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.
A bid for a 100 per cent increase in maritime patrol aircraft was agreed, but it was already too late to save the jigs for Nimrod production, and the American Lockheed Orion had to be purchased instead. Finally, proposals to station further USAF air defence forces in the UK, both to afford further security in the Western Approaches and to strengthen UK air defence as a whole, proposals which had only received lukewarm support in Britain in the early seventies and had encountered stiff resistance in Congress, were now, as it became evident that Britain was at last beginning to do something for herself, looked on with favour.
On the side of offensive air operations, it was not quite so easy to secure funds for expansion. An increase in front-line strength of 30 per cent was eventually negotiated, to be taken in a combination of Tornados, Jaguars and Harriers, with an option on the F-16 and F-4 Phantom if Jaguar and Harrier production should prove — as turned out to be the case — to have been run down too far to meet the requirement. A long and keenly debated decision as important as any in the development of air power was taken to bring the cruise missile into service with the RAF in its air-launched version. This, in its high-explosive mode, was seen as a quantum jump in the capability for counter-attacking enemy air bases and attenuating the weight of effort which might be mounted from them against the British Isles. This was a complex and expensive programme which had to follow in the wake of the American re-equipment with these weapons, and it was not expected to be available to the RAF until the middle, possibly late, 1980s.
APPENDIX 2: Gorshkov and the Rise of Soviet Sea Power
‘The flag of the Soviet Union flies over the oceans of the world,’ observed Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov in 1974. ‘Sooner or later the United States will have to understand that it no longer has mastery of the seas.’ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, even after Admiral Gorshkov’s retirement from active service, successive Politburos had accepted his well and persistently argued thesis that world peace, that is to say the triumph of Marxism-Leninism throughout the world, must be, and could only be, based upon mastery of the seas.
To gain this it would be necessary to allocate an exceptionally high proportion of Soviet resources of men and material to naval and maritime purposes, and to apply these scientifically. The classical sea power doctrine of Mahan had to be reinterpreted in the light of Marxist-Leninist theory and the socio-political and technical conditions prevailing in the last quarter of the twentieth century. These included the continuing credibility, and therefore necessity, of the submarine-launched strategic nuclear missile system, with matching general-purpose naval and air forces in support, and to counter, as far as possible, the opposing submarine strategic systems. Necessary, also, was the evolution from Mahan’s theory of general command of the sea of a doctrine of local and temporary command appropriate to the support of ‘state interests’. Additional general-purpose naval and air forces would be needed, in consequence, for use in situations involving a limited number of participants, in a limited area, using limited means to realize limited ends.
This line of reasoning was not only persuasive in itself, and accorded almost universal agreement by the naval hierarchies of the non-Soviet world. It also seemed to be fulfilling, when put into effect, the promise of its progenitor. The activities of the new Red Navy began to hit the headlines just after the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War in 1967, when Soviet naval forces entered Port Said and Alexandria ‘ready to co-operate’ with the Egyptians to repel any aggression.