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A Royal Air Force Tornado GR-1 refuels from a VC-10-K tanker with a Jaguar in the background. Both the Tornado GR-1 squadrons and Jaguar squadrons survived Britain’s latest round of defense cuts, although the number of aircraft in each Tornado squadron has dropped from 15 to 10.
They Made the Cut
Britain’s Defense Cuts: Royal Air Force Hardest Hit
At the end of January, the British government chose its next round of defense cuts. The Royal Navy is to sell off its four new Upholder-class diesel-electric submarines, leaving it with only eight nuclear attack craft and its four strategic submarines. Proceeds of the sale may pay for later construction of a new helicopter carrier. The British deferred an expected choice between repair bases at Rosyth and Devonport, probably mainly for political reasons. Devonport has a modern frigate refit facility, and Rosyth had expected to be the specialist nuclear submarine refit yard. However, Devonport developed a new submarine refit technique that was far less expensive than Rosyth’s. Many in Rosyth believe that the yard will close after a few frigates are refitted there, at excessive cost.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) was much harder hit.
Its air defense force already had lost two squadrons when the F-4 Phantoms were retired without replacement.
Now another will be disbanded, leaving six Tornado F3 squadrons. The government had already canceled plans to upgrade the F3, reportedly on the ground that the current Foxhunter radar was so inherently ineffective that it would need to be fully replaced. It was also widely reported that the Tornado was grossly outperformed by the Phantoms it replaced (it was, after all, designed as a bomber, not a fighter). The British government has already spent large sums on this program. It has not reduced the force of seven Tornado GR-1 bomber squadrons, but two of those squadrons replace two squadrons of recently retired Buccaneers. These aircraft are being upgraded with better navigational equipment, and they will carry the Sea Eagle missiles of the old Buccaneers. The three squadrons of Harrier GR-ls and the two of Jaguars remain. These figures cover deeper cuts. Each Tornado squadron had 15 aircraft (to keep 10 operational), which is now being cut to 10. Harrier squadrons are being cut to 12 aircraft each.
The European Fighter Aircraft (EFA) fighter project is still alive, though its future is not secure. The Germans agreed to remain in the program for the time being but only on condition that unit cost was drastically reduced. Now, however, the German government has decided to make further major budget cuts, eliminating virtually all new equipment. A full defense review is proceeding, without any definite deadline. The German defense minister, Manfred Rune, has already tried to kill his country’s participation in EFA because this single expensive program is crowding out most others. As in the past, the problem is the sheer cost of integrating East Germany, particularly given the sluggishness of the overall German economy.
The British Army took some battering, but it was largely protected on the grounds that it had suffered so badly in earlier rounds, and that Britain must make a significant contribution to the new NATO rapid-reaction force, which a British officer commands. The argument is that the rapid-reaction force helps anchor the United States to Europe. The alternative, to support the Franco-German force now being formed, would help move the United States out of Europe. In a sense the old argument of continental versus maritime strategy for Britain has been turned on its head, with the continentalists arguing that they are the ones keeping the transatlantic connection alive.
All of these choices echo current U.S. defense issues. As in the United States, the survival of particular bases is an intensely political question. Several studies show that, as defense funds shrink, the base structure consumes an increasingly disproportionate share of overall resources. Drastic cuts in that structure probably make far less difference to overall defense capability than the more likely cuts in fighting forces. Yet each base struc-
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ture cut badly damages the surrounding community, and that community’s representatives are often capable of precluding it. For the United States, the key may be to turn over surplus military facilities to other governmental functions, removing them from the defense budget but reducing the impact on local communities. Too, the question may soon be whether to cut the swollen infrastructure or to cut so much of the industrial base that it collapses. Both the industrial base and the bases support localities, so the choice may not be a simple one. In Britain’s case, it is supporting Rosyth because it is in Scotland, a badly depressed section of the United Kingdom, and the British government badly wants to show that it supports the area. Some have suggested that it is significant that the Defence Minister, Malcolm Rifkind, is Scottish.
Britain abandoned the diesel submarines because their primary mission, patrolling the Norwegian Sea, is no longer important. Like the United States, Britain considers power projection extremely important. Nuclear submarines are fast enough to reach distant areas quickly; diesel submarines can get there but more slowly and with far wearier crews.
The choice also had a political dimension. Reportedly, the British submariners sided with the RAF in attacking the project to build a new generation of aircraft carriers in the 1960s. They knew that funds would be limited, and they apparently felt that the British government could not afford both a nuclear attack submarine force and a full-deck carrier force. Britain had just decided to build strategic nuclear submarines. The new carriers were justified largely for their role in supporting troops ashore, including troops in combat in Europe. The RAF feared, then, that it would lose both its strategic rationale (to Polaris) and much or all of its tactical rationale.
The submariners reached the peak of their power in 1981, when the Defence Minister at the time nearly abandoned the small carriers and the frigate force in favor of nuclear submarines and land-based maritime patrol aircraft. Later, it was suggested that the British had not used carriers as effectively as they could have in the Falklands Conflict because the senior officers were submariners who resented the carriers’ existence, and who had opposed the Sea Harrier program.
Now, as in the 1960s, money is tight, partly because a new generation of deterrent submarines is so expensive. Now, too, many within the Royal Navy would like to concentrate on power projection, meaning a new generation of air-defense ships (to replace the existing Type 42 destroyers) and possibly even larger carriers to replace the current small ones. Concentration on big surface ships suggests that the submariners have lost much of their influence. During the run-up to the defense review, it was even reported that the nuclear submarines might be the ones discarded (leaving one ship in the force, for development purposes). The Royal Navy might buy four modified Upholders, incorporating the new fuel-cell technology that Vickers, their builder, is currently advocating. Now it seems unlikely that Vickers will be able to sell any such craft.
The RAF was cut because its role is no longer as clear as it once was. With the Soviet bomber threat virtually nonexistent, the role of even the remaining F3s is hazy. Their limited performance makes it impossible to use them for air superiority in areas such as the Middle East (which is why they saw so little action during the Gulf War)—hence the desperate need for EFA, which the British government probably cannot afford. Reportedly, the British official evaluation of strategic bombing in the Gulf War was that it achieved little compared to its cost. The Tornado is, in effect, a strategic bomber; therefore, its value is questionable. The Tornado made excellent sense when the primary British problem was a Soviet push across the Central Front in Europe; Tornadoes would have struck deep into
Warsaw Pact territory. Now that the Soviet Army has collapsed, that role is almost gone. Deep strikes seem less and less important, even if local governments welcome British aircraft. The rapid-reaction force needs close support. Hence the decision to cut Tornado units more deeply than Harriers and Jaguars, which would be used closer in.
Recent events bring the value of deep-air support into question. For example, much of what is happening in Bosnia is the work of local Serbian militias and even of local free lancers. Serbs and Bosnians are indistinguishable from the air, and they are mixed together so closely that air strikes would almost certainly kill those they were supposed to help. Sufficient numbers of ground troops could probably end the massacres, but all the Western governments shrink from the costs involved.
In World War I, governments learned that ground fighting could be horrendously bloody and yet inconclusive, Postwar advocates of air power argued that airplanes offered a cheaper, cleaner alternative. The triumph in the Gulf seemed finally to prove their point, although now it seems more likely that the ground offensive was decisive (the Coalition, mainly U.S. and British, army fought so well that few realized just how hard it had fought). Many of those advocating action in Bosnia thought that it, too, could be handled cheaply by surgical air strikes. The realization that ground troops would have to carry the burden revived deeply buried memories of World War I.
Cold War Espionage
Recent information suggests just how well Soviet espionage worked during the Cold War. Where the United States often seems to reject anything “not invented here,” the Soviet attitude often seems to have been to prefer what was “invented there,” or at the least to use the West as a research-and-de- velopment resource to make up for some of the rigidity of state planning. In about 1964, for example, the Soviet Navy suddenly became intensely interested in antisubmarine warfare, largely to support the Yankee-class nuclear-powered fleet ballistic missile submarines it was being permitted to build. At that time a new torpedo attack submarine, the Victor, was about to enter construction. It has long been known that sometime around 1964 the Soviets managed to obtain details of the new U.S. SubRoc missile, adopting it as the SS-N-15. It armed the modified Victor II.
What was not known was the extent to which Soviet submarine systems mirrored Western ones subject to Soviet espionage. It now turns out that the sonar associated with SubRoc, BQQ-2, was also compromised, and later modified to Soviet production standards as Barracuda. Like its U.S. counterpart, Barracuda uses a spherical active/passive sonar (active at 3.5 kHz, passive at 0.5-5.0 kHz). Its sphere is somewhat smaller, with about 1,000 elements rather than the 1,245 of the U.S. version. Where the U.S. version includes a conformal passive array (BQR-7) wrapped around the submarine’s bow, the Akula has a smaller cylindrical passive array wrapped directly around the sphere, consisting of 27 staves (20 double, 7 single; BQR- 7 has 52 three-hydrophone elements). Reportedly, the array operates only at 3.5 kHz, perhaps to intercept the pings of U.S. submarines. It is unlikely that Barracuda is a direct copy of BQQ-2, but the inspiration is quite clear—they got it from the U.S. Navy.
Given limits on Soviet/Russian computer technology and production, at least in the 1970s (the Victor III appeared in 1978), it seems more likely that Barracuda parallels the analog BQQ-2 than the later all-digital BQQ-5. Later submarines, however, might well have a fully digital version.