James Burnell-Nugent had arrived in Spain’s ancient port city of Barcelona. A larger-than-life character, confident, some would say overly-so, he fitted in to the mould of those more flamboyant naval officers of the past, brimming with self-belief. A Cambridge graduate, he had spent much of his early career in submarines. But now he was here in Barcelona at the beginning of December 1997 to take over command of one of the Navy’s big ships, Invincible. It was a confused and confusing time. Tensions were simmering in the Gulf after Saddam Hussein had forced the UN weapons inspectors in his country to leave. The ship, at the time under the command of Captain Roy Clare, had just made a headlong dash across the Atlantic from Barbados at nearly 30 knots, with the prospect of sailing on eastwards. But the politicians seemed to be uncertain what to do next.
Burnell-Nugent himself had not been sure for a while whether he would be taking charge of the helicopter carrier Ocean or Invincible. He had never set foot on an Invincible-class carrier before. But it was, for him as much as for anyone, a dream command. It was not just the size, but also what he felt a carrier represented as a political and diplomatic tool. And his time in command was to demonstrate that amply.
The Gulf crisis was ebbing and flowing. It looked as if Invincible would probably just sail home after all, or maybe linger for a while in Gibraltar. So the new commanding officer had clothes for only a few days away – and a gentle passage back to Portsmouth so that he could get a feel for his new charge. He was optimistic that there might be a stopover in Gibraltar, and if so there might be an invitation to dine with the Governor. So the only item of social attire that he had with him was a dinner jacket. As it turned out, he would not need it. Within a couple of days of departing from Barcelona, he had to break the news to the ship’s company that Invincible would be staying in the Mediterranean and would not be home for Christmas.
The ship would spend another month sailing up and down the Mediterranean before finally heading on through the Suez Canal and into the Gulf. What then followed was a classic piece of gunboat diplomacy – even if the Navy may have been reluctant to acknowledge it as such.
Invincible had made her first foray into the Gulf just over a year earlier, in November 1996, with Roy Clare in charge. He had taken the ship over from Ian Forbes, while she was at Izmir in Turkey. The two men knew each other well. As always, there was much build-up and PreParation to a change of command. But, when it happens, it is always swift. Forbes and Clare had dinner the night before. On the day of the handover, the actual business was completed in fifteen minutes.
The ship knew that she was heading for the Gulf. As such, she would be the first British aircraft carrier to enter the waterway for over thirty-five years. The last time that had happened was in the summer of 1961, when HMS Victorious had dashed to the Gulf as part of the British force rushed in to protect the then newly-sovereign state of Kuwait from a threatening Iraq. Victorious was relieved by HMS Centaur. On that occasion, deterrence and gunboat diplomacy had seemed to work.
There was no specific crisis on this occasion, just the background war of nerves between Saddam Hussein and the West that had gone on since 1991, over UN inspections and the hunt for suspected weapons of mass destruction. There had been flare-ups along the way in the previous few years. There might be another. Invincible’s mission was to assert Britain’s naval presence in the region at what remained an uneasy time, and to gain new experience of operating a carrier in the waterway, which might be of value in the future. It was.
Clare himself was an unusual mixture. He believed in working a ship to its limits; he had felt the Navy had been caught off-guard in its training by the Falklands. He did not believed in enforcing rules inflexibly. But he would let a ship’s company know what was expected of it, and deal firmly with those who let him down. When he joined Invincible, he knew that she was worked-up and efficient, but also that she had been working hard. So, one of the first things he did, as the ship sailed in the heat and humidity of the Red Sea en route to the Gulf, when there could be no flying operations anyway, was to hold a flight deck barbeque, to get to know the crew.
Clare knew the Gulf well. He had served in the region at almost every stage of his naval career, not bad for an officer who had made his way in the Navy precisely at the time when Britain had supposedly relinquished its East of Suez interest. So he knew the tensions and potential pitfalls of the area. There was the edgy transit through the narrow Straits of Hormuz, under close Iranian surveillance. There was a visit to the Saudi port of Jubail, the first ever by a British carrier, and not an easy run ashore for the crew. The ship also deliberately sailed right up to the north of the Gulf, and anchored off Kuwait City.
And so it was, a year later, that Invincible found herself hurrying back in the direction of the Gulf. The ship was visiting Florida, and much of the crew was on leave, when Roy Clare received the order to sail. Once again, there was all the excitement of a rushed departure, and the added difficulty of recalling the crew when the instruction from London had been to keep things low-key. Invincible would sail with about a hundred members of her crew missing.
Some had an early opportunity to catch up. The politicians changed their minds again. The urgency reduced, Invincible diverted to Barbados. But then the plan changed again. That was how Invincible found herself dashing across the Atlantic in five days, encountering heavy weather on the way, and sometimes surfing down the huge waves as the ship rolled and plunged her way across the ocean.
Ian Forbes, meanwhile, had been ordered to rejoin his old ship urgently to take overall control as the flag officer. After he had handed over command to Roy Clare, he had served for nine months as the military adviser to the UN High Representative for Bosnia, Carl Bildt. Now he was back as the admiral in charge of the UK Task Group. He had already paid one return visit to Invincible while she was in the United States. This visit would be different.
In the headlong rush, Forbes managed to get aboard Invincible’s sister ship, Illustrious, by helicopter in thick fog off the Cornish coast. The two ships would rendezvous off Gibraltar to transfer stores and the admiral. While all this had been going on, permission had been given to embark nine RAF Harrier GR. 7s aboard Invincible to provide the bombing effort to support US forces in the Gulf should it come to that. In a massive effort, the aircraft, the support crews, and supplies all came aboard off Gibraltar.
The urgent task now was to mould the ship and the extra aircraft together into an effective force as a quickly as possible. Both immediately embarked on intensive flying training, day and night. And then, suddenly, in the middle of the night, disaster struck. The emergency klaxons aboard Invincible sounded. An RAF Harrier had ditched in the pitch darkness.
The pilot was safe. But the hearts of both Clare and Forbes sank. For Clare, it was the second aircraft that the ship had lost while he was in charge. He would get a reputation, he thought. For Ian Forbes, it was the sinking feeling that so much of what the Navy was pinning its hopes on for the future was represented in what Invincible was doing now – the response to a crisis, the coming together of the Royal Navy and the RAF to project power and influence, the whole development of a new generation of carriers. Was the concept to fail before it had even been properly tested?
In fact, it was an isolated incident. The ship and the squadrons would quickly get over it. And they would soon be on their way to the Gulf. But not Roy Clare. His time in command was up. There had been some thought that perhaps it would be better to keep the experienced commanding officer, rather than have a changeover now. But it was still unclear how this particular crisis would unfold, and how long it would last. So James Burnell-Nugent took up the reins.
The orders were still confused. First, it looked as if the crisis would blow over. The ship would return to Portsmouth. Then came the instruction to remain in the Mediterranean. That lasted over Christmas. Then, on 16 January, the order was sent to deploy, to conduct air operations over Iraq.
Invincible was joining a force that would ultimately include three US aircraft carriers. So, again, the British contribution to this particular example of coercion looked tiny in comparison. But she was packed with over twenty aircraft, with a squadron each of Royal Navy Sea Harrier FA. 2 fighters and RAF Harrier GR. 7 bombers, plus Sea King AEW and ASW helicopters. Invincible’s complement of aircraft was, in a relatively small way, now echoing the air groups of the old strike carriers of over a generation before.
There were some new aspects to the exercise of maritime leverage, and presenting a high profile to send a message. Invincible also took aboard a BBC news crew, including the veteran correspondent Kate Adie, to broadcast the first live television news reports from a carrier while under way. Invincible, because of her name, and because of the Falklands, attracted headlines anyway as the crisis developed. And that was useful.
Invincible arrived in the Gulf. Her aircraft would join ‘packages’ of thirty planes and more in missions over Iraq, as the military pressure mounted, and the threat of real confrontation loomed. Talk of war, of a campaign of air strikes, grew louder.
In the end, the negotiating efforts of the new UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, defused the crisis temporarily. Invincible handed over to HMS Illustrious and sailed quietly away. But the part played by the very public build-up of naval and other forces in the Gulf was widely acknowledged, including by the UN’s top diplomat himself. Kofi Annan may have been playing a deft bit of politics there, knowing that the US and British governments needed some crumbs of consolation for the fact that he had somewhat hijacked their own diplomacy.
But two key elements in this drama were that Invincible had played a very high-profile part in the first major international crisis for the new British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and she had done so just at the moment when decisions were being made back in Whitehall on whether the Royal Navy could look forward to a new generation of aircraft carriers. Invincible was helping to secure her own legacy.
Britain, in May 1997, had experienced a political sea change. After eighteen years of Conservative government, the Labour Party had swept into office. Tony Blair, who had never previously served in any government, was untried and unknown on the international stage. The imprint that he would leave on the country’s foreign, defence, and security policy could hardly have been anticipated at the time.
The new government came in to office with a manifesto pledge to carry out a major review of defence policy. And this was at a time when key decisions were beckoning on the need for new carriers. In fact, this avowedly ‘new’ Labour administration, or at least its prime minister, appeared determined to depart from the party’s most divisive policies of the past, and would set the foreign policy conditions and the political atmosphere more favourably for the Navy’s carrier case than at any time in nearly four decades.
Tony Blair would emerge as a conviction politician on international affairs. He would become identified with a creed of liberal interventionism. In part his developing views may have been a reaction to what many had seen as costly hesitations and indecision in the Balkans for most of the 1990s. He would talk of ‘the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community’. The existence of states like Britain may no longer be under threat, but now ‘our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish … In the end, values and interests merge. ’1
Whatever the Prime Minister’s motivation, this philosophy would provide the platform for an expeditionary defence policy. It would offer a modern, forward-looking policy agenda around which the Navy could lay its own plans and proposals, instead of having to rely on arguments that appeared to rely as much on the past as the future. At least at this early stage, Tony Blair certainly did the Navy a great favour in the international stance that he adopted. And, for a young prime minister, finding his way in the world and believing strongly that Britain had a significant and active role to play, the appeal of the carrier and the broader maritime case must have seemed strong in return.
It would not remain that way, of course. And to the sceptics, there was little new in this. It was, to the sternest critics, merely the latest incarnation of the prolonged and ultimately debilitating self-deception from which British governments had been suffering since at least 1945.
The government confirmed in The Queen’s Speech on 14 May 1997 that it would carry out a Strategic Defence Review (SDR). It was launched two weeks later by the new Defence Secretary, George Robertson.
The man to lead the Navy’s case at this time was Jock Slater. He had been in office as First Sea Lord since 1995. He was a seasoned Whitehall warrior. Since his time as HMS Illustrious’ first commanding officer, as well as being the C-in-C Fleet, he had been Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Policy and Nuclear) and Vice Chief of the Defence Staff. He was intelligent, sharp, determined, highly articulate and charismatic, and a very capable pair of hands at the head of the Navy at a crucial time. He was a determined and persuasive advocate. However, the path that he would pursue to try to secure what he believed to be the central elements of the Navy’s future would provoke unease among the more traditionalist parts of the naval establishment.
Jock Slater was from a medical rather than a naval family. His father and grandfather had both been eminent neurologists. But there was that illustrious naval relation, his great-uncle, ‘Uncle Ned’as he was known in the family. At the time of VE Day, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, First Sea Lord at the time, and a fiery character, had created quite an impression on the seven-year-old Jock when he had taken him in his very big and smart official car with his leading seaman chauffeur to see the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle.
Cunningham was an inspirational figure anyway, one of the country’s great war-time commanders, who had wrested control of the Mediterranean from the Italian Navy with some daring actions, like that at Taranto, launched from the then HMS Illustrious, the forerunner of the ship that Jock Slater would later command.
Still, it was perhaps the biggest crisis in the Slater household in the post-war years when Jock decided that he wanted to pursue a naval rather than medical career. ‘He’ll end up as a golf club secretary by the time he’s forty,’ his father despairingly predicted. Jock Slater joined the Navy in September 1956 just a few weeks after the Suez Crisis had erupted with Egypt’s nationalization of the Canal. Unfortunately for him, his father did not live to see him rise to the highest naval office once held by Uncle Ned.
He might have gone further still. In the dying days of the Conservative government, he was the favourite to become the next Chief of the Defence Staff. He had a strong track record in promoting the joint approach in defence. As the Vice Chief, he had been instrumental in setting up the Permanent Joint Headquarters to run future operations.
But some were not convinced. And there did seem to be a tension in Admiral Slater. When he reverted to the ‘dark blue’ of the Navy as First Sea Lord, he doggedly pressed the case to keep all three Invincible-class carriers in operation, and to push for new big amphibious ships. It harmed his cause. So too did the fact that, at the highest level, the Army was lobbying heavily behind the scenes for its man to take the job. Unfortunately for Slater, he too was a particularly able and effective operator, General Sir Charles Guthrie.
Inevitably, the Navy felt aggrieved when Guthrie got the job. But some pointed out that it then left Admiral Slater in a strong position to promote the Navy’s cause without reservation.
Jock Slater and the other chiefs of staff knew that the review was coming. It had, after all, been in the Labour Party’s election manifesto. And, in his first encounter with George Robertson, he was very open in saying that he was going to spend a large part of the time from now arguing the case for new aircraft carriers.
The Navy’s thinking now was to press for two much larger ships to replace the three Invincibles. Admiral Slater was uneasy about arguing a case for just two ships, but he knew that money would be limited, and the key was for the new generation of ships to be able to deliver a much bigger military punch than the Invincibles.
Officially, the programme was dubbed CVF by now, for Future Carrier. The First Sea Lord and the Defence Secretary would quickly come to refer to the two new ships, jokingly, as HMSs Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, after the Prime Minister and his powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The question of the carriers would become the single biggest issue in the SDR. In fact, it had been looming for some time now. And, of course, it came with a huge amount of historical and political baggage.
It is also the case that there is just something about aircraft carriers that excites controversy. There is the cost of course. But they also make such a statement about a country and its aspirations in the defence field. With their great flat expanses of flight deck, the bigger ones at least are akin to floating islands;‘four-and-a-half acres of mobile real estate’as the Americans are wont to say of theirs, and very visible launching pads for a nation’s firepower that can be stationed off another country’s coast.
And, as instruments of war or even just of international leverage, aircraft carriers have become so closely associated with one nation, a superpower, the United States. Somehow, that fact would lend weight to the doubts of some about what Britain was doing even thinking of reviving such a capability. And the ships that were being proposed were certainly going to be a big leap back up in capability.
One thing that the Naval Staff had done early on was to commission a study of all the old papers from the CVA-01 debate, to try to learn the lessons from them. A difference between then and now was the strength of the Navy team this time. Slater had, as his first Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff, Jeremy Blackham. He would be succeeded by Jonathon Band. Between them, a key decision was taken that the Navy would have to enlist the RAF’s support for the new ships. As Blackham put it, these had to be presented as ‘the RAF’s carriers’, runways at sea that could take RAF aircraft. Jonathon Band became part of a small team, which was known as ‘the quad’, of two senior officers each from the Navy and the RAF, to thrash out a united approach to the problems that they faced.
The problem that the Navy faced was that, in the view of officers like Admiral Band, it had become too small to continue to run a seindentte fixed-wing air force supporting its Sea Harriers. Both of the services would also face a challenge supporting a new generation of aircraft. Between them, the four officers agreed to create a joint Harrier force, which would be a link to a new joint aircraft that could operate from a new generation of aircraft carriers. They also agreed that both land-based and maritime air power would underpin the emerging expeditionary strategy.
Clearly, Admiral Slater felt that the agreement was vital. He was uneasy that there was hostility to the carrier case among the top civil servants in the Ministry of Defence, and that the arguments of the Navy were not being properly communicated to the Defence Secretary. He told George Robertson so.
That was also the catalyst for a document produced in January 1998 that enshrined the agreement between the Royal Navy and the RAF, and was signed by Admiral Slater and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns. The admiral would call it ‘the historic paper’, and it was meant to leave no room for argument.
As Jonathon Band put it, the two services would be trying to ‘disprove history’. Of course, it had been tried before: the Navy gambit at the beginning of the 1960s of portraying its carriers as ‘national assets’;and the proposed joint aircraft, the still-born P. 1154. There were howls of protest from former Fleet Air Arm officers, and talk of ‘a dirty deal’ and ‘a pact with the devil’. The First Sea Lord’s response to the accusation that he had got into bed with the RAF and that nothing good would come of it, was simple: ‘the RAF has got into bed with me’.
The other great argument was the price that the Navy would pay for the carriers in terms of destroyers, frigates, and submarines. And, again, the First Sea Lord was anxious that the civil servants had been working away behind the Navy’s back.
The Navy’s shrinking escort force had dwindled further. The figure of ‘around forty’ escorts at the time of ‘Options for Change’ was whittled down to thirty-five in another round of savings in 1994, which also saw the Navy lose its last four conventionally-powered submarines. Suddenly, Admiral Slater was presented with a proposal to cut the escort number to twenty-nine, for which he believed there was no rationale. He was very uncomfortable.
At the end of a long discussion with the Defence Secretary and his full team, George Robertson looked at the First Sea Lord and said, ‘I’m going to give you three more’.
‘You mean thirty-eight?’ the admiral asked.
‘No, I mean thirty-two,’ replied Robertson.
‘But that’s three less,’ retorted the First Sea Lord. ‘Twenty-nine was never my figure. ’2
But thirty-two it would be.
The losses for the Navy from the SDR would include three destroyers and frigates, two SSNs over time, and a clutch of smaller vessels. But Jock Slater felt that those were a price worth paying to get the carriers into the programme, preserve the new amphibious ships that he had previously fought for, and protect the overall nuclear programme. Another coup for the Navy was also the commitment to build twelve advanced new Type 45 air defence destroyers, the long overdue replacements for the increasingly antiquated Type 42s.
Maybe it was the strong advocacy of Jock Slater and his team, or the co-operation that seemed to exist between the services. Maybe it was the way that the Navy had positioned itself earlier in the 1990s, with its new doctrine and shift in focus. Maybe it was the inclination of the incoming government and the new team of defence ministers to embrace the arguments that were deployed. Whatever it was, there was much to the Naval Staff’s liking in the tone and thrust of the SDR when the results emerged in July 1998. The First Sea Lord may have been uncomfortable about the numbers question. But the Navy seemed to be central to the new government’s thinking on defence in away that it had not seemed to be for as long as anyone could remember. There was no question in particular but that carriers were at the heart of the review.
In his introduction, George Robertson spoke of a changing and complex world of uncertainty and instability that posed real threats to Britain’s security, a world in which ‘we must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us’. 3 Here was the justification for the expeditionary strategy that was now explicitly espoused, and which was further underpinned by the affirmation of policy based on values: ‘The British are, by instinct, an internationalist people. We believe that as well as defending our rights, we should discharge our responsibilities in the world. We do not want to stand idly by and watch humanitarian disasters or the aggression of dictators go unchecked. We want to give a lead, we want to be a force for good.’
For better or worse, this was a hymn sheet for interventionism. What is more, the SDR argued that power projection was a role for which maritime forces were well suited. The elevation of ‘defence diplomacy’ to a mission in its own right also seemed to be tailor-made as much for maritime forces as any others. And recent experience had shown that aircraft carriers ‘play a key part in peace support, coercion and combat’. Although she was not actually named, even the recent high-profile despatch of HMS Invincible to the Gulf was cited as evidence of ‘a coercive presence which can contribute to conflict prevention’. 4
The sceptics would quickly dismiss all this as another misguided attempt to perpetuate an inappropriate British self-image on the world stage, and a transparent effort by the new government to re-establish the Labour Party’s credentials at home as ‘sound’on defence. On balance, though, the SDR would win good reviews itself as a model of how to get to grips with the problems and questions facing defence establishments around the world. But that would not last. As with much else associated with the Blair years, the gap between the promise and the delivery of the promise would soon begin to show. And the carefully-crafted scenarios set out in the SDR of the kinds of operations that Britain would plan for in the future would also in the end be swept aside in the face of new realities, with huge consequences for the armed forces that would present a new challenge for the Royal Navy.
The confrontation with Iraq had quickly soured again during the summer. In mid December 1998, UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn, and Britain and the United States launched Operation Desert Fox, an intense air and missile campaign lasting three days, aimed at Saddam Hussein’s suspected illegal weapons sites. There was much scepticism about the motives and effectiveness of the operation at the time, although it has subsequently been judged to have had a far more profound impact on the Iraqi leader than was then suspected.
None of the Navy’s carriers was directly involved, but there was still a requirement to keep the pressure on Baghdad. So Invincible was on her way again. She set sail on 9 January. James Burnell-Nugent was still in charge.
Perhaps because of the prevailing mood at the time, and with a sense of history and a desire to capture his moment in charge of one of the Royal Navy’s big ships in a special way, he did something quite unusual for what were the dying days of the twentieth century. As the ship stored for possible hostilities, he decided to have his portrait painted. It was a novel experience for Invincible’s crew members, being told that the captain could not be disturbed because he was sitting for his portrait.
There were no delays this time and Invincible arrived in the Gulf at the end of January. There would be no actual bombing missions. But the ship’s aircraft supported the much bigger presence of the US Navy aircraft carrier George Washington in some aggressive policing of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq, to send a message.
Invincible spent more than two months on Gulf operations. But, as the weeks passed, and the Gulf summer began to loom, the pilots and maintainers began to confront one of the crucial limitations of their aircraft and the Navy’s existing carrier capabilities. The planes, designed to wage war for NATO in the temperate or cold skies of northern Europe, began to struggle in the thinner, hotter air of the Gulf as the seasons changed.
In early April, Invincible departed the Gulf. But it was not to be a simple passage home. By now, in those European skies, NATO was in fact waging a full-scale air campaign over the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo. Invincible was ordered to divert to the Ionian Sea to bolster the fighter cover for the NATO bombing missions with her Sea Harriers. The aircraft and pilots would mount long sorties, flying at night, to maintain their part of the overall fighter umbrella.
As the size of the NATO air armada continued to mount, Invincible’s small contribution was no longer necessary. But, as she set a course for Portsmouth, Captain Burnell-Nugent reflected on the story of his year-and-a-half in command. He saw it as an object lesson, in a new and unpredictable strategic environment, in the mobility and adaptability of maritime power, and especially of that part of it which is embodied in the aircraft carrier. Twice now in the Gulf, Invincible had acted as a political messenger, a deterrent, and a military enforcer. Within days of leaving the Gulf for the second time, she was an integral part of another military operation in another theatre.
Kosovo would see another important milestone for the Royal Navy, and for Britain’s armed forces. HMS Splendid would become the first British nuclear-powered submarine to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles in action. It was another significant string to the Navy’s bow. For the Royal Navy, it brought closer to realization the enormous potential of these vessels, in which it had invested huge sums and efforts. But it was also ammunition for those who saw nuclear-powered submarines armed with such weapons as an alternative to aircraft carriers as a way of projecting maritime power from the sea to the land.
Invincible had shared duties in the Gulf with her sister ship, HMS Illustrious. And, as Invincible now disappeared into dockyard hands for another facelift that would see her changed significantly again, Illustrious was preparing to take up the challenge and the story in yet another theatre.
Illustrious had already had her latest facelift, which might more appropriately be described as a nose job. Up until now, throughout the lives of these ships, one prominent reminder of the fact that they had started out as hybrids – part cruiser, part carrier – had been the bulky Sea Dart missile system that had been planted so very obviously in the bows, at the forward end of the flight deck.
Even as they were being built, and the first inklings appeared that the balance of their employment would be shifting, designers looked at removing the system. Then, with the focus still on the prospects of a hot war with the massed ranks of Soviet forces, and with the value of the Sea Harrier still uncertain, it was decided that it would be too high an air defence price to pay for the possibility of a small increase in aircraft capability. Now, in the post-Cold-War world, the balance of the argument had changed. Illustrious lost her Sea Dart, gained a full-length flight deck to aid air operations, and the magazine space for the missiles was taken up with stowage for aircraft ordnance, to help with what had remained one of the key weaknesses of the ships. Invincible was the next to receive the same treatment, and finally Ark Royal.
At the beginning of May 2000, Illustrious was testing her new facilities in NATO exercises in the Bay of Biscay. In command now was Captain Mark Stanhope, who had taken over just as the modifications to the ship were being completed. For Stanhope, those changes were a critical moment in the evolution of these ships towards the principle role of delivering carrier air power. It was a small change on the face of it, but would make a considerable difference to the way that the ships could operate.
Suddenly, the former British colonial possession of Sierra Leone, on the West African coast, leapt into the consciousness of everyone aboard. The country had been scarred by civil war for most of the 1990s. With UN peacekeepers and the capital, Freetown, seemingly about to be overrun by rebels, the British government had rushed a military force to secure the airport, initially to evacuate civilians. But the operation quickly became more than that – an attempt to use a limited but capable force to try to restore an element of political stability.
Illustrious was the flagship for the NATO exercise, with a mixed force of Sea Harriers and RAF Harriers aboard. But suddenly Captain Stanhope received a call from London asking for an assessment within two hours of whether the ship could deploy jets from where she was over the jungle of Sierra Leone in a show of force. The squadrons quickly did their calculations. It would need a lot of tanker support. There were other technical issues. But it was feasible.
The conclusion was that such an operation was not needed quite so urgently. However, it was decided to withdraw Illustrious from the exercise. Captain Stanhope was told to head for Sierra Leone, in the time-honoured phrase, ‘with all despatch’. Thus Illustrious found herself hurrying south to support the intervention. She steamed 2, 500 miles in five days. Having not long completed a full tour of duty in the Gulf, it seemed to be another demonstration of how maritime power, and an aircraft carrier in particular, could swing from one role and mission in one part of the world to another in a relatively short time with the minimum of outside assistance. Eventually the naval group off Sierra Leone would comprise Illustrious, the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean, three frigates, and supporting RFAs. Illustrious’ aircraft would conduct a number of patrols to back up the mission. Under the skilful command of Brigadier David Richards ashore, this classic piece of brushfire intervention would have a telling impact on the ground.
It had been a remarkable flurry of activity in the last few years, a level and tempo of operations that was unlike anything that the last couple of decades of the Cold War had seen. There had been the Gulf War, the US debacle in Somalia, the Balkans, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. This was the context of the SDR, when the unusual and unexpected seemed to be becoming the norm, and the impetus to do something was actually translated into action. But Sierra Leone would come to be seen as the high-point of Blair-style interventionism. Things would quickly get a lot more difficult.