Abstract
This article explains how national, bilateral and multilateral work was vital for the development of Royal Navy tactical doctrine during the Cold War, and how cultural norms enabling both application and confidence resulted in a high-quality product. 1 The article is in three main parts, first explaining how bilateral engagement with the US became a multilateral process with NATO, then showing the mature multilateral Royal Navy-NATO process in action and finally considering how and why the resulting doctrine was of a high standard.
Doctrine, in this sense, is simply ‘considered thought on what works’. 2 It is written down, taught and then used as guidance during planning and action. Tactical doctrine is important because naval warfare has become so complicated. It is not sufficient, for example, to point a missile at an enemy ship and press fire. The target will probably be outside the range of the firing unit's sensors, so another unit must pass targeting information. There are choices to be made about who does this and how. There are then questions about how many missiles to fire and the settings to apply. The firing unit will meanwhile try to avoid enemy detection and so counterfire. There may be several ships on each side and enemy submarines in the vicinity or an air attack inbound. No individual has the expertise in different subject areas, ranging from the underlying physics to interactions of equipment performance, human psychology and much more, to work all that out. Even if they did, the factors could not be analysed in the few seconds available. People therefore follow tactical doctrine when making decisions in the operations rooms of ships, or planning the next day's action, to a remarkable degree.
The development of the Royal Navy's Cold War tactical doctrine after 1953 has not previously been explored. Of the standard works of the history of the Royal Navy in the Cold War only Edward Hampshire's
Bilateral to Multilateral Doctrine, 1945–1959
After victory over Germany and Japan in 1945 the Royal Navy and the US Navy were determined to ensure that they could continue to work effectively together.
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This required consolidation at the national level. In 1946 the Royal Navy merged the many parts of Confidential Book (CB) 04211
These documents were used at sea, in training and for equipment and thought development. At sea a ship would use the relevant CB for its activity to get the procedures right and understand how to set up for success, and its team as well as any flag staff would use
Bilateral discussion on tactics had indeed never truly ended, with talks continuing in 1946
Parallel work on communications by the UK and US Combined Communications Board, with Canada represented, resulted in Allied Communications Publication (ACP) 175 being completed in March 1951. This book, just the latest of series of publications which had been produced since the early 1940s, provided a comprehensive set of common procedures for the use of radios, the dissemination of signals (here meaning formatted text messages sent by radio but presented to the recipient printed out on a piece of paper) and much else. It was followed by yet further communication publications. 15
Work on both publications was made easier by both parties having already adopted some of the other's ideas. In the 1920s the US had updated its signal book after experience of working with the Royal Navy in the First World War.
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Then during the Second World War the Royal Navy had shared its ideas without restraint, including carrier based aircraft interception techniques, training the US officers who then founded the US fighter direction schools, and showing the system in practice when HMS Victorious served with US forces in the Pacific in 1943.
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Conversely, analysis of major US Pacific battles appeared just weeks after the events in the British
Overall ATP(1) and ACP 175 were a balanced reflection of the two naval traditions and experiences. If the US influence predominated in some areas, given their navy's recent success in carrier warfare in the Pacific, many British procedures were also adopted. Corbin Williamson argues that the US influence was predominant because the British principle of ‘safe and timely arrival’ of convoys was not given headline importance, and that greater emphasis was given to offensive action than was the British habit. 20 This cannot be sustained given how much British thought on anti-submarine warfare went into the publication, from the positioning of escorts around a convoy to how to counter-attack and use aerial support, and given that the Royal Navy had regularly taken the offensive against the U-boats. 21 It is noteworthy that while ATP(1) used American terminology such as ‘officer in tactical command’, it followed the format and in places the chapter layout of the British source publications. Indeed, throughout the process there was, amidst occasional tension, a remarkable spirit of compromise. A good example was that while American spelling was used for some commonly used words, (i.e., ‘maneuvre’ rather than ‘manoeuvre’), the Oxford English Dictionary, with its UK spellings, was accepted as the determinant of the remainder.
ATP(1) and ACP 175 were quickly followed by other publications. ATP(2)
National and bilateral development (in part tri-lateral, given Canadian inputs) was therefore working well, but the geopolitical situation was changing rapidly with NATO founded in 1949, and an alliance command structure established in 1952. 26 For the major NATO exercises conducted that year, Mainbrace and Longstep, and even more if war broke out, NATO needed collective maritime doctrine to enable ships from many different nations to work effectively together within each task group. 27 What had been bilateral had to become multilateral.
In a small way, this had already happened. The first widely accepted doctrine within NATO was the Royal Navy's Book of Reference (BR, a lower classification than CBs) 1287 on minesweeping. In May 1945 the Admiralty had set up a ‘Mine Clearance Board’, to coordinate the removal of sea mines after the war by European navies. To make this work the participants had been given the Royal Navy doctrine, which was therefore already in wide multinational use when NATO was founded. 28 NATO, however, needed naval doctrine on much else. The solution was obvious. ATP(1) and the other publications were sent to the other members of NATO as they were completed, from 1951 onwards, and were accepted across the alliance. 29
What turned a UK–US gifting of doctrine to NATO into a more equitable process was a combination of the recovery of the other nations and the way that NATO institutions slowly came to the fore during the 1950s. NATO's Military Office for Standardization, established in London in 1951 to replace the Standing Group set up in 1949, was initially used merely to collate allied statements of agreement to each publication. However, France started to comment on publications in preparation from ATP(2) onwards and was soon joined by others.
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In 1958 the US argued that suggested amendments to ATP(2)
The content of publications, however, continued to come largely from the UK and US. Indeed, when ATP(5) and ATP(6) on mine warfare were issued in 1959 to finally replace BR 1287, the British influence extended not just to content but also pictures and examples taken directly from the BR. Other NATO publications started to appear, such as Allied Administrative Publication (6)
Mature Multilateralism, 1959–1991
The mid to late Cold War saw a mature multilateral process of NATO doctrine development which worked well in part because the Royal Navy changed the structure of its own doctrine. In 1959
Another major change was that
It is worth dwelling for a moment on the extent of this change. Just twenty years earlier the Royal Navy had been the largest in the world, yet here the organisation was effectively accepting that, as the necessary price for being able to operate effectively with allies, the core of its tactical thought would be NATO doctrine created in conjunction with others. Richard Harding and others have pointed to the Royal Navy's flexibility.
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In this the Royal Navy was following clear political direction to fully engage with NATO, as well as reflecting the realities of the new military balance. There was an obvious cost in some loss of control, but this could be mitigated by Royal Navy publications sometimes explicitly stating that NATO doctrine on a particular point was not to be followed and giving an alternative approach. By contrast, the US Navy kept an entire set of its own doctrine, just using NATO documents when needed, and consequently its personnel, with honourable exceptions, often knew NATO doctrine less well. The Royal Navy's shift also showed a clear appreciation of how naval warfare was more integrated than ever before and the speed of the change. If the 1947
Soon afterwards the Royal Navy added another publication, Fleet Charge Document 10,
The new system based on
This updated British system supported ongoing inputs to NATO doctrine publications, which from the early 1960s were updated on an annual cycle. Nations would send in ideas which were then considered during an annual meeting, (later several meetings, on different publications) to which all nations could send representatives. The Royal Navy invariably had people assigned to attend the meetings. Indeed, the UK is the only nation which has attended every one of the top-level maritime doctrine meetings, the inelegantly named ‘Military Committee (Maritime) Standardisation Board’, since its inception. 41 Further, to ensure the quality of its inputs, the Royal Navy often had its own meetings before the NATO ones, deciding which ideas to put forward. A typical sequence might be that a Royal Navy idea went into FXIs, then FOTIs, which were explicitly described as ‘the major national channel into NATO publications’ and was then put forward as a ‘change proposal’ for a NATO publication. 42 Alternatively, an idea might go straight from FXIs into the NATO Experimental Tactical publication commonly known as ‘EXTACs’.
The Royal Navy also contributed to NATO doctrine outside the annual cycle. Indeed, when NATO did not have the right publication the Royal Navy sometimes simply produced one and shared it. It was also a Royal Navy officer who, in 1983, brought together the mass of message formats that had grown up, and organised them into the structure that NATO nations still use today. 43 The new structure was tested in Exercise Teamwork 1984 and then put into NATO doctrine. Each group of ships would now have a capping ‘Operations General’ (OPGEN) signal issued, with ‘Operations Task’ (OPTASK) signals for individual warfare areas such as surface or air warfare.
The drive to share ideas with NATO had to be balanced with the need for secrecy. Anything shared between several nations was inevitably more vulnerable to being discovered by the Soviets than if held by just one. 44 It was not just the tactics which might be revealed, but the covertly gathered information on the Soviets upon which the tactic depended or the implications for the performance of particular pieces of British equipment. This sometimes led to deliberate delays in passing ideas across with, for example, one particular anti-submarine tactic first trialled by the Royal Navy in 1949 not being proposed for entry into NATO doctrine until the late 1960s.
Working multilaterally, however, also had many benefits. NATO exercises played a major role in identifying issues to solve and in validating, or otherwise, proposed solutions. 45 To these were added the lessons from the constant acting together of the NATO standing forces, including the ‘Standing Naval Force Atlantic’ of frigates and destroyers initiated in 1968 following a British proposal in 1963, and the minehunters’ equivalent set up under the aegis of the British led Commander in Chief Channel in 1973. 46 NATO personnel training with the Royal Navy or serving as staff officers in Royal Navy institutions also added much. For example the UK work on missile defence in the late 1960s was usefully discussed at an early stage with a Netherlands officer working at the shore base HMS Dryad, and in the 1970s a Royal Navy idea on getting targeting reports from a non-firing unit was merged with Netherlands ideas to become an EXTAC. 47
Continental NATO navies also contributed as institutions through their inputs to NATO doctrine. Their lack of access to UK–US or five eyes (i.e., UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) intelligence, and simply the smaller number of people engaged in writing doctrine and the defence scientific hinterland, meant that they could not have the same impact as the US or UK. 48 They could however produce ideas for further study, and some had specific areas of expertise. The German, Danish and Norwegian navies, for example, led on the development of fast patrol boat tactics, craft which both the Royal Navy and US Navy largely discarded in the 1960s.
As a consequence, NATO doctrine continued to develop, with the main structural change in the mid to late Cold War being simply the steady increase in the number of publications. For example, ATP(8) was produced on amphibious warfare, ATP-24 gave more detail on mine warfare, ATP-28 on anti-submarine warfare was added in 1968, to be shortly followed by ATP-31 on above-water warfare. 49 The gaps in the numbers discussed here reflect that the ATP series also included land and air-focused publications. A minor shift in titles saw the brackets around the number changed to a hyphen from 1960, i.e., ATP(8) to ATP-8. A myriad of Allied Diving Publications, Allied Hydrographic Publications, Allied Logistic Publications and other types were also created.
The publications tended to get longer as well. ATP-1 expanded like the rest, and in 1962 it was split into two, Volume I becoming
Meanwhile, NATO ownership of the publications, which as noted earlier was largely in place by 1959, was further confirmed. An important indication of this was that the Royal Navy and US Navy started putting ‘reservations’ into the front of documents from the mid-1960s. ‘Reservations’ are a process by which any NATO nation can accept a document as a whole but say that it will not follow or does not agree with a particular part. Another indication was, from the late 1960s, letters to NATO's Standing Group from the UK and US asking the permission of NATO nations to share Allied doctrine with third parties such as South Africa and Iran. 51 Such permission was not always granted. What had been UK–US–Canadian publications were now NATO property. As found elsewhere, ‘NATO's own bureaucratic actors played important…roles in its adaptions’. 52
A Matter of Quality
Was NATO and British doctrine any good? So many factors come together to determine success or failure, from the political background, morale, training, equipment and more, that it is difficult to split out the effect of doctrine alone. We do, however, get indications of the doctrine working in practice from operations. For example, in the Falklands War the task group structure, the formation of the units around the carriers, and the way the disposition was ordered, all followed ATP(1). 53 Naval gunfire support was done using ATP(4) and the successful amphibious landings were organised using ATP(8). 54 As Admiral Woodward's anti-submarine warfare commander wrote after the war, ‘the organisation of ASW [anti-submarine warfare] defence was conducted using NATO doctrine and dispositions and tactics’. 55
There was also the British doctrine which had not been shared with NATO. For example, when the Royal Navy went on the offensive against the believed position of the Argentine submarine San Luis on 1 May 1982, the forces assigned, with the frigates heavily augmented by dipping helicopters taken from other tasks, reflected the assessment in
We get another indication from the Gulf War of 1990–1991, at the end of our period. NATO doctrine, with its significant Royal Navy contribution, enabled the navies of the many nations represented in the Arabian Gulf to work effectively together.
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Royal Navy specific doctrine on the use of helicopters then helped the Royal Navy to itself perform excellently. In the battle of Bubiyan Island, Royal Navy Lynx helicopters destroyed 14 of the 22 Iraqi vessels involved. The Royal Navy's minehunters then led in clearing Iraqi mines.
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While protecting them HMS Gloucester achieved the first-ever war time interception of an anti-ship missile, despite nominally more capable US units being present, and while being more efficient with its decoys as it did so, by following CB 00191
What then led to success? It was important that within the British national process each classified book had a ‘responsible authority’. At first these were largely the gunnery, torpedo and other ‘schools’, each with their own shore establishment and responsible for not just the training of their specialists, but the development of that aspect of the Navy's capability. 60 As these reduced in importance in the 1970s, they were replaced by new organisations such as the Naval Air Warfare Development Group and the Submarine Tactical Warfare Group, while the Maritime Tactical School continued its work. 61 The institutionalised update rate of the publications, in particular the updates to FOTIs four times a year, was also a factor. The doctrine was not just the repository of collective wisdom, providing a base from which the next step could be made, it also helped to drive the innovation.
It was also vital that the creation of doctrine had broad support within the organisation at every level. There were regular contributions from other parts of the Royal Navy, particularly front-line units, the staffs of Admirals and training establishments. For example, almost every ‘problem’ in FOTIs had inputs by at least five different entities, printed for all to see, and some received many more. It was also important that though the inputs were often written by more junior officers, they were usually signed out by officers of Admiral or Captain rank. This kept the more senior members of the Royal Navy engaged with the process.
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Indeed, at the beginning of our period the 1947 update to
The directly naval inputs would however have been of little use if not assessed in conjunction with scientists. The changing structure of the British defence science institutions is not traced in detail here but they included both Admiralty focused teams, such as the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, and wider British defence science organisations. 64 Naval officers and scientists also came together to do tactical experimentation and analysis. 65 For example, to improve interception rates against Indonesian craft trying to reach Malaysia between 1962 and 1966, studies were conducted with the right numbers of patrol craft for each task, what patrol speed gave the best chance of detection and much else. 66
Another way of achieving high level, considered thought on which updates to doctrine could be based were the annual or twice annual study groups run in the 1970s and 1980s. These involved forty to seventy people drawn from the Royal Navy, RAF and selected allies, for three to six weeks, using information classified secret or top secret, tasked to study and produce a report on a specific issue. For example, in 1974 the subject was ‘Operational Communications in Maritime Warfare’ and in 1984 it was ‘Amphibious Operations’, with a focus on Norway. 67 This work was supported by deep analysis conducted by historians working for the service which included over twenty ‘staff histories’, some of which were only made available to the public after a deliberate delay. 68
Another advantage the Royal Navy possessed in the development of its own doctrine was the continuation of its excellent relations with the US Navy. Cooperation on developing anti-submarine techniques had never really ended and when in the mid-1960s doubts arose in both navies as to whether their defensive procedures against anti-ship missiles could be executed in the short time available between missile detection and potential impact a discussion was the obvious next step. 69 Both were working on lists of immediate actions to speed the processes, and the ideas of the two navies were merged, taking the best from each. The general points were put into NATO doctrine in the early 1970s, but for security reasons the UK and US held back some of the more detailed conclusions and procedures. 70
The bilateral relationship intensified as the Royal Navy shifted focus from ‘East of Suez’ to the North Atlantic and was clearly reflected in the publications, both in their focus and the way that from the mid-1970s the USA was increasingly given direct access to some British doctrine, though far from all. To complete the shift, the first piece of national doctrine marked UK-USA, i.e., shareable with the United States but not, for example, Australia, was created in 1977, and from the early 1980s the proportion increased significantly. 71 In that decade the Royal Navy and the US Navy worked particularly closely together on doctrine, with Royal Navy staff officers finding a ready welcome. The US approach to the British was often that, ‘NOFORN [the US indication that no foreign access was allowed] didn’t mean anything’. 72 Much of this also depended on the close working relationship between the UK and US intelligence systems. 73
Though US thought was influential on the Royal Navy it was not accepted unquestioningly. For example, the Royal Navy's comment in 1979 on the US idea of defended lanes, which meant protecting shipping routes rather than individual vessels, was that ‘there is much experience to be gained before this mode of operation could be accepted’, a very British way of saying that it wouldn’t work. 74 That the two organisations worked closely together without the subsuming of independent British thought was also shown in UK involvement in the US ‘Maritime Strategy’ of the 1980s, the idea of putting pressure on the Soviet Union by threatening targets ashore from multiple directions. 75 The Royal Navy's practical role in what also became NATO policy was, in part, a supporting one, in particular providing an anti-submarine striking force to protect the US carrier task groups. The service, however, played a larger part in the inception of the strategy than sometimes appreciated. While the underlying ideas were present in the US from the late 1940s and reborn in the late 1970s, the operation of aircraft carriers and large amphibious vessels in fjords in the 1980s was only tactically credible because the Royal Navy had been working on anti-submarine warfare there since 1971. 76 In the 1980s the Royal Navy took this work further, including using the geographic similarity between Vestfjord in Norway and the waters inshore of the Hebrides for both training and analysis. 77 In sum therefore, the UK–US naval relationship helped both parties develop better doctrine, both for themselves and to feed into NATO doctrine.
Why, though, did the Royal Navy have this drive to create good doctrine? There was, for the first half of the period in particular, the war experience of senior officers, and the appreciation that getting it right mattered for both individual and national survival. Perhaps more vital were a sense of importance and a determined professionalism. The sense of importance was emphasised within every ship in the service, with the words, ‘It is upon the Navy that …the wealth, safety, and strength of the Kingdom chiefly depend’ prominently displayed.
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As Richard Hill explained, ‘the Navy and its management during this period had no doubt that it was a national force charged with national tasks…and that Britain might have to act alone’.
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Indeed in 1968 Rear Admiral Lewin, then Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), publicly spoke about a ‘continuing capability to go to the assistance of our friends anywhere in the world’, less than four weeks after the final government decision to end the East of Suez commitment.
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The professionalism was epitomised by the title of Admiral Leach's autobiography,
As an example of the professional rigour applied to doctrine, the analysis conducted after the Falklands War extended to thousands of pages. Every aerial engagement with the Argentines was analysed in detail, as was every single helicopter flight, every Argentine missile firing and every use of anti-submarine weaponry. 83 In parallel the task group staffs and every individual unit involved provided reports and the loss of each ship was subject to a board of enquiry. Errors were very clearly identified. Indeed a senior admiral found some of the criticisms made in the analysis to be so strong that he felt it necessary to remind people that the decisions had been taken in seconds and during the stress of battle. 84
This combination of experience, a sense of importance and determined professionalism led to a consistent drive to face problems rather than imagine them away. For example, one can read that ‘the USN seems generally more aware of the potential of the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System, … than is the case in the Royal Navy’ and that ‘the Mk 44 torpedo [then in service with the Royal Navy] has little chance against XXX’ 85 Best of all is the diatribe of a clearly annoyed officer: ‘in exercise after exercise, year after year, we continue to engage [i.e., attack] our own aircraft and in recent exercises we have broadened this self-destruction into attacks on our own surface ships and submarines’. 86
These internal criticisms are not the sign of a failing organisation. Indeed, fratricide is a universal military problem. Instead they show a service that had high self-expectations and was confident enough to criticise itself. Nor were the problems simply admired; the issue of fratricide was tackled with practical changes in both doctrine and training. Indeed serving personnel from the time confirm that doctrine in general was effectively taught on repeated courses and internalised. 87 A later First Sea Lord writing about the Falklands War emphasised, ‘the impressive conceptual component of our fighting power’, and that, ‘we had the doctrine, the operational planning experience, the tactics, techniques and procedures’. 88 This was, of course, largely the work of mid-ranking officers and is therefore an example of Paul Kennedy's ‘history from the middle’, the idea that the ‘middle people’ will also have a role in determining the outcome of any event, even if unheralded. 89
Conclusion
This article has applied previously unused archives and interviews with participants to explain the role of national, bilateral and multilateral work in creating British and NATO tactical doctrine in the Cold War. In doing so it touches on several areas of existing scholarship. For the history of the Royal Navy during the Cold War the main histories are not challenged, but it opens up a hitherto unexplored aspect of the story with, for example, the change in Royal Navy doctrine in 1959 and its implications mentioned nowhere else. This article also provides insight into the institution's underlying assumptions. For NATO the article explains the development of NATO maritime doctrine beyond the end of the Korean War in a way not done before. Points are also made about national relationships, in particular the productive ongoing UK–US dialogue.
The presentation here of year after year of detailed and insightful analytic work overturns Markus Mader's suggestion that ‘The Royal Navy's organisational culture was dominated by wide-spread aversion against written doctrine’.
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It similarly refutes Harald Hoiback's contention that ‘Great Britain has never been a fan of doctrine’, and Bert Chapman's argument that ‘development of a formal written corpus of British military doctrine has been a relatively recent [i.e., 1990s] historical phenomenon’.
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Writers on NATO have been more accurate, with Sarandis Papadopoulous in ‘The Combined Framework: How Naval Powers Deal With Military Operations Other Than War’, and Joel Sokolsky in
This article also provides a case study for how doctrine changes. One example cannot prove a point overall, but the interaction shown here between internal national work, bilateral relationships and NATO processes supports the views of Benjamin Jensen in
These cultural factors led to the Royal Navy getting six things right. It had people allocated to write doctrine and not pulled away to other tasks. This was in part possible because of an appreciation that, as Geoffrey Till has argued, ‘telling doctrine is a very significant force multiplier’, which also led to the wide engagement of the organisation as a whole, including senior officers. 96 The doctrine was then used as part of rigorous individual training. Close engagement with operational analysts and scientists was also vital, as was a wide range of national and wider operational experience and exercises to spark and test ideas. Finally, the rapid drumbeat of amendments encouraged innovation, kept people engaged and prevented ideas having to be repeatedly rediscovered.
There is, of course, more to say. There could be useful studies on NATO doctrine from the perspectives of other nations, more on the role of the Canadian Navy between its two larger partners, an indication of the wider diplomatic effects of British leadership in NATO doctrine, more on culture and much else. Further evidence will be revealed in the decades to come.
However, we can already identify that effective Royal Navy culture led to hard work by Kennedy's ‘middle people’ and the engagement of the entire organisation, which, along with an ability to work both bilaterally and multilaterally, led to the delivery of high-quality doctrine. This then supported effective operations. Perhaps navies get the doctrine they deserve.
Footnotes
Funding
ORCID iD
