Argentina's claim to the falklands

Factual Questions
21

Along with the already-mentioned Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht is also cited by some Argentines. Here is a chronology of major events in Falklands history. As you’ll see, Amerigo Vespucci might have sighted the Islands as early as 1501. Hmmm, wonder if Gavin Menzies would say the Chinese actually beat Amerigo by some eighty years…

Zapper: Although Malvinas Day indeed commemorates Argentina’s “righteous and glorious” seizure of the islands on April 2, 1982, the public celebration of the occasion took place on March 31 this year. Since the next observance is slated for April 5, 2004, it’s apparent Argentina joins the USA in invariably observing certain holidays on Mondays.

22

RickJay wrote,

Tell me more. How do we know this? I’ve heard this figure before but it doesn’t conform to anything else I’ve read. Argentina had nine ships that (at least on paper) carried Exocet missiles.
2 Type 42 Destroyers 1 twin Sea Dart launcher, 4 Exocet
3 Sumner class Destroyers 4 Exocet
1 Gearing class Destroyers 4 Exocet
3 A 69 type Corvettes 2 Exocet
That’s 30 sea-launched Exocets not counting reloads (which Argentina may or may not have had).

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1984/HJA.htm
That site mentions “six Exocet missile equipped destroyers”.

Does the “six Exocets” figure apply only to the AM 39 version, which was designed to be fired from Super Etendard aircraft? Or did someone has go and do some research which indicates that the Argentines had a bunch of empty (or nonexistent) Exocet launchers on the their vessels? In any case I’m curious. Discrepancies between real capabilities and “on paper” capabilities have always interested me.

23

NorthernPiper wrote,

Hey, watch your pronouns! :slight_smile: If you had written that to a present day American, I might still object, since there is obviously a difference between a government (which applied in the 1812 case, if not the 1775 case) and its people. In any case the situation doesn’t apparently apply to Dancing Fool, unless you happen to know that her or his location is not the same as her or his nationality.

24

Boris, the Argentine navy did not play a role in the conflict after the Belgrano sinking. Any sea-launched Exocets would have been irrelevant unless they managed to convert them.

25

Not quite the full story, though I should have phrased it better, for which I apologise. The destroyer screen is there to shoot down the missiles as you say, but also to be hit instead of the carrier it protects if it can’t destroy the missiles.

You are correct that the Sea Dart and Sea Cat defense systems proved useless against the Exocet. However this does not hold for the Seawolf system. Seawolf failed, IIRC, on two occasions. Once where another ship sailed between it and the missile (and got hit); and once where the radar frequency interfered with something else and was shut off with predictable results.

I don’t believe that the Atlantic Conveyor had any defence at all.

Some useful cites

http://www.btinternet.com/~broadsword82/ourstory/gdp.htm

http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/cmackenzie/website/falkwar.htm

I am well aware of that. Where I work made good money out of it. But once British troops were ashore and equipped, the war was effectively won. Argentine ships could not approach because of British submarines, and British troops had Rapier and Blowpipe to defend themselves against aircraft.

26

I’m not sure where this idea of Falkland Islanders not being able to work in Britain came from. I grew up there in the 80s, and when kids reached A-level age (about 16 - last 2 years of secondary school) they got packed off to a boarding school in England (at the govt’s expense - cheaper than employing teaching staff for the small proportion of pupils who stayed on past 16). Then, they would go to Uni sometimes. Often they would then stay. They could do this because they are British subjects - the relationship of the Falklands to the rest of Britain is a bit like that between the Isle of Man and the rest of Britain.

And trust me, you have never met anyone on this earth who feels as British as the Falkland Islanders do.

27

Is the “Falkland Islands Company” (which owns most of the islands a publicly held firm? I winder if it is profitable?

28

DrNick

The point about Falkland Islanders is they had no automatic right of work or residense.
Most Falkland Islanders however do have UK passorts due to direct descendency from UK nationals.

As for the effectiveness of missile and weapons systems, talk to me, I was firing them!

Seawolf was the most effectice surface borne missile system in the war.(Harier borne sidewinders were possibly the most decisive)Seawolf missiles took out most of the aricraft hit from the surface, and they also hit bombs and missiles released from those aircraft.

Seadart was extremely effective at hitting its targets, and it was the command of the approaches to Falkland sound by HMS Coventry, armed with it, that led to the mission by the AAF to sink her.It was Seadart that made airborne Exocet attacks on the fleet risky as the Etendards were no match for it.

HMS Coventry was in company with HMS Broadsword which was providing close range air support.

These two vessels had been attacked previously and had not been hit, however HMS Broadsword was unable to shoot due to a software error.

HMS Coventry had been unable to shoot because the two aircarft made their approach over land and her radar was unable to decipher the contacts in time.

The software error on HMS Broadsword was caused by the two aircraft flying very close together, it’s doppler radar identified them as one target, and when they separated for the attack run the software identified those two correctly, but in addition, generated an image for a third ‘ghost’ aircraft whose speed was the sum of the two true contacts. Because of the prioritisation of the onboard computors, this ghost contact which had a much swifter arrival time, was given highest priority for the short range radar to attempt a lock.
Obviously a radar lock could not be obtained on a non existant contact but it prevented the system from operating on the true contacts.

All this was discovered on that first attack, and when the second attack came in, HMS Broadsword had found a temporary solution, reboot the computor as the aircraft spearated, and as a precaution, not use the data from the main radar to feed the computor and go by line of sight to get the short range radar lock.

As the second wave came in, HMS Broadsword was preparing to shoot the aircraft down, but HMS Coventry, not knowing the Broadsword was definatetly able to defend them both, turned right across the clear fire zone of HMS Broadsword, thus compromising their defense.

HMS Coventry was hit by bombs, turned turtle and sunk.

Most of the Argentine aircraft hits on RN vessels were from aircraft not capable of carrying Exocet(it is a big heavy missile)
Those hits were mostly bombs with a number of other types of smaller missiles.

The Argentine pilots were extremely highly skilled, we trained them, and they released their bombs as close to their targets as possible to prevent countermeasure defences. Those bombs were armed by a propellor like device that unscrews as the bomb leaves the aircraft, they released them too late however and the bombs struck their targets without arming, some passed right out the other side, and a few came to rest inside the ships, such as on HMS Antelope.

Not true, Exocets hit HMS Sheffield, which should not have been lost if the proper state of readiness had been in use at the time, and should have been.
Exocets hit Atlantic Conveyor, leading to an almost critical loss of them big heavy duty helicopter things whose name escapes me for the moment.
One Exocet was hit directly by a 4.5" shell from one of the type 21 destroyers, can’t rremeber who, another was diverted away from its target by using helicopters to decoy the missiles off course, at least one missed HMS Sheffield and two other missed competely.

HMS Antelope was sunk by bombs that had landed inside her and had not gone off, but did so during the process of trying to defuse them.
HMS Ardent was hit by bombs and ‘dumb’ missiles in Falklands Sound.

HMS Torquay was hit by one bomb that went right through the main magazine and out again without exploding.

These are all from memory, I think a couple of others took bomb hits that did not explode.

However, the effectiveness of the Exocets on the overall campaign turned out to be far less than the effectiveness of plain bombs.

Had those bombs all gone off, I think there were about a dozen or more ships hit, things would have been far more difficult, however the fact remains that the AAF was seriously depleted by the time the landings went ahead, they were operating outside their own fattack profiles and were no match for the Harriers.

No AAF attack got near to damaging HMS Invincible, nor HMS Hermes and it was the air support from these two, along with that from HMS Fearless and HMS Itrepid that proved decisive.

As for Seacat, what a crap system it was!

29

Any truth to a story that was being told shortly after the Falklands War; that one problem the Royal Navy had was that their missile defense programs were not written to defend against Exocet missiles because the original programmers had assumed Exocets wouldn’t be fired at British ships?

30

The “six Exocets” figure (I recall only 5, but it’s been a long time since I read about that war) were air-launched. Argentina did have a number of Exocets launchable from sea or land platforms, but only a few that were the AM 39 version.

–Patch

31

One thing we did get from the French, the best advice on how to jam, distract and divert Exocets.

If Argentina had more Exocets to bring into action, there is a godd chance they would have been ineffective anyway.

I do remember all the Electronic Warfare Operators being sent for an extremely confidential briefing at one point, rumour had it (and ship scuttlebutt can be compellingly accurate, and also wrong too)
they had been given the operating frequencies of the Exocet radar and ways to reduce the Electronic signature of the ships so that Exocet couldn’t see the EM emissions.

32

[highly controversial for the sake of argument hat on]

…so it seems to me,that in fact the only claim the british have to the falklands is the same as the claim they have to Northern Ireland…“We’ve been here a damn long time and we ain’t gettin out any time soon”…

[/highly controversial for the sake of argument hat off]

33

glass onion wrote,

Heh. That sounds like pretty much the basic claim that any country has to any territory. Obviously legalistic claims are made as well, but at their roots, most territorial territorial claims seemed to be about status quo: military power, who lives where, etc. All I’m saying is maybe your statement isn’t as controversial as it may appear on its surface.

34

Thanks to patchbunny and company for the elaboration about the sea- versus air-launched Exocets. I wonder why there are two versions (actually three if you count the sub-launched SM 39)? Are there multiple versions of Harpoon, or Penguin (which, IIRC, can be launched from certain mods of the F-16 as well as certain ships)?

Actually, I think the Argentine reliance on aircraft instead of ships to deliver Exocets has more to do with fear of personnel losses than military survivability per se. Certainly, RN subs (and Sea Harriers and Exocet-armed frigates) could have sunk a lot of Argentine vessels, just as Sea Darts, Sea Harriers, and 4.5" guns chewed up a lot of Argentine aircraft. It’s just that ships have crews of hundreds, where aircraft have crews of one or two each. What fraction of Argentines killed in the conflict were aboard Belgrano? I bet it was pretty high.

I don’t fault the Argentines (or anyone else) for having tried to minimize losses in human life. The loss of Belgrano was obviously a major tragedy, and had that ship been sunk in 1945 by the Imperial Japanese Navy it would have been a very sad day for my country. It’s just that there’s nothing about losing a Super Etendard or a Skyhawk that makes it militarily insignificant compared with the loss of a 1940s-vintage cruiser or destroyer. Perhaps the Brish sub fleet would have swallowed the Argentine navy whole, but the Argentines must (or should) have known that going in. Argentina had several specialist anti-submarine vessels and anti-submarine aircraft; they let one of the former get shot up by a bunch of Royal Marines in South Georgia with recoilless rifles (and a Lee-Enfield!)

The British risked a huge portion of their surface navy to secure the islands. The Argentines weren’t willing to do that, and I can’t beat the feeling that that is part of why they lost.

35

casdave wrote,

Aww, but Seacat is every boy’s dream of a surface-to-air missile: you fly it like a remote control plane and it ends in a big explosion! Not like those fancy new system where a computer gets all the fun. :slight_smile:

Okay, back to adulthood. I’ve been wondering for a while: was Seacat ever even fired in the Falklands? Did it have any successes? What about Seaslug (now there’s a great name for a SAM)?

Chinooks. Another of my childhood favorites.

36

Hey, as long as we’ve got the Falklands experts around…

There’s a widely circulated story on the interweb that as the Sheffield went down, the surviving sailors sang Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Is it SD or BS?

37

As opposed to the Argentinian claim which is “There were some Argentinians living on those islands for five years in the early nineteenth century, which trumps the British claim based on consistent occupation for the last one hundred and seventy years.”

38

Seacat missiles were also known as ‘Whoosh plops!’

These missiles have two motors, the first is the launch motor, this provides the thrust to get it to its cruising speed of around 450knots, the main motor sustains the flight from around 500 yards onwards.

The idea is that the missile launches only whEN the launch motor is producing enought thrust, there is a shear pin in the missiles which breaks when that level of thrust is reached and releases the missile.

We used to test the avionics and hydraulic systems as part of planned maintenance. The would be set on the launch pad, with all the safeties to prevent accidental firing, and we would run pressurised hydraulic lines to the missiles, the avionics would be powered from the main connector in the missile base in diagnostics mode. This was we could check rf reception and crystal frequency and wing delfection and wind deflection rates.

The trouble was that all this manhandling of the missiles resulted in the electrical connectors becoming damaged, other reliability problems were caused by the testing process, as a result it was not unusual for one or other motor initiation circuit to fail, and the missile would do one of two things…
1)It would ignite the main motor alone, but this does not produce that massive burst of accelaration, nor the massive thrust, so it would never break the launch shear pin and it would just sit on the pad burning the paint off everything nearby, but not get airborne.
2)The Launch motor alone would fire, the missile would launch with a big ‘whoooooosh’, but that motor would burn out after a maybe five seconds, and with no main motor to sustain flight, it would just plop into the sea.

Seacats were launched many times, the fully automatic version of the system such as fitted to type 21 frigates (GWS 24?) was the best as it did not need to rely on visual contact nor a missile aimer to steer it. It was designed to deal with short rang ethreats, about 3miles range with incoming speeds of around 300 to 400 knots, even in the Falklands arena it was hopelessly outdated, nevertheless it was credited with 8 kills, but it needed around 80 succesful launches to achieve that.
One that I heard about was HMS Fearless, it was tracking an AAF target crossing, rather than one coming straight in. The system on this ship was particularly old and decrepit, being visual only.
The missile director crew had locked onto the AAF target and were following it when the missile was launched.
The electro/mechanical computor predicted the course of the target and adjusted accordingly, but the target was obscured as it flew on the other side of some high ground.
Having lost visual contact the director crew, with a missile in the air were dissappointed and just carried on tracking across, seemingly aimlessly, however the AAF target emerged from behind the high ground, only to meet the missile which was on the computor corrected course.

Seawolf, in comparison, only launched 8 times, and scored 5 kills and it was so effective that neither of the two ships carrying it were hit by AAF aircraft.
Seaslug was a waste of time, the confidence in the system was so low it was used against aircraft only once, and it missed, but the aircraft concerned didn’t, and it hit one of the County class destroyers, can’t remember which one.
It was used instead to try and hit a few shore based Argentine positions, I don’t know it it was effective but a mach 2 missile incoming and weighing several hundreds of pounds would make for a pretty good distraction.

One serious shortcoming of the Royal Navy air defences is that the fire control systems were only able to run one weapons system at a time, so for instance Sea Dart could deal with the longer range threat, but the 4.5" gun which might have coped with the short range threat, could not be used at the very same time.
The type 42 destroyers were designed to have Sea Dart, for long range, and then 4.5" for medium range and general utility and also Sea Wolf for short range air threats, each with an independant but integrated fire control system, but someone in Whitehall decided it was too espensive, and what copuld have been an area defence platform was seriously compromised, resulting in the loss of HMS Coventry, and generally weak air threat cover which could have cost another eight or nine ships had the bombs exploded correctly.

Sea Dart was well capable of taking on Exocet, it was used to take out a number of bombs, it was tested on taking out artillery shells and succeeded and after the war Sea Wolf was tested against Exocet and hit the mark.
Had it not been for the bean counters in the Ministry of Defence its possible the HMS Sheffield would not have been lost, however I personally don’t think it would have made much differance since HMS Sheffield was operating in an inappropriate state of readiness for action.

The RN’S main weaknesses were,

a lack of an airborne early warning system,

it’s poor distribution of Sea Wolf systems, there were only two ships so equipped when designers had called for at least another 4 vessels but in truth there should not have been any Seacat systems these should all have been replaced with Sea Wolf and that would have meant myabe 30 operational systems,

poor implementation of fire control systems so that two weapons systems on one ship were not able to engage separate targets, software faults in Sea Wolf, Sea Dart needing way too long to get the missile into an operable state (it took a couple of minutes to run up the gyros on a Sea Dart)

Sea slug systems were all but completely useless but still took a great deal of resources in material and operators just to keep running.

39

Another Argentine here on the board, first post I think BTW.

The official line for claiming the Falklands was that they are situated under the continental platform, supposedly delimits the sovereignty of Argentina in that sector of the sea.

At any rate, I really don’t care. A stupid war fought for stupid reasons, not to mention there was a dictator in the government (I think he was pulled because he bit the hand the fed him, mind you), and that there really is nothing of value since gas is dirt-cheap to extract in the Patagonia. If anything the largest concern should be handled collectively by South America, which should be the constant prescense of a British base.

@Zapper: Che, de donde sos? De Bs. As., Paternal aca.