Post-Cold War development of United Kingdom joint air command and control capability

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2004 by Redvers T.N. Thompson

Editorial Abstract: The United Kingdom received a "wake-up call" from Operation Desert Storm when that country's unpreparedness for "expeditionary" and indeed joint warfighting was highlighted. The mid-1990s brought extensive consequential changes to the United Kingdom's joint operational command structures, including the organizational development of its air command and control capabilities that encompassed the eventual formation of the UK Joint Force Air Component Headquarters.

Coming out of the Cold War

In the mid-1980s, the focus of both the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the rest of the United Kingdom's (UK) military forces was, as it had been for nearly four decades, almost exclusively on their respective contributions to the defence of NATO's Central Region and the UK mainland. The RAF's aircraft were primarily located and operated from main operating bases (MOB), with many permanently deployed in Germany where they were expected to train and fight. These MOBs were collocated with both their required support infrastructure and well-defined national and NATO command and control (C2) organizations. Then in the late 1980s the political/military status quo changed at an amazing pace. In 1987 US president Ronald Reagan and USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev met in Washington to sign a nuclear weapons treaty. In December 1988 President Gorbachev gave more freedom to the states of Eastern Europe, and a month later he withdrew the Soviet military from Afghanistan. By the end of 1988 President Gorbachev renounced the use of force in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, whose communist regimes had fallen. Then on 9 November 1989 the world watched in amazement as Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. In May 1990, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev met in Washington and signed treaties that called for a reduction of nuclear weapons and a ban on chemical weapons. Later that year, President Gorbachev met with German chancellor Helmut Kohl, signed a nonaggression pact, and initiated the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Germany.

However, through this period of fundamental and rapid change in the grand and military-strategic realpolitik, little if anything changed in the United Kingdom's military focus. (1) As the RAF entered the 1990s, while remaining honed to an extremely fine edge at the tactical level of war, at the operational level of war it was still psychologically wedded to a Central Region "bunker mentality" embodied in the fixed operational-level NATO C2 organization; fixed NATO infrastructure and logistic support; fixed MOBs, with their hundreds of hardened aircraft shelters proofed against nuclear, biological, and chemical attack; and fixed "play-book" of war plans. With a Royal Navy focused largely on the Soviet submarine threat, a British Army focused on its defensively orientated "heavy-metal" armoured divisions, and an RAF dependent on fixed infrastructure and, most pertinent to this article, fixed operational-level NATO C2, it is likely that it was only with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 and the United Kingdom's subsequent deployment for and execution of the coalition operations of Desert Shield and Desert Storm (United Kingdom's Operation [Op] Granby), did the full realization hit the UK political/military establishment that its extant Cold War posture was in need of change.

Operation Desert Storm--The Dawn of Realization

And so it was that at some time during or shortly after Desert Storm did the term expeditionary suddenly drop into the lexicon of the RAF. The author of this article can vouch that as part of an operational, front-line aircrew the only time the term expeditionary was used was in the context of a week's walking excursion to the Scottish Highlands! However, as a result of the Gulf War and its associated US after-action reports and UK lessons-learnt processes, and the subsequent doctrinal stocktaking, UK attention was drawn to some significant problem areas related to the RAF's ability to execute air C2 on a national, expeditionary basis. Firstly, it came into stark focus that the RAF was dependent on an operational-level legacy system of fixed C2 and infrastructure that had very limited adaptability, and therefore in fact possessed no effective deployable air C2 capability whatsoever. Equally, there was an equivalent lack of C2 capability possessed by the other UK services, and as no UK environment had any national, operational-level C2 capability worthy of note, it is not surprising that there was no effective doctrine or procedures for operational-level coordination between them. Indeed, the other word that was not widely prevalent in the UK operational lexicon at this time was joint. While following the lessons of the Falklands War, a Joint Force Operations staff was established, and the doctrine for a Joint Headquarters (JHQ) and Joint Force HQ (JFHQ) was developed. There was little in the way of single-service doctrine regarding the operational-level planning and integration of air/land/ maritime operations. It also became clear that nationally little was provided by the way of operational-level C2 training; this was especially true in the case of air C2 training, where there was no effective operational training at all for air commanders or their battlestaff. Understandably, as the RAF had little need to undertake operational-level planning or C2 outside of a NATO context, it had largely abrogated the responsibility for the training and provision of operational-level air C2 expertise to NATO. The result was that at the time of Op Granby, the RAF had little or no air C2 expertise, and not surprisingly therefore the UK air input to the US-led air planning and C2 process was marginal. In 1992, taking account of some of the air C2 lessons from Op Granby, the Department of Mr Warfare at the RAF College Cranwell revamped the Air Battle Management Course (ABMC) and instituted the "estimate" process as a formal air campaign planning process both in the course and in the new Air Operations Manual (AOM). However, without an identifiable Air HQ neither the ABMC nor the AOM could be targeted at any specific audience. (2)