What seem to be obvious lessons for our military establishment, from the recent war in the Falkland Islands, turn out to be unimportant lessons on inspection. The real lessons of the Falklands are for our political leadership. They pertain to how nations can be dragged into unnecessary wars and how a lack of foresight can leave a nation inadequately prepared for war.
The military lessons are limited because the war was fought under unique circumstances. For instance. had the islands been 100 miles closer to Argentina, Argentina would very likely have won; or had they been 100 miles further away from Argentina, Britain would not have suffered the losses it did in winning. In addition, if either side had used the electronic wizardry that the Israeli Air Force employed to defeat Syrian missiles and aircraft, the battles in the Falklands could have terminated quite differently.
Hence, we should tread carefully before reaching the conclusion that this experience in combat proves particular weapon systems are the wave of the future. In fact, there were few weapons or battle tactics demonstrated in the Falklands that should not have been anticipated by military analysts. Claims have been made, for instance, that the sinking of HMS Sheffield demonstrated that ships are vulnerable to modern missiles, but this same thing was demonstrated in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War and the 1967 Israeli-Arab War.
There is certainly a lot to be learned about the broader reaches of military strategy. It was, for example, a combination of misunderstandings that led both Argentina and Britain to go to war. In addition, despite deliberate neglect of the Royal Navy by a series of British governments, Britain won the war because its navy was able to establish control of the sea and air space around the islands. Still another strategic lesson highlighted by this war concerns training; one of the most important contributors to Britain’s success was the superior training of its personnel. Finally, a lesson in weakness of planning is that Britain had apparently neglected to buy adequate supplies of the mundane consumables of war, such as ammunition.
It is instructive to look at each of these issues and to ask whether the United States is prepared not to stumble into an unnecessary war and whether, in light of the British experience, the guidance give to our military establishment is appropriate to the kinds of conflicts we might face.
Britain and Argentina went to war because neither tried to understand the other’s position and outlook. During 16 years of negotiations with Argentina, the British never made it appear that a transfer of sovereignty to Argentina was out of the question. The only issue of debate was how to assuage a small segment of British public opinion.
A weakness in any democratic system of government is a tendency on the part of politicians to procrastinate making decisions on unpopular issues. Throughout the 16 years of British procrastination, they failed to recognize the depth of Argentine feeling on this subject and what might result from such emotions. It is of interest that former British Foreign Secretary David Owen stated that, in 1977, the British sent warships to the area of the Falklands to forestall an invasion. Yet, in 1981, they just could not believe that Argentina would do something as irrational as invade the islands. British thinking was dominated by a stereotype of Latins as being long on “macho” and short on “follow-through.”
The Argentines, however, made a similar miscalculation. They could not believe that a rational British prime minister would respond to their invasion by accepting the risks and costs of war in order to preserve a hold on islands Britain was close to giving away. The Argentines also held a stereotype—that of Europe and Britain being too decadent and self-centered to rise to such an occasion.
The remarkable point is that there has been a long and strong British connection with Argentina, ranging from the sizeable British community in Argentina to extensive trade, including armaments. In short, there was ample opportunity for these countries to understand each other’s outlooks and attitudes, but the effort was not made. Look at some other examples of similar situations in the forefront today:
►Israel invaded its neighbor, Lebanon, apparently with a conviction that by driving out the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Syrians it could install a stable Lebanese Government and withdraw. Israel, instead, has found that Lebanon is much too complex for such a plan to succeed. Israel failed to recall the fractiousness of Lebanon's internal structure.
►Another example is that of Iraq, an Arab and a Sunni-Muslim nation, which, in 1980, invaded Iran, a Persian and a Shia-Muslim nation, in the expectation that the large number of Arabs living just across the border in Iran would rally to Arab Iraq’s cause. They did not, and Iraq was driven back.
►Still another example is that of Iran, which counter invaded Iraq last June in the expectation that the large number of Shia Muslims living just across that same border would rally to the Shia-Iranian cause. They did not, and Iran got bogged down.
In the United States, we are not much better at understanding foreign attitudes. Look, for instance, at our instinctive response to Iran’s invasion of Iraq. We immediately publicized an offer to conduct military exercises with the Arab nations of the Persian Gulf. This was intended to display our support for them. What we failed to understand was that the main threat that Iran’s Khomeini poses to these states is not a military invasion, but an undermining of their leaderships with the claim that they have corrupted their Islamic principles in order to do business with the West. The last thing that these countries need right now is a big military exercise that would display their close ties to the United States, a non-Islamic nation.
In light of U. S. global responsibilities, failure to understand the mores and attitudes of other nations could be serious. It is a problem that is not easy to correct. We do not have a natural proclivity for probing beyond the stereotype of other nations. The world has generally tried to understand us. We neglect languages in our educational curricula. Governmental funding for academic centers of study on various areas of the world has almost evaporated in the last decade.
Our intelligence agencies tend to focus on immediate and specific issues. Moreover, it is not easy to task a clandestine intelligence organization to send agents into bazaars (or wherever) to feel the pulse of a nation. There are few incentives, in a bureaucracy of people trained to obtain information clandestinely, to obtain information that is available rather openly.
The U. S. State Department is charged to collect information from open sources, but years of budget cutbacks have severely constrained that capability. Numerous consulates have been disestablished. Embassy staffs have been reduced to the point that in-depth political reporting is shunted aside in the press of handling the consular and protocol workloads.
The American business community is spread across the world and should be an excellent source for feeling the pulse of a nation. Business tends, however, to focus narrowly on the outlook for its area of commercial concern and to rely too exclusively on its own personnel who may not be attuned to sensing broad political or economic trends. For a long time, it was not important that business worry much about political stability, because the drive for economic growth in other countries continued no matter who came to power. There have been few major losses of overseas investments because of political factors. Today, though, we have on one hand the example of Khomeini cavalierly repudiating Iran’s debts and on the other the prospect that Poland, Mexico, Argentina, or others may be forced into national default. Business, as well as government, needs to be carefully attuned to such risks.
It is easy to criticize the British and the Argentines for stumbling into an unnecessary war, but the United States is not well-organized to understand foreign lands and people in depth. If we do not improve, we could stumble into serious problems.
The United States has generally accepted the British contention that they went to war in order to defend the principle that aggression does not pay. That may sound nice, but the prime reason Britain responded so quickly and decisively was that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s political fate was on the line. Her government had failed to deter the Argentine invasion. She had a choice between explaining her error or retaking the islands by force. She chose the latter and then encouraged public feelings about fighting for principle. British concern for principle has not shown conspicuously in other recent cases of aggression, however, such as in Afghanistan, in Kampuchea, in the instance of the U. S. hostages in Iran, or in the imposition of martial law in Poland.
This is not intended to sound cynical, for the desire of politicians to hold onto office is a key motivating factor in the British-U. S. example of democracy. The democratic process, however, needs some means of regulating the impulses of politicians who go to war as an escape from domestic difficulties. Perhaps the United States has stumbled onto one such technique in the War Powers Act, which was a result of the war in Vietnam.
The most important counterbalance to the politician’s impulses is an informed and concerned public. A well-informed British public which had been aware of the possible consequences of neglecting the Falklands problem, for instance, might have insisted that its political leaders grapple with the problem, despite its difficulties. Actually, in both Britain and the United States, we have exceptionally well- informed publics. Where we fall short is in not giving the public adequate opportunity to focus on long- range issues.
Our U. S. media are particularly prone to emphasizing immediate or dramatic issues while letting longer term problems lie fallow until they become crises. Seventy percent of our public is reported to receive its news from television, where such tendencies are worse than in the printed media. This is not a problem that can or will be solved easily, but it is one which deserves serious thought.
It is an even more difficult problem in nondemocratic societies. Argentina’s decision to go to war was undoubtedly shaped by a political desire to distract attention from the depth of problems on the home front. We should seriously be concerned about the possibilities of future Soviet leaders one day resorting to external diversions, for surely their internal economic and political problems are going to multiply. Public opinion in the Soviet Union plays a much lesser role than in our country, but that role has been increasing and will likely continue to grow.
We already do a fair amount to inform the people in countries like the Soviet Union where the media are totally controlled. The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and such are quite effective. Keeping the public informed through our radio broadcasts is one of the few things that we can do to forestall Soviet adventurism. We should explore the possibility of vastly expanding the reach of our information broadcasts. One way to do this would be through the use of communication satellites. With these, we should attempt to beam radio and television behind the Iron Curtain. There would be a tremendous hue and cry from the dictators if we attempted this, but freedom of speech and the right to transmit ideas are the bedrock of our democratic way of life. This is, indeed, a principle on which we should stand.
To address the issue of deliberate neglect of the Royal Navy by a series of British governments, note that as far back as the late 1960s British political leaders determined that they would forsake any capability of using military force farther away from Britain than land-based air cover would reach. In effect, the quintessential maritime power of modern times adopted a continental ground strategy and cut back its navy to maintain the British Army on the Rhine and its air elements. Britain hoped to ignore its interests and responsibilities in distant lands. Even the lessons of two battles of the Atlantic in World Wars I and II were forgotten, and the country pared its capability for ensuring its use of the seas to negligible proportions. The ability to control the use of the seas, however, is the most important naval capability of any maritime nation like Great Britain.
The British could have won this war with nothing more than superiority in sea control, which they achieved quickly. First, they took control of the seas around the islands by establishing a sea exclusion zone policed by nuclear-powered submarines. That all but stopped the Argentines from resupplying their garrison on the islands by sea. Next, the British formed an air blockade by bombing the Port Stanley airfield and challenging Argentina to use the air space over the islands. At that point, the Argentine force on the Falklands was almost completely cut off from supplies, and the British essentially had won the war.
Unless the Argentines could have broken the air and sea blockade, their garrison on the islands was bound to fold up in time. The British chose not to starve them out. Perhaps this was because of the 1,800 Falkland Island residents who would also have suffered, or perhaps it was because the British did not like the prospect of maintaining a fleet in those distant and inhospitable waters for a considerable period of time (though they have ended up having to do just that). Most likely, they moved on to an invasion because the political pressures at home would not have tolerated a long delay.
It was during the British amphibious landing that the Argentines had their last chance to turn the tide of the war—which lay in wresting back control of the seas from the Royal Navy. Argentina was just not capable of doing this, even though they sank six ships in trying. The outcome of the war on the land was a foregone conclusion once that contest for control of the sea line of supply was over. The British troops could have performed badly and still have won simply because they were assured of a continuing supply of beans, bullets, and fuel and the Argentines on the Falklands were bound to have run out. The British troops, however, performed splendidly, and when they brought the fighting to a quick conclusion, it was clear that the lack of supplies was already taking a serious toll on the Argentine troops. It appeared that the troops folded to the pressures of the blockade more quickly than was anticipated.
This British experience should remind us of how critical sea control is to any maritime power such as Great Britain or the United States. The Falklands experience emphasizes the fact that even today a secondary power may well be able to challenge our use of sea approaches to its shores. In both the Vietnamese and Korean wars, we operated with major ships so close to enemy land that an air attack could have developed before we could start to defend against it. Fortunately, the temptation to those enemies was not great because they lacked sophisticated weapons like the Exocet missile that sank HMS Sheffield. Rather than counting on sea sanctuaries in a future war, we should be ready to assert sea control in areas close to hostile territory, even if we are dealing with smaller military powers like Vietnam or North Korea.
When thinking about the remote, but dangerous, possibility of a prolonged, conventional war with the Soviet Union, we should recognize the fact that we also would be in a position in which our supplies and troops would have to move by sea. In contrast, the Soviets would have internal lines of land communication and a navy that has a worldwide capability to challenge our use of the seas.
Unfortunately, the Navy that we have built since World War II has been designed around the requirement for projecting power ashore by air attacks from aircraft carriers rather than for sea control. Immediately after the war, power projection was an emerging capability. We had a lot of sea control potential left over from the war and no opposition at sea. In the 37 years since, though, we have continued to build the U. S. Navy around larger and larger aircraft carriers whose special capability is sustained bombing of the shore, not defeating the kind of aircraft, submarines, and surface ships that the Soviets have built to challenge our use of the seas.
What can the loss of the Sheffield and the other five ships in the Falklands War tell us about how to meet modern challenges from ships, aircraft, and submarines? Certainly it is not, as some have alleged, that ships are too vulnerable to be useful. Ships are essential to moving commerce in peacetime and military forces and supplies in wartime. Nor should the loss of the Sheffield tell us, as others have alleged, that she would have been quite safe under the protective umbrella of one or two large U. S. aircraft carriers. She might have been safer, perhaps, but not totally safe. The point is that in a war for sea control there are going to be losses. There is a great risk in placing the responsibility for as much of our fleet’s fighting capability in a small number of ships, such as in our 12 large carriers. The British “Achilles’ heel” in the Falklands was not that their carriers were small, but that there were too few. They had only two of them. Had they lost even one, it is quite possible that the Argentines might have taken back control of the seas around the islands. The U. S. Navy has already shrunk to the point where it faces the same danger. Would we risk placing even one or two supercarriers in the Persian Gulf tomorrow if the Iranians began air attacks on the Saudi oil fields, for instance? I personally doubt it.
A sea control navy is one in which value is spread among as many ships as possible. There is clearly a lower limit to how small and inexpensive a ship can be and still be useful, but the idea that only supercarriers can carry the aircraft needed to defend the fleet simply overlooks advances in technology that are already here or upcoming. The idea that only a large carrier can mount enough armor and defensive devices to be able to survive a reasonable number of attacks is reminiscent of our unsuccessful efforts in the 1930s to make our battleships impervious to bombs.
If the sea control capability is of utmost importance to the U. S. Navy, our principal ships should be designed with that in mind. No one can contend that today’s supercarriers were designed for sea control. Rather these ships were designed for power projection and then rationalized that they are suitable for sea control.
Air power is essential to sea control. A sea control navy, however, should be composed of large numbers of small carriers and of large numbers of even smaller ships, each with a few vertical takeoff aircraft and helicopters. This would distribute air power around the fleet and increase the probability that enough would survive to do the job. Thus, only after a maritime power like the United States designs its navy with sea control in mind can it ask what modifications need to be made in order to give that navy enough capability to project power ashore as well.
The answer will be some compromise with the ideal sea control navy. Today, though, that is a theoretical question that need not yet be addressed by the United States. We will have a Navy of a dozen supercarriers designed for projecting power at least through the year 2000, even if we do not build any more. We can, therefore, afford to shift our design objective exclusively to sea control for quite a few years (leaving aside for the moment the need for building more amphibious assault projection forces).
The British squeaked through the Falklands challenge despite the fact that they had neglected their sea control capability by reducing the entire Royal Navy to a shadow of what they needed. The two carriers on which the whole war hinged were both scheduled to leave the navy within a year, for instance. The United States cannot afford to take a chance on squeaking through on its sea control needs because if we go to war again the stakes will likely not be trivial, as they were in the Falklands.
The British were also barely able to keep the minimum flow of supplies going because of a shortage of shipping and a shortage of some materials. The majority of the British ships that carried supplies to the Falklands were hastily requisitioned merchant ships that were diverted from normal trade. The British were well prepared for such use of their merchant marine, and this plan was not an inherently bad solution to their problem. For the United States, though, it would be questionable if we would receive such support. Our merchant marine has never been very responsive. For instance, during our early buildup in Vietnam we had to rush old merchant ships out of mothballs because the shipping operators would not give up their lucrative commercial routes to serve the war effort. Some new and sound plan is needed to cover our military resupply requirements today.
With respect to the shortage of materials, it is surprising that the British had any shortages of supplies for an operation of such low intensity and of limited duration. There are reports, though, that they had to turn to the United States for critical items like air-to-air missiles. Perhaps they did this so as not to deplete their stocks in Europe for NATO. If this was the case, those NATO stocks must be relatively thin—if the limited consumption in the Falklands would draw them down appreciably.
What this tells us is that the United States should look carefully at our reserves for NATO and for other contingencies. When we buy new equipment the military is often sorely tempted to postpone buying the full requirement of spare parts so as to have more money to buy a larger number of tanks, aircraft, and ships. After all, this kind of armament is the more obvious and is used to compare how our forces measure up to forces of other countries. Purchases of ammunition and other consumables are also often postponed in a budget squeeze on the theory that they can be made up more quickly than shortages of aircraft, tanks, and ships. Yet, when the same thing happens year after year, there is no make up. The Falklands should remind us that the best built weapon systems will be useless unless we are willing to support them with adequate supplies of essential consumables.
Finally, one area in which the British had such superiority in the Falklands, to which we must pay attention, is in the training of their personnel. Argentina’s personnel were almost untrained in comparison and it made much of the difference on the field of battle. The Argentine Army and Navy did not plan their battle schemes for this war, and their tactics were terrible. Neither service’s personnel were motivated to perform with valor on the field of battle. The Argentine Air Force made up for the valor, but not for the lack of planning and organization. Argentine military leaders, in short, were lulled into believing that because they had adequate, modern equipment they were a fighting force—when they were not. The British military made mistakes also; however, they had imaginative and daring concepts as to how to go about their tasks and then performed them with great skill. There are several points here of significance to the United States.
►It takes money to conduct all manners of training exercises—ranging from an individual rifleman conducting target practice to a massive joint exercise involving several divisions of troops, several air wings of aircraft, and a fleet of ships. One of the first areas affected in a budget squeeze is the money allotted for training. The political leader does not get much public credit by strengthening our military through better training, because that cannot be seen. However, how effective were Argentina’s multimillion dollar weapon systems when placed in the hands of untrained men?
►The fact that Great Britain is a member of a major alliance (NATO) and Argentina is not a member of any was an important factor affecting relative force readiness. When an alliance conducts multinational exercises, each participant’s capabilities will be quite apparent to the others. This serves as an incentive for each country to train adequately its own forces in preparation for those exercises. Moreover, such exercises provide opportunities to exchange ideas on tactics that help prevent a given nation’s concepts from growing outdated. For the United States, then, we should be even more than willing to fund our share of the numerous training exercises with NATO and our other allies.
None of these lessons of the Falklands is particularly startling. They are all lessons that have been learned over and over again in history and should be better classified as reminders. We continually observe unnecessary misunderstandings between nations; we expect our politicians to place political survival high on their lists of priorities; we can recall two World Wars in which our Navy’s sea control capability was essential to victory; any observer of warfare recognizes that guns without ammunition or tanks without fuel or soldiers without food are of little value; and it should be obvious that the men behind the weapons must match their capabilities. Still, the very obviousness of these lessons, or more properly reminders, tends to make them unobvious and neglected. Both Britain and Argentina neglected them and had a war in which everyone lost.
The Argentines clearly lost. They have postponed, rather than advanced, the time at which they will gain sovereignty over the islands; and they have dealt themselves an economic blow that is already very evident. The British lost because they are now paying a troublesome price of having to maintain a military force on and around the islands for the indefinite future. The Falkland Islanders lost because with a garrison of some 4,000 British soldiers imposed on a population of only 1,800 and with weapons of war all around, their islands will never be the same quiet, pastoral place they once were. And, finally, more than 1,000 men lost everything—their lives—in this unnecessary war.
The key lesson for the United States, then, is to try to avoid the mistakes that carried Britain unwittingly into this unneeded war. That means developing a deeper understanding of what motivates those other nations with whom we must deal on important issues. It means understanding that our military strength as a maritime nation rests on a foundation of being able to use the oceans as we need. Finally, it means according adequate priority to stocking beans, bullets, and spare parts and to training our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. It is easy to suggest that we heed these reminders, but difficult to escape the pressures that have made us neglect them in the past. The tragedy of the Falklands should certainly stimulate us to try harder in the future.