Page 558 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

558 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

Learning to project power in an era of declining access:
joint forces, expeditionary operations and the Royal Navy,

1956-1982

Ian SPELLER

his paper examines the way in which the British Royal Navy sought to exploit the
T reach and flexibility of joint expeditionary forces in order to meet the needs of
foreign and defence policy beyond Europe in the period from 1956 to 1982. It focuses
particularly on the navy’s concept of a Joint Services Seaborne Force (JSSF), which was
developed in the 1960s, and it discusses the reaction of the other services to this new
approach. It will allude to a number of expeditionary operations that were undertaken
by the British in this period but, unfortunately, there is not enough space to allow us to
examine these operations in detail. 1
The 2007 US Maritime Strategy argued that we are entering an ‘era of declining
access’ where third-parties will be reluctant to offer bases and transit rights to western
forces and where western governments will be reluctant to see their troops based on
foreign soil where their presence could engender a hostile response and where they are
2
vulnerable to guerrilla and terrorist attack. The same point is repeated in more recent
US policy statements and is also reflected in the calculations of a number of other navies.
Nations, and navies, it seems, will need to find new ways of projecting their power and
influence overseas. Maintaining a footprint on foreign soil may not always be an option
3
and, even where it is, it may come at a prohibitive cost. This is not an unprecedented
development. The British faced a similar problem in the 1950s and 1960s. Decolonisation
and a growth of nationalist sentiment in Africa and Asia threatened to deprive Britain
of the string of overseas bases on which its military policy had previously been based
while, simultaneously, there was an appreciation that the European withdrawal from
empire and Cold War rivalry made instability in these areas more likely.
In the first years of the Cold War British defence policy had focused on the threat
of a major war in Europe and the Royal Navy was preoccupied with the challenge of
securing sea control in an anticipated third Battle of the Atlantic, this time fighting the
Soviets rather than the Germans. By the mid-1950s British planners began to appreciate

1 This paper is based on a shorter work previously published as Ian Speller, ‘Inter-service rivalry: British
defence policy, 1956-69’ in Royal United Services Institute: History and Policy Series, Spring 2010.
2 A Co-operative Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, October 2007. Available online at http://www.navy.
mil/maritime/Maritimestrategy.pdf
3 For example see the US Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020 (2012), the US Joint
Operational Access Concept (2012), or the Australian Defence Force, Future Maritime Operating Concept
-2025. Maritime Force Projection and Control.