Britain And N A T O S Northern Flank

This book investigates several aspects of military power and security in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions. NATO’s northern flank is a large maritime and littoral theatre, where NATO directly borders Russia’s Northern Fleet Military Administrative Territory, which is the location of some of Russia’s most potent air, sea, and land power capabilities. While military tensions on the northern flank had been relatively low for years, the Ukraine war and increased great-power rivalry have altered that dynamic, with heightened geopolitical tensions. This has increased the focus on military-strategic competition in this northernmost region of the alliance. This book presents new assessments of several aspects of military power and security in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions. With an analysis of the security and political climate in the High North and of developments in Western military strategies, capabilities, doctrines, and operational concepts, the volume seeks to bring together an holistic understanding of the strategic challenges and opportunities facing the North Atlantic states and NATO in this dynamic area of responsibility for the alliance. In doing this, the book provides key insights into the role of branch-specific and joint approaches to power projection and operations in the High North, which also include selected country case studies. This book will be of much interest to students of NATO, military studies, security studies, and International Relations.

From the John Holmes Library collection.

Since 1815, Denmark and Britain have lived in peace with each other. From the last half of the 19th century, massive British imports of Danish agricultural products gave Britain a central role in the Danish economy, likewise in the 20th century, British efforts in the two world wars became of crucial importance to Denmark's position in relation to Germany and, later, the Soviet Union. In the same period, the emergence of English as the first foreign language in Denmark facilitated the increasingly closer human and cultural contacts between the two countries. Britain and Denmark, written by Danish and British historians, constitutes the first attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of the roles that these two neighbouring countries have played in the lives of each other during the last two centuries. They are different in size and have had very different global and regional orientations. So, naturally, Britain has always loomed larger in Danish life and politics than the other way round. In many areas, however, relations have been close. The book covers contacts relating to trade, security policies and social and political theory, but also touch on mutual influences within the areas of literature, music, design etc. Most treatments of Danish political and cultural relations with the outside world in this period concentrate on Germany for the period up to 1945, and on the Soviet Union and the USA in the post-war world. In the same way, works on British contemporary history rarely devote much space to relations with the Nordic countries. The aim, therefore, of this book is to provide a supplement, and perhaps corrective, to the existing literature on the international positions of Britain and Denmark in the modern world.

During the 1960s - in the midst of its retreat from empire - the British government had to grapple with complex political and military problems in order to find a strategic defence policy that was both credible and affordable. Addressing what was perhaps the most contentious issue within those debates, this book charts the arguments that raged between supporters of a land based air power strategy, and those who favoured aircraft carriers. Drawing upon a wealth of previously classified documents, the book reveals how the Admiralty and Air Ministry became interlocked in a bitter political struggle over which of their military strategies could best meet Britain's future foreign policy challenges. Whilst the broad story of this inter-service rivalry is well known - the Air Force's proposal for a series of island based airfields, and the Navy championing of a small number of expensive but mobile aircraft carriers - the complexity and previous lack of archival sources means that it has, until now, only ever been partially researched and understood. Former studies have largely focused on the cancellation of the CVA-01 carrier programme, and offered little depth as regards the Royal Air Force perspectives. Given that this was a two-Service rivalry, which greatly influenced many aspects of British foreign and defence policy decisions of the period, this book presents an important and balanced overview of the complex issues involved. Through this historical study of the British debate about maritime air power and strategic alternatives in the 1960s, the detailed arguments used for and against both alternatives demonstrate clear relevance to both historical and contemporary conceptual debates on carrier forces and land-based air power. Both from military strategy and inter-service relationship perspectives, contemporary Britain and many other nations with maritime forces may learn much from this historical case.