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Aviation History
1976
1976 - 0013.PDF
FLIGHT International, w/e 3 January 1976 13 Air defence: the renewed RAF need In the midst of more threatened defence cuts, the RAF is seriously concerned about the number of aircraft it has in the front line as well as the improved quality of the Warsaw Pact forces facing it. Chief of the Air Staff ACM' Sir Andrew Humphrey, in a "state of the nation" speech just before Christmas (see "Flight" last week, page 900), drew particular attention to the air-defence needs of the Royal Air Force. I HAVE OFTEN SAID that the quality of the air force is all-important. In deed a small air force is nothing— only an extravagance—if its quality is not high. I believe our quality is high today. We could not have moved the forces to Belize that we did at such short notice a few weeks ago if it had not been; nor could we have the success that we do in international competitions, and a month or two ago the Harrier Wing in Germany gained a TacEval assessment of one in every respect—something that I do not think any other unit has ever done in Nato. But if the quality is high, the quantity gives me great cause for worry—in particular our strength in combat aircraft. A very large reduc tion was made as a result of the 1957 Defence White Paper and ever since then there has been a gradual erosion, sometimes noticed momentarily but more generally unnoticed. Our strength in combat aircraft today is only 13 per cent of what it was in 1957—that is an 87 per cent reduction, and I use the expression combat air craft to mean any aircraft intended for attack, defence or reconnaissance. It is not only we that have been reduced. The other Services have been too and so have the other Allied air forces. Balances are delicate things, fairly easily upset, and in important respects the balance of power has been moving for many years against the interests of the Western Alliance. If the focus of Russian effort is today on the ideological struggle, she is at the same time building up her physical strength so that she could change or threaten to change to a strategy of force at any time she wished—and certainly much more quickly than we could increase our strength to meet her. At a time when the Western Alliance is weakened by dissent be tween some member nations, and by an unwillingness on the part of most to pay sufficient to sustain the present level of defence, Russia is increasing her military expenditure each year— indeed Dr Schlesinger has said that it has increased by between 3 and 5 per cent each year for the past ten years and that this year it exceeds that of America in real terms by no less than 50 per cent. Perhaps even more alarming, Russia is now spending considerably more on military research and development than the whole of the Western world put together. So in the future we must expect to be faced not only with forces of increasing size and increasing quality but also with, most probably, some alarming technological achieve ments. Russia is now making more than 1,700 military aircraft each year and of these more than 700 are of the most advanced type of high-per formance combat aircraft. She is replacing her older aircraft at least one for one with new and vastly more advanced types. To take a civilian analogy, it is as though an airline was replacing its aged fleet of Comets and early 707s one for one with Concordes and 747s—a gigantic increase in capability. In spite of this there are still those who argue that it is Russian inten tions, not capabilities, that matter and. MJG-23B photograph courtesy of Flug Revue since it cannot be shown that their intentions are hostile, there is no need for the Western Alliance to match their capability. It was against this rather sombre background that we had to consider our strategic priorities in the defence review of 1974. We gave first priority to the core of Nato strategy and in particular to three components of it: the security of transatlantic lines of communication; the security of the base area—Great Britain and the sea and air approaches to it; and the security of the Central Region. The submarine is seen by most people as dominating the transatlantic lines of communication today, but I would take a very substantial bet that in a few years it will be air power that does so. In war, the top-priority loads would be bound to be carried by air. Moreover, Russian fast, wide-ranging and high-performance aircraft like Backfire, armed with stand-off missiles, may soon become an even greater danger to allied shipping than the relatively slow-moving Russian sub marines, and in the battle against the
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