at the Royal Navy's forces in Singapore in 1966, you would have had two carriers there, two assault ships, 15, 18 more or so frigates and destroyers.

You would have had minesweepers, a squadron of submarines. You look at 1976 and it's reduced to one frigate, which is withdrawn by the end of the year. So within one decade, the naval footprint, the size of the forces that the British can put in that part of the world, has gone from quite considerable, i.e. its main effort, in effect, to nothing. And something similar happens again in the Persian Gulf, where there's a full retreat of forces in 1971. So this withdrawal from East to Suez, and as I mentioned right at the start with France, it's the withdrawal away from a world role world role um is is much quicker and much fuller the french keep some of their territories in some parts of the world in the indian ocean and they

keep their naval forces and the small garrisons and some of the air capability the british go in the other direction and again that's quite important and again for for navies that have that worldwide role that have that presence role that defense diplomacy role is a large part of what they do that perpetual operating that navies do linking to foreign policy that becomes much less important if you don't have territories in the region or you you've uh you don't have significant defense agreements with with local powers so yes he's changing priorities and the shift away from us is a fundamental to the story that i tell in the book um you have a navy that is optimized for this world role optimized for um being part of carrier strike groups for presence

showing the flag um uh defense diplomacy and then you shift to an environment after 1968 where the uh the situation against the warsaw pact seems so much more dangerous you have the invasion of czechoslovakia you have a whole series of new soviet capabilities maritime capabilities under the sea second generation of soviet nuclear power submarines are much more capable than the first some are incredibly fast like the the alphas uh some um can dive incredibly deep like the single might class submarine and you have large numbers of them and you have a production line for example of victor class submarines being produced all the way through the 70s and much of the 80s so much more capable um capabilities on the surface as well and again i mentioned the the

backfire strike aircraft which um concerns both the us and the uk and the rest of nato um from the 1970s onwards they entered service um actually 576 um with quite considerable numbers being allocated to maritime air operations from land bases um so these capabilities look much more scary the political environment is uh much different um again after the fall of khrushchev in 1964 up until the invasion of czechoslovakia it was thought that um uh nato and the warsaw pact coexist that there would be less confrontational relations that falls away in 68 and although you have detente although you have the salt treaty um you still have a situation of quite considerable confrontation quite a bit of it driven by the fact that the soviets are producing

more and more very very effective kit and equipment and are using it and undertaking these worldwide exercises like okien 70 and okien 75 demonstrating the soviet navy can operate all around the world, in the Atlantic, in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean, and deploy huge numbers of forces. And this is extremely worrying to NATO forces and to a Royal Navy that's now returning to home waters without carrier air power to provide air cover, and with a whole series of ships that have been procured

in that little gap between 64 and 68, when it was thought there'd be a less dangerous world. So you have a light commercial design frigate called the Type 21 and a very small air defence destroyer called the Type 42. They're procured in that gap. And then suddenly, up to 68, things look much more dangerous. The Type 42 has a magazine of only 22 air defence missiles. That seems pathetically small when you're dealing with regimental backfire attacks

in the late 70s in the Barents Sea or the North Sea, Norwegian Sea. Similarly, again, with ASW capabilities, you have real problems by surface ships tracking Soviet submarines. And it's not until the coming of Total Ray on surface vessels, the surface vessels actually have that, I suppose, balance out the capability a bit more. To some extent, it was at least perceived to be very much on the nuclear submarine side through the 70s. So it's a very, very dangerous environment. And the Navy doesn't appear to have the kit and equipment to be able to defend itself well. And this then makes it very, very vulnerable in the late 1970s.

Within the UK Ministry of Defence, and I talked about the strategic myopia, and I suppose you could almost call it strategic culture, there is a very, very strong focus on the Central European Front, the land-air campaign. And not only that, but a short war, short warning approach, where you might well only have a few days warning of an attack by the Soviet Union. That attack would be across the Central European Front, was the assumption, and that the war would only go on for about four or five days. and this by the late 70s was having a huge impact in terms of how the defence capabilities were being managed across all three services. There were ammunition stores support despite for only for five days on the assumption the war would only last five days. Couldn't operate in a high threat environment much longer than that and that affected how the Royal Air Force provided capability to support the Navy. That meant that they would only be able to operate for five days

in support of the Navy. The Navy had a very different view of strategically how such a conflict could occur. It looked at the Cuban Missile Crisis. It looked at a similarly dangerous situation at the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where Soviet and US naval vessels marked and countermarked each other in the East Mediterranean and said, well, actually, you could have a very long standoff over a couple of weeks, a couple of months. You could have a gradual and slow escalation. Even if your war is short, the warning could be for a very long time, and you would need naval forces in these sorts of environments and as i mentioned earlier the unexpected can happen you can have your expected enemy the soviet navy uh undertaking operations in an unexpected area

undermining nato and its resilience in an unexpected way not across the central european front but these sort of arguments didn't really have much traction in the late 1970s and as a result you get something called the notch review which is a defense review in 1981 named after Defence Secretary, Sir John Knott, who was put in place to get the defence budget under control. Spiralling out of control, all three services had procurements that were costing far too much, much more than the 10-year budget plan, and Knott decided, rather than cutting each of the three services equally, which would have been an approach to take, that he would focus the cuts almost entirely on the Navy. On the presumption that the Navy was just, I suppose, underlying this,

the presumption that the Navy was just less important, but on top of that, the presumption that the Navy was so vulnerable, the surface Navy was so vulnerable, that really all you would need would be nuclear submarines or a submarine-based fleet, a middling small number of small frigates with Togre sonars, and a mine warfare force. And that's how Knott's review progressed. So the Navy in the 1981 Defence Review fought its battles, not especially successfully, and you then have the production of a white paper that although it said the navy would own would keep two of its three carriers and would still have 50 frigates and destroyers by the late 1990s and this is shown in my book and stuff that many people haven't really been aware of the archival

research has sort of discovered this that actually the navy would have been very small indeed by the late 1990s if this review had gone through interestingly it's a lot of very strong u.s pressure that reverses some of these outcomes so you have the new reagan administration you have a commitment i suppose you would call a soft commitment to increase to a 600 ship navy you have an administration that's very pro-navy casper weinberger as defense uh secretary of defense again much more pro-navy much more focused on naval and expeditionary powers than the previous carter administration the harold brown under harold brown there'd been a presumption there'd in a shifter way, I suppose, from a worldwide role, a focus on pre-positioning in Europe,

a focus on supplying Europe in time of war, and then a discovery that maybe the war would be so short you wouldn't actually be able to supply across the Atlantic. And this was sort of the position that the Ministry of Defence was in in the late 70s as well. But then you have a new Reagan administration, just as this review is underway. And Reagan and Weinberger have very and Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, have very different views as to what sea power can do against both the Soviets and worldwide. And what they don't want to do is to be building up the US Navy only to backfill the newly reduced Royal Navy. So there is a huge amount of pressure on Nott and on his civil servants to row back on a lot of these changes. And he is pushing to doing

this. And the leverage the US has got is that they're negotiating the replacement of the Royal navies polaris ballistic missile submarines were trident and it's that leverage with trident again it's made explicit in my book that gives them the ability to push them to keep more frigates and destroyers to keep the amphibious capability that would have been withdrawn and a whole range of other elements as well so yes it's not review i suppose of the culmination of what i call this strategic myopia this single focus on a single place and a single enemy and it's rode back even before the Falklands War by American pressure. The Falklands conflict changes that

again, and then the development of the U.S. maritime strategy actually gives a key and important role to the Royal Navy in that strategy. The Royal Navy would provide not only nuclear submarines, but the ASW, a defensive force for the U.S. strike fleet that would come

across the Atlantic and undertake operations in the Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea. The Royal Navy would provide the ASW forces for that. combined with the breakthrough with the technological breakthrough with the surface towed array you then actually have a naval force that's capable of undertaking effective asw operations so yes it's quite a roller coaster ride sort of period of not review where it seems like utter disaster with a navy that might have only had about 25 30 ships by the mid-1990s

no ships larger than a frigate and be largely a submarine-based navy to u.s pressure forkland campaign, US maritime strategy, then builds and bolsters, and to some extent, basically rebuilds the Royal Navy as a surface fleet. So yes, really interesting period. And I suppose the last thing I'd say, despite that, you still have the nuclear submarine fleet, which is growing quite rapidly at this time, from only a few boats in the late 70s to a plan for at least 18 or 19 of them. These were attack boats by 1990. You still have that regarded as the main offensive arm of the navy now so the carriers that exist the invincible class only have subsonic carriers it's actually the nucleus nuclear-powered submarines the attack boats and the ballistic missile firing boats that

are regarded as the core of the navy so despite that partial return by the surface fleet you have a navy now that is much more undersea orientated and you get a generation of naval officers submariners very few of whom had been towards the top of the navy beginning to fill key posts within the naval staff and senior positions through the late 70s and 80s so there's a cultural shift again going on within the navy at this time so yes i'm a fascinating period and as i said very much a roller coaster ride at the time yeah now how did um inter-service rivalries and competition for funding affect the navy at this period okay yeah it again this is a a fascinating period for our inter-service rivalries play out, and I suppose what you've got in the period that I'm

covering in my book is a shift from the 1966 review that results in the aircraft carriers being cancelled, where it's quite clear that the Secretary of State for Defence and those ministers who want to cancel the carriers are, to some extent, almost co-opting the Royal Air Force, trying to use their arguments and use them as a way in order to justify cancelling the carriers. I would say countering that, though, is the Navy does not – its staff work is not strong. It had probably a pretty good opportunity of getting a smaller carrier at 30,000, 40,000 tons, and it didn't take it. It assumed that Healy in the end would back down, a bit like ministers had backed down in the 1930s. That did not happen.

So this is as much a huge error of naval staff work as it is an issue of inter-service rivalry. the irony of that review followed by a whole series of other reviews sort of 66 67 and then a large impact on the army in 68 is that by the time you get to the end of the labor government 1970 all three services to some extent probably suffered equally through these different reviews one after another then they was hit first and lost its carriers the raf was then hit and lost the f-111 strike aircraft that was going to buy from the u.s and then right at the end the army that had stayed out of these inter-service battles as much as it could was then hit by large personnel reductions and the abolition of a whole series of regiments or regimental mergers

again all three services had its version of a sort of a major trauma to live through between 64 and 70 the result therefore is in 1974-75 when you have the next defense review is the three services actually deliberately say attacking each other doesn't help us and so the three services led by the Chief of Defence Staff, Field Marshal Carver, basically have a united front against ministers and against the Treasury, against budget control, and it's relatively successful. It staves off what could have been a much more vicious review with much greater reductions. And by the time you get to 1981, the irony is that the Royal Air Force isn't actually there in the front line as it had to some extent in 65-66 against carrier is not there in 1981 as the navy is is being sort of put

under huge pressure and and it seems to be large parts of its fleet will be removed partly because the royal air force is not gaining very much the review is about reductions so the the royal air force will gain some harriers it will gain a little bit of capability on the side but also it's this residual thing you do not deliberately go into battle against the other services at the same time however the arguments the air force use for using maritime patrol aircraft in place of anti-submarine frigates they are used and developed to build a case and to some extent it's driven as much by the permanent civil servants by the scientific staffs the chief scientific advisor is very strongly in favor of a reduced surface fleet to the navy and by the minister himself

and some of the junior ministers as well so it's interesting by the time you get to the 81 review the one that potentially could have been as traumatic as the 66th review, it's less inter-service rivalry. It's as much driven by, I suppose, what you could call the civilians in the ministry, the strategic culture that's built up in the ministry over the last 5, 10, 15 years. I wouldn't say it's entirely disappeared, but it's certainly gone underground by the early 1980s. And I would also say, although I'm a naval historian, to be balanced on this is the navy wasn't above a bit of inter-service politicking against the other services every now and again as well so although you could talk about the 65-66 review

as being one where the the royal air force was in there to some extent fighting hard to get those carriers cancelled there were other circumstances and other situations where where the navy was undertaking possibly similar operations against other services so again this period is fascinating where you have with inter-service rivalry a shift from quite vicious and painful rivalry so for example at the start of 66 defense review the naval staff officers are told those that sort of commander or captain level that if we fail in this your careers are over it's quite a hard stuff and and some of their careers were over by the end of it because they did fail to carry procured i'm not entirely sure that's a productive way of getting the best staff work out of your

your staff officers but that's what was done in 65-66 to a shift where the services strongly hold together to one where it's it's it's quieter and if it's happening it's under the surface so again you've got a shift in the development and i suppose what you have in the united kingdom that is quite different from the us is that you have a a very strong and powerful cadre of permanent civil servants when one government change is replaced by another the only people who change the ministers and in this time a very very small number of um political special advisors but they might only number one or two in each department all of the civil service stays in place so in terms of create creating a strategic culture it is remarkably stable and it's not just stable

because the strategic environment stays the same it's stable because essentially the personnel stay the same so you shift from one government to another labor to conservative back again you can see very strong continuities because the permanent undersecretary who would be running the department would remain in place the deputy undersecretaries the scientific advisors they would all be remaining in place and at most the secretary of state for defense might have one possibly two critical advisors uh termed in the uk special advisors so unlike the us setup where you have the top raft of officials being removed and replaced that doesn't happen in the uk so you get a much more stable strategic culture i would argue though that although it's stable i would say

that there was a there were elements of groupthink and you come back to my sort of phrase there is to do myopia sort of a blinkerness in in certain elements but there are advantages to to having that in in terms of a sort of a policy making stability yeah yeah so well let's look to the navy learned from the four ones war and how did the success of that conflict affect the navy in the late 80s into the 90s yeah no i think firstly and i mentioned this earlier in terms of the services self-confidence and self-belief it had a huge impact in terms of the i suppose public understanding of the utility of a navy and that's the navy certainly since the 60s has occasionally Within, I suppose, popular perceptions talked about what has been called a sea blindness.

The population itself has trouble understanding what a navy might be for. And again, the UK is an island nation. You might find that very strange to believe. But there has been that perception and a little bit today. It's difficult to understand what navies are for. There's a much stronger popular perception, one could argue, of an army based on conscription armies of the first second world war of these continental large continental campaigns of overall air force the battle of britain and strategic bombing campaign in the second world

war and a perception understanding of the need for those capabilities a naval capability of warships that are perceived to be slow but perceived to be vulnerable and i argue that's not necessarily the case um it's more difficult it's not something that maybe members of the public intuitively grasp in the united kingdom and you have to then explain which is not always the easiest so in terms of the public perception of the navy and a public understanding of the worth of a navy and a realization that no the army and the air force could not have taken the balkan islands by themselves you really did need a an expeditionary naval capability with organic air power with very long and effective logistics chain with frigates destroyers nuclear submarines

and so on and so forth it had a huge impact in that respect in terms of the not review and i mentioned there about a whole range of factors sort of reversing the initial radical outcomes u.s lobbying maritime strategy u.s maritime strategy the falklands is part of that as well one of the carriers would have been sold to australia hms invincible that was cancelled it had been assumed the air defense vessels would no longer be needed for the fleet and the ships would only be defended by their own point defense capabilities that was reversed and so there was a commitment there to replace the small type 42 with a new class of vessels initially that would have been the nato frigate replacement program which which died towards the end of the cold war and

then eventually replaced in the royal navy by something called type 45 destroyer much more capable vessel uh yeah large number of missiles and so forth so that saved those vessels you also had an understanding of the importance of the amphibious capability. So US pressure meant that the two LPDs were kept, large amphibious dock vessels were kept, but they would still have been retired at the end of the 80s

without replacement. As a result of the Falklands, again, there was a commitment that those two vessels would be replaced with brand new vessels, and they did enter service in the early 2000s. And also a commitment that wasn't, again, honoured until the late 1990s though, what's

called in the UK a commando carrier. An LPH, an amphibious warship, lands its troops primarily through helicopters of vertical envelopment. So you have a series of changes there. You have the self-confidence. You have the reverse of some of the outcomes not review. You have also battle loss replacements. So four frigates and destroyers are lost in the campaign. They're replaced with very, very capable vessels.

One of the light landing ships is lost, the Sir Galahad, and that is replaced with a more capable vessel. These battle loss replacements are very important for the Navy. They are new and very large and capable vessels. And you have the existing vessels modernised. With the old Type 42s not being replaced, they would not have been modernised after Falklands they are. And you find across the fleet the point defence capabilities of vessels are upgraded, destroyers and frigates and others with close-in weapon systems like the phalanx or the goalkeeper so you have a whole range of short-term changes as well so through the 1980s the navy is benefiting

quite considerably there is one change that's under the radar that has actually got nothing to do with the falklands got nothing to do with the rowback from the not review and actually is a result of one of the big decisions of sir john not in the defense review he decided that the costs of the Trident procurement, rather than being a special procurement item or being spread across the three services, would be borne entirely by the Navy. And because of that, he therefore knew that a large part of the Navy's surface fleet program would be crowded out. And that was one of the starting points of his review, in order to reduce the numbers of the surface fleet. Ironically, what happened is that through the review, through the Falklands, the Trident costs

were borne by the navy but because trident was largely a u.s system and as a result of that it would be paid for in dollars rather than pound sterling ironically the exchange rate came to the rescue of the navy through the 1980s the recovery of the british economy through the 1980s the reforms of the thatcher government meant that the pound became stronger against the dollar that meant in all practical terms trident became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper if trident had been spread across the three services then the gains and the benefits of that increasing cheapness would have gone to all three services but because it had been put into the budget of the navy only the navy got all of the gains of that sort of beneficial move in in foreign exchange through

the 1980s so this is one of the ironies again not really that well known something i bring out in my book um it really benefits the navy so a whole series of capabilities at least into the mid 1980s can be brought into the navy not just the battle loss replacements and augmenting capabilities but the continuation of the frigate program nuclear submarine program uh reviving conventional submarine construction these would have been very very difficult to undertake and you would have had a navy shrinking a lot in the late 1980s had it not been for these favorable foreign exchange movements which which is interesting in itself and it it makes you look at let's say inter-service rivalry battles funding and actually see that there are a large

number extraneous factors that navies that ministries of defense sometimes can do very little about and and that's another one of the areas i look at in the book is look at personnel policy huge difficulties in recruiting and retaining personnel through the 60s and the 80s And this is due to maybe pay falling behind to some extent, cultural changes in civilian society, factors where people who might have been willing to go to sea in the 1950s, 1930s, 1920s, because going to sea on board a ship would give you hot running water, would give you decent food. By the 1950s and 1960s, living standards in the UK are rising dramatically. People are less willing to basically leave home for years on end to have a naval career. um so a range of factors that actually may mean that retaining personnel become really really difficult and this is an important issue in the cancellation of the carrier 1966 one of the

factors that dennis healy highlights is probably his second most important was the navy just did not have the personnel the manpower to crew these two vessels and the escort fleet that it wanted and it's an issue all the way through the late 70s in particular as a crisis period for personnel and through large parts of the 80s um so these are factors are quite often forgotten about there's very much a focus on the strategic the policy side the inter-service rivalry the operational side of navies but personnel support logistics and as i said before if you're procuring material from other countries foreign exchange changes can have a huge impact in what you're able or table to do so yeah unfortunately that's all the time we have for today i'd like to thank my guests

ed hampshire ed we're going to find you online and what are you working on next oh right well i'm doing a couple of things that um link into um the book i'm also doing a bit of research into official history writing in the uk as well particularly naval staff and official history writing so there might be some outputs from that and i'm having a think about what my next book will be rather than articles it may well follow the story forward into the 1990s looking at the royal navy from the end of the cold war up to 9-11 um i might go broader but that's still something i'm going to make up my mind on so yes great we'll be looking forward to those thanks again for joining us to listen thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time

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