The Third World War: August 1985

by John Hackett

  It was this lack of forces in depth which had led to the stationing of two US brigades in northern Germany — most valuable but still far from sufficient to restore tactical control once the NORTHAG front was pierced. The main significance of this move on the part of the Americans, though its purpose was essentially military, can be seen apolitical rather than tactical. It showed simply that the US did not accept the clear implication of British defence dispositions in Germany: that a failure to hold an invasion on the Demarcation Line must very soon be followed by nuclear action, which could lead to a strategic nuclear exchange; that provision for a land battle in depth was unnecessary. The Americans, in rather pointedly providing two combat brigades for the very purpose of defence in depth, in an area of mainly British responsibility, demonstrated that in a matter directly affecting the security of the United States under threat of strategic nuclear attack, they were not prepared to allow their choice of options to be dictated by British defence policy.

  This did not pass unnoticed in Britain. The suggestion, given a generous airing in the British press, that Britain was continuing to rely on the US to do what Britain should really be doing for itself, was not particularly pleasing to the British public in a time of reviving national confidence. It was to play a small but not unimportant part in securing public approval for the increase in Britain’s contribution to the NATO ground forces, which will now be explored.

  The principal features of the restructuring programme for the British Army carried out under the Defence Review for 1974, to which reference has already been made, were as follows: divisions would be made smaller and one level of command, the brigade, would be eliminated. The span of divisional and unit command would be increased, with the result that there would be fewer HQ and fewer but larger combat units. The fighting capacity of the British Army of the Rhine, it was claimed, would be maintained and in some respects enhanced — though if anyone believed this to begin with no one did for long, not even the politicians who made the claim. Certain specialist functions (such as the flying of army aircraft, the manning of the larger anti-tank missiles and the driving of supply vehicles) would be concentrated in the hands of a single branch of the army.

  For the army as a whole, the aim was said to be to reduce manpower while maintaining combat effectiveness. It was true that the numbers of equipments in service were kept at about the same level, which was dangerously low. What was described as ‘cutting the tail and keeping the teeth’, however, only meant that even in the inadequate numbers to which these equipments had been reduced, there were insufficient men to man, maintain and move them. The real purpose, of course, was economy at almost any price. Within three years of the 1974 Defence Review BAOR was at its lowest level of operational efficiency ever.

  Not everything that was done was wholly bad, however. The regular army logistic reinforcement which the army at home (United Kingdom Land Forces — UKLF) was to provide for BAOR was drastically reduced, but to help fill this gap units of the Territorial and Auxiliary Volunteer Reserve (TAVR) were integrated into newly created regular combat formations. These, though brigades in all but name, could not be called brigades without contravening one of the declared principles of the exercise. They were therefore given the imprecise but otherwise inoffensive title of ‘field forces’ instead. This was at least one step towards a much needed improvement, the better use of reserves.

  The effect of the restructuring plan on NATO reinforcement plans was one of nomenclature and source rather than of numbers. Before it, UKLF had undertaken to despatch to BAOR in support of NATO a total of some 60,000 to 70,000 troops, consisting of complete formations — 3 Division and 16 Parachute Brigade, for example — and a whole series of unit and individual reinforcements of great variety. Sortie were TAVR Signal Groups to activate the NATO and BAOR communications systems; some were so-called Yeomanry Regiments, fully equipped with armoured reconnaissance vehicles, to thicken the covering force troops available to I British Corps; others were units or individuals to strengthen either the structure or total numbers of BAOR formations, regiments, companies and squadrons. Leaving aside those who might be sent to the so-called flanks of NATO (Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, Turkey), the operation was designed to bring BAOR on to a war footing, which involved more than doubling its peacetime establishment. It was essentially a reinforcement which combined regular units, regular reservists and units of the TAVR.

  After the army’s restructuring programme had been completed in 1978, the plans for reinforcement were substantially the same, but it was of course a reinforcement of a BAOR which had itself been restructured. By then I British Corps contained four armoured divisions (which were little more than large brigades) and one light infantry formation, called 5 Field Force. Two other field forces, 6 Field Force from Aldershot and 7 Field Force from Colchester, were part of UKLF reinforcements for BAOR and were themselves composed partly of regular units and partly of TAVR, the latter providing the bulk of the logistic support. Otherwise the reinforcement plan conformed to the previous pattern. As far as equipment was concerned BAOR remained as poorly provided as ever, though some new ATGW were promised soon.

  Public dissatisfaction in Britain with its contribution to NATO, as Soviet military preparations still showed no sign of slowing down while pressure within the Alliance upon its members to do better steadily increased, caused the British government to introduce in 1979 a new Army Reserve Act, whose main purpose was to tap unused sources of trained military manpower. This Act laid down the means by which a liability for annual training and for embodiment in a national emergency would be given to those officers and men leaving the army each year (some 20,000 in number) who had hitherto not had any such liability. There were two main categories: first, those who served on short regular engagements, that is, officers who had completed a three-year Short Service commission and soldiers who had served for three, six or nine years with the colours. The second category (for it was decided to disregard Long Service men who retired at the age of fifty-five) comprised officers who had served on Special Regular commissions of up to sixteen years and soldiers who had completed twenty-two years. Although this second group already had certain reserve liabilities in an emergency, they were not required to do annual refresher training. The new law would therefore enable the government to call on both junior officers and soldiers and also on more senior ones, such as majors and warrant officers. All those in these various groups would for three further years have a training liability for two months’ annual embodiment, including overseas training, and their reserve liability in times of national emergency would continue until their forty-fifth birthday. The necessary safeguards of employment and so on were included in the legislation. Thus some 20,000 officers and men, well trained in existing equipment and techniques, from all corps of the army, became available each year from 1980 onwards.

  Four things would be required to turn this availability of men into a really valuable NATO contribution — weapons to equip them, the structure to absorb them into units and formations, training exercises both at home and in their NATO role, and all the administrative, ammunition and transportation support necessary to make them operationally effective. Extra equipment came to hand in two ways: first, a modification of regular infantry and armoured units reduced them once more from four companies/ squadrons to three, which was all their authorized manpower could properly support anyway; second, re-equipment programmes for regular units on a rather more generous scale made it possible to transfer weapons and vehicles to the newly forming reserve units. These were themselves formed by the expansion of existing TAVR organizations. The Artillery and Engineer Groups were trebled, each regiment forming a group; the dismounted Yeomanry Regiments were remounted on armoured vehicles; the two fully equipped Yeomanry Regiments quadrupled in size, each squadron forming a complete regiment; fifteen more of the TAVR Home Defence battalions were given a NATO role and equipped accordingly. There were similar expansions and re-equipment programmes for signa
l support and logistic units, and all was fitted into the existing organization of UKLF. At the same time, what was known as TAVR II was again, after some years in suspense, brought into being. It was a force resembling a militia, mobile and lightly armed, with an important role on the home front.

  By 1984 the whole position had been transformed: 5 Field Force stationed at Osnabruck had become a division, which, with its TAVR and regular reinforcements, could be made fully up to strength. Both 7 Field Force and 8 Field Force (which was stationed on Salisbury Plain and which had had a home defence role), with their TAVR components, became fully-fledged armoured divisions on the same pattern as those in I British Corps. Their despatch to Europe meant that a second corps would be available to NORTHAG, a corps HQ having been formed at Bulford from resources thrown up by the reduction of HQ UKLF and the former HQ South-West District. In addition to these increases, 6 Field Force became a full light division with a limited regular and TAVR parachute capability, to be employed either on the flanks of NATO or in the Centre.

  The Home Defence units of the TAVR, together with certain regular units formed from the Training Establishments and Base Organization, numbered in all some 30,000. Thus C-in-C UKLF was able to retain a sufficient fighting strength to ensure the security of so-called key points, and have a mobile reserve for emergencies, provided initially by 6 Field Force, and later from mobile columns from the Training Establishment.

  It was planned that from 1985 onwards II British Corps, with its headquarters normally located in Britain and with a wartime location near Rheine on the Dortmund-Ems Canal, would carry out manoeuvres in BAOR once a year. The extra divisions would at last give the Commander of NORTHAG what had been lacking for so long — some degree of depth. He would now have in consequence a better chance of containing an incursion without very early recourse to nuclear weapons.

  During this time of awakening interest in defence, perhaps no question in any Allied country (except possibly the truly critical problem of reserves in the United States, to which we shall return) raised more domestic difficulties than that of the air defence of the United Kingdom. The nakedness of NATO, once the nuclear shield was seen to be so brittle, was nowhere more brutally exposed than in the vulnerability of the British Isles to air attack. The comforting assumption of the short, sharp war conducted in someone else’s country had vanished once it had been realized that in the present condition of NATO a war with the Warsaw Pact was most likely to be short and sharp if it were to end in victory for the other side. To prevent this would need a capacity for sustained intensive conventional operations, and in these the position of the United Kingdom as a rearward base for Europe and a forward base for the United States made heavy air attack inevitable.

  Rueful looks were now cast back at the baleful consequences of the 1957 White Paper, of which one had been the concentration, in the interests of economy and ease of management without operational penalty, of RAF installations in vulnerable patterns offering responsive and rewarding targets to penetrating aircraft. The recovery and rehabilitation of airfields disposed of to the army or to civilian use, the construction of further airfields to relieve dangerous congestion on those used by the USAF (which already in 1977 had more than 200 F-111s in Britain), the hardening of operational control centres and the provision of mobile alternatives were all only parts of a very big construction programme demanding the expenditure of something like £1,000 million in a three-year plan.

  It had soon become apparent that the permanent stationing of further USAF squadrons in the UK, probably on the west coast, would now be unavoidable. This brought at least partly into public view a matter which had long been under confidential discussion: the question of the distribution of responsibilities between British and American air forces in an emergency.

  There had long been little doubt that the USAF would generally play the dominant part in air operations based in the UK. There was equally little doubt that, although the USAF would assume the chief responsibility for the security and air defence of its own installations in the UK and a high degree of responsibility for the defence of the UK base as a whole, the RAF would have to play the chief part in the defence of national territory. It was, indeed, a sign of the reviving national self-respect evident in Britain at the end of the seventies that in the matter of air defence, as well as in other respects, total reliance on the United States was being increasingly replaced by a robust determination in the British people to play a full part in their own defence — and to pay for it.

  A growing public willingness in Britain from the end of the seventies to see a higher proportion of a rising GNP devoted to defence can be said to have been truly indispensable to the survival of the Western Alliance in the years that were to follow. There was a limit to the share of other people’s burdens which would be borne by the United States. There was also no lack of latent-support on the western side of the Atlantic for the dangerous argument that the US should disengage itself from the Alliance.

  At sea, the rundown of the Royal Navy had thrown a heavy additional load on the US Navy in maintaining the flow of fuel, food and raw materials into Western Europe, which would be vital in an emergency. Contraction of the RAF had gravely impaired Britain’s ability to give air support to BAOR ground troops and keep the air forces of the Warsaw Pact off their backs, and above all had removed the capacity to defend the UK base. The reduction of Britain by blockade at sea, the collapse of the Northern Army Group on land, the neutralization by air attack of Allied forward bases in the British Isles — together these would spell ruin for the1 Alliance as a whole. This was in the event only prevented by the reversal of the rundown in Britain’s defences forced by public opinion on politicians from the end of the seventies. It was costly but the money had to be found, if necessary — if, that is, a growing GNP could not cover the increase — at the expense of other programmes. The reconstitution of UK air defences was at least labour-intensive and thus useful in the continuing fight against the obstinately high level of unemployment in Britain.

  Important though the problems of the British contribution to NATO ground forces might be, the situation of the RAF and the needs of air defence could be said to be marginally even more critical. Britain could survive, in some form, if only for a while, the collapse on land of Allied Command Europe. It could probably get along somehow under severe blockade at sea. What it could hardly be expected to survive, given the state of technology today, was devastation from the air. To prevent this, then, was the task of highest priority. It was also the most costly. Because of its impact on so many different aspects of life in Britain, and its widespread requirement for the diversion of effort and resource from other uses, the re-creation of the air defences of Great Britain was also the most difficult part of the defence programme.

  The programme got off to a relatively slow start in the financial year 1979-80 and gathered strength in the following years, as the percentage of the GNP devoted to defence moved upwards from 5 per cent and began to approach — though it never quite reached — the 11 per cent it had touched during the war in Korea at the turn of the fifties. It never, in fact, until the outbreak of war, exceeded 9 per cent, but since this was a percentage of a greatly increased GNP, the rise in expenditure in real terms was very considerable. Vulnerable points, such as main ports, airheads, defence and other key industrial installations and command and control centres, against any or all of which attack by precision-guided weapons could be expected, were furnished with point-defence surface-to-air missile systems supplied by the United States. Airfields were extended and hardened to 2 ATAF standards, like those in Germany, and light and easily concealed operational control centres were established. The lack of ordnance for operations sustained for any more than a very few days — one of the gravest weaknesses in all aspects of Britain’s defences — began to be made good by the reactivation of production lines allowed to lapse, and where this was not possible (as was sadly all too often the case) the setting up, at great expense,
of new ones. The training machine began to be rescued from the poor condition to which successive defence cuts had reduced it and a vigorous recruiting drive opened in the schools and universities. The Auxiliary Air Force was expanded with a non-combat role of weekend instruction, thereby developing a nucleus capable at the appropriate time of taking on a full-time function and releasing flying instructors for combat duties. Even so, with the training time for pilots to front-line standards approaching three years and a grave shortage of instructors it was to be a long haul before the new cockpit seats arriving in the front line would be filled with competent combat pilots. As was also happening for the other two services, legislation was amended to permit the embodiment of volunteer reservists in advance of Royal Proclamation. At the same time provision was made for the utilization of reservist RAF general duties personnel without high specialization but with an invaluable initiation into service under arms. These were absorbed into Home Defence units of the land forces.

  In the matter of equipment, as a top priority, orders for the MRCA (multiple role combat aircraft) — the Tornado — in the air defence variant were increased, but lack of elasticity in the production line compelled the RAF to run on their existing F-4 Phantoms to achieve the 100 per cent increase now sought in air defence aircraft. Radar cover was provided around the west coast, and a tanker force augmented by aircraft from the United States to sustain long-range interception of enemy aircraft operating in the Western Approaches. Real progress, hitherto stalled for lack of funds, was made in exploiting over-the-horizon radar techniques and satellite information; organic aircraft radar was steadily improved and increasingly relied upon; airborne early warning (AEW) became available to the extent that it could be relied upon as a mainstay; and the ambition of the RAF to be largely independent of ground radars by 1990 looked like being realized as much as five years sooner.