The Libyan operation has provided a particularly clear demonstration that carrier-based aviation is worth its price. Prior to the Libyan crisis, the British government had decided to scrap its carrier air arm on the theory that it largely duplicated a capability offered by the Royal Air Force, and money was too tight to tolerate duplication, at least for the moment. This meant that, on paper, RAF attack aircraft based in Britain could fly long distances when supported by tankers. It turned out that indeed they could, but at a great price, and to spend only a few minutes anywhere near the targets.
What seems to have been missed was that the tanker-based capability was worthwhile only to hit preselected fixed targets. It had little to do with any requirement to hit pop-up targets whose significance would become apparent only when they attacked Libyan civilians (or rebels). Close air support, which is really most of what NATO is doing, is anything but a war against fixed preselected targets. A very embarrassed British government was forced to admit that it was spending far more than it had imagined, and that even one carrier could have done far better at a much lower cost. If anything, the disposable capability was surely the RAF ability to attack fixed targets at long range.
The embarrassment was such that the chiefs of the British services felt compelled to complain that they did not have the resources to prosecute the Libyan war. British Prime Minister David Cameron was less than amused; he wanted his service chiefs to do the fighting, while he alone did the talking. The upshot was a reorganization similar, at least in theory, to that carried out by the United States under the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Instead of sitting on the Defence Council, the three service chiefs have been demoted; only the Chief of Defence Staff remains on the Council. Presumably a single chief will not bite his political master. As in Goldwater-Nichols, to defeat the evil of interservice rivalry, officers with more joint experience are to be favored.
Exactly how interservice rivalry has caused the current problem is not clear. U.S. experience does not suggest that joint staffs are willing or able to contemplate gaining efficiency by killing off a central capability of one service or another. Nor is it clear how reorganization will overcome the inefficiency of recent British procurement disasters such as the Nimrod saga.
It is conceivable that a single defense chief could formulate a vision for Britain’s military that made good fiscal and strategic sense. For example, he might decide that in the future, British forces would most likely be employed overseas, and that their areas of operation might almost always be accessible by sea. Britain usually deploys her forces in coalitions, but it can be argued that the ability to operate independently greatly increases the weight that coalition partners will attribute to British participation. It might be argued that the current British army is large enough to get into considerable trouble, but not large enough to win on its own (its lack of resources in Iraq was embarrassing). Perhaps an appropriate unified vision would be an army sized so that British amphibious shipping could transport and support (and, if necessary, extricate) it, with a mobile air-support element on board British carriers. One lesson of Libya is that the paper range of attack aircraft has little to do with their actual tactical capability at any great distance.
Who Lost the Carriers?
Without the benefit of reading Cabinet papers that will not be released for another 30 years, it is impossible to know what happened to the British carrier force. However, it is not difficult to guess. Civilians often consider the uniformed military a collection of squabbling tribes. It was the navy’s fixed-wing air element vs. the air force’s attack element. The air force lost its ASW capability, leaving that vital role to the navy. Surely the attack air arm was a fair trade. After all, without its attack aircraft, what would become of the RAF? The government may have felt that it was being fair: The Royal Navy will still get its two big carriers later on, although it is by no means clear what sort of aircraft they will operate.
Unfortunately, the reality was nothing like that. The carriers were not toys for the benefit of the Royal Navy; they were vital national assets. Their loss has proven rather expensive to the United Kingdom. The British are now adding up the high financial cost of a war they decided to fight at least partly because it seemed to be a very minor but also very virtuous operation. Libya has shown that the appropriate measure of air-power effectiveness is the cost per minute of sustained air presence over a target area, with the understanding that the value of those minutes falls sharply if there are only a few of them. That is quite aside from the unpleasant reality that it is impossible to provide responsive air support from a distant base, because by the time the airplanes arrive, whatever disaster they were supposed to avert already would have happened. None of this should have been as surprising as it obviously has been.
The British are also discovering that light air attacks at a great distance using precision weapons (so as to avoid collateral damage) don’t work—at least not quickly. To the extent that air attacks are likely to succeed, they ought to involve a continuous air presence—which cannot be mounted from distant land bases. Otherwise, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s forces will suffer damage, but they will not be prevented from moving against the rebels NATO is supporting. After some weeks of air operations, the NATO staff announced that about half of the colonel’s military power was gone, but that the remaining half may be heavily weighted toward capabilities that are not very relevant to maintaining control of his portion of Libya.
For that matter, several of the NATO air forces involved in the Libyan operation are discovering that they have bought entirely too few precision weapons. One of the more unpleasant military realities is that, given the choice between platforms and weapons, everyone always buys platforms. Somehow the weapons can be conjured in an emergency—except sometimes they can’t. The U.S. solution has been heavy dependence on inexpensive GPS-guided munitions, but other NATO countries have not taken that route. GPS weapons are inexpensive because other elements of the overall air weapon system take over more of the load, such as reconnaissance and command and control (the attack pilot carries much less of the load in designating targets). The European NATO air arms have not invested heavily enough in the required network-centric systems to enjoy the savings entailed by adopting GPS-guided bombs on a large scale.
The Value of Sea Power
For the British the question is not how to be fair to the service tribes, but how to be fair to the taxpayer who foots the bill. In theory, jointness emphasizes the national character of the military, and forces it to strive for total effectiveness. Joint staffs should, in theory, better understand overall goals and their members should have a less parochial view of available resources.
Nothing in the U.S. experience should make anyone particularly confident of this outcome. Goldwater-Nichols was supposed to work because it was to mimic the enormously successful German World War II joint (army-air) staff. That this success led the Germans to defeat was perhaps missed. Nor was it noted that the German joint staff was really an army staff with a supporting air arm, not even a truly joint army-air staff in a Western sense in which the air arm favors deep or strategic strikes rather than close air support of ground forces.
The argument against some British form of Goldwater-Nichols is the argument the U.S. Navy made in the 1980s. The West has succeeded because it understands the value of pluralism: Rivalry between the services can bring out the best in all. Stifling that rivalry does not necessarily bring efficiency. It is possible that the Royal Navy failed to make the arguments that it should have. Often it gives the impression that the logic of sea power is so obvious that it need not be laid out explicitly.
The lesson the U.S. Navy has learned is that the realities of sea power have to be explained again and again, not least because so few people have any idea that the sea still dominates the transportation of the materials and manufactured goods that rule their lives. The basic reason for explicit maritime strategies, from Mahan through to the present, is that those living on land do not automatically understand why the sea matters, and how it can and should be used.
Air forces understand that unless they can make their case, they are doomed. They are very expensive, and without nuclear weapons or vast fleets of aircraft they cannot duplicate the kinds of effects they achieved during World War II or even in Vietnam. It would be absurd to expect them to point out just how weak they are when acting at a great distance. Nor would anyone expect the British army to emphasize the expense of moving it thousands of miles, because that might bring into question the value of its current considerable size. It was for the Royal Navy to make its case, and to continue to do so until someone in Whitehall understood. That is the least that the British taxpayer deserves.