Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers

Rear Admiral J.R. Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architekturgeschichte

This book, first published in 1986, argues that there is a special category of medium powers in the world – such as Britain, France, India, Brazil, Japan, China and others – which have sufficient military power to do something to protect their interests but which are not a match for the superpowers. It surveys the whole range of naval warfare – equipment, operations, organisation and deployment – and discusses how each item should be tailored by the recognition of the position of the medium power. It considers alliances, a key element for medium powers, and explores how these should be handled and what use they may be expected to fulfil. The book argues that the concept of medium power, here developed thoroughly for the first time, will be extremely useful to many countries in defining their strategic role in a purposeful way.

Part One
The Strategic Background

1 Introduction

The genesis of this book lies somewhere in 1968. It was a turbulent year, probably the most politically seminal of this half-century, and it saw among its many developments a critical change in Britain’s defence policy.

Until then, in spite of the twists and turns imposed by internal and external events, Britain had a strategy that assumed her to be an independent actor on the world stage. The 1967 Supplementary Statement on Defence (its cover printed in ironic bright red) put more emphasis on peacekeeping, or ‘brush fire wars’ East of Suez, than it did on the NATO alliance. British measures were to protect, by a combination of defence and deterrence, British interests. The means provided were inadequate, but the intention remained.

In January 1968 that changed. As had been the case so often before, the motor of change was an economic crisis; but this time the reduced level and less comprehensive character of our forces were to be matched by a radical reduction in task. Thenceforth, British defence policy was linked to that of the Western alliance, and new force requirements could be justified only by reference to that policy.

As a ministerial statement of the period averred, British strategy (it was still called that) was now irreducible. The Alliance was the absolute core of British external security, the Soviet Union the only threat seriously considered in force planning. There was an assumption, more openly paraded by conservative than labour governments, that forces for operations beyond NATO’s political and geographical boundaries could be found from among those provided for the core task. But of that task there was no doubt. A Secretary of State for Defence, fairly newly arrived in post in the mid-1970s and no doubt carefully briefed by his civil service advisers, was asked what British defence policy was. ‘It is’, he said, ‘to make a contribution to NATO.’ And stopped.

For a naval staff officer concerned with force planning in the Ministry of Defence, which — with a couple of remissions — I was from 1967 to 1980, this policy carried some difficulties. First, how big was a contribution? The Army and Royal Air Force had a simpler task than the Navy here. However artificial and pragmatic the premisses for the British force levels in mainland Europe might originally have been, the Treaty and its subsequent protocols could be quoted as authority. Back-up for those forces in the United Kingdom, too, was well-established and could be argued by direct reference to the NATO task. Moreover, the Army could, after 1969, point to a heavy internal security load in Northern Ireland. For the Navy, the bases of force requirements were less secure. At sea, there was no section of front allocated to the British to defend; NATO force goals were known to be a weak justification because they were arrived at by adjusting upwards the force levels that already existed; and NATO maritime forces were dominated by the US Navy in a way that had no parallel in central Europe. The mechanics of justification, then, were a serious intellectual difficulty.

But more important was a strategic crux. As the 1970s went on it was clear that Britain did not fit easily in the NATO box. The cod wars, Oman, Caribbean preoccupations, and flurries as far away as the South Atlantic and the New Hebrides showed the sensitivity of British interests to matters that were considered of no concern by the Alliance. Some of these could be presented as non-recurring residues of Empire, others clearly could not. It was evident that Britain’s interests, as they came out in the wash, were of a different pattern from NATO’s. Britain was not unique in that, of course; no NATO country could claim a complete identity of interest with the Alliance. But Britain’s declared posture made it peculiarly difficult to do anything practical in planning for the anomalies; and Britain’s geography and history ensured that many of the anomalies had a singularly maritime tinge.

Inevitably one began to live a kind of intellectual double life. Strategic realities demanded that our maritime forces should be responsive to a very wide range of demands, and the characteristics needed must all if possible be incorporated in our plans; but they had to be justified on the much narrower ground of a contribution to the Alliance. These justifications were not spurious (though sometimes the scenarios stretched reality to its limits) but they were incomplete. Attempts to reconcile the half-hidden, national requirements with the open, NATO ones were not welcomed by ministers, civil servants or the other services. The most serious, a carefully thought out and unclassified paper by the Naval Staff, vanished, after having been printed, in the mid-1970s.

Nicely-Nicely Jones, in Damon Runyon’s immortal books, gets along by doing the best he can. The Naval Staff did the best it could. It was helped by the inertia both of naval forces — ships’ lives being long and fleet patterns slow to change — and of what Chatfield called ‘the power of the defensive in Whitehall’. Once a project was on the books, it took some shifting. So the fleet, and maritime air forces too, managed to maintain and even build many characteristics that served the national as well as the NATO end — afloat support, ship-based fixed-wing aircraft, a substantial specialised amphibious force. It did not — could not — succeed in providing ship-based airborne early warning, with results that were all too apparent in 1982.

But all this activity helped to set me thinking along broader and more theoretical lines. Britain was unique; all nations are unique. But surely she shared many characteristics and categories of interest with other medium-sized powers? There was no doubt that was what she was; superpower aspirations were not on the agenda — had not been since 1945. (I recall putting a motion at the Royal Naval College Debating Society in that year that ‘Britain is no longer a First-Class Power’. It was heavily defeated, of course.) It was clear that the British experience was not unique, though it might not be typical; and, if France was anything to go by, Britain’s solution was not the only one on offer. It seemed to me, as the 1970s went on, that there would be some value in gathering information on the ways in which other medium powers — both developed and developing — sought solutions to their strategic problems particularly in the maritime field, and attempting to formulate some principles, even perhaps a general theory...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part One: The Strategic Background
• Part Two: Tools of the Trade: Concepts and Materiel
• Part Three: Available Strategies
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index