It seems to me that we could have sent a couple of F-14s over there and helped our friends out, but we didn’t do anything and I’ve never seen a document that says why, or why not?
The UK almost had its hands full there, but we didn’t do jack…
My understanding is that the US did help, with a combination of diplomacy and intelligence information.
There’s the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, which establishes a doctrine of ‘hemispheric defense’. The U.S. is also a signatory to NATO. So both Argentina and the UK were allies. It would have been sticky to take direct action. In the end the U.S. did supply Intelligence as PaulParkhead said, reasoning that Argentina was the aggressor.
Conveniently ignoring the Monroe Doctrine in this case, while continuing to argue its validity (for right or wrong) with regard to Soviet assistance or interference in Cuba and Latin/South America.
Initially, there wasn’t a perceived need that the U.S. should intervene; the Argentine Navy was a third rate naval power consisting of mostly second-hand ships and obsolescent, lashed together attack systems. Indeed, if Britain had in its fleet inventory even one real aircraft carrier there simply wouldn’t have been an issue; the Royal Navy would have taken and held air superiority and the surveillence capability that comes with that, and would have been able to make short work of the poorly trained and unprepared Argentine Navy had they chosen to clash swords. However, Britain’s lack of air power–a sorry strategic error given the British experience with WWII–meant that the Argentine Navy could maneuver with near impunity, and their French-built Exocet anti-ship missiles proved to be far more effective and difficult to defend against than anticipated, allowing attacks on supply ships and ultimately sinking MV Atlantic Conveyor and HMS Sheffield.
Reagan ostensibly didn’t see the need to participate in what he considered a minor squable over a cold bit of icy rock, especially when it would have required diverting resources from the strategically important North Atlantic Second Fleet and Mediterranean Sixth Fleet in the midst of one of the most tense points in the latter days of the Cold War. The U.S. did eventually provide satellite and overflight intelligence to aid the British, and the Argentines withdrew, leaving the Falklands–a minor collection of islands with no siginificant 20th Century strategic importance whatsoever–under British protection. Whoopee.
One thing the Falklands War did do is provide a test of NATO naval tactics, and they came out with some serious deficiencies, particularly the reliance upon point defense systems to protect convoys and the weakness of the fleet structure in response to low intensity attacks. As the definitive post-WWII naval conflict, it demonstrated that traditional fleet protection methods were obsolete against even a nominally outdated anti-ship missile system, and resulted in a pretty significant reconsideration of naval strategy vis a vis a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict. The Soviets were heavily invested in cruise and supercruise anti-ship missile technology and strike-and-fade submarine attack tactics, and from the experience from the Falklands War would have been far more effective than planners had previously estimated. (Whether Soviet systems would have been anywhere as effective as claimed remains to be seen, but as has been noted since time immortal, in a challenge between armor and warhead, the warhead typically wins in the end.)
Stranger
I guess the British inhabitants of the Falklands don’t count, huh? :rolleyes:
Straun, there’s a difference between morality and strategy.
Had the Falklands remained in Argentinian hands, it would not have adversely affected the strategic picture that was the focus of the 80s - the Cold War. For that matter, the powers involved were all, in one way or another, on pretty good terms. The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins is still considered an excellent history of the conflict, and the events that lead up to it. I’ve not read the new edition shown here, but an older one.
At one point the Home Office was actively trying to help the Argentinian government seduce the Falkland Islanders to wanting Argentine citizenship. So, the idea of Argentine control of the islands really wasn’t anathema to anyone involved.
By invading and taking the islands by force (in part, as an attempt by the ruling gov’t to distract the populace from domestic troubles) Argentina changed the moral situation. So, while there may be some ecnomic value to the islands (mostly for the claim to the oil fields that are still AIUI untapped, because the technology is still not yet cheap enough to make getting the oil economically viable) they possess no inherent strategic value themselves.
Or to put things more succintly: Morality and strategy need not be locked together.
I don’t mean to imply that. However, from a strategic standpoint, the Falklands Islands are unnecessary, and if the Britain had been less anxious to prove itself on the world stage, it’s likely that the whole affair could have been aborted by diplomatic means. The Argentine Navy was certainly not prepared and the Galtieri regime was looking for someone to focus attention away from their own transgressions, so it started saber-rattling, then got backed into a corner by British threats. The Argentines had been agitating about the Falklands in the United Nations for years as a way to get attention and aid, and didn’t really expect the Brits to go to bat over it.
In retrospect, that estimation was foolish on their part, because the Thatcher Administration was having similar morale problems at home and we all know that a good juicy war fronting is a great way to detract from domestic issues, so Maggie was happy to oblige. (Despite conspiracy theories that Thatcher deliberately cooked up the scheme there is no evidence of intentionality on the part of the British, but nonetheless it benefitted Thatcher’s government which was struggling to justify its increasingly unpopular economic reforms.) FWIW, Argentina does legitimately hold claim as having first continually occupied the Falklands, and has never legally relinquished that claim, so their position on possession of the Falklands isn’t entirely unreasonable, even if the rationale behind it was pure politics.
One other reason that the U.S. didn’t want to pick sides was that Argentina was then being used as a proxy for arms sales to the Contras. The U.S. was still strongly supporting any non-Communist regime in South America, regardless of how authoritarian and corrupt it might be. Therein lie more shades of the Monroe Doctrine of Convenience, but it would have been impolitic, and possibly quite ugly, to go against a partner in crime.
Stranger
bolding mine
As I recall, the Argentine Navy withdrew prior to the arrival of light carriers HMS Hermes and Invincible.
The Monroe doctrine had nothing to do with anything. That was about preventing (mostly mainland) European powers from meddling in the Americas, and in fact was always something of an under-the-table agreement with Britain, which shared the same strategic goal. However, it didn’t prevent them from hanging around their own Caribean islands, several of which were and remained under foreign control well after the establishment of the Monroe doctrine.
It’s a minor part of the discussion, but the NATO agreement isn’t relevant to the Falkland Islands conflict; the North Atlantic Treaty’s mutual defense clause is geographically limited to Europe, North America, Asian Turkey, and the North Atlantic.
That was my understanding too. I’ve heard it said that the USA did not have the means to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, but knew that the Royal Navy would do it for them. The alternative to the US, from a British POV, was other European powers in charge of the Americas. Not an attractive option.
Comments and corrections welcome, as always.
I find this statement puzzling. The Argentine Navy had no units within 200 miles of the islands when HMS Conqueror (nuclear submarine) sank the Belgrano. And after that, the Argentine Navy scarecely participated.
It certainly is true that inadequate British air power was an important factor - it allowed air attacks on the British troops that made the ultimate outcome of the war much less certain that it otherwise would have been.
But note that those Exocets were delivered by Super Etendard aircraft.
The Monroe Doctrine, despite its age, has been the rationale for U.S. involvement in Latin and South America from the late 'Fifties onward, including the blockade that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the support of regimes in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, and the supply of arms to the Contras. Far from having “nothing to do with anything” it has been the key policy justification for U.S. involvement, and opposition to European involvement, in the entire Western Hemisphere. Of course, it is also a doctrine of convenience, readily ignored when it suited policy or with regard to our European allies. The U.S. certainly did have the means to make mince meat of the Argentines; one small carrier group would have been sufficient, but then would have also involved the U.S. in an uncomfortable conflict with no clear justification and detracted resources from the Second or Sixth Fleets.
I’m not quite sure what you are puzzled about. British lack of air coverage for both protection and serveillence permitted the Argentine Navy more freedom to move than it otherwise could (restricting landing operations and movement by smaller groups) and allowed the Argentines to succeed with aircraft of only moderate capability. (The Super Étendard was an unimpressive aircraft even for its day, and would have been easily bested by either the F-4 ‘Phantom II’ and F-14 ‘Tomcat’ in an air superiority role, but the limited range of the Sea Harrier gave British through-deck cruisers a relatively small radius of coverage, further limited by weather conditions). Ultimately, the Argentine Navy succombed, but only after levying much greater losses on the Royal Navy than anyone–even the Argentines–anticipated, and forcing the Brits to chance naval tactics. This was ultimately good for everyone involved–except the actual sailors who lost their lives, of course–because it demonstrated holes in modern naval strategy that had never been tested in actual conditions and caused the RN and USN to adopt more realistic tactics and (to some extent) and estimates of the effectiveness of point defense anti-missile systems.
Stranger
Didn’t the Argentine pilots resort to dive bombig th British ships? That hadn’t been used since WWII. I guess I don’t understand why the argentines didn’t build an airstrip on the islands (and bade their fighter planes there. that would have kept the British fleet away.
I just want to toss out that the US involvement in the war, as little as it was, was still enough to cause all of my Argentine relatives to have significant grudges against the US. Presumably active participation would have made things even worse.
It is literally impossible to overstate the difficulty of getting supplies to the Falklands, esp. at that time. AIUI the Argentinians had no way to ship, by air, the sort of heavy equipment that would be required to improve the local airfields to the point where they could base their fighters there. And once Britain said they were intending to fight - well, it would not be a good wager that supply ships would have been able to get to the islands without being attacked by subs. I don’t know, offhand, when the first British sub took station around the islands, but I’d be surprised if it were more than three or four days after the invasion.
I don’t recall that the Argentine planes were dive bombing, what I recall was that they were coming in, more or less on afterburner to maximize their speed advantage over the Harriers, with minimal ordinance loads, and firing as soon as they acquired any ship. From as far out as possible. IIRC they had a grand total of fifteen minutes total in the theatre of operations before they had to turn around to make landfall before they ran out of fuel.
I wont swear to it, but I thought that the Harrier’s biggest problem as a CAP plane was that it really had never been intended as an AAW platform, rather as a close support plane, similiar in basic mission to the A-10 Warthog. So, it was being forced into a mission that it had never been intended to face.
The other big problem that ISTR for the RN was that the Harriers lacked the ability to set up a radar warning bubble, so for the most part the RN was depending on the destroyers for their raid warnings. Which meant that detection was at most five minutes warning before the Argentinians could fire on the fleet. And five minutes isn’t a lot of time to vector the CAP into position. The RN could have moved out a picket ship, but when the relative weakness of the point defense units was realized, this would be effectively sacrificing a ship for advanced raid warning. And since the Argentinians were looking for a political victory, rather than a military one, anything that they could do to make the British public believe that the costs of the war were going to be too high would have been the right tactical decision. Ergo, if they found a radar picket ship isolated from the rest of the fleet, the raid would change target to that picket, rather than going on to the original raid target.
(Looks like Battle for the Falklands is going to the top of my to-be-read pile)
See Commander ‘Sharkey’ Ward, Sea Harrier Over The Falklands (1992). The author’s thesis is that the fish head Admirals had (and have) very little understanding of the proper application of naval aviation.
The US had substantial South American interests at the time and would rather have stood aside as a first reaction (Jeanne Kirkpatrick was openly favourable to the Argentinian cause). Once it became clear that the Reagan Administration would have to make a choice, it had to make the obvious choice. AIM9-L Sidewinders with the head-on engagement ability were one of it’s biggest contributions
Did they ask us to participate in the actual military operation?
I’m afraid this is my recollection from a radio documentary on the BBC in April (no longer available on “listen again”), so take my potentially faulty recall as you will: but Thatcher sent the US ambassador to the State Department to ask “what assistance the US was going to provide”, and was told “none”. The UK govt. was somewhat miffed, but proceeded with compiling the Task Force, while British diplomats went around Washington drumming up support in a less direct fashion, leveraging historical “special relationship” stuff, and eventually secured offers of intel and armaments.
I’m puzzled about your statement that the lack of british air power “meant that the Argentine Navy could maneuver with near impunity.” As noted, the Argentine Navy was being quite circumspect even before the sinking of the Belgrano, and pretty much withdrew to port after that. This seems the opposite of maneuvering with “near impunity.”
What losses did the Argentine Navy inflict? It sounds as if all the serious damage was done by land-based aircraft.