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Myth and Reality in Great Britain
British Defence Minister Malcolm Rifkind in mid-November announced that the Royal Navy’s new Trident submarines would not deploy with their designed complement of warheads but would be limited to an average of 96 per boat. Total fire- ✓ power will be about the same as on the Polaris submarines they replace. He thus countered charges that Britain was not following the lead of the United States and Russia in reducing nuclear arsenals. Polaris missiles carried two or three warheads; Trident missiles, which replace Polaris on a one-for-one basis, . can carry ten or more.
Great Britain also canceled plans to develop a new nuclear stand-off missile for the Royal Air Force. As existing WE 177 free-fall weapons are retired, the RAF’s tactical nuclear role will devolve upon the Royal Navy’s Trident missiles. Trident’s great range—particularly when equipped with only a single warhead—makes it possible for a submarine in waters near Britain to attack targets as far away as the Middle East.
The total British nuclear arsenal will change very little.
Britain was thought to have about 150 WE 177s, a num- ! Ber comparable to the maximum number of warheads a Trident submarine could cany—although the Trident’s fire power would be greater.
B can be argued, moreover, that no potential target other than Russia can deploy seri- 1 °us antimissile defenses, whereas many can buy mis- siles entirely capable of neutralizing a Tornado strike.
The end of the RAF’s nu- ! clear role coincides with enor- mous pressure for a new defense review, i.e., for deeper cu's in the British defense kudget. In the recent past,
British governments have tried to spread the pain evenly, foregoing the savings that might be achieved by eliminating any particular defense capability. Now that
RAF policy has been to maintain sufficient infrastructure for massive wartime growth—“shadow” air bases, for example, in case the active ones are put out of action. This made sense during World War II, although during the Cold War there must have been some question as to how much of the RAF would survive nuclear strikes on its air bases.
Critics have now noticed that the RAF requires far more overhead per airplane than, say, the Israelis, and costs far more to maintain than the Royal Navy, even though some think it contributes far less to post-Cold War British defense.
The RAF’s future has become clouded.
The new Defence White Paper holds that the chief
Barak Intercepts Missile
A vertically launched Barak defensive missile successfully intercepted an incoming Gabriel antiship missile Fired from another Israeli ship during acceptance testing last October. Israel’s new Sa’ar V missile corvettes will carry Baraks.
j^e Cold War is over, however, just such cuts are contemplated. n mid-November the British press was filled with articles °n the possibility of major savings at the cost of the RAF— and possibly the army.
roceedings / January 1994
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roles of the RAF and the Royal Navy are to support army units projecting British power abroad. In government eyes, power projection includes a major contribution to the new NATO rapid-reaction corps, which contribution justifies British command. Unfortunately, like many ground- based organizations, the corps cannot move anywhere very rapidly. Studies of its possible deployment to Bosnia were uniformly depressing.
The British contribution to the corps is the remnant of the Cold War British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). Its continued existence justifies major expenditures—e.g., on a new generation of heavy tanks— and also justifies the continued survival of RAF deep-strike aircraft, since the corps would deploy into areas with the sort of infrastructure that could also support the ground-based aircraft. Such infrastructure, however, is generally available only when local powers welcome
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intervention, which was the case in the Gulf War. It is possible that the British Government feels that the future of intervention will follow the Gulf model. It must be increasingly obvious, however, that many Third World countries have built up local ground forces on such a scale that no affordable British contribution is likely to be decisive. In that case the British may find the special contribution which their sea power makes is more valuable on every level.
Even then, some considerable army force will be needed, but its sea transportation will become crucial. Support of the type envisaged by the White Paper will continue to be essential, but it will generally have to come from the sea.
This logic may well fail to prevail. In peacetime, defense policy is often industrial policy; in this case, British Aerospace depends heavily on government commitment to a new aircraft— the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA). Its recent attempt to gain money from Taiwan to save a faltering short-haul airliner program (the BAE 146) has apparently failed. The EFA, on the other hand, has the special advantage of being a multinational European program at a time when the British government is intent on showing its loyalty to the “European Idea.” For a time it appeared that the German government might withdraw support for the EFA, but that has not happened. In Britain, the RAF calls EFA the centerpiece of its strategy—though clearly that is an industrial strategy, not a military one. The aircraft is a highly maneuverable interceptor, essentially a Spitfire, rather than the sort of close-support bomber implicit in the White Paper.
It will of course be argued that a dog-fighter is exactly the right platform for modern power-projection in the form of enforcing no-fly zones in places like Bosnia and Iraq. Skeptics might ask whether such zones have any significance beyond favorable publicity. Neither in Bosnia nor in Iraq have no-fly zones precluded continued atrocities. In Iraq the RAF was present to photograph the results of the Iraqi Army’s assault on Shiites in southern Iraq, but its presence did not sufficiently embarrass Saddam Hussein to cause him to stop.
In Bosnia, it appears that a regenerated Bosnian army may be slowing down or stopping assaults by Serbs or Croats; the foreign air presence has been essentially irrelevant. Maybe the air-power theories that engendered the RAF (and other independent air forces) in the first place are finally being called into question.
Shore-based Combat Information Centers in the Narrow Seas
The U.S. Navy’s new emphasis on littoral warfare makes the details of foreign coastal systems more important to us. It is particularly difficult to obtain information on the computerized centers, if any, which coordinate antiship weapons with sensors. Yet for many years it has been obvious that the ideal coast defense requires what amounts to a shore version of a ship’s combat direction system, to keep track of coastal traffic and to detect and track potential targets. Sweden, for example, uses a much-enlarged variant of the 9LV shipboard system, and Germany has a maritime headquarters at Murwik, which uses Link 11 to communicate with deployed fast attack craft and other warships.
To what extent Third World countries have adopted such technology is unknown. On board ships, computer handling of combat data is necessary to avoid confusion and saturation. Presumably, a shorebased defense system lacking such coordination would be relatively easy to counter. Unable to transmit a tactical picture directly to a deployed vessel, it might well be thrown off by the vessel’s navigational errors.
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Also, because a good command system ties together the proc ucts of a wide variety of surveillance systems, it may be di! ficult for our own fleet to recognize the buildup to an attack It is one thing to detect the characteristic radiation of the Russ ian Plank Shave radar associated with a land-based SSN-2I battery (SS-C-3 system); it is quite another to associate a star dard surface-search coastal radar with the command center feeds, and which in turn may call down missile fire. The ne: ted system also is difficult to counter, since it may easily over come the jamming of any single sensor.
Until very recently, it seemed that the West had a virtu; monopoly on computer combat direction systems, and thus th; potentially hostile Third World states were unlikely to posset them. In this regard, the Russians still have not displayed the: naval command systems at any of the international arms fair they have attended. But a feature of the ex-East German mis sile boat Hiddensee suggests that coastal computer system may be quite common. The missile control panel abaft th‘ bridge has a “data link” setting, through which the boat can f controlled and her missiles fired. Unlike a Western link, this one is not intended to provide the boat’s commander wit) tactical information; instead, like several other Russian link it permits the higher level of command to control ships directly through their own computer command systems. As the We'! Germans found, without some kind of tactical data system, >' is very easy for boats to attack their sister warships in a cot>' fused tactical situation. The missiles fire well beyond the boat * horizon, so no on board identification-friend-or-foe system W® suffice.
The East German boat was an export version of the Sovk Tarantul, not the Russian version armed with much more po" erful SS-N-22 missiles. It seems likely that the link was a statf dard feature, indeed that the boats were exported together will a shore station. If that is the case, Tarantul buyers generally enjoy the services of rather sophisticated command system* That may also apply to export versions of the larger Nanuchk class. Readers of this column will be aware of the architec ture of the command systems on board larger Russian warship* [see “Below Decks on Russian Warships,” Proceedings, Sef tember 1993, pages 104-106]; the Tarantul on-board systetf would seem to exemplify low-level recipients of digits' instructions.
Examples of Third World systems have surfaced recently The ASEAN group (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philip- j pines, Singapore, and Thailand) has invested in such a system, built by Ferranti using the company’s F2420 computer. Fe(X ranti, which was recently absorbed by GEC-Marconi, was re- sponsible for many British naval command systems, most m- cently computer-assisted command system (CACS) in som{ j Type 22 frigates, and the action data automation weapon sy5- tem (ADAWS) upgrade. The ASEAN system is probably a vet' sion of a Ferranti shipboard system, possibly CACS or an up- graded version of the earlier computer-assisted actio11 ] information system.
Local centers receive data from sources such as maritin1* patrol aircraft, shore radars, and observers. They apparent!) control fast attack craft through the Ferranti-supplied Link 1' an export version of the old Dutch-British NATO Link 1®’ Link Y can transmit a tactical picture, but at present it cann0' transmit orders or give notice of weapons use. Signaal is cut- rently developing an improved Mk 2 version that provides the5* extra functions, currently available only in NATO Link 1 !•
The ASEAN system was probably justified by the shee[ weight of maritime traffic passing through the waters of the5* maritime countries. All of them are interested in protectitk: merchant ships from local pirates, for starters; the system shou*J also provide a very considerable measure of improvement||! coast defense. It may well have been marketed elsewhere.