Every single time the prospect of war in a foreign country is raised, it seems that the Navy – and not just the Royal Navy, the US Navy and for all I know the Peruvian Navy – steam off to the general locale of the prospective battle, totally cannoned up, on “long planned” manoeuvres.
“The aircraft carrier Ark Royal is to lead a naval taskforce sailing towards the Gulf next month, on their way to “long-planned” exercises in the Indian Ocean.
The Ministry of Defence said that contingency plans were in place to divert the vessels for war with Iraq if necessary.”
So what’s this all about? Are there really long planned exercises? Is it really just a bald lie? I suppose it might be, I doubt you could check, as navies in general probably don’t make their social diaries available for general inspection.
I guess there might be in each Navy some poor sod given the job of talking to his counterpart in all the other navies in the world and planning exercises everywhere at every point between now and the distant future. Must be terribly embarrassing for him “I say, terribly sorry, I know we said we’d go to the Arctic Ocean with you and the Japanese this Spring, but the Americans have invited us to the Gulf and they’ll be so disappointed if we don’t come. Do you have a window to go to the South China Seas in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007?”
I imagine that in a few weeks we’ll be hearing all about the long planned exercises for a sodding enormous joint invasion force to practice invading somewhere sandy, taking place in a handy desert right next to Iraq.
Shortly the Airforce will be making public a document printed by Caxton saying “To Do, December 2002: Send a privy-load of flying-shipf to Ottoman Empire to practice raining down hellfire on the infidel”
Wish they’d be honest and just say outright that all they’re doing is upping the ante.
“I say, terribly sorry, I know we said we’d go to the Arctic Ocean with you and the Japanese this Spring, but the Americans have invited us to the Gulf and they’ll be so disappointed if we don’t come. "
I love it.
WAG, they are “long planned” in that it’s been planned in case it was needed. Rather than saying “we are going to kick your ass” it gives the bad guys a chance to suddenly discover that they forgot to hold elections, or they didn’t mean to keep James Bond in durance vile, it was all a mistake, etc.
So it’s like “Who shot Mr Burns?” in the Simpsons, they’ve got loads of different strategies just in case.
I wonder if they really cover their arses, and in one Bizarro-world scenario there’s a plan where the spineless bimbos in Whitehall refuse to make the UK the premier nuclear target in the world and decline the US offer to upgrade Fylingdales to form part of the Missile Defence radar network.
I think it has a lot to do with projecting power when something is happening. In a basic sense, you want your big guns floating near the trouble spot for two reasons:
So that, in case it’s needed, the forces are days and sometimes hours from mounting a response to an attack or declaration of war.
When forces go floating off to the hinterlands, the deployments are planned years in advance for the general area, and within that general area there are regularly repeated exercises conducted. There are three USMC Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) from California, and they all basically have the same Western Pacific/Persian Gulf float scheme, and many time have the same exercises scheduled over time (for instance “Sea Soldier” in Oman, “Cobra Gold” in Thailand, “Team Spirit” in Korea, “Eager Mace” in Kuwait). But if the hot spot de jour is the Middle East, good old “Team Spirit” may not have as big a participation from the MEU, and they may choose to do a Show of Force, oops, I mean “Previously Scheduled Exercise” while they are hanging around that region waiting to open an industrial sized can of whoop ass.