Mark Urban - The Edge: Is the Military Dominance of the West Coming to an End?

T he Spithead Naval Review of June 1977 was one of those ceremonial occasions at which Britain excels. Scores of warships anchored in the Solent, pennants flying and sailors cheering as the Queen cruised by in the Royal Yacht. Dozens of naval helicopters performed a fly-past, and those unable to attend the spectacle were treated to a full-scale BBC outside broadcast.

The fleet lying at anchor was much smaller than that of the Coronation Review of the Fleet in 1953, and that of today hardly resembles the Royal Navy of 1977. Spithead, though, was a snapshot of British naval power as it drained away on an ebb-tide every bit as powerful and irresistible as those Solent currents feared by weekend dinghy sailors.

As a sixteen-year-old anxious to see the spectacle, but without the Royal Yacht at my disposal, I reviewed the fleet two days before the Queen, from an Isle of Wight ferry. I had gone there to see the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, rows of frigates with such names as Naiad, Euryalus and Ariadne, that evoked not just Nelsons victories but also the classical era, and to see the sinister shark-like profiles of Oberon-class submarines like Ocelot and Osiris. I was spellbound at the scale of it.

Today, Britain has no operating aircraft carrier, though it plans to get back into that business soon, and it has no diesel submarines like the O-class at all. Meanwhile its force of destroyers and frigates, the workhorses of the surface fleet, has shrunk from seventy at the time of Spithead to nineteen today.

This story of disappearing naval power could just as easily be applied to the other armed services. A couple of years after Spithead, I signed up as a gap year officer in the Royal Tank Regiment. For a short, heady time I was the commander of one of the British Armys nine hundred Chieftain tanks. Now there are fewer than two hundred tanks in service.

Britains post-war stepping back from global power was marked by a series of defence reviews or cuts, in laymans terms in 1957, 1974 and 1981. Undoubtedly, though, the end of the Cold War gave the greatest impetus to this process, at least in my lifetime. The 1990 package of cuts, called Options for Change, came in the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and presented Britain with its long-awaited peace dividend.

The Soviet threat, the driver for decades of defence spending, had collapsed and there could be no justification for the continued diversion of resources from the civilian economy. Like many other veterans of the Cold War, I embraced this wholeheartedly and was quite unsentimental about the disbandment or amalgamation of many regiments, including the one in which I had served. Such ebbs and flows in the status of great powers are familiar enough to students of history. While I might love reading about Nelsons or Wellingtons victories, the harsh realities of ships paid off or officers put on half pay at the end of the Napoleonic Wars were an integral part of Britains national story. A child of the 1960s, I had absolutely no hankering after empire.

There was a post-1990 demobilisation across Europe. France, always primarily a land power, took steps that would lead to its army shrinking from 548,000 to the current planned 213,000. The story was the same, whether for a national political elite labouring under the sense that preserving military power was part of preserving their top table status as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, or for a country in which a completely different history produced equally different attitudes to military power and its use.