Is Britain now a fading force?

WIRELESS Ridge, the rocky escarpment that overlooks Port Stanley, capital of the Falkland Islands, is a cold and inhospitable place to be in June. The weather is often atrocious, sending rain or snow sheeting down for hours on end, well into the long, dark nights and short, miserable days.

To the hundreds of cold and shivering Argentinian conscripts dug into the hillside 20 years ago, it must have seemed an even more wretched place as they waited for the final push by the British troops sent to evict them.

The "honour" of taking the ridge for the Brits had fallen the way of 2 Para - backed by naval gunfire support provided by a frigate and two batteries of guns. It was to be a classic advance: noisy ("Because second-rate troops don't like being shelled," according to commander Chris Keeble), frightening and savage in its execution.

Having taken their objective during the night, British troops paused the next morning. Paratroopers huddled in groups around small fires, many of them found the time to brew tea or coffee, happy they had taken the ridge and were now poised to sweep into Port Stanley itself - even if the "Argies", their backs to the South Atlantic, were expected to put up some stiff opposition.

Then, quite suddenly, the portable radios crackled into life with a dramatic message: "The Argies are legging it - they're running everywhere." All along the British front line, officers and men watched in astonishment as the fed-up Argentinian soldiers scurried out of their emplacements and ran towards Stanley. The resistance had finally crumbled, the union flag would soon be flying over Government House once again. In the space of a few hours, the transition from war to victory had taken place.

On paper, the Falklands War was a conflict Britain couldn't win.

Conventional wisdom has it that successfully to overcome a well-provisioned and well-prepared enemy a long distance from home, a potential liberator needs a numerical advantage of at least three-to-one. Even when all British troops were ashore, they were still dramatically out-numbered by the Argentines.

That same convention states an attacking force must have proper control of the skies if it is to mount a successful amphibious landing. With only two aircraft carriers at its disposal, the British Task Force could never make such a claim.

Unwittingly, the Falklands campaign was almost undone two decades earlier. When he was Defence Secretary, Denis Healey was the politician who stopped the Royal Navy's plan to buy two new large aircraft carriers to replace the ageing ships Ark Royal and Eagle.

Healey's reasoning seemed sound. In the modern world, he claimed, Britain would never again have to fight alone. If any naval engagement were to happen, it would most likely be conflict in the North Sea between Nato forces and the Warsaw Pact. If that were to happen, the RAF would provide air cover for UK ships.

Naval chiefs weren't so sure, though. They could see the logic behind the need for a floating platform capable of providing air cover far from a friendly airstrip. Eventually, they managed to convince the politicians to agree a compromise - a carrier far smaller than anything that had gone before, but still large enough for a handful of Harrier jump jets. To avoid a political storm, they weren't called aircraft carriers but "through deck cruisers".

The first, HMS Invincible, was commissioned in 1977. Ironically, she was due to be sold to Australia with delivery being just a few months after the Falklands conflict began - had the Junta held on until the ship had been disposed of, the British could never have undertaken the war.

Today, Britain has three of these "light" aircraft carriers, Invincible, Illustrious and the slightly larger Ark Royal. The Navy also has the Ocean, a larger helicopter carrier, which could, at a pinch, carry a wing of Harrier aircraft.

HMS Ark Royal was most recently deployed to the Gulf where she provided a very visible sign of British naval power in the bombardment of Afghanistan. Her helicopters also helped ferry the first British troops ashore when it was deemed safe for ground forces to go in.

But what if we needed to "go it alone" again? For all the sabre rattling in Sierra Leone or Afghanistan, there is an acceptance in the Ministry of Defence that Britain today could no longer win another Falklands War. Even as long ago as 1994, when then Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind announced yet more deep cuts in defence spending, one senior officer was forced to admit: "Since the Falklands we have moved inexorably towards an acceptance that those kind of operations have to be done with someone else. Any other idea is simply fiction."

Between 1990, when Options For Change started the cuts, and 1996, defence expenditure fell by a quarter, one of the biggest reductions of any Nato nation. The changes have been felt everywhere but it is the cuts in the Royal Navy that make another Falklands-style war unthinkable today. Just take a look at the figures.

In 1985, three years after the Falklands when lost ships had been replaced, the Navy had four aircraft carriers, two assault ships, 15 destroyers, 41 frigates, 45 mine sweepers, ten support ships and 29 fleet submarines.

Today, it has three carriers, one helicopter assault ship, 11 destroyers, 21 frigates, 23 mine sweepers, no support ships at all and just 12 fleet submarines. To make matters worse, many of these vessels are in turn-around, undergoing refits or simply mothballed. There are now more admirals and captains than there are ships to go around.

Britain has to retain the capability to defend the Falklands. It does so by maintaining a garrison on the islands and an airstrip long enough for fighter aircraft. If the Argentinians marched in again they wouldn't be removed by force so the policy has to be to maintain sufficient military assets to ensure they would never be tempted. The UK also has to make provision for Northern Ireland and, beyond that, there is a need to contribute troops to any alliance or coalition operations. All this has to be achieved on an Army establishment of around 110,000 men and women. Make no mistake, our troops are stretched to the limit at the moment.

Why else does the Government want to create a home-grown National Guard, as it announced this week, to cope with domestic emergencies and possible terror attacks? Because what few soldiers we have should be fighting, or keeping the peace, not chasing infected cattle down during a foot-and-mouth epidemic or manning fire engines during a strike.

In the post-September 11 world, Britain probably doesn't need its heavy armour or even a state-of-the-art fighter like the Typhoon. After all, what good is a Challenger II tank against a man carrying a suitcase packed with explosives and radioactive materials? Today's armed forces need to move quickly and punch above their weight, using highly-trained forces equipped with efficient and mobile weapons systems.

The battle for the Falklands may have been a freak of history but, if history tells us anything, it's that we can never accurately predict the future. Hopefully, the decisions being taken by politicians today are the right ones for our soldiers tomorrow.

After the Falklands War, one of the victorious British commanders, asked if there should be a motto to sum the conflict up, said: "You never know." In 1982 British military planning and hardware were just sufficiently flexible to be up to those words. One can only trust that the professionalism of our armed forces overworked as they undoubtedly are - would allow for the same outcome in 2002.