Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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1900–1968’, in Brown and Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire,

294–304; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 638–9; Holland, Britain and the

Commonwealth Alliance, 167–204. R. Ovendale, Appeasement and the English-

Speaking World: Britain, the US, the Dominions, and the Policy of Appeasement

1937–1939 (Cardiff, 1975), is the standard work.

93 Holland, Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 1, 24, 37; D. Mackenzie,

‘Canada, The North Atlantic Triangle and the Empire’, in Brown and Louis

(eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 592–5; R. Ovendale, The English-

Speaking Alliance: Britain, the US, the Dominions and the Cold War 1945–1951

(London, 1985); A. Orde, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The US and British Imperial

Decline 1895–1956 (London, 1996), ch. 6; Grey, A Military History of Australia,

chs 9–10; Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, 410.

94 Ovendale, The English-Speaking Alliance, 53–119, 251, argued that at the prime

minister’s conference in 1948 the British provided ‘comprehensive details of

the new British defence policy’ to all participants, including India and Pak-

istan, but also noted the conference rejected any idea of a concerted Common-

wealth defence policy. At least one reason was the fact that ‘A distinction

developed between the old “white” Dominions and the new Asian members’.

The distinction went both ways. India was no more keen to commit to a British-

led defence policy than the British were to divulge strategic plans to India. An

interesting recent discussion is L.J. Butler, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-

Imperial World (London, 2002), chs 2–3. Mansergh, The Commonwealth

Experience, 394; Holland, Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 33.

95 K. Jeffery, ‘The Second World War’, in Brown and Louis (eds), The Oxford

History of the British Empire; Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, 284–9; A.

Clayton, The British Empire as a Superpower 1919–1939 (Athens, GA, 1986), 517.

96 Margaret Thatcher joined this argument in her memoirs The Downing Street

Years, London, 1993. Among the many causes of the decline of British power

after the Second World War that she listed on page 5 she included ‘the decep-

tive might of an empire which continued to expand until 1919 but which cost

more to defend than it contributed to national wealth’.

302 B.P. Farrell

14 Imperial defence in the

post-imperial era

Ashley Jackson

In the decades following the Second World War, imperial defence con-

tinued to be a key element in Britain’s strategic posture, though commit-

ments in this direction slowly contracted, and the word ‘imperial’ was

dropped as the British Empire disappeared and Britain’s relative power

declined. Despite this, Britain’s appetite for a global military stance and

the defence of overseas territories and interests – main features of imper-

ial defence – never ended. In this light, the Strategic Defence Review of 1998

was not a departure in British defence policy so much as a refocusing on

wider world commitments in an age where, not for the ﬁrst time, Britain’s

investment in European security could be scaled down.

Before that, from the 1960s to the 1990s, despite insistent calls in other

strategic directions from NATO and the European Economic Community

– and the urgent pleas of the British economy for strategic austerity –

Britain never lost the ardent desire to remain a world policeman, even if

its historic role of chief constable had been usurped by the Anglo-Saxon

power on the other side of the Atlantic. Even when scaling down its terri-

torial possessions or defence establishment, as will be seen, the British

time and again evinced a desire to stay on, to never withdraw completely

and to retain a strategic culture associated with a global presence and

global intervention. The former American Secretary of State, Dean

Acheson, once said – to be paraphrased by many thereafter – that ‘Great

Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’. On the contrary,

in substance as well as in policy, Britain never in fact entirely lost that

empire, and certainly never lost the appetite and capacity to perform a

world role, despite the turn towards Europe that Acheson approvingly dis-

cerned, and the relative contraction of British economic, political, and

military power in the post-war decades.

This chapter will consider a number of related issues. First, the fact that

the British Empire never entirely disappeared, and that even today Britain

has, as one of its core defence missions, the defence of overseas colonies

and interests, and retains overseas military bases; second, the fact that even

when colonies were lost, the British remained reluctant to abandon mili-

tary commitments in the surrounding region, and that often the transfer of

304 A. Jackson

power to an independent government was the cause of a new defence

attachment between the ﬂedgling nation and the erstwhile colonial power;

third, the chapter will consider what might be termed the ‘non-withdrawal’

from East of Suez commitments, as well as those in the west of Suez region;

and the chapter will conclude with a consideration of the Strategic Defence

Review era and the semantics of ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ in an appar-

ently post-imperial era.

A great deal of historical attention has been devoted to the themes of

Britain’s decline from world power status in the decades following the

Suez crisis. It is a commonplace that the British Empire ﬁnally foundered

in the 1960s, to be washed away by the irresistible tide of nationalism and

the force of economic, strategic and political shifts unleashed by the

Second World War and the onset of the Cold War. Thereafter, beset by

economic problems, domestic social problems and the logic of closer

integration with Europe, Britain’s attachment to the Commonwealth

became less important, and, in the 1970s, Britain ﬁnally jettisoned its

extra-European defence responsibilities as it bade farewell to East of Suez

commitments, to focus its energies almost exclusively on the defence of

Europe through NATO. As Ritchie Ovendale writes, after the announce-

ment of the decision to withdraw from East of Suez in 1967, ‘the emphasis

went right over to the continental commitment’.

Finally, it seemed,

Britain had reconciled itself to being a second-class military power linked

more naturally to Europe than a global empire and Commonwealth. The

fundamental defence policy realignment that accompanied these painful

lessons in the realities of world power status was pursued to such an extent

that Britain was barely able to perform ‘out of area’ operations, and the

Falklands conﬂict proved to be a desperately close run thing because of

this. Thus, it would appear, Britain went from empire, far ﬂung lines and

global interventionism to a defensive line much closer to home, because

of the strategic imperatives of Cold War national survival, the end of the

imperial adventure and the Treasury’s bare coffers.

Of course, in many ways this is a sustainable rendition of British history

since the 1960s. Yet it is a misleading one, for there were never such

sharply deﬁned breaks in British practice, irrespective of policy state-

ments. If one focuses less on policy statements and more on the reality of

British force structures and deployments, the disjuncture between what

was said and what was done becomes clear. Britain never turned its back on

the world role, either as a political and economic actor or as a power pos-

sessing a global military reach, even when NATO and the defence of

Europe took centre stage. Furthermore, Britain never fully withdrew from

its East of Suez commitments, despite the decision to close down the Sin-

gapore stronghold and end the practice of stationing tens of thousands of

armed services personnel in the Indian Ocean region. This continuation

of the world role into the 1970s and beyond was the result of political

decisions based upon a rational assessment of Britain’s national interests.

An important feature in this stubborn refusal to abandon the world role

was the mindset of the armed forces, which continued to believe that

global deployability was a part of their mission, even if the defence of

Europe had taken centre stage. The British Army, for example, never

happily gave up on ‘small wars’ in distant places, and the Royal Navy

remained determined to preserve its organic airpower capabilities despite

the government’s apparent belief that the era of British expeditionary

operations had been consigned to history.

Many senior politicians,

despite the logic of putting Britain’s strategic eggs in NATO’s European

basket, were susceptible to the lure of Britain’s past, particularly the siren

call of its maritime heritage. A belief in Britain as a ‘world power’, with a

unique maritime calling, was shared, among others, by Harold Wilson,

prime minister when the East of Suez withdrawal was announced.

The focus on post-imperial decline and contraction has concealed an

obvious continuum of extra-European British defence interests, facilities

and deployments running from the 1960s to the present day. Similarly,

the focus upon the end of empire has blinded many to the numerous

imperial legacies – not to say imperial commitments – that survived the

1960s. Though the major territories that had formed the British Empire –

located in Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia – had gained independ-

ence by the late 1960s, Britain’s empire in fact remained sizeable, and cer-

tainly global, well into the 1990s. The remaining islands and enclaves of

empire still represented a signiﬁcant global footprint, and many did not

gain their independence until the years after Africa, South Asia, and

South-East Asia had witnessed the end of British rule. Between 1968 and

1971, for example, independence came to Aden, Mauritius, Swaziland,

Nauru, Tonga, Fiji, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Between 1973 and 1984, independence was granted to the Bahamas,

Grenada, the Seychelles, Dominica, the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert and

Ellice Islands, St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Lucia, the New Hebrides,

Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, and Brunei. Hong Kong

remained a British possession, and military base, until 1997.

Part of the British Empire still exists today, and the fact that the

defence of these colonies remains a primary British military commitment

has helped preserve the global posture of Britain’s armed forces. The

remaining British colonies, known today as Overseas Territories, are

Anguilla, Ascension Island, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British

Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands,

the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie,

and Oeno Islands, St Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich

Islands, Tristan da Cunha, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Some of

these territories have a military use for Britain and its allies, or require gar-

rison forces, such as Ascension Island, British Indian Ocean Territory, the

Falklands and Gibraltar. Britain also has two Sovereign Base Areas in

Cyprus, which support permanent British military establishments.

The

Imperial defence in the post-imperial era 305

306 A. Jackson

retention of some of Britain’s imperial base infrastructure represents

another important continuum with the era of classic imperial defence,

and Britain also enjoys base rights and military facilities in numerous

independent countries, such as Belize, Brunei, Canada, Kenya, Oman and

Singapore, as well as supplies defence and security expertise to scores of

countries around the world and is a signatory to numerous defence

alliances. Today, British forces are committed in Africa, the Caribbean,

Central Asia, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, as well as in Euro-

pean locations such as the Balkans, several former Soviet states, Germany

and Northern Ireland. According to the Chief of the Defence Staff,

General Sir Michael Walker, in addition to British warships, air squadrons

and regiments serving in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Brunei, Cyprus, the

Falklands, Gibraltar, Iraq and Sierra Leone in 2005, Britain had small

detachments of service personnel in seventy-four different countries and

eighty-four defence attaché sections around the world.

The fact of

Britain’s continuing commitment to a global military presence and global

military deployments – irrespective of the Cold War and the downsizing of

the armed forces – should come as no surprise, for the defence of British

overseas interests and overseas territories has always been a priority for

British foreign and defence policy. Furthermore, despite relative decline

and imperial contraction, its ﬁnancial, commercial, diplomatic and cul-

tural links with the wider world remained substantial.

Imperial defence from the dawning of the Cold War to the

decolonization decade

Having argued that there was more continuity from the days of the empire

and imperial defence than is usually assumed, it is useful to examine how

Britain came to retain such commitments even whilst its power and pres-

ence in the world was shrinking. Between the end of the Second World

War and the Suez crisis of 1956, imperial defence changed surprisingly

little, conceptually at least. Despite the seismic shifts in the balance of

global power wrought by the Second World War and the onset of the

nuclear age, Britain’s defence vision remained recognizably imperial, with

familiar pre-war – not to say nineteenth century – themes to the fore. Thus,

for example, the strategic appreciation presented by the COS to the British

government in May 1947 read very much like a nineteenth-century imper-

ial defence study, in terms of its emphasis on retaining forces in the Middle

East and other key regions, and the continued use of the Royal Navy to

police the world’s major sea routes.

The Russian threat (and Russia had of

course been public enemy number one for much of the nineteenth

century) was taken in the report’s stride, a simple bolt-on to the enduring

precepts of imperial defence. Having had the ‘Eastern Question’ as a key

pillar in Britain’s strategy of Russian containment throughout the nine-

teenth century, it was not too much of an exercise in strategic diversion to

embroider a standard rendition of imperial defence with new threads asso-

ciated with the atomic environment and the emerging Cold War. Imperial

bases in the Middle East, as they had done before, could house the forces

required to strike should there be a war with Russia (strategic bombers

becoming more important than large concentrations of troops). Part one

of the report dealt with ‘Commonwealth Defence Policy’, contending, in

ﬁne tradition, that ‘the security of the UK is the keystone of Common-

wealth defence’.

Another striking feature of the COS’s strategic appreciation of 1947 was

that, even with the independence of India and Pakistan and the loss of the

Indian Army in the same year, Britain’s strategic vision continued to

encompass the need to contribute to the defence of those two countries.

Russian ‘eastward expansion’, for example, ‘would threaten the security of

India, our control of sea communications in the Indian Ocean and our

resources of oil, tin, and rubber’. This demonstrated the way in which, in

British eyes at least, the empire to Commonwealth transition was not sup-

posed to see an end to Britain’s leadership, or its responsibility for the

security of newly independent states (in the event of war with Russia, the

report stated, ‘an offensive base in North-West India’ would be required).

It was hoped that, irrespective of independence, such states would choose

to remain within the orbit of British power. A similar intent was to be

observed in the Paciﬁc. There, despite the fact that America had clearly

become the defensive guarantor of British territories and dominions when

Pax Britannica’s naval shield failed in December 1941, Britain still con-

ceived the need to deploy forces in order to contribute to the security of

Australia, New Zealand, and the many imperial territories in the Paciﬁc.

All of this showed how robust the legacy of Britain’s traditional formula-

tion of imperial defence policy was, and how strong its determination to

remain a world power was (and, it should not be forgotten how great the

demand was from other countries for a sustained British contribution to

their security). Of course, some saw this as a strategically blinkered

approach, as Britain missed a golden opportunity in the post-war world to

scale back its commitments and tether defence policy more ﬁrmly to

national security.

There were constant and powerful pressures for a scaling down of

Britain’s ambitious extra-European security commitments. The develop-

ment of NATO, and its preoccupation with the defence of the western

European heartland, was to lead to a long-term tension with this older

strategic stance, habit and instinct of the British, though it was never to

completely win out over it.

Acting as an unwelcome rudder to defence

policy in the post-war decades, the plight of the British economy was never

far from the Whitehall mind; in 1945, the British government had

expected the country to remain at the centre of a global empire and Com-

monwealth, which would recover its strength and form the third arc of

power in the world behind the spheres of America and Russia. The

Imperial defence in the post-imperial era 307

308 A. Jackson

economy was never to recover sufﬁciently, however, to drive this world

vision, though successive British governments showed themselves unwill-

ing to heed its steer in the direction of strategic economy.

The question ‘Did the Suez crisis of 1956 herald the end of empire?’

has been a popular undergraduate essay title for years. Brian Lapping,

who produced a seminal Granada television series called End of Empire in

the mid-1980s, believed that, whatever twitches emanated from the dying

empire thereafter, Suez had indeed been its death knell, and, more

particularly, that of the actions associated with British imperialism. ‘The

Suez operation wrote ﬁnis not only to the British empire but to all the

empires of western Europe’.

Others were not so sure.

They pointed out

that Suez was not as big a deal as assumed; on the one hand, Britain was

recalibrating and downsizing its Middle Eastern commitments before 1956

anyway; on the other hand, the debacle did not lead to a British retreat,

from that region or any of the others in which Britain was engaged. Not

only did Britain’s territorial hold in the Mediterranean remain ﬁrm and

British strategic weapons remain based in the region (including nuclear

bombers), but also Britain was back two years later on another interven-

tionist military mission, this time in Jordan. Moreover, the decade follow-

ing the Suez crisis was something of a heyday for imperial intervention,

particularly that of an expeditionary nature, in the East of the Suez

region. The British Empire as a territorial entity did not suddenly implode

after Suez, irrespective of damage to reputation and relations with

America as well as the Commonwealth, and British policy-makers and mili-

tary strategists did little to revise their conception of the world and

Britain’s place in it – the third power behind America and Russia, the

senior partner in the Commonwealth club, the arbiter of the destiny of

scores of colonies and their peoples.

Another factor keeping Britain strategically engaged with the wider

world was its role in the Cold War, which included membership of regional

security alliances, particularly the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)

and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), both designed to

compliment NATO in barring the spread of communism (and both requir-

ing the commitment of British military resources).

Britain’s involvement

in these Cold War creations stemmed directly from her imperial presence

in the regions concerned. Britain’s participation in SEATO was driven by a

traditional desire to help protect and reassure parts of the empire and Com-

monwealth that felt exposed by increasing regional tensions and the spread

of communism (in particular, Australia and New Zealand). Even in the late

1960s, the British government believed that it had a responsibility to con-

tribute to the defence of Australia and New Zealand, to afford a nuclear

guarantee to allied states and to contribute to security in the South

Asia–South-East Asia region, particularly in order to counter the spread of

communism. A feature of this defence commitment was the desire to offer

India an alternative to ally with either of the superpowers or to develop its

own nuclear capability. Britain’s imperial defence commitments and

mindset had, to a signiﬁcant extent, survived the end of empire by respawn-

ing as Cold War defence imperatives. These commitments, though scaled

down, survived beyond the ‘end of empire’ decade, SEATO lasting until

1977, CENTO staggering on until 1979.

Despite the continued attachment to extra-European security commit-

ments, there took place a conscious, Whitehall-directed imperial retreat in

the late 1950s, though even here, talk of an end of empire or abandon-

ment of imperial defence is premature. Framed against the backdrop of

Suez, sluggish economic recovery and the 1957 Sandys Defence Review

(nuclear costs going up, conventional forces therefore coming down),

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan asked his Cabinet colleagues for an

‘audit of empire’: what have we got, why do we have it, what does it do for

us?

The impossible was thought; even a ‘fortress colony’ such as Cyprus,

it was concluded, could proceed along the path to independence. With

Malaysia, the remaining jewel in the imperial crown, recently independ-

ent, and Ghana pointing the way towards African independence, in 1959

Macmillan appointed a colonial secretary (Iain Macleod) who believed in

faster decolonization in the remaining imperial regions. In the following

year, Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech was beamed across the globe as

‘the year of Africa’ began the rush to independence that was to see Britain

out of Africa by 1968.

Nevertheless, even this resolve to prune imperial commitments severely

was largely a result of an assessment of how best to preserve British inﬂu-

ence in the world, how to secure Britain’s continued leadership of a

global Commonwealth that, whilst not quite imperial red on the map,

would remain cheerfully pink.

In particular, it did not denote a lessening

of commitment to the vast Indian Ocean region; in fact, it was quite the

reverse. The 1962 Defence Review conﬁrmed that Britain would tighten

its grip in this region, the last great imperial redoubt. Moreover, in terms

of imperial defence, the British government saw no reason why a post-impe-

rial state could not still form part of British plans to project power. Ceylon

provided a good example of this; becoming independent in 1948, the new

government was willing to remain a Commonwealth member, whilst grant-

ing the Royal Navy the continued use of Trincomalee, from which the

navy’s East Indies Station continued to police the Indian Ocean from the

Malacca Straits to the Swahili coast and from the Southern Ocean to the

Persian Gulf. Imperial defence also lived on in Britain’s stubborn refusal

to abandon a commitment to a region even as Britain’s military forces and

overseas bases contracted. This can be illustrated by extending the

example given above. The navy’s East Indies Station was closed in 1958,

and Britain departed Ceylon for the ﬁrst time since the days of Nelson.

The station’s disbandment, however, did not signal the end of Britain’s

naval commitment to the region.

Responsibility for the area formerly

covered by the East Indies Station was divided between the Far East

Imperial defence in the post-imperial era 309

310 A. Jackson

Command, the Atlantic and South America Command, and the newly

formed Arabian Seas and Persian Gulf Station. This example reveals two

enduring British defence themes: on the one hand, the desire never to

abandon a commitment, even when that commitment was being scaled

down; on the other hand, the habit of stretching resources (some would

say overstretching) to continue to meet those commitments.

Britain intended, and never ceased attempting, to perform the military

and political roles commonly associated with the term ‘world power’. Even

though Britain lost the remaining large territories of its empire in the

1960s, it still had a global role, both in terms of the government’s concep-

tion of Britain’s place in the world, and in terms of the hard power of mili-

tary reach and infrastructure. In 1967, for example, with decolonization

apparently complete, Britain still had 61,000 military personnel East of

Suez. The Far East Fleet, based in Singapore, had between seventy and

eighty vessels of all classes, and the Far East Air Force deployed numerous

squadrons, including fast jet combat aircraft and strategic bombers.

Even

though the empire was retracting, it had never been umbilically linked to

the projection of British power, and Britain’s resolve and capacity in this

direction continued long into the post-imperial age. This was especially

true given the importance of Britain’s new post-war role as Cold War

junior partner. Standing alongside the US in defence of the West and its

interests in the wider world, and with a global military presence featuring

strategic nuclear weapons and globally deployed conventional forces, even

when shorn of formal colonial holdings, Britain remained a unique world

power. The intention and capacity to be a global military power even in an

age of imperial contraction, was well summed up in the title of a book

contributing to the contemporary strategic and defence debate of the

1960s, called Arms Without Empire.

Britain would remain capable of

deploying forces globally in defence of its interests, including the defence

of Commonwealth states and remaining colonies, and in fulﬁlment of its

Cold War commitments.

The loss of the ‘imperial defence’ perspective on British security policy

has obscured the fact that there was a great deal of continuity in Britain’s

relations with the wider world; as already suggested, it might be said that

the imperial strand of British defence policy never ended and remains to

this day. Even with the empire disappearing, Britain’s armed forces

retained a global posture, even if they became much smaller. The loss of

colonies did not alter the mission of the British armed forces to project

power globally as well as to defend Britain through NATO, and with

technological developments, the need for colonial bases in order to do

this was greatly reduced. In the 1960s, both the Navy and the RAF champi-

oned their competing visions of how to project power around the world,

much as in the past. A new emphasis upon strategic mobility brought the

promise of military projection without the need for imperial garrisons or

bases on anything like the old scale. The RAF’s island staging plan, for

example, was founded upon the use of a small handful of strategic colo-

nial bases and strategic lift aircraft and ﬁghters such as the American F-

111 and the British TSR2. The navy’s vision, similarly allowing

intervention and troop deployment worldwide, was based upon aircraft

carriers, commando carriers and the Royal Marines. The struggle between

the RAF and the Navy for a greater share of the defence budget in order

to fund their competing visions for global power projection ended when

the Treasury rode roughshod over both their dreams. Plans for the two

new aircraft carriers (CVA-01), approved by Cabinet in 1962, were

scrapped; TSR2 was cancelled, as was the order for F-111s. Nevertheless,

true to Britain’s reluctance to abandon the imperial role, the 1966

Defence Review did nothing to change Britain’s defence commitment to

the East of Suez region.

The non-withdrawal from East of Suez and the wider world:

imperial defence after the 1960s

The 1967 announcement by Harold Wilson’s government that Britain

would withdraw from the East of Suez region by the mid-1970s is rightly

seen as a milestone.

Britain was withdrawing its forces and shutting its

two remaining ‘big’ imperial bases and would cease to be the major exter-

nal power in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf regions that it had

dominated for nearly a century and a half. The announcement also sig-

nalled a signiﬁcant Cold War repositioning, for America would now have

to ﬁll the void in order to protect this vital region from Russian penetra-

tion. It is usually assumed that the Labour government’s decision to with-

draw forces from East of Suez ended Britain’s historic military role in the

region, and many imperial historians see the 1967 announcement, rather

than the Suez crisis of 1956, as a more ﬁtting peg to hang Britain’s ‘end of

empire’ hat. Despite the apparent ﬁnality of the decision to withdraw

from East of Suez, however, there was to be no ﬁrm handshake and swift

departure – more of a long, lingering goodbye that is yet to end. The

‘withdrawal’ was tempered by the creation of a new standing naval force

based in Singapore, and the institution of a defence agreement focused

on South-East Asia. Britain adopted the practice of sending a naval task

group to the East of Suez region at regular intervals, a makeweight in the

light of the unpopular decision to withdraw. Instability in the Gulf – some

of it caused by Britain’s decision to leave – led to the establishment of a

permanent naval presence there, less than a decade after the withdrawal

was supposed to have been affected.

Why was the withdrawal from East of Suez not completed? As has been

contended, partial withdrawal was a symptom of Britain’s reluctance to

sever connections with the wider world. Another reason was purely to do

with events; instability, particularly in the Persian Gulf, meant that Britain

continued to be engaged in the region, because it remained an area of

Imperial defence in the post-imperial era 311