Had the Argentines built an airstrip at Port stanley (capable of handling jet fighters) the British would have failed. The Argentines thought the British would not fight-big mistake.
There was an airstrip at Port Stanley. It was blown up by RAF Vulcans in the first days of the war, forcing the Argentine fighters to mostly operate from their own territory. It was promptly repaired and some transports and ground attack aircraft were launched from it. Nobody - including most of the RAF - thought it was possible for a heavy bomber strike to reach the Falklands, and it very nearly didn’t due to weather conditions that made in-flight refueling problematic.
Every modern navy operates anti-ship missiles. And Exocets were useful for attacking all sorts of ships, not just big ones (though I’ll note that Brazil was operating an ex-Royal Navy aircraft carrier well before the Falklands conflict).
I’d second all this, particularly that 1) Argentina isn’t and wasn’t then a ‘third world’ country (except in the technical sense of not being formally allied with the U.S. or the USSR), and 2) despite seeing the western bloc as a Cold War ally, the Argentine government was a hardcore ultra-right wing ideological regime, to a degree it’s difficult to grasp, and they saw liberal democracies as decadent and weak.
That certainly wouldn’t prevent the US from re-asserting the Monroe Doctrine if it were politically expedient.
You may continue to believe that if you wish.
Reality is, we lost fewer ships than we expected.
Once the Belgrano was sunk, that was the end of Argentine navy involvement, without seaborne support they could never have flown enough material and supplies to keep their land based forces going. As it was their air force was not capable of breaking the blockade either.
We could even have lost the land battle, the war was already lost.
As for the political aspect in the UK, we’ve done this to death a number of times, and you can search for my previous posts on this subject.
The reality is that we had sent deterrent forces down to the Falklands on three previous occasion - I served on Operation Journeyman which was the last of them.
Given that our intelligence had provided adequate warning and prevented war on all those occasions, you have to wonder why those warnings, which were certainly received, were not heeded by an extremely unpopular government that was going to be wiped off the electoral map.
Maybe it turned out for the better, maybe not, but it did topple a murderous Junta - responsible for the deaths of maybe 30,000 and although not to my political persuasion,it enabled Thatcher to be re-elected.
Idealistically I despise Thatcher - the region where I live has been industrially devastated and will not recover for many generations however history is history.
We live with the results and others have different views - they tend not to live in the North of England, Scotland or Wales
Thatcher is the most divisive figure in British history and her legacy is increasingly likely to lead to the break up of the UK.
I think a big factor was that Argentina did not expect that international opinion would be so heavily in Britain’s favor. They probably convinced themselves they would get support as the “anti-imperialist” side in the conflict. (In reality, I think most countries saw the invasion more as an act of Argentinian imperialism rather than a blow against British imperialism.) The biggest hope of all was that the United States would at least stay neutral in the conflict.
You think the Monroe doctrine itself was more significant than the actual missiles? I don’t.
Fascist dictatorship running a dirty war against its own people, or democratic government elected under the rule of law: choices, choices…
I don’t know what you mean by this.
But in the early 1980s the Argentinian junta was looking at a US that had a long history of not being in the least bit bothered if its allies were Fascist dictators running dirty wars against their own people. They wouldn’t have expected the US to treat this particular characteristic of the Argentinian regime as a big black mark.
Sure, but had there ever previously been a head-to-head between a junta and a democracy where the US supported the junta?
The 1971 war between India and Pakistan comes to mind. Yahya Khan was the leader of the military government of Pakistan at the time.
Throughout the Cold War, the US generally supported Pakistan, often under military control, against India, which was mostly democratic.
I think he’s saying that the salient point in “the Kennedy administration was willing to go to the brink of nuclear war” was not the legal/diplomatic concept of the Monroe doctrine, but the fact that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba pointed at the USA. Even in the absence of the Monroe doctrine, Kennedy would probably have been willing to go to the brink of nuclear war over that particular issue, and conversely, in the absence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, he probably wouldn’t have been willing to go to the brink of nuclear war just to uphold the Monroe doctrine. It’s called the Cuban Missile Crisis after all, not the Cuban Monroe Doctrine Crisis.
Moderator Note
Since this is in GQ, let’s refrain from the additional political commentary. No warning issued, but let’s stick to factual information rather than opinions.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
One would think any country with a large coastline that wants a significant military capability will possess some sort of anti-ship weapon. That still fails to demonstrate that Argentina purchased Exocet missiles specifically to attack the Falklands.
As has been well demonstrated, Argentina’s Plan A would be that the British would NOT mount an expedition and therefore that Exocet would not have to be used.
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Given that our intelligence had provided adequate warning and prevented war on all those occasions, you have to wonder why those warnings, which were certainly received, were not heeded by an extremely unpopular government that was going to be wiped off the electoral map.
[/QUOTE]
There really isn’t a lot to wonder; literally no part of the British apparatus of state believed Argentina would actually invade the Falklands. It was a gigantic intelligence failure.
The fact that the UK had sent deterrents before was in part one of the reasons they didn’t in 1981/1982; it was very expensive to do so, the government was not rolling in money, and there was a clear sense that the boy was crying wolf. After all, nothing really happened in 1977, right? And hey, the Argentines weren’t Communists, who were Thatcher’s bugbear. Had the Thatcher government sent off a bunch of ships at a heavy cost and nothing had continued to happen they would have taken a significant popularity blow.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
The installation, though, was the violation. I mean, obviously, a violation with nukes is a lot more serious than, for example, when Germany threatened to land troops in Venezuela in 1902. But the principle is the same–hands off the Western Hemisphere, except where you were here in 1820.
I was at RMC, Kingston (Canada) at that time and I remember reading in Jane’s Defence Weekly or something like that an interview with, ISTR, Haig. In it he said that Britain had to respond as they did because the USSR thought that all western nations were weak and corrupt and that this was an opportunity to prove otherwise.
And in a weekly news magazine (Time, Newsweek or Maclean’s) there was a quote from the mother of an Argentinian soldier (after the Brits won) about how terrible it was that the Argentinian government “sent our boys to fight against the professionals”.
I am aware that “proved to be” is semantically equivalent to “turned out to be”. You are still having military leaders assure their colleague that the invasion of the Falklands in early to mid-1982 will be (would have been, speaking from today’s perspective) as easy as the U.S. invasion of Grenada in late 1983. How is this possible? Presumably, the assurances were offered to Galtieri before the invasion took place. In 1982.