The 16th article reproduced from early editions of the Journal of the Australian Naval Institute is about the Falklands War. The article is titled, “The Falklands War — Seapower in Action” by the co-founder of the ANI, Commodore J.A. Robertson. It appeared in the February 1983 edition and was based on his address given to the Sydney Chapter of the ANI on 5 October 1982. As the first naval war in nearly two generations and employing many systems not yet tested in combat, the Falklands War was of immense professional interest to ANI members. This is well captured in ‘Rocker’ Robertson’s article.
The Falklands War — Seapower in Action
So much has been said about the Falklands War in the last few months that I am now in the well known position of Prince Orloff, Catherine the Great’s favourite, summoned to the Royal bedchamber one night, he entered looking pensive and worried. When the great lady asked the reason for his concern he replied “Your Majesty, my problem is not what I have to do, I know what I have to do, and I am confident of my ability to do it. My problem is how to make it seem new.”
What has struck me very forcibly in many articles and papers on the Falklands War is the singular way in which many commentators appear to have missed the point – which my thesis. I refer of course to the fact that, before anything else, the Falklands War was dominated by considerations of maritime strategy. And, of course, just as World War II in the Pacific was similarly dominated by maritime strategy, and Australians are still to understand this rudimentary fact, it seems to me that too much attention given to less important aspects may prevent the most important strategic lessons of the Falklands War being understood.
What appears to happen is that individuals use incidents from the War to illustrate and make points to support their own parochial interests, and so, perhaps unwittingly, mislead their readers. For instance, the Brown Shoe. Big Carrier admirals in America, whose immediate objective is a USN based on 15 big nuclear powered carriers, are conducting a battle with Admiral Zumwalt, Stansfield Turner and Senator Gary Hart, and have accordingly made remarks alleging the inadequacy of Hermes and Invincible, which they would call ‘Gary Hart Carriers’. And this internecine fight in America has provided Australia’s anti-carrier lobby with a rich source of quotations from revered authorities. The fact that this in-house dispute is quite irrelevant to Australia’s strategic circumstances is lost in the anti-carrier lobby’s delight at being provided with ready made bullets to fire at the Navy’s carrier project.
Similarly, some of Australia’s Fortress Australia strategists, committed to the Maginot Line concept of the embattled stockade fighting off the invading hordes, have referred to the Falklands War as an airman’s war; Continentalists – of which we have a majority in Australia – gleefully draw attention to the fact that, in true Clausewitz fashion, it was the final showdown at the Port Stanley corral between the land forces – the presentation of the bill at the end of the transaction as Clausewitz called it – which was the ultimate factor in deciding who won. Well, even maritime strategists acknowledge that the ultimate determinant is the man on the ground with a gun exercising control. What the continentalists are apparently unable to see is that, as in World War II, unless the maritime strategy succeeded, there was no foundation for any sort of victory at all.
It would be dishonest, and futile anyway, for me not to admit that I am ardently committed to the need for a predominantly maritime strategy for Australia and for it to include naval aviation for its implementation. But I believe that my position is more defensible in terms of strategic theory, and the way in which the Falklands War demonstrated its working.
The principal factors affecting the opposing strategies in the Falklands were geography, the opposing force’s objectives and the instruments available to them to achieve those objectives.
On geography you may remember John Collins’ vehement comment in Grand Strategy: Principles and Practices. Misguided strategists who misinterpret, misapply or ignore the crushing impact of geography on national security affairs learn their lessons painfully after squandering national prestige, lives and treasure’. Theodore Ropp in War in the Modern World, more succintly, says Geography is the bones of strategy.
And there’s little doubt that the geography of the Falklands. 8,000 miles from Britain and over 300 miles from Argentina, inevitably made considerations of maritime strategy the predominant feature Argentina had committed itself to a Fortress Malvinas’ garrisoned by 10,000 to 15,000 troops with a logistic supply line of over 300 miles. If Britain was to take up this challenge and eject the Argentine forces, it had no choice but to undertake a power projection mission, and to succeed in that, it had first to conduct the sea assertion mission successfully. Since an attack on a fortress may employ any or all of three methods – frontal assault, starving it into submission, and subverting it morally. Britain also decided to undertake the sea denial mission to weaken the garrison. And sea denial was also needed to ensure the safety of its own power projection forces.
There was another strategic option available to Britain, to employ aspects of aerospace strategy; that is, strategic bombing of Argentina itself or of the Argentine garrison. For reasons which we can only speculate on, Britain decided not to take up that option. The only slight gesture towards it was rather more tactical – the V-Bomber attack on the Stanley runway to crater it – but it was badly botched and failed to achieve its objective.
So Britain undertook all three seapower missions, sea assertion, sea denial and power projection – and with surface naval forces configured primarily for sea assertion in the North Atlantic, Argentina’s seapower missions were sea denial, sea assertion to maintain its surface resupply route to the Falklands, and strategic air support, of the garrison. And I don’t need to tell you what happened.
But even before it got to the actual shooting, it was seapower in action. Let’s go back a couple of steps and comment on that aspect, an aspect which has been almost universally overlooked. Australians, generally, tend to scoff at the classic uses of seapower in conditions short of war-fighting. I refer of course to naval presence, deterrence, and crisis management.
My first impression of the war was that the Argentines thought they could safely occupy the Falklands because they probably thought that Britain, haven given up its attack carrier capability, would not be able to undertake a successful power projection operation. As various commentators have noted, the availability of F4 Phantoms. AEW Gannets and Buccaneers would have altered the balance quite sharply. So I was not a little surprised to read a subsequent report that it was not so much Ark Royal which influenced the Argentine assessment but, of all things, Britain’s decision, in the sacred name of Defence economies, to withdraw its ice patrol ship HMS Endurance. Apparently, the Argentine comment published was, and I quote, “Britain is giving up her deterrent”. Was that credible? But then I recalled Geoffrey Blainey’s conclusions in The Causes of War where he said “Wars usually begin when two nations disagree on their relative strength” and, “A change in one factor may dramatically alter a nation’s assessment of its bargaining position In the snort term that factor could wield an influence which seems irrationally large”. Now I’m not suggesting the planned withdrawal of the Endurance was the only factor but it would seem that it probably had an influence out of all proportion to its negligible military capacity I’m sure many would think this is drawing a very long bow but it is not easy to put any other interpretation on the facts. The point is, that no one can ever prove satisfactorily that naval presence actually achieves its object of providing the control and influence that advocates of seapower claim for it, so it is easily denied. This incident suggests the opposite, that the lack of even a very modest naval presence may wield an influence which seems irrationally large.
Force Structure Design
From Britain’s point of view, too, some consideration of the vexed question of her force structure design, and how it may have affected events can be instructive. A recent American strategic conference included an interesting address on philosophies of force structure design. The speaker suggested that there were three observable philosophies at work. He called them ‘abjuration’, ‘holism’ and ‘concretism.’ I’m afraid they are all very ugly words but the ideas are worth examining.
Abjuration holds that military forces are of declining importance and that political and economic factors are of increasing importance. Accordingly, the abjurationist suggests that less money should be spent on combat forces and diverted towards say, roads or other infrastructure to improve the national economy, or, say, international aid programmes. All of us who have done time at Russell Hill will have been exposed to that philosophy, and bloody annoying it can be too. I’ll come back to it.
Holism is the traditional instinctive approach to force structure design. For example, everyone knows that Air Forces have bombers and fighters. Lets not waste time discussing the obvious. How many and of what types can we squeeze out of the system. Holism tends to be a bit untidy but it also tends to provide a useful measure of flexibility, allowing for the sort of improvisation so often needed in war, because as J.C. Wylie has observed (Military Strategy, A Theory of Power Control), we cannot predict with certainty the pattern of the war for which we prepare ourselves.
Concretism is another way of describing the McNamara cost-effectiveness’ approach. It holds that there is a tight relationship between strategic policy and force structure design. It goes to great lengths to try to tie force structure down with mathematical precision. Now as Wylie has also observed, concretism tends to sail on one essential point, at least so far as seapower and land forces are concerned, and he says this “(concretism) worked beautifully with respect to aircraft and missiles and air defence and their warheads; but it ran into snags, and the results were a little less precise when applied to other instruments of warfare. The process just would not work out into clean and precise figures as would the process applied to the air and missile bombing elements. Perhaps the answer (as to why it does not) lies not in the techniques but in the theory. The air theory is predicted on the delivery of destruction. Destruction is a finite and measurable phenomenon. But destruction is not so clearly the cornerstone of the maritime concept of war. Destruction is only one component of control, and not the whole of it.”
The point I am getting to is that Britain, in pursuit of at least the sort of pseudo-determinism we also apply to the question of an aircraft carrier in the Australian inventory, had run down its conventional seapower to conform to its perceived NATO interests and its dependent nuclear deterrent, overlooking, it seems, that it still retained an interest in the Falklands. And as Admiral Moorer has observed, in order to be effective, “seapower, like any other aspect of a nation’s arsenal, has to be commensurate with that nation’s role and the sweep of its interests.” In order to save money and under the misleading influence of concretism, Britain had reduced its conventional surface naval forces and configured them tightly to the constraints of sea assertion in the North Atlantic. The result was that it simply was not prepared for the war it found itself in.
Let me introduce an aside about Australian force structure at this point. The Prime Minister has recently said that Australia would not yield a foot of its territory to another power – and he was referring specifically to the Cocos Islands. If that is so, then I suggest he had better make damned sure that he keeps at least one carrier in the Australian defence inventory. Of course, a different Prime Minister might be prepared to give up the Cocos – but that still would not eliminate the need for a carrier and naval aviation. You won’t catch me that way.
I said I’d return to abjuration and this may be linked to the use of seapower in crisis management. In the light of what happened, abjuration did not come out of the Falklands dispute very well. The slow advance of the British Task Force gave a chance for political and economic measures to demonstrate their effectiveness. In fact they did not succeed at all. But at least the measured approach of the Task Force gave them the opportunity and also provided a demonstration of the delicacy with which seapower can be applied to influence events. I find criticisms of the time it took for the Task Force to get to the Falklands quite juvenile, and an indication that those voicing such criticisms have little understanding of the interaction between politics and military force.
Some Losses
But let’s get back to the shooting war. Britain achieved her sea assertion mission and sustained it through its transformation into power projection, despite some losses. Too much has been made of British losses in my view. Such comments are on a par with those who claim that we did not win the Battle of the Coral Sea. That is fatuous nonsense. If the strategic objective is achieved it is only a question of whether the losses were tolerable. And in all the circumstances they were. No one likes losses of course, but you will notice that the very same people who want to deprive navies of the appropriate instruments for exercising seapower, are the first to concentrate on the price extracted for being forced to use the unsuitable force elements they have decided you should have.
We might note too that the actual losses were far and away more expensive than the money which was supposed to have been saved by withdrawing Endurance and running down the RN’s Fleet Air Arm. But that is the sort of false economy democracies have indulged in for centuries – and never seem to learn is unforgivably stupid. I’d like to think we in Australia could learn the lesson but I would not hold out much hope.
Although it is true the Hermes and Invincible, particularly, were not designed for power projection, I must flatly disagree with Admiral Moorer’s comment that these small carriers were inadequate in and of themselves. That may be a best seller with the Big Carrier lobby in the States – and of course the anti-carrier lobby in Australia – but the undeniable fact is that, despite their acknowledged limitations, they did the job successfully. One British team in Australia recently – both soldiers – when asked what was the single most critical element in the campaign, replied unhesitatingly that without the carriers it would not have been possible. I do not mean to suggest that this makes a case for an Australian sea control ship. On the contrary, what I am saying is that the Australian anti-carrier lobby cannot use Admiral Moorer’s remarks to argue against an Australian carrier of that type – but of course they have done just that.
Of course an attack carrier would have been better and would probably have cleaned up the operation faster with fewer, perhaps no losses. But as I’ve pointed out earlier, the Endurance alone, much less one Ark Royal, might have prevented the war occurring at all. This sort of speculation, while interesting, is on a par with that of some senior RAAF officers who have suggested changes in the scenario to suit their pre-determined positions, such as AVM Barnes who’d like to move the Falklands 100 miles west to ‘prove’ the uselessness of Invincible. Or AVM Scully who wants to have the British Task Force trying to invade Australia, so that he could try to sink them all at over 1,000 miles from the coast with Harpoons launched from F111s, F18s and P3s. I don’t know what these gentlemen do to a potential enemy but, as Wellington said, “By God, they frighten me!”
Let us just stick to the facts; and the simple and incontrovertible fact is that the Argentine sea denial mission failed. And incidentally at very high cost. This cannot be much consolation to the British widows or even the British Treasury, but while everyone is understandably full of praise for the Argentine aviators, both naval and Air Force, losses of 94 aircraft and probably the cream of their operational aircrews have been relatively far more damaging to Argentina’s military capacity than the RN’s losses which have been given so much attention. Again, this is an aspect you will notice is generally covered in a discreet silence.
The fact is, as I have said, that the Argentine sea denial mission failed. It enjoyed some tactical successes to be sure, but the strategic seapower mission of sea denial failed. On the other hand, the British sea denial mission was almost 100% successful, spectacularly so with the sinking of the General Belgrano and the restriction of the Argentine’s surface forces to their own 12 mile territorial sea. The British power projection mission succeeded too, and ‘Fortress Malvinas’ fell to a numerically inferior force, I suggest, because it was able to enjoy the advantage of the initiative and attack at a time and place of its own choosing. There is evidence that both the blockade of the Fortress and the moral subversion of its garrison played their parts in making the frontal assault successful.
Australia strategists might ponder this example and concede that there could be more to an Australian strategy than their preoccupation with frontal assault only I doubt if it will; their minds are made up and they do not enjoy being confused with facts.
Lessons for the Future
The only other points I’d like to draw your attention to are the Sea Harriers’ outstanding success as a Fleet Air Arm Defence Fighter; another is the fact that so many ships were made available at short notice and remained on station from the best part of six months. I’m willing to bet, however, that we will continue to hear the usual twaddle that ships spend so much time in refit that you cannot depend on them. Finally, we have had a timely reminder of the immense importance of access to merchant ships, and, incidentally, I am sure all of us must admire the way the British merchant seamen played their part. Perhaps the Sydney Chapter of the ANI might like to follow up by establishing some links with the Company of Master Mariners, or the Maritime Services Guild, or both.
Perhaps the most encouraging lesson is how well the theory of maritime strategy seems to have been validated in practice. Most wars today are land battles; this one. for a change, provided a working laboratory for maritime strategy. For Australia, which, as Dr Tom Millar said, has a great propensity to forget that it is an island first and a continent second, there are important lessons to be learned. Not by any direct comparisons of certain tactical aspects, though they are by no means unimportant, but in the broader sweep of the nature of seapower and its application to Australia.
About the Author
Alan ‘Rocker’ Robertson was born at Footscray in 1926 and joined the RAN College in 1940 and graduated in 1943 with the prize for English. He was posted to the UK and joined his first ship, the cruiser HMS Cumberland in Jan 1944 from which he went to the destroyer HMS Paladin. Both these ships were based in Trincomalee. He then proceeded to India and undertook a minesweeping course in early 1945; on completion of the course he returned to England and joined HMS Vanquisher at Sheerness. Later in 1945, he joined HMS Excellent for courses before joining HMAS Shropshire for 18 months. In mid 1947 he joined HMAS Australia, then HMAS Swan and later HMAS Lithgow as part of the 20th Minesweeping Flotilla which was formed to clear the minefields in New Guinea-Solomons area, Torres Strait and the Great Barrier Reef.
In 1952 ‘Rocker’ returned to the UK and specialised in Communications and, after RN Exchange, joined HMAS Melbourne for her commissioning in 1955. In 1960 he became OIC NAVCOMMSTA Darwin. During his time at Darwin he became the Executive Officer of HMAS Melville and served until mid 1961 before proceeding to HMAS Voyager as the Executive Officer. After passing the RN Staff course at Greenwich in 1963 he had a further two years exchange RN service which was in Singapore as a Joint Planner on the staff of the C–in-C Far East.
Subsequently, ‘Rocker’ was posted as Executive Officer of Melbourne in 1966 and the following year he commanded HMAS Duchess until 1969. Later in 1969 he became the Director of Naval Communications and in 1971/72, he commanded HMAS Hobart. In February 1975 he commanded HMAS Stalwart and in August 1977 was promoted to Commodore and appointed as DGNOP. Commodore Alan ‘Rocker’ Robertson was one of the Australian Naval Institute’s founding fathers and was renowned for his innovative and lateral thinking both during and after his naval career. He died in 2012.
