The Strategic Defence Review

During the Battle of the Atlantic, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal consistently opposed the transfer of heavy bombers to convoy escort duties, even though without the fuel those convoys carried, his heavy bombers would have been grounded. Following the invasion of Europe Portal no less consistently opposed their diversion from "strategic bombing" to missions in support of Allied land forces.

As John Terraine acidly commented in The Right of the Line, "it is hard to say whether the RAF was irrelevant to the Second World War, or whether the Second World War was irrelevant to the RAF".

Now, once again, we are witnessing the Air Staff doing the only thing they have consistently done well since the RAF came into being, namely defending their budget and establishment by misrepresenting their capability. The RAF has by far the biggest PR department of the three srvices and what it wants above all to prevent is the retention by the Fleet Air Arm, and the acquisition by Army Aviation, of fixed wing aircraft.

The political decision in 1967 to phase out RN fixed wing aircraft carriers was taken on the strict understanding, as given directly by the Air Staff, that "the RAF would be able to provide fixed wing air defence of the fleet throughout the oceans of the world". The Air Staff told Ministers that by using air to air refuelling tankers they could place fighter aircraft over the fleet anywhere within the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This was a knowingly false claim supported by a map of the Indian Ocean in which Australia was displaced 1500 nautical miles to the west of its real position, and by misrepresenting aircraft performance.

Later, the Air Staff vehemently opposed the acquisition of the Invincible Class ‘through-deck cruiser’ and the conversion of the ground attack Harrier into the radar-fitted, all-weather Sea Harrier. Mainly as a result of RAF opposition, only a very limited number of Sea Harrier aircraft were procured. It proved to be the only British military jet aircraft project that was ever delivered on cost and on time, and had the best flight safety record of any jet aircraft in history during its first years of service.

The clearest possible demonstration that the RAF could not defend the fleet at sea came during the Falklands War, when neither RAF fighters nor even the Nimrod antisubmarine aircraft proved capable of flying far enough south of Ascension Island to be of any use. This did not prevent the RAF from achieving the premature withdrawal from service of the Sea Harriers twenty years later by the exercise of the utmost bad faith, thus the following extract from the proceedings of House of Commons Defence Select Committee on Procurement of 8 May 2002.

Mr Howarth: So the truth is we are not going to have an air defence capability, as [Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Equipment Capability) Air Marshal] Sir Jock [Stirrup] accepted last week, and there will be a reduced capability when the Type-45 [destroyer] comes in. Why not keep the Sea Harriers, some of which air frames are relatively new, being only three years old? Why not keep the existing Sea Harrier, even with its reduced capability in hot weather conditions in force in order to provide that defence capability to enable us to mount independent offensive operations?


Lord Bach: Sir Jock was saying last week that the role of the RN carriers is not primarily now to defend the fleet, but it is in line with the expeditionary doctrine that underpins our defence policy, much more about the ability to project power a distance, precisely the point Sir Jock made. The Sea Harrier makes little contribution to this frankly. The [RAF Ground Attack Harrier] GR7 makes a much more substantial one and will make an even greater one when it is upgraded to GR9. Clearly Sea Harrier provided a useful defence against attacking aircraft, but in general terms it offers no protection against sea-skimming missiles launched from ships, from submarines, from land or from aircraft standing off from distance and that is something that those who attack this decision have never tried to answer. The real issue here is that Sea Harrier does not help against sea-skimming missiles from wherever they are launched. Now, that sea-skimming missile is assessed to be the primary threat to maritime assets.

How the Naval Staff let the RAF get away with that is a mystery. The Sea Harrier with the AMRAAM missile was the only British weapon system specifically designed to counter the sea-skimming missile threat at long range, with a kill probability of close to 100%.

Perhaps not such a mystery, though. The elephant in the room is that "strategic" bombing was the main reason the RAF became an independent service, and there has been no reason for it to remain an independent service ever since that function was taken over by the Navy's ballistic missile-launching SSBNs. Yet from that time, the Air Staff have won most of the political arguments. There is more than a suggestion of institutional quid pro quo involved, with the Naval Staff perhaps reluctant to press ahead with developing its own fixed wing capability because it poses an existential threat to the RAF.  

This may lie behind the current controversy over funding for the Trident SSBN - the Air Staff appear to have won another round by successfully proposing that the cost of the politically unpopular programme should be borne entirely by the RN. Under the traditional, but utterly arbitrary division of the defence budget into three more or less equal parts, that would force the RN to choose between its beloved SSBNs and the aircraft carriers. It should not have to make such a choice.

It should be perfectly apparent that Britain cannot afford to have three infighting armed services, and that the simplest solution - and the one that would do most to preserve Britain's essential war-fighting capability - is to restrict the RAF to air defence of the British Isles. Fleet defence and ground warfare support should be done by RN and Army fixed wing aircraft, with a joint air transport command to handle their logistical needs. 

Unfortunately there are very few MPs who know anything at all about defence, and there is nobody in the new administration with the ministerial experience necessary to bang heads together in the Ministry of Defence in order to get the best value for money from a shrinking overall budget.