CHAPTER TWELVE
More than two decades had passed since the Healey defence review had appeared to snuff out the prospect of any long-term future for fixed-wing flying from Royal Navy ships at sea. But patiently at first, then surreptitiously and perhaps craftily, and in the end doggedly, determinedly, and maybe luckily, the Navy had kept the art alive. And, in so doing, it had kept open the option for Britain to exercise a level of maritime power and influence that it would otherwise have foregone completely. The question once again, though, was what would the future hold now that all the established defence and security assumptions were apparently being discarded and new ones defined and written?
For Invincible, back in service after her long modernization, life resumed with more NATO exercises and port visits. But, all around, the certainties of the Cold War were vanishing. After the decades of a frozen political landscape in Europe, the events were breathtaking in their speed. With a timescale measured in weeks and months, the edifice of Soviet control in Eastern Europe crumbled. But the effects of all this were far from clear.
It might have seemed like unadulterated good news for the Royal Navy. At last, surely, the tyranny of the Central Front had been broken, and Britain would be free to pursue a maritime strategy again. But the justification for much of the current Fleet, the battle against the Soviet submarines in the eastern Atlantic, was also evaporating. And if, by one bound, the Navy was free from the Central Front, none of the services was free from that unchanging impulse to save money. The political imperative to seek a ‘peace dividend’ was already asserting itself. The cautious would warn of the risks of an unknown future, but public opinion just would not sustain defence spending at existing levels when the rationale for that spending was disintegrating before everyone’s eyes.
In fact, there was a dilemma for the Naval Staff. There would still be much hedge-betting. Were the changes irreversible? Could Russia return to its bad old ways? If so, with forces in Europe at lower levels, would that not increase the significance of potential transatlantic reinforcement by sea should an East-West crisis re-emerge? Or should the Navy start focusing again on wider horizons? In fact, it tried to do both.
There was a new Defence Secretary, Tom King, in office for just a few months before the Wall came down. Affable and confident, but at times also domineering, he was not a deep thinker on defence, but was – from the services’perspective – a bit of a meddler when it came to detail. But to him fell the task of taking the first tentative look at the post-Cold-War world from the Ministry of Defence’s perspective.
Tom King would quickly predict that the chief complaint that critics would make of his ‘Options for Change’review in 1990 would be that he had not cut enough. But the very title of the review underlined the imponderables that existed. Staff in the individual services would complain that the review would be too centralized, that too many options for change would actually not be considered, and that the process would look backwards as much as it looked forward: the template of forces was not changed much, just shrunk.
At the helm of the Navy now was Julian Oswald. He was mild-mannered and thoughtful. He was not really from a naval family, although his father had been a naval officer. Having leapt at the chance to go to Dartmouth as a boy of thirteen to avoid Latin, he would turn out to be one of the most intelligent First Sea Lords of modern times.
As for the idea that the chief complaint against ‘Options for Change’ being that it did not cut enough, Oswald’s view was that it took a large enough bite out of all the services. The results of the review were unveiled at the end of July 1990. The process of German reunification was well under way. But it would not formally take place until October. The Warsaw Pact would not formally dissolve until July 1991, and the Soviet Union itself would not disappear until December of that year. The direction of political travel may have been pretty clear. The full ramifications of it were not.
The cuts clearly fell most heavily on the Army. Its presence in Germany would be cut by half. Likewise, the number of RAF bases in Germany would be reduced from four to two. But the Navy faced some further hefty reductions as well: another cut in destroyer and frigate numbers to ‘around 40’ over the next five years, but more painfully a reduction in submarines, with the SSNs chopped down from sixteen to twelve, and the number of conventionally-powered submarines reduced from ten to four.
But, in Julian Oswald’s eyes, there was at least one glimmer of hope. He had always been a great champion of the Royal Marines. They had overcome countless threats to their survival in the previous twenty years. They had reinvented themselves as elite arctic troops for NATO’s northern flank. And, Paradoxically, they had proved their value and their valour at the other end of the world, in the South Atlantic. But, as the Navy had scrimped and saved through the 1980s, the plans for new amphibious ships from which they could operate were being forever postponed. The ships that they had were wearing out, and with them the Royal Marines’ skills as truly seaborne soldiers.
As long as their main theatre of operations was going to be just a short voyage away across the North Sea, that did not matter so much, perhaps. In the future, it would. The Chief of the Naval Staff already felt that this capability would be a central part of the Navy’s future. His priority was a new helicopter carrier – the Navy’s first-ever custom-built Landing Platform Helicopter (LPH) in the jargon, a successor to the Commando ships that had been rather shabby conversions of old aircraft carriers. The LPH had been talked about for so long, but Sir Julian detected the first signs that it might just be possible to turn it into a reality.
Through all the arguments, the twists and turns, the frustrations of the last generation-and-a-half since the end of the Second World War, naval officers in the Ministry of Defence – whenever they had the chance – had always pounded away at the message that governments had to ‘expect the unexpected’. And, of course, the Navy’s reasoning was that, for that imprecise but apparently inevitable contingency, the inherent flexibility of maritime power would always find some sort of utility. And barely had the ink dried on ‘Options for Change’, than the unexpected happened, just as it had done with the Falklands.
After all the anguish of the withdrawal from East of Suez, and especially from the Gulf, it seemed that the Navy had hardly left for any time at all. In September 1980, the brutal new leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, decided to capitalize on the upheavals in Iran following the Islamic revolution there, and provoked a war with his neighbour. Far from Iraq achieving the rapid humiliation of Iran that Saddam Hussein intended, there would be eight terrible years of human wave offensives and chemical attacks, and hundred of thousands of casualties.
Within weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, the Royal Navy had established what would become known as the Armilla Patrol, to keep a watch on threats to shipping in the strategic Gulf waterway. The patrol, too, would endure. The attacks on shipping presented the greatest risk that the fighting would spill over. But the steadily mounting international naval presence, the growing Western efforts to protect the vital oil shipments, and especially some one-sided skirmishes between the Americans and the Iranians, would ultimately be important factors in persuading Tehran to accept a ceasefire in 1988. The Royal Navy may have been only a small player compared to the Americans, but it was there for the long haul. And those years in the 1980s, patrolling in the gruelling, shimmering heat of those strategic waterways, provided another example of the endurance and impact of maritime power over the long run.
At that time, for the West, Saddam Hussein had been the lesser of two evils, and a bulwark against the spread of Islamic revolution. But, when the Kuwaitis showed what seemed to Baghdad to be insufficient gratitude for Iraq’s war efforts, and asked for the return of the money that they had loaned it, the Iraqi leader was not amused. On 2 August 1990, exactly a week after Tom King had announced the results of his defence review to the House of Commons, elite Republican Guard units of the Iraqi army swept into Kuwait, setting in train a looming international confrontation with Saddam Hussein.
The other accident of timing, unfortunately for Saddam Hussein, was that Margaret Thatcher was in the United States when the invasion happened, and was famously on hand to stiffen the resolve of the US President, George H W Bush. Less than four months later, she would be gone, ousted by her own party after eleven years in office. But still, over succeeding weeks and months, an international coalition was formed first to deter further Iraqi advances into Saudi Arabia, and then to reverse the occupation of Kuwait – as Operation Desert Shield transformed into Operation Desert Storm. Britain would be a major player in that coalition, and would ultimately commit 45, 000 personnel to the enterprise.
The naval contribution would be a sizeable one. But, unlike in the Falklands, the Royal Navy’s role would not grab the headlines. It kept an eye on the long sea routes that were crucial to the massive international war machine that was built up in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. But a threat to them never materialized. And everyone’s attention was quickly grabbed by the blitz of the air war, the grainy fascination of gun-camera videos, and the bravura of the man running it all, US Army General ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf.
The US Navy would be at the leading edge of the fight, with its six full-size strike carriers and volleys of cruise missiles. The Royal Navy had to be content with a supporting role, and the important but unglamorous mission of mine clearance. One of its destroyers, HMS Gloucester, did score a notable first, shooting down an anti-ship missile aimed at an American battleship. Missile-armed Royal Navy Lynx helicopters also caused havoc among the few Iraqi vessels that ventured out. The big frustration for the Navy was a battle fought mainly along the corridors in Whitehall.
HMS Ark Royal had departed from Portsmouth in the middle of October, and got as far as Gibraltar. While she was there, a change of command took place. Captain John Brigstocke, on his promotion to rear admiral, was replaced by Neil Rankin, who had been the first Wings on Invincible ten years previously.
It was a case of many happy returns for Rankin in a number of ways. The old Ark Royal had been his first carrier at the outset of his career as a naval aviator. Now, as he surveyed his new command, he could see the strides that had been made in the practice of operating the Invincibles since his time at the dawn of their era. He particularly noted the better Ski-jump ramp, the better accommodation, and more space. It was not quite night and day, he thought, but it was pretty close.
But he and the rest of the ship’s company would be confronted with mixed signals on whether and where Ark Royal would be deployed in this gathering Gulf storm. Finally, early in the New Year, as the drumbeat towards actual conflict got louder, she sailed for the eastern Mediterranean. Admiral Brigstocke returned as the flag officer in charge, and was eager to get in on the action. Captain Rankin, too, expected that Ark Royal would sail on through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and into the Gulf.
There was a very good case for having Ark Royal, with all her command capabilities, in the Gulf. But there was also a suspicion that the Navy just wanted to get more in on the act. Tom King was not having it. The episode would in turn leave a bad taste in the Navy’s mouth, and a feeling that it was deliberately being kept as much on the sidelines as possible.
Ark Royal did find a role, but on the periphery of the action. She took over the command and control of the coalition naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean, providing protection for the clutch of US warships that were launching cruise missiles into Iraq from there, as well as maintaining surveillance over what were still seen as rather vulnerable supply lines. In this way, Ark Royal released another American carrier to head through into the Red Sea. It was still intensive, demanding work. She remained at a high state of readiness, and flew many air defence missions with her squadron of Sea Harriers. But Rankin and his crew still wanted to get closer to the action, and he was disappointed when they could not.
The decisiveness of Operation Desert Storm, and the fact that such a huge international coalition had been assembled under the umbrella of a UN mandate, led to enthusiastic talk of a ‘new world order’. Such notions would prove to be short-lived; the international stage soon began to resemble a new world of disorder, with nobody really willing to take the lead in sorting things out. An early US stab at humanitarian intervention in Somalia would quickly run into the debacle of ‘Black Hawk Down’ and an ignominious withdrawal.
There were the beginnings of the tortuous Balkans tragedy, and the first stirrings of a popular sense that ‘something must be done’. But, at this stage, the British government, like others, was recoiling from any temptation to get involved, let alone to embrace a broad new policy of interventionism. It was an unsteady policy platform for the services as they tried to contemplate the future.
The Gulf War certainly had not deflected the government from its pursuit of the peace dividend. There was a dawning realization in the services that they would have to set out a positive new case for themselves. The Army’s incentive was that it knew unequivocally that its previous raison d’etre was ending. But a residual commitment lingered in Europe, and it would be partially sustained as a Balkans commitment did begin to emerge – at least some of its garrisons in Germany would be turned into ‘reaction forces’. The RAF could bathe in its Desert Storm exploits, which had given new force to the arguments that air power was now truly a war-winning tool.
The Navy might have been in danger of complacently believing that now, surely, its time had come again, and politicians would come to realize the true value of a flexible and mobile maritime capability in an uncertain world, that the time of maritime forces had finally returned. Some on the Naval Staff, though, felt that was not enough.
Meanwhile, HMS Invincible was heading east. One thing that the Navy was clearly determined to do was to demonstrate once again the extent of its reach, and if possible to drive home the message that it had a modern relevance and was not just another voyage down memory lane. In May 1992, the ship sailed away from the grey, squally conditions of home waters at the head of a six-ship task force bound for a six-and-a-half-month deployment to the Far East.
At the heart of this expedition, dubbed Orient 92, were two very different men, but each in their own way dedicated to what they felt the Navy now stood for. In charge was John Brigstocke, who had now put the frustration of Operation Desert Storm behind him. An able commander, he was intelligent but intense, ambitious and an eloquent advocate of the Navy’s modern raison d’etre. This deployment, he clearly believed, had nothing to do with the colonial past, and everything to do with being ready to deal with modern-day concerns like threats to oil supplies and support for allies.
Invincible’s commanding officer, now Captain Fabian Malbon, was quiet and laid-back. He was a man with the traditional enthusiasms of a naval officer – a deep attachment, of course, to his family, but also to the Navy, the sea, and a thirty-three-foot sailing cruiser. And his casual style seemed like a breath of fresh air to those who served with him.
This deployment would also present a very modern challenge for him as a commanding officer. It would certainly be a powerful confirmation for him of how the Navy had changed since he had joined it twenty-seven years previously.
The Navy, like the other services, was finding it increasingly difficult to recruit enough of the right sort of men to crew its ships. So, after much anguished debate, reluctance, and soul-searching on the Naval Staff, and some prodding from ministers, the Navy took the momentous decision to accept women at sea. So Fabian Malbon was the first captain of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier, or indeed of any British capital ship, to embark on a long deployment like this with a mixed crew aboard. Invincible, as well as having to squeeze many more crew members aboard than originally planned, now had to cater for the fact that among them were 80 women sailors as well.
There would be grumbling and discontent and not a few discipline problems as the Navy came to terms with the change. It added another dimension to the task facing every commanding officer at sea. It would change the character of life at sea, and the atmosphere aboard the Navy’s ships. But this was a transformation that the Navy simply had to make if it was to continue to be effective in the modern age.
Another man with a particular challenge on this deployment was Captain John Lippiett, the commanding officer of HMS Norfolk. He had taken over from the ship’s first commanding officer, Jonathon Band. She was the newest operational frigate in the Navy, and the first of the Type 23 Duke class. Her design had emerged after the arguments of the late 1970s and early 1980s on the right size and shape of the Navy’s future warship, and the trade-off between quality and quantity. Her presence on this deployment also represented yet another paradox in the modern story of the Royal Navy.
For much of the time when it was trying to adapt to the role of an ASW fleet focused on NATO, the Navy had to rely on ships that were a hangover from its colonial policeman days. The Type 23s, on the other hand, had been designed more than any other previous class of escort for the very specific Cold War task of modern anti-submarine war against the Soviet Navy in the northeast Atlantic, and as a vehicle for using a towed-array sonar. But they were just starting to arrive on the scene when that requirement itself disappeared beneath the waves. At least, thanks to the lessons of the Falklands, the Type 23s were much more like general-purpose frigates than they would otherwise have been.
Now it would be the job of Captain Lippiett and his crew to see how HMS Norfolk and her sisters would be able to perform on the broad oceans, on the kind of long deployment far from home for which they were not really designed but which could turn out to be one of the Navy’s main priorities once again. The fact that the ship’s company itself was far smaller than those in previous generations of frigates was part of the challenge.
Thanks to the efforts of John Lippiett and his crew on Orient 92, the Navy would convince itself that these Cold War warriors were perfectly suitable for the age-old tasks of traditional cruisers and frigates as well. The Navy would build sixteen of them altogether, the last not entering service until more than ten years after the Berlin Wall had come down. They would become the backbone of the Fleet, and perform sterling service in many ways. But some shook their heads, and thought that – yet again – the Naval Staff clung on to a design in hand when it should have started to think about constructing something simpler, more cost-effective, and more appropriate to the changed world scene.
As the ships, officers, and crews of Orient 92 made their meandering way out to the Far East and back, the news headlines were of continuing tensions with Iraq and growing worries about events in the Balkans. For Admiral Brigstocke and his staff, there was the nagging question of whether the task group might be called on to deal with a real contingency.
Neither of these crises actually boiled over while the ships remained on their deployment. But the public pressure to take a hand in the Balkans was growing. The United States was not ready to get involved on the ground. However, as the stories of violence and atrocities continued to emerge, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of a UN protection force (UNPROFOR), first to Croatia and, as concerns grew over the situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, to Sarajevo airport and then to protect humanitarian aid convoys.
The British government despatched troops to join UNPROFOR in October 1992. But it also wanted further back-up for the force, without adding to the number of troops on the ground. So, early in 1993, the decision was taken to deploy a naval task group to the Adriatic centred on an aircraft carrier. Invincible’s sister ship, Ark Royal, was the first of the carriers to deploy, under the command of Captain Jeremy Blackham. As the Balkans agony continued, the next few years would see all three of the carriers carry out this Adriatic deployment, and it would evolve significantly over time.
Jeremy Blackham received his instructions on 8 January 1993. He was to proceed to the Adriatic with a small task force and be ready for action by 26 January, to support the British UN troops and, if the situation on the ground really turned sour, to assist in pulling them out.
After some hurried preParations, Ark Royal set sail from Portsmouth on 14 January. Blackham would have with him in the Adriatic a small force including a destroyer, a frigate, and three Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) support ships. Crucially, one of those was the 28, 000-ton RFA Argus, a helicopter training ship, which would serve as a sort of troop carrier, with a detachment of light artillery weapons, some 400 troops, and a host of associated support vehicles, ready to be landed if the need arose.
For Ark Royal herself, it was hardly business as usual either. Aboard were eight Sea Harriers and three Sea King AEW helicopters. But in place of her normal anti-submarine squadron was a force of eight Sea King troop-carrying helicopters. Half-a-dozen ASW machines were scattered among the RFAs in the force, just in case. This would be another step in the evolution of these ships which had started their lives as cruisers, and along a path which might, just might, take the Royal Navy full-circle in its relationship with the aircraft carrier.
Some sceptics wondered why a carrier was needed when there were NATO air bases so close in Italy. But a carrier and its task force were that much more flexible, and available, closer to hand and able to react more quickly if things turned nasty on the ground. To Blackham, what he and his flotilla of ships were embarking on was a classic ‘poise’ operation, which had been an enduring strength of naval forces down the ages. Unlike the costly, politically sensitive, potentially provocative, and diplomatically fraught option of despatching even more ground troops, guns, and land-based air power, the Navy could stand ready, for as long as it took, as a visible statement of serious intent, but without raising the level of risk or the political stakes unnecessarily.
Using the Navy in this way left more options open for longer. In Blackham’s view, this was a task that was both ancient and modern, and would become the most likely form of naval operation again in the future. Unfortunately for the crews concerned, and perhaps not least for the pilots of the Sea Harriers, ‘poise’ translated into another age-old naval tradition, familiar to the crews of the storm-tossed sailing ships that had kept Britain safe from Napoleonic invasion. It was that of mounting frustration and even boredom when nothing in the way of significant action materialized.
The Navy was also now in something of a Catch-22 situation. Ark Royal’s commanding officer saw this dash to the Adriatic as demonstrating once again the flexibility inherent in a ship like his, large enough to take on a whole group of aircraft to perform a variety of possible missions. But there was a very real snag. The Navy had already squeezed much more out of the Invincibles than some in the Naval Staff had probably ever expected. They were showing what valuable political and diplomatic tools they could be. But, if the situation required serious amounts of firepower, they were still just too small. The Invincibles offered a window onto what might be possible again. But the Navy, with these ships, would largely be consigned to the sidelines or a supporting role when really major air power was required.
Back in Whitehall, Julian Oswald retired as First Sea Lord in March. But he had a couple of parting shots before he left. He paid his last call on the Defence Secretary, now Malcolm Rifkind. The minister asked the admiral if he had a parting thought. ‘Yes,’said Sir Julian, in his reflective way. ‘If I were to leave you with one idea, it would be the need to go ahead and order the LPH. ’1
For Julian Oswald, that one move would be a critical step towards fashioning a fleet for the future, creating a centrepiece for the return to a genuinely effective amphibious capability for the unstable world ahead. The LPH – the new helicopter and Commando carrier – would fill a gap that had existed for about twenty years. The plans had faltered. Shipyards had been asked to bid to build such a ship, but the project had lapsed. However, within months of Sir Julian Oswald’s departure, Malcolm Rifkind would indeed agree to order the ship, which would be HMS Ocean. The contract was placed a couple of months after Julian Oswald departed, and she would finally enter in September 1998.
The Navy had cut many corners to try to get her. Her price tag was just 150 million pounds, not much more than the cost of a frigate at the time for a vessel that weighed in at over 20, 000 tons.
Just a few weeks before he stepped down, at a lecture in Cambridge, the First Sea Lord had taken as a theme the deterrent value of naval forces, in a conventional rather than a nuclear sense. In a world in which the threat of an East-West nuclear confrontation had receded, but the dangers of limited crises looked to be on the rise, it seemed like fertile ground on which the Navy could plant a post-Cold-War case. It would become an emerging theme, although not without resistance from elsewhere within the Ministry of Defence, where the concept of conventional deterrence was seen as potentially complicating and undercutting the case for retaining the ultimate deterrent, Polaris, and its successor, Trident.
Conventional deterrence was taken one step further when ministers began to contemplate openly the concept of coercion – the limited application of force to have a specific effect, for instance to make a potential troublemaker think twice. The idea would become associated with the Navy’s bid to buy a limited number of Tomahawk cruise missiles for some of its SSNs, that would for the first time give the submarines the kind of potential that had been envisaged for them for thirty years.
There may have been an ingrained cultural hostility in the Navy to setting down a doctrine. But everyone else was doing it. The political thrust, in the wake of the Gulf War experience, emphasized the joint approach between the services. The Navy needed to join in, or risked being left out.
Still, naval thinking remained cautious. Jock Slater, now the C-in-C Fleet, established his credentials early on as an advocate of ‘jointness’: ‘I am in absolutely no doubt that joint operations will be the cornerstone of any future conflict. ’2 But he, like others, was still hedging his bets, defending the size and shape of the existing fleet on the grounds that there were new threats at sea, from the proliferation of conventionally-powered submarines and sea skimming missiles.
There was continued emphasis on the balanced fleet, and the enduring attributes of naval forces – of flexibility and mobility – even as the types of missions envisaged began to change, to include counter-terrorism and disaster relief, peacekeeping, and all the way up to hostilities, possibly involving a ‘national task force’. 3
Late in 1993, a key document entitled ‘UK Maritime Power – A Change in Emphasis’, heralded the main shift in thinking from a preoccupation with sea control towards amphibious operations and the support of land forces, with a focus on that area of water between the shore and the deep sea that has become known as the littoral. It might have made some Nelsonian navalists wince. But, at about this time, the US Navy and Marine Corps were also producing their ‘From The Sea’doctrine of force projection. One thing Royal Navy thinking was already highlighting was that, in this new uncertain age, maintaining close transatlantic ties would become increasingly difficult, and Britain’s naval forces could play a key role in achieving that.
The Navy also did not flinch from trotting out its old axiom ‘expect the unexpected’. It did shy way from the term ‘gunboat diplomacy’, for obvious reasons. Others did not, and asserted that its value was as sure as ever when a time of trouble and of frequent and fractious disputes seemed so obviously ahead.
The impetus continued with the production of a broad doctrine paper, BR 1806, in 1995, 4 on the way to the more focused thinking on the maritime contribution to joint operations, which really enshrined power projection as the Navy’s primary role after providing the strategic deterrent. Those at the top of the Navy would make no apology for accepting that its central conventional task would be in support of events and operations ashore. The Navy should certainly press to play a prominent part, but should not claim for itself more than was reasonable. Apart from anything else, there were limits to what it could offer with the hardware it currently had, not least its compromised carriers and the lack still of a dedicated helicopter carrier for the Royal Marines. But there were certainly some of the old school who would feel that the Navy was selling itself short, just at the moment when it should be pressing its case hardest.
At the beginning of August 1993, Invincible took over from Ark Royal for her first stint on the Adriatic patrol. Very soon, Captain Fabian Malbon found himself entertaining some unusual guests. The two international mediators on the Balkans, the former Navy Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord Owen, and the Norwegian former Defence and Foreign Minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg, convened peace talks. Invincible, cruising offshore, was the chosen venue.
It was a memorable moment for Owen as he flew aboard by helicopter. This was the ship whose design and justification had taken up so much of his time and effort when he had been at the Ministry of Defence over two decades before.
The parties huddled for eight hours of talks in Invincible’s wardroom. A tentative agreement would emerge that would be known as ‘the Invincible package’. But it would founder, and the fighting went on.
Invincible handed back responsibility for the Adriatic mission to Ark Royal early in the New Year. As the violence on the ground worsened, the United Nations, now joined by NATO, was being driven gradually to ratchet up the pressure. The British carrier presence was now only a small cog in a large NATO machine enforcing a no-fly zone and supporting UN peacekeepers. But, as the tensions mounted, one of Ark Royal’s Sea Harriers was shot down as the pilot tried to protect UN troops near the town of Goradze. He ejected and was recovered safely.
In April 1995, Captain Ian Forbes took command of Invincible just before her third appearance on the Adriatic mission. It had become a repetitive and unrelenting task, cruising up and down the ‘launch line’, flying daily air patrols. The ship had the new version of the Sea Harrier, now called the FA. 2. But events in Bosnia were coming to a head. The Bosnian Serbs had overrun the UN ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica in July, and were threatening others. This led NATO to threaten a campaign of air strikes, Operation Deliberate Force, against Bosnian Serb targets. The actual trigger, though, at the end of August, was a devastating mortar attack on a market in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, that killed over forty and injured scores more.
Operation Deliberate Force would be the first sustained military action in NATO’s history. It would be a big test for Invincible, and there would be much riding on how she performed. But her eight Sea Harriers were fighters, they were not really bombers. They could deliver laser-guided bombs, and Forbes made sure that they had practised hard, but there were limits to their capabilities. Because of those limits, the aircraft could not be allocated the most precise targets that NATO had identified.
Invincible had withdrawn from the Adriatic to undertake a port visit and some rest and recreation in Palma, Mallorca, when the crisis suddenly escalated. Forbes himself was on the golf course when the call came to return to duty. Invincible sailed within hours. The speed of her departure meant that she would leave some 200 of her crew behind. But Forbes had taken precautions, and made sure that he had the key personnel for air operations with him. Then it was a 25-knot dash to be on station at the appointed moment. She was, and would launch her first mission of four Sea Harriers to strike their allotted target, a warehouse on the outskirts of Sarajevo.
Operation Deliberate Force would last three weeks. Invincible’s operational tempo would settle at two missions a day, of four aircraft each. That was hard work. There were constant reminders that she had not really been designed as a strike carrier. Struggling to get enough bombs from the magazines to the aircraft, and arming them, was a significant challenge all by itself.
And Invincible’s contribution was hardly decisive in the context of the whole campaign. NATO had some 270 aircraft of various types at its disposal, which flew 3, 500 missions in all. The Adriatic itself was crowded. As well as Invincible, there were two American carriers and a French one. And the RAF could also point out that twelve of its Harriers were happily flying from an air base in Italy. Operation Deliberate Force was hardly a cast-iron case for the carrier.
Of course, it had always been the Navy’s contention that friendly host nations would not always be available: that had been the situation in the Falklands, and it would be again, as the world became even more unpredictable, and the number of potential friendly footholds got smaller and smaller. The Navy view was that, even in the unpromising Adriatic, right under NATO’s nose, the carriers had demonstrated their added flexibility, often sailing out of bad weather to keep flying while aircraft ashore remained grounded.
Ian Forbes knew that Invincible’s contribution, counted in sorties and bombs, had not been huge. Some of her limitations had been exposed again. But, after a very long gap, what she had done in those three weeks had surely given renewed credibility and concrete expression to the idea of a Royal Navy carrier in a strike role, projecting power ashore. The question was whether there was enough force in the argument to sustain it for long enough and powerfully enough to turn what was latent and limited in the Invincibles into something on a different scale that could make a much bigger military difference.
Another step on that road took place the following summer. As an experiment, Invincible took aboard a detachment of RAF Harrier GR. 7s. This was the real bombing version of the aircraft, with more range, payload, and accuracy. It may have been an uneasy first encounter. There had been plenty of RAF pilots who had flown with the Royal Navy over the years. But the cultural divide between the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF had been so wide for so long, the suspicions so deep, and the practices of flying from ships and from the land so different in so many ways. But perhaps the climate was different now.
And elsewhere, in quiet offices in the Ministry of Defence, people were beginning, tentatively, to consider a more distant horizon. Invincible was already approaching the half-way point in her planned operational life. It was looking as if she would retire in about 2010. In the Navy, they were daring to think about what might come next.
Initially, the ambition seemed to be to produce an almost direct replacement for Invincible and her sisters. The strategic backdrop in the early 1990s remained unclear. The notion still had not taken hold that the Navy’s main business in the future would be projecting power ashore, rather than preparing for a full-blown war at sea.
The ship designers started looking at a range of options, and produced some twenty to thirty possible designs, with numbers of aircraft ranging from ten to fifty. The Navy also considered the possibility of keeping the Invincibles going, by stretching them to fit in more aircraft. The ships would be cut in two, and a new section inserted, to carry more planes, ammunition, and other equipment. But the idea looked doubtful and the number of aircraft would hardly increase at all because the new generation of planes would be bigger. Many of the Invincibles’ old handicaps would remain. The ships would also get heavier, expanding to about 24, 000 tons, but slower.
It looked risky. The state and design of the ships’ hulls might make the task a lot more difficult than it at first appeared. And the Navy always seemed to have unhappy experiences every time it tried to carry out a major modernization of its ships. The memories went back to HMS Victorious in the 1950s, and the mid-life frigate refits in the 1970s that got the Navy into so much trouble when it came to the Nott review.
It was the Adriatic mission that started to shift the focus. Anti-submarine warfare and air defence became less of a priority, a strike capability more so. The trials with RAF Harriers took on a growing significance. The Navy experimented to see just how many Harriers it could squeeze on to Invincible and her sisters. Two dozen was the record, but that created terrible traffic jams on the flight deck, and was not really operationally viable.
There were studies which looked into converting merchant ships. The thought was that they could at least provide a relatively cheap stop-gap which might last for ten years or so. But, given its past habits, the Navy probably did not ever have much enthusiasm for this proposal, which seemed to be dismissed very quickly. The conversions were considered either too slow or could carry too few aircraft.
But there was plenty of thinking and work going on. That was just as well, because the political landscape was about to shift dramatically.