COMMENTARY SPECIAL

ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD LET THE ARMY RUN AMPHIB OPs

BY ODIN

Royal Marines go aboard a Royal Navy landing craft. Photo: Nigel Andrews.

As the painful process of cutting the UK Armed Forces even closer to the bone gets into full swing along the corridors of power in London, one of the more alarming - and fiendishly clever - powerplays mounted by the wily agents of the British Army’s Whitehall War brigade has been unveiled. Naturally all sorts of outlandish propositions will be forming up, either in genuine attempts to reform the British military to deliver more capability and just as much effect - but with a lot less money and people - or as bargaining chips to see off rival proposals.

Under General Dave Richards - a fiercely clever, incredibly astute and ruthlessly partisan leader - the British Army has postulated a new headquarters, which will absorb both the navy’s UK Amphibious Forces and deployable components of the RAF. The alleged purpose of this new headquarters, is to take over from the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJH) responsibility for training (and day-to-day running) of all high readiness units to allow the PJHQ to concentrate on running the war in Afghanistan. This would allegedly save money and manpower by getting rid of the need for different expeditionary staffs in each Service and having just one Joint one. Such a move would, in reality, turn out to be a means to an end for the army.

The truth would be that the navy and air force would be squeezed out and the new headquarters dominated by the army. This is what has happened with the new Special Forces support battalions. Allegedly tri-service, they attracted recruits from the Royal Marines and the RAF who soon became deeply disenchanted with the iron grip of the SAS, Guards and Paras on allegedly Joint formations.

Reading the writing on the wall about Afghanistan - the army’s operational silver bullet, giving it a war to fight and a means of justifying itself at the expense of the navy and air force - General Richards and his team moved their Whitehall War on from attacking anyone who disagrees with Britain being involved in counter-insurgencies forever and ever, to showing an (alleged) interest in other forms of warfare that will be far more relevant once the UK and USA are out of Helmand.

The army has in recent years shown no interest, or deep inclination, for amphibious warfare, but if you aren’t fighting the Taliban, you need to have some other means of justifying your existence and it might be nice to control it as well. However, the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) is about achieving BIG cuts, not playing politics with warfare headquarters. Cuts of at least 25 per cent, and maybe as much as 40 per cent, in the costs of all government departments, except health and overseas aid, are on the agenda. One can question the wisdom of even ring-fencing these latter two departments, but cutting the UK defence budget from £36 billion per annum to £27 billion pa, or more, is not about setting up new headquarters.

This time around, cuts must mean bringing home all British forces from Germany. No longer can the army justify maintaining a rump British Army of the Rhine, which still consists of 23,000 troops, 30,000 dependents, and 2,200 civilians (not to mention nearly 1,000 RAF and their hangers-on - RAF Germany was disbanded in 1993). Bringing these people home would be Odin’s first measure to reach the level of cuts needed. Odin notes that British forces in Germany were 55,000 strong in effective manpower when the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) was formally disbanded in 1994, three years before the Strategic Defence Review set up by the then incoming New Labour government, yet British forces in Germany still number nearly half that number, grouped under eight different headquarters.

And the army wants to add another headquarters to its portfolio!? One old chestnut brought out on these occasions is that there is nowhere in the United Kingdom to put these people or that the accommodation in the UK is not of sufficient standard. There are plenty of RAF airbases in the UK that can be turned over to the army.

The MoD is already using a baseline for its planning cuts of the number of multi-role Eurofighters (aka Typhoon) from 232, a number promulgated during the Cold War, to just 107. At the same time the 130-strong all-weather Tornado force, which is at least a generation older than the Eurofighter, may be slashed early. Observers note that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, is a fast-jet man and that one reason for his falling out with government may have been his opposition to these plans. It was Stirrup who ultimately took the decision to replace Harriers in their Close Air Support (CAS) role in Afghanistan with Tornados, and other decisions taken on his watch as DCDS (Equipment Capability) 2002-2003, Chief of the Air Staff 2003-2006, and as CDS were to disinvest in support and attack helicopters for the Royal Marines and the army, and not to order body armour, boots and desert clothing for the 2003 Iraq War. With Stirrup’s departure announced in advance, he is now neutered during the SDSR. Even the RAF realise how top-heavy their command structure is and the Eurofighter force will be formed into not more than half a dozen squadrons.

Even RAF Marham is rumoured to be on a list for closure. So, plenty of room for those troops finally coming home from Germany. And the Tornados are not the only fleet that can be scrapped: There are currently five armoured regiments in the British army, which operate some 400 Challenger tanks. If the army thinks that future warfare is going to be ‘lite’, then it’s high time to give up its Main Battle Tanks (MBT). It is understood by this magazine that Dave Richards’ talk of tanks and big guns being redundant has stirred up a hornets’ nest of opposition within his own service.

Furthermore, if the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) can be civilianised, so Odin thinks could a large part of the RAF’s tanker and transport fleet. What’s left of the air force after all these changes could easily be given to the Army Air Corps and to the Fleet Air Arm - thus cutting the headquarters overhead of the uniformed armed service by one-third. That would enable the army to keep its nose out of amphibious warfare - which it does not understand at all - and leave it to the marines and sailors who have a proven track record of success within the lean machine that is today’s Royal Navy.

The lunacy of the army’s bid to run amphibious warfare is clearly illustrated by the fact that not since the Falklands War of 1982 has a single British Army brigade, much less a division, mounted any kind of operation from the sea. Even in the South Atlantic the poor bloody infantry were not much good at it and the landings and crucial manoeuvres from the sea had to be planned by the Royal Marines and Royal Navy. That is what you would expect though, the earth being seven tenths covered in water and British sailors and marines having been experts at amphibious warfare since 1759 and the attack on Quebec. It was the genius of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay that enabled the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of troops from Dunkirk in 1940 and four years later he devised the Op Neptune phase of the D-Day invasion. In 2003, the amphibious forces of the UK - under joint RN and RM command - played a key role in opening up southern Iraq for the invading forces. When the army’s supplies didn’t arrive the entire British logistics effort was mounted from the sea during a crucial 48-hour period.

Ever since the end of the NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation while the army has kept its tanks, troops and big guns in its Cold War bases, the navy has revolutionised its order of battle and tactics, with the primary focus of enabling a wide range of expeditionary warfare from Carrier Strike to amphibious landings. The fruit of that, sometimes painful, reorganisation and rationalisation, has been borne out during recent operations in and off Sierra Leone, the Lebanon, in the Gulf of Aden, the Caribbean and even in Afghanistan. Bearing all that in mind, it is plain that only an idiot would hand over any element of control of amphibious/expeditionary warfare to the army, even on a part-time basis.

Both President Obama in Washington and Prime Minster Cameron in London want troops home from Afghanistan as soon as possible and preferably by the time of the next election, which places the declaration of victory - whatever successes are held to represent “victory” - as sometime between 2012 and 2015. Therefore, this cynical army proposed take-over of amphibious warfare headquarters, units and ships, can be seen for what it is: A smokescreen to avoid rationalising the army’s own bloated and out-dated structure, which persists in retaining thousands of troops and their families on foreign soil, more than two decades after the Cold War ended.

The amphibious warfare ship HMS Ocean on deployment. Does she really look like a future army asset? Photo: Royal Australian Navy.

• For more commentaries and news analysis SUBSCRIBE to WARSHIPS IFR today!