Before the Falklands/Malvinas broke out, the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy had been leading a delegation called the “Zakheim power talks” for about a year to save HMS Hermesand HMS Invincible and kept Chatham Shipyard open, which were essential to the Falklands War later. After the crisis broke out, the DOD chose the Special Assistant to set in motion the U.S. covert support for the U.K.
(Source:https://www.csis.org/events/falklands-40 )
My question is: was the US DoD involved in the British defense cut in the early 1980s? If yes, why?
Not to my knowledge. The British defense cuts in the first years of the 1980s were due to the early 1980s recession which hit the UK pretty hard. The 1981 Defense White Paper favored cuts in out-of-area operations in order to minimize cuts that would affect the UKs ability to maintain its NATO commitments, though those too suffered cuts. Full pdf of the 1981 Defense White Paper is here.
This was why Hermes was to be retired and Invincible was to be sold to Australia and both of the UKs major amphibious assault ships, the Fearless and Intrepid were going to be retired before the Falklands War broke out and drastically changed those plans. Even with the major hits being to forces for out-of-area operations, small hits to NATO committed forces had to occur, the Army was to shed 7,000 personnel and 2,000 troops stationed in Germany as part of the British Army Of the Rhine (BAOR) were to be withdrawn.
AFAIK The US would never get involved in individual decisions other NATO members take on specific pieces of defense equipment. They may have an opinion if their overall defense spending drops below the 2% guideline, but they’d never put their oar in to complain about individual decisions made by another government
Then, why did Zakheim noted the "Zakheim power talks’ during the forum claiming he saved HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible and kept Chatham Shipyard operational? I get confused.
Genuinely don’t know. I can’t find any reference to anything like that ever happening other than that statement by Zakheim. A junior US official getting involved in the nitty gritty of another NATO nation’s defense policy (and a very politically controversial bit of defence policy at that*), to the point of successfully advocating that a specific bit of naval equipment should not be scrapped. That seems very implausible to me, but I’m not an admiral? Maybe these ships were important to the wider NATO naval strategy in some way?
I imagine that there was a lot of intense interest- after all, NATO felt (and in many ways was) severely outnumbered in Europe, and defense cuts during the Cold War were probably viewed with alarm and dismay by all NATO nations, as they directly represented a diminution of the alliance’s power in the face of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. And in the case of the US, somewhere we’d potentially be called to fill that gap.
So I suspect that while I doubt there was any overt action, there was probably no lack of informal diplomacy and politicking to work on the parts of the UK establishment who wanted to cut force levels. I imagine it was more like the second-in-line guy at the American embassy was at a barbecue with a Labour MP, and brought it up in passing or something. Certainly not official communiques or anything like that.
I’d say (as with a lot of these more obscure questions) your best bet is to find a book, rather than rely on the Internet. That defense spending cut, and those ships specifically, is a big enough deal that if you find a book about it, or about the senior figures who made the decision it should describe this American intervention if it happened.
I’d always recommend that, but especially nowadays as I really think Google has gotten much worse at looking up more obscure things like this
A good start is to see if any of the major figures have biographies, e.g. John Nott (the defence minister) has one I’ve no idea how much detail it will have on what you are after but its good start. Maybe also look for biographies the senior British naval officers at the time.