A Troubled Watch on the Rhine

The very names evoke heroic themes. The British Army of the Rhine, guardian of the North German Plain. The Royal Navy, charged with sealing off the North Atlantic. But where in 1941 there was the mighty H.M.S. Ark Royal, there is now H.M.S. Tiger, an antiquated hybrid frigate, and only a river of esprit is holding together the Army of the Rhine. Because of their strategic positioning, today's British forces serve as one of the most important links in the NATO chain of defense. But the enduring strength of this link is now in doubt.

One immediate threat to it is the minibudget that Prime Minister James Callaghan's government will soon present to Parliament. It is expected that defense spending will be slashed as part of the further harsh austerity London will have to impose on itself to qualify for a $3.9 billion international loan.

Any new defense cuts would come on top of two decades of scrimping. In that time British force levels have fallen 57%. Much of this cutback reflects the disappearance of the globe-girdling empire--and the vanished responsibilities for defending it. The garrisons are gone from Singapore, Rangoon, Calcutta, Nairobi, Cairo. The naval bases are closed in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. The Royal Air Force's fighters and bombers have left such strategic spots as Cyprus and Gan. Yet it is even difficult for the British today to pursue the modest post-imperial strategy of concentrating their shrinking defense resources on NATO.

No branch of the armed services has been squeezed more than that onetime favorite--the Royal Navy. In recent years, for instance, the admirals have been forced to forgo many of their plans for destroyers and frigates. Although assigned one of the most critical responsibilities in NATO--helping the U.S. prevent the Soviet submarine fleet from getting out of its Kola Peninsula bases and into the Atlantic--the Royal Navy's antisubmarine surveillance force consists of four aging ships and a total of 28 helicopters.

After being taken aboard the Tiger at sea by helicopter, TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron reported: "She is old and creaking. Her keel was laid in 1941, but bureaucratic squabbling and constant fiddling with design delayed commissioning until 1959. As a result, the forward half of Tiger vaguely resembles a cruiser while the aft section, where the helicopters are stored, looks like an enormous warehouse. The Tiger's crew calls her a 'mutant frigate towing a garage.' It is all too apparent that the constant rejiggering of roles with an ever diminishing number of ships has strained the Royal Navy to the limits of its operational capabilities."

The army, which so far has not suffered as much budget cutting as the navy, technically has been able to maintain the strength of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) at about 55,000 men. Actually, however, 4,000 of these troops are always on peace-keeping duty in Ulster, a grim role that has the one advantage of making them the most battle-tested force in NATO. The BAOR suffers from a shortage of advanced reconnaissance vehicles, helicopters and guided antitank missiles--all of which would be essential in blunting a Soviet armored thrust. The Royal Air Force, meanwhile, lacks adequate numbers of antisubmarine patrol planes and will be short of advanced fighter-bombers until the end of the decade, when it begins taking delivery of the first of 385 MRCA aircraft, a multipurpose warplane developed jointly by the British, West Germans and Italians.

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One of the British forces' true assets is its high morale. After observing the BAOR's "Spearpoint" maneuvers in Germany, TIME'S Byron reported: "The British soldier possesses an irrepressible esprit de corps. The defense cutbacks have toughened his resolve as he has grown accustomed to running things on a shoestring. He is probably the world's best scrounger and cannibalizer of military equipment. At the R.A.F. base in Brueggen, West Germany, I saw an enlisted man who is so adept at repairing damaged aircraft that he was able to refashion a perfect fuselage section for a Harrier fighter jet by using his bare hands and nonelectrical tools. And because they are short of equipment, the British feel they cannot stint on training. One result: the R.A.F. wins nearly every NATO tactical competition."

There is a limit, however, to how long an army can march on high spirits or make a virtue of poverty. Observes one Pentagon official: "The British are now down to cutting into muscle." If the minibudget requires substantive defense cuts, the first muscle to go may be about 5,000 men from the Army of the Rhine; London will apparently try to keep the Royal Navy's Atlantic patrols at current levels.

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