World Naval Developments

Carrier-based Aircraft Range Counts

The Royal Navy will get 68 FRS.2 versions of its Sea Harrier short takeoff-vertical landing (STOVL) carrier-based fighter, including both new airframes and rebuilt FRS.ls. These numbers suggest four 17-airplane carrier air wings (three active and one training-reserve, the latter to be activated in wartime). Presumably the training air wing could fly from HMS Ocean, the new helicopter carrier, under some circumstances.

The numbers also suggest a radical reversal of traditional British naval concerns. When the three light carriers were completed, they were expected to accommodate only five Sea Harriers. The augmented strike wings sent to the Falklands doubled that number, but the carriers also had to accommodate numerous Sea King ASW helicopters with dipping sonars. Both sides of the combination proved essential: the Sea Harriers shot down most Argentine aircraft killed, but the Sea Kings saved HMS Hermes when an Argentine submarine fired at her from outside her ring of surface escorts.

It is unlikely that any British carrier will embark 17 Sea Harriers; that number clearly includes airframes to make up operational losses and to allow for aircraft withdrawn for rework. The balance of the carrier air wing, however, is clearly shifting drastically in favor of strike-air defense airplanes. One reason is that the newer frigates can accommodate EH-101 Merlin helicopters that are larger and more capable than the Sea Kings normally embarked on the carriers.

Another reason is the perception that British battle groups deploying abroad face a much reduced submarine threat. It also is quite possible that the British plan to rely more on their nuclear-powered submarines in direct support of their carriers. Like their U.S. counterparts, these same submarines are likely to carry Tomahawk land-attack missiles, and using Tomahawks against air-defense centers should help facilitate raids by fixed- wing attackers bearing heavier loads.

The shift in favor of fixed-wing aircraft mirrors a shift in British naval priorities. The three small carriers were originally built largely to provide antisubmarine warfare cover for the NATO Strike Force Atlantic, formed mainly of U.S. large-deck carriers, although they did have a secondary role supporting British and Dutch Marines in Norway—possibly using nuclear bombs. Now the British government is concerned primarily with power projection, e.g., peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia.

In this scenario, air-to-air and air-to-surface combat over land seem most important. The British claim that the FRS.2 has the most advanced combat system in Europe. In theory, its AIM-120 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles should make up any lack of aircraft performance—though skeptics may observe that the missiles’ effective performance often will be limited by identification-friend-or-foe considerations.

The carriers remain without their own long-range, airborne- early-warning aircraft and still depend on radar-equipped Sea King helicopters. This problem is unlikely to be resolved and there are other problems. During the Falklands Conflict, an Argentine submariner very nearly caught HMS Hermes because she was confined to a very limited sea area to the east of the islands. The limitation was operational, not political, and was

set by the short operating radius of her Sea Harriers.

In theory, a modem aircraft carrier should never feel at risk from diesel-electric submarines, simply because they should never be able to get into a firing position against a ship so much faster than they. Anything that restricts an aircraft carrier’s operating area—or any foolishness that makes her movements predictable— plays into the submariner’s hands. The British may yet come to regret having cut their carrier-based ASW helicopter force.

They may not be alone. An F/A-18 does outrange a Sea Harrier, but the U.S. Navy may yet wish for much more range—not to fly deep inland against some Third World enemy, but to allow the carriers to operate far offshore, where they can maneuver freely and unpredictably. These points become more important as a new generation of high-frequency surface-wave coastal radars (currently offered by Marconi in Great Britain and also by a Russian company) promise continuous surface coverage of ship-size targets out to 200-250 nautical miles offshore. Since the air activity above a carrier is probably very easily identified, one might suspect that effective location range is even greater. Ideally, then, air strikes should be mounted from even farther offshore. The radars are not yet in service, but they are certainly coming. That Russia shares the technology means that its diffusion cannot reliably be controlled.

U.S. Navy Wants Long-Endurance UAV

General Atomics will demonstrate ten unmanned aerial vehicles called Predators—scaled-up versions of the GNAT-750 design (above), which has an endurance of 40 hours. The demonstrators must carry 450 pounds at 25,000 feet.

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The F/A-18E/F decision is sometimes defended on the ground that very deep strikes are unlikely to be essential in future; surely Tomahawks can substitute. If this choice limits carriers to dangerous waters off shores defended by modem diesel-electric submarines, however, it may turn out to have been singularly ill-advised.

Mexico’s Instability May Affect U.S. Military

The news has brought another example of partial deja vu in Mexico. Early in January a group calling itself the Zapatista Liberation Front revolted in the poor southern state of Chiapas. The Mexican Army seems to have restored order, but the strength of the rebellion shows in the government’s apparent need to negotiate with the rebels.

The Zapatistas claim to be speaking for the poor of Mexico; they demand social change. The government refuses to negotiate on that basis, although it is apparently willing to make concessions. The new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was the nominal cause of the revolt: Mexican farmers apparently fear that cheaper American farm products will drive them from the market. Surely that is ironic: American trade unionists opposed NAFTA on the ground that cheap Mexican manufactured products would kill their jobs.

The problem goes much deeper. Chiapas is not only poor; it is overwhelmingly Indian, in a country where Indians feel discriminated against by those of Spanish descent. This divide goes all the way back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519, and to a greater or lesser extent it applies throughout Latin America. The Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru is a prominent example.

Deja vu may apply to the great Mexican Revolution begun in 1910, in some ways the precursor of the other great peasant rebellion of this century, the Chinese Revolution. Clearly Mexico has changed enormously since the revolution ended in 1920. The war began in 1910 in a country with considerable U.S. investments, a relatively small and apparently corrupt ruling class, and enormous numbers of unhappy peasants. The great cry for social justice led to the founding of a victorious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which then pursued generally left- wing policies. It befriended the new Soviet Union and for many years after 1959 was Cuba’s window on the Western world.

For some time now the Mexican government has followed more conservative policies closer to those espoused by the U.S. government. It has been unable to abandon altogether, however, the rhetoric of its past. Many Mexicans still believe that the United States is the root cause of their troubles; the saying “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” still resonates. U.S. opponents of NAFTA certainly described appalling conditions in U.S.-owned manufacturing plants near the border.

The situation is complicated by the ruling party’s apparent refusal to allow its opponents free rein. Opposition parties are not directly suppressed, but there is a widespread belief that recent national elections were rigged to prevent the opposition from coming to power. Opponents charge that the PRI's ideology has now been reduced to providing patronage for itself. The management of the oil boom is taken as a case in point. Given these circumstances, plus a very high birth rate and often nonexistent infrastructure, many in the United States have feared a Mexican explosion for years. The rising in Chiapas may be its beginning, or it may be the lifting of a valuable safety valve. No one can know for some time.

If the explosion—or something like it—is at hand, it will have enormous consequences for the United States. First, the job-seekers currently rushing across the southern border will probably be joined by a flood of refugees. The Zapatistas have promised to carry their fight to the more prosperous north (they set bombs off in Mexico City). If, as they seem to suggest, the United States is the problem, then the string of manufacturing plants along the border will probably be attacked.

Second, Mexico is a major oil producer and a serious revolution might well interrupt or at least seriously reduce produc

tion for years. That might raise the price of oil worldwide; it would certainly make other oil-producing regions more important, and it might intensify interest in undersea oil in places like the Spratlys in the South China Sea and the Falklands.

During the various Middle East crises, many Americans suggested publicly that instead of defending the Persian Gulf, we would do better to concentrate on the vast source of oil closer to home, in Mexico and under the Gulf of Mexico. The usual response was that world oil is bought on a single market, so the loss of any one very productive region affects its overall price in a way that can ultimately devastate our own economy. Severe instability in Mexico suggests a very different response: with virtually no exceptions, no place outside the United States is so secure that we can take its resources for granted.

Third, revolution often spills across the border. Some may remember 1916, when the U.S. Army chased Pancho Villa around northern Mexico after he crossed the border into Arizona. If indeed the U.S. border is relatively easy to cross illegally right now (for job-seekers), then it may follow that at some point Mexican guerrillas may see the United States as a valuable haven. What happens as the Mexican Army pursues them? To what extent will they want to provoke incidents to preclude us from supporting the Mexican government?

The uprising shows that it is virtually impossible to catalog the forces of instability in the world. The Zapatistas are neither Cuban-inspired Marxist thugs nor are they Moslem fundamentalists. If they enjoyed any foreign support, their base was across the southern Mexican border in Guatemala, hardly a center of world revolution. The villains were two: the uneven pace of economic development, which left the southerners behind in the general Mexican scramble for modernization; and an essentially one-party system rather typical of the Third World.

The latter tends to anger a newly prosperous middle class which expects more power of its government; it leads to disaffection in Mexico (which makes a small rising more threatening) and has caused upheavals in places like Thailand and South Korea. In the latter cases, middle-class anger particularly puzzles a government that feels it has been largely responsible for the prosperity of the middle class itself.

For U.S. citizens fearful of NAFTA and other free-trade treaties, Mexico suggests that low wages are not always the main consideration. If the country explodes, all those factories, which cost a great deal to set up, will be shut down and many may be destroyed. A really poor country is not inherently stable, and its work force may not really be suitable for modern industry. It is not clear how many Western industrial managers understand this issue.

For all of us, the best solution to the Mexican problem is not to isolate it but to make it prosperous enough to be fully stable. That would, incidentally, raise local wages to the point where few jobs were being exported—and where few Mexicans would be all that desperate to emigrate north illegally, to jobs worse than the ones at home. Many Americans may feel that stabilizing the situation to the south is well worth some immediate pain on our part (and, in any case, most of the jobs that can be exported already have been).

How many readers will recall the U.S. occupation of Veracruz in 1914, or President Wilson’s determination to force a president on revolutionary Mexico, whether wanted or not? Wilson’s goal of a stable and prosperous Mexico was laudable but nothing happy came of his methods—and some of the longterm effects still haunt us.

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Parenthetically, Wilson the idealist was the godfather of the Yugoslav civil war: he was the champion of national determination, i.e., of the state based on ethnic identity (except for minority populations that were suppressed). We are far enough away to imagine that Yugoslavia will not affect us. Will we be caught in a Mexican imbroglio?

Proceedings / April 1994