John KThis focus on the Falklands is becoming very tiresome guys. Surely there’s more to UK Defence policy?
And if it were all about the Falklands, it would surely be a lot cheaper to build up the islands’ defences even further, in order to deter an invasion in the first place: don’t forget that Mount Pleasant is also an ‘aircraft carrier’, permanently in situ.
That would make sense too, but how likely is it? If there proves to be a lot of oil out there, we will have to pay to defend it, and I don’t think 4 Typhoons really cut the mustard.
John KYou cannot dismiss the “fleet in being” so glibly. If all that Britain had in 1977 was an SSN and two frigates, I doubt it would have stopped an invasion. The purpose of Operation Journeyman was surely to show to the Argentines that we were prepared to use force if necessary. The Argentines would thus look at what force Britain actually had. Any battle for the Falklands would clearly need Britain to have naval air power, and in 1977 we had it. By 1982, we did not have it in a way which impressed the Argentines, and indeed many people thought that the small force of Sea Harriers we could embark would not be enough, and it was a close run thing. After 2011 we will not have it at all. If the Argentines were to seize RAF Mount Pleasant in a commando raid, it would all be over.
John KNO of course they could take the risk! Thats the point! The Argentineans took a gamble, they rolled the dice. It was a regime that had nothing to lose, they were banking on a quick seizure and then UN backing and world opinion to keep the UK at bay. In 1977 the swift deployment of Dreadnought stalled their plan, they couldn’t be sure that the UK wouldn’t oppose an attempted landing. In 1981-82 it quickly became clear that the change in UK government had also signalled a collapse in resolve over the issue so they took the gamble. It would not have mattered if the UK had the largest most powerful carrier force on the planet, if the political will to use them was not there then an unpopular regime who was up to taking a risk would still go for it, they were banking on the UK backing down.
This is where I disagree with you. I believe a “fleet in being” is an important instrument of deterrence, quite apart from the policy of the government of the day. In 1982 the Argentines might have been quite right in believing that the British did not care about the Falklands, and that, given the low priority given to them, an invasion would succeed. The question they would then have to ask is what the British would do about it? They might accept the fait accompli, but if Britain had had a strong carrier force, the Argentines would have had to take into account the fact that Britain would have been able to retake them without much trouble. Whatever they thought of the British government, they would have had to realise that in a democracy, governments come and go, and the Thatcher government could easily have fallen, but if the Royal Navy had had fleet carriers, that was a fact which could not be ignored in their calculations. What the Callaghan government did in 1977 was of course better, as it left the Argentines in no doubt of British intentions.
John KWe are agreed that the British response to Argentine provocation was indeed crass and led to war. Nonetheless, if Britain had, for the sake of argument, 20 CVNs with F14s in 1982, then no matter how pathetic and/or careless the responses of Britain to Argentine provocation, they simply could not have ignored the obvious calculation that if they invaded the islands they could have been swatted back off them without any trouble. And therefore, no matter how limp wristed they thought Britain was being, they could not have taken the risk of invading the islands.
Is that clear?
John KJohn K
Please read the following article from the Guardian with regard to operation journeyman, with particular note to paragraph 4.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jun/01/argentina.military
Also a review of “we come unseen” in paragraph 5 “Operation JOURNEYMAN, now regarded as a classic of deterrence.”
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_3_55/ai_92745794/
What is bizzare is that you seem to consider you know better than accepted deterrence theory, that some how you have some greater understanding of the nuances of military strategic reach than the accepted reality used by governments and general staff in planning.
What is also bizzare is that you don’t actually read what I type. To quote one of my earlier replies….”Ark Royal was part of the overall umbrella of British deterrence, it would of course figured in contingency planning in Buenos A…”
Of course had Argentina invaded in 1977 AND the government had decided to launch a military operation to recover them Ark Royal would have been at the heart of that recovery. Fair enough. BUT if Argentina had invaded as they had planned to do so and were essentially doing so (They had obviously decided it was worth the gamble and seized South Thule to test the waters) then deterrence would have failed.
As I have been trying to tell you and as the two quotes I give you above demonstrate AND if you wish to join me in the Public Record Office where we can read the Operation Journeyman file together (I’ll even pay for access and you can stay in my spare room, Kew is ten minutes drive away) The Argentineans were deterred from invading by the placement of HMS Dreadnought in the South Atlantic, a deployment that they were made aware of at the time (otherwise it would not be deterrence). Ark Royal did not figure in the Op Journeyman and at the time was sailing away from the crisis towards Malta.
Are we done now?
It would certainly make more sense if the Argentines had been informed about the SSN deployment. I do recall hearing that they had not been told, which did rather detract from its deterrent effect. Then again, one of these authors seems to think Britain had Poseidon subs. However, you are obviously unwilling to accept that though Ark Royal was not part of Operation Journeyman, she was nonetheless part of Britain’s deterrent to Argentine aggression.
John KThat’s true as far as it goes, but if Britain had still had a fleet carrier in 1982 the Argentines would have to have taken that into account. It is all very well to say that Britain was acting in a casual if not spineless manner over the Falklands, but that in itself does not mean that Britain would not respond militarily if the islands were invaded. The Argentine conclusion must have been that Britain lacked the will to defend the islands and the means to recapture them.
John KNot primarily Ark Royal, that didn’t matter at all. 1982 could have been countered with a single nuclear sub just as it was in 1977, it mattered not one jot if Ark Royal was sailing on the high seas, in the knackers yard or taking pope John Paul II on his holidays. In 1977 Ark Royal was not deterring Argentina from trying it on, they seized South Thule. The response was to send Dreadnought and tell them we had, game over. If we had sent Ark Royal then I would agree with you, but we didn’t. In 1982, we could have had no carriers at all, not even the harrier carriers. If we had dispatched a timely SSN to the south Atlantic the Falklands war would have been averted as it was in 1977.
It had nothing to do with Thatcher’s gender. Her foreign policy was weak and flakey and they gave the Junta all the right signals.
I’m afraid I can’t agree with that. Clearly, a platoon of Royal Marines and HMS Endurance were not enough to stop an Argentine invasion. Neither would two frigates and an SSN have been, on their own, and we still had plenty of frigates and SSNs in 1982, so no change there. What was missing in 1982 was both the resolve to deter aggression and the means to deter aggression, a fatal combination. Without a fleet carrier, the Argentines obviously thought that if they seized the Falklands (which they were always going to be able to do), Britain would lack the means to recover them. Without the means, you can have all the resolve in the world, but it won’t make any difference. Getting rid of HMS Endurance signalled to the Argentines that we did not care very much about the Falklands, getting rid of HMS Ark Royal, and then planning to sell HMS Invincible and retire HMS Hermes told them that we did not even care to keep hold of the means of recapturing them, hence the green light for the invasion
John KExactly. Cunard is a commercial customer with a clear idea of what it wants in its liners. It tells the shipbuilders what it wants, they do it, job done. Government, by contrast, is a schlerotic labyrinth of mediocrity and obfuscation. There is no commercial imperative to get anything done, so it doesn’t get done. And lo, it hasn’t been.
John KJohn,
What you are not getting here is that it is completely academic and irrelevent whether an LPH is more or less complex than a CATOBAR aircraft carrier. If neither would have been available to the task group within the weeks immediately following the loss of the RN deck then it doesn’t matter one jot if the LPH would have been RN crewed faster than a theoretical CV.
At the time of year we were fighting we had, perhaps, 4-6 WEEKS after the period when we actually defeated the opposition in which we could manage modestly high tempo combat ops owing to deteriorating environmental conditions. Thats it. No, unfamiliar, replacement vessel could have been brought in in that time without it being crewed for us by its original owners.
Hopefully that will put into context the utter pointlessness of your argument and the relative merit, however generous, of Cap Weinburgers offer IF in fact he ever made it.
Apart from the fact that I didn’t raise this subject, so please wind your snarky comments back in if you don’t mind, as it happens I tend to agree with you. An LPH probably would not have been ready quickly enough in 1982, but I still think that anyone saying that it would have taken the Royal Navy as it was in 1982 a year to be able to sail an LPH under wartime imperatives is wide of the mark.
John KYes, but close air support is a key USMC mission, and are they really going to be happy using a $100 million F35B as a bomb truck?
John KI tend to agree that the F35B is expensive overkill for the job the USMC want. Is a $100 million stealth fighter the thing you want to use as a CAS aircraft? I too think the Harrier should have been kept in production and developed, but that didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now.
John KWell more than two very tenuous ones frankly. Two ambassadors does not the entire FO make. We have started, created and engineered as many wars as we have dodged and avoided. Suez? Oman? Iraq? Iran? (its almost sport to wind up Tehran).
Ok lets take hold of this, we are almost there! keep going with that logic. IF THEY CAN BE DELIVERED….i.e. if they are actualy sent to the crisis, are at least in the right hemisphere of the globe, closer than the length of the Atlantic. Ark Royal was part of the overall umbrella of British deterrence, it would of course figured in contingency planning in Buenos A, but unless it was actually in a position to contribute it’s deterrent effect, or had been ordered to prepare to do so then it would not have been the key deterrent preventing an invasion. At the time it was steaming from Gib to Malta, have you looked at a globe? Draw a 1000 mile circle round Malta, make it 2000 to be generous. The Argentinians could have landed, seized and taken the Falklands and not had any concern about Ark Royal for at least two weeks.
There is nothing convoluted here, I am just “differentiating for ability” as we say in my current trade. You are arguing against accepted deterrence theory, the theory that governments actually work with, what they teach you at officer college (of what ever shade). A weapon system is a deterrent only within its defined effect.
Much the same way as a Police car on a motorway is a deterrent to poor driving but as soon as we can’t see it we all stick our foot down, you don’t forget it exsists, you always check your mirrors, you know the consequence if you are caught, but does it deter everyone on the motorway from breaking the law? SO like wise, Argentina would have been aware of Ark Royal, but she “wasn’t in their mirrors”, she had never even been seen in that part of the world.
So how can you possibly state that Ark Royal was the primary reason Argentina did not invade in 1977 and conversely her non-exsistence was the primary reason for the 1982 invason, you are making what scientists would recognise as a false causality. The logic of that statement appears true on first appearance – Event X didn’t happen when object Y was “present” and did happen when it wasn’t. But the problem of false causality is that it tends to ignore the other miriad of factors or suggests that two events are even the same when they are actually not.
You asked for examples of the FO being scared of “provoking” foreigners, I gave you three from the top of my head, and somehow this isn’t good enough. Tough! Do a bit of your own research, you might even find out if the Argies were told about HMS Dreadnought’s mission in 1977.
Your points about Ark Royal strike me as being increasingly bizarre. The fact that she wasn’t actually in the South Atlantic is immaterial. Any Argentine planner would have had to take into account that, following an Argentine occupation of the Falklands, Britain had the means to retake the islands. There would therefore be no point initiating force if you were going to lose. That’s deterrence. We had it in 1977, we didn’t in 1982. Not only did the government in 1982 not give the impression that it would defend the Falklands, but by cutting the Royal Navy’s surface fleet, it gave the impression that it couldn’t even if it wanted to. Given those two conditions, the only surprise should have been if the Argentines didn’t invade.
John KWow you are delusional. The RN would of been unfamiliar with the radars, comms gear, steam plant setup, all of the axillary machinery, the combat systems, the consoles in CIC (just getting them familiar with NTDS would of taken weeks if not a few months) the BMDS and EVERY other system on that ship.
Listen to what people who have actually served are saying it never would of happened.
As I think everyone agrees, this was never going to happen. But if it had, do you seriously think that under the demands of wartime these problems would not have been sorted? If necessary the ship would have had to operate without some systems, if the need was dire. The original point made was that the USA offered a carrier, which would indeed have taken a long time to work up (though in 1982 the Royal Navy still had the men with the experience to do it). But when I pointed out it was the much simpler LPH which was on offer, some people don’t seem to be willing to modify their views. Fair enough.
John KNo thats the film.
I’ve read the book and seen the film. What’s your point?
John KBy jove your getting it….
I spoke too soon. You see thats a very tired cliche. Most of what governments do make complete sense. Not everyone agrees with them (you clearly) but that is not the same thing as “not making sense”. If it doesn’t make sense I would suggest that tells you something.
And I don’t now how the Foreign office hates to provoke ‘foriegners’, care to expand?
You see you are reading the bits you want again. I have clearly stated that in the overall picture of deterrence Ark Royal would of course be part. But that is a long way from saying that because she exsisted in 1977 she was the primary reason that prevented an Argentinian invasion. The Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, Vulcan Bombers and Nimrods would all have featured in the Argentinian planning I am sure, so do they get equal billing with Ark Royal? They were all 8,000 miles away as well….
The Foreign Office, where to start? How about the British Ambassador to Thailand in 1941 who vetoed the plan to attack Japanese forces in Thailand before they invaded Malaya (Operation Matador). This put British forces on the back foot throughout the Malaya campaign. How about the Ambasador to Guatemala who didn’t want the Navy to “provoke” the Guatemalan junta by a show of force from Ark Royal in 1972? How about the efforts of the FO to offload the Falklands? How many examples do you want?
Do you seriously think the Argentines would have been worried by Vulcans and Nimrods? The Paras and Marines are only a deterrent if they can be delivered (in 1977 we had Hermes and Bulwark as well as Fearless and Intrepid), and they can only be delivered if they can be protected, eg by a large deck carrier’s air group. I really think you are trying to defend an impossible position, which is forcing you take ever more convoluted arguments in an effort to avoid accepting the obvious.
Sign In
