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real interest in accepting the Admiralty’s offer of partnership in the expeditionary role. 20
Even as the services laid plans for an expeditionary future the pressure of events
tested some of their basic assumptions. The ideas underpinning the JSSF were proven in
a number of crises, including Kuwait (1961), Tanganyika (1964), Zanzibar (1964) and
21
the withdrawal from Aden (1967). A joint capability was required to meet Britain’s
defence needs east of Suez. Operations in Oman in 1957 and in Aden in the 1960s
22
demonstrated the limitations of independent air action. Air control theory did not work.
Air transport was very useful in delivering troops to secure airfields but long range air
transport or airborne operations were not possible without air superiority and without
an aircraft carrier the RAF could not provide this at significant distance from their fixed
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bases. That much was evident at Kuwait in 1961. Their suggested alternative, of pre-
emptive air strikes, neglected political reality and had been explicitly ruled out during
Vantage. In the real world of operations short of war the enemy air force was likely to
be given the first strike.
Meanwhile, as the RN and RAF squabbled over the expeditionary role, Army interest
east of Suez focused on the requirement to fight insurgencies in Borneo and Aden and
the need to support them in this often tied down expeditionary forces, particularly the
navy’s amphibious ships and helicopters, reducing their availability elsewhere. 24
The JSSF concept was well-suited to British defence needs as they appeared in the
early 1960s and on this basis the Macmillan government rejected the RAF island strategy
and agreed to build a new large aircraft carrier, which would have been named HMS
Queen Elizabeth. As is well known, the carrier did not progress beyond the drawing
board still less did the Navy get the second ship they had anticipated. In 1966 the Labour
government, bequeathed unsustainable spending plans by the previous administration,
cut the programme. This did not represent a victory for the RAF’s alternative vision
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as much as an overall reduction in British aspirations. The island strategy did not,
could not, provide the flexible range of options offered by the JSSF but the government
decided that it did not require such options and with ambitions suitably reduced, the
RAF plan would suffice. Quite how a total of twelve F-111 aircraft would truly have
served British interests, out of sight and out of mind at airfields remote from many

20 Eric Grove, ‘Partnership Spurned: the Royal Navy’s Search for a Joint Maritime-Air Strategy East of Suez,
1961-63’, in N.A.M. Rodger, Naval Power in the Twentieth Century, (1996) pp.227-41. Also see Gjert Lage
Dyndal, Land Based Air Power of Aircraft Carriers. A case study of the British debate about maritime air
power in the 1960s, (London: Ashgate, 2012) and Tim Benbow (ed.), British Naval Aviation, The First 100
Years, (London: Ashgate, 2011).
21 See Speller, ‘The Royal Navy and Expeditionary Operations’. For Tanganyika and Zanzibar see ‘An African
Cuba? Britain and the Zanzibar Revolution, 1964’ in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vo.
35, No. 2, June 2007 pp.283-301.
22 Darby, British Defence Policy, pp.130-133. Air Chief Marshal Sir David Lee, Flight from the Middle East,
(1980). Spencer Mawby, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates 1955-1967, (2005)
23 Ministry of Defence Naval Historical Branch, Box T2644-T2673, Summary of lessons learnt by FOAC from
the Kuwait Operation, 25 Oct 1961. Lee, Flight from the Middle East, p.180.
24 For an examination of the impact of Confrontation on maritime forces see Christopher Tuck, ‘The Royal
Navy and Confrontation, 1963-66’ in Kennedy (ed)., British Naval Strategy East of Suez.
25 Statement on the Defence Estimates 1966. Part 1. The Defence Review, Cmnd. 2901.