Land Based Air Power or Aircraft Carriers?: A case study of the British debate about maritime air power in the 1960s by Gjert Lage Dyndal Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Farnham, 2012, £60 (hb)
212 pages, with 5 maps, 4 black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, index
ISBN 978-1-4094-3335-4
This is the sixth in a series of studies by the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies, which draw on the expertise and wider networks of the Defence Studies Department of King's College, London. The author is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Norwegian Air Force and Dean of Academics at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy; he was awarded his PhD by the University of Glasgow in 2009 and has written three earlier books on military subjects.
This work follows the successful format used in the previous case-studies and has a bibliography that runs to 16 pages of published and unpublished reference material together with an index and useful list of abbreviations. The preface is written by Professor Geoffrey Till who gives a lucid and succinct background to the case study, noting that the question's origins can be traced from the ‘battleships versus bombers’ debate of the 1930s, through the debate in the 1960s that forms the subject of this book and into the present. As he says, ‘there is every sign of a new round starting in the ongoing debate about maritime air power intended to re-calibrate British Defence after Afghanistan for the next Strategic Defence Review in, or possibly before, 2015.’ This book is, therefore, timely and lays out aspects of the argument as seen through the eyes of a NATO ally rather than a protagonist in the debate.
The main text has both strengths and weaknesses, however. The author has located and identified a number of original documents that are relevant and informative, but he uses them without wider explanation to provide context. Nor does he comment on which arguments, in his opinion and with the wisdom of hindsight, had the greater merit. Similar arguments in the USA over whether to build B-36 bombers or the CVA to have been named United States in the late 1940s are surely worth a mention if only to compare the outcomes. The human angle is omitted completely but it would have been interesting to know if the Admirals, Air Marshals and politicians had ever worked together (or against each other) before and what their wartime experience had been. The author makes no mention of the Admiralty's attempts to order a new fleet aircraft carrier from 1951 onwards or the reasons given by the Government for not funding it. There had been a good measure of inter-Service harmony in the 1950s with a succession of joint aircraft and weapon projects including helicopters, atomic and nuclear bombs and the successful Firestreak and Red Top air-to-air missiles. The Joint SR177 fighter project was a model of inter-Service co-operation until it was cancelled by one of the Defence Minister's less comprehensible decisions in 1958; its continuation might have provided a more harmonious atmosphere in the 1960s and it surely deserves a mention. The Hawker P-1154 supersonic STOVL strike aircraft is mentioned but the author fails to explain that arguments over its design and capability were not just between the RN and RAF but between the very different avionic requirements of the ground attack community in the latter who wanted a fighter-bomber and the air defence community in the former who wanted a long-range all-weather fighter; both could not be fitted in a lightweight aircraft that had to use engine thrust to support its weight when landing. Combining the two roles in a single airframe as large as a Phantom proved difficult but trying to do so in a small airframe of an unproven and revolutionary design was a witless political decision that was likely to be a an expensive and limited compromise solution at best. It forced the Services into a conflict which was arguably unnecessary; both Services subsequently bought the F-4 Phantom from the USA but the politicians failed to reap the benefit and make the RAF Phantom operable from a carrier. Why not? The impact of poor political decisions that led to conflict deserves greater comment.
The role of politicians was fundamental as arguments unfolded in the 1960s and it was clear that they had little comprehension of what they were asking the Services to achieve. Any sort of forward-deployed policy relied on a maritime strategy to underpin it and the Chief of the Defence Staff, Mountbatten, appears not to have placed the emphasis he should have done on a joint approach to operations. Rather than being seen simply as a fight between the RN and RAF for a share of the shrinking defence budget, the core of the problem surely lay with politicians who failed to articulate a sustainable defence policy and forced the Services into polarized arguments for the replacement of equipment they relied on to perform their designated tasks. On p. 179 the author states that politicians used the expert advice ‘of their choice’ but offers little comment on how this impacted on the eventual outcome in which no-one got what they wanted.
The strongest aspect of the work is that Dyndal brings to light a number of previously unpublished papers that shed light on aspects of the debate which will add substance to further arguments as they unfold. Important as this is, wider research and conclusions that are based on analytical judgement are needed to set the 1960s debate into its full contemporary context. The statement that ‘advocates for British carrier forces will most likely have to fight for this potent but costly capability in the coming years’ is a weak conclusion which seems to indicate that the author is unable or unwilling to decide between the arguments he has set out. He notes that the RN case for CVA-01 was less robust in 1965/66 than it had been in 1962/63 but fails to explain the different staff structures that followed the Admiralty secretariat being subsumed into the Ministry of Defence in 1964 or postulate what difference this made. A comparison with the Canadian decision to scrap the aircraft carrier Bonaventure soon after the creation of the unified Canadian Armed Forces might have been interesting and relevant. The author's comments about the contemporary British focus on the withdrawal from Empire in the Far East rather than with NATO are interesting and shed new light on British participation in the evolution of the alliance.
In summary this is a book that stimulates interest in the arguments that wrecked British defence policy in the mid-1960s but which provides neither opinion nor strong conclusions about the wealth of documents referred to. It can certainly be considered a ‘stepping-stone’ towards understanding but it is not the definitive product and the reader is left to form his or her own view on the arguments. Some might prefer it that way but I feel that, given the author's military background and status at the RNoAF Academy he could have added more value to his work by discussing the relative practical merits and de-merits of the arguments he outlines.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2013.767574
© David Hobbs