Falklands War
The ten-week war of 1982 in which Britain retook South Atlantic islands 8,000 miles away, destroying Argentina's junta and saving Margaret Thatcher's government.
On 2 April 1982 Argentine forces landed on the Falkland Islands, a British possession since 1833 with about 1,800 inhabitants, roughly 8,000 miles from Britain and 300 from Argentina. Buenos Aires called them the Malvinas and had claimed them for a century and a half. Within seventy-four days the islands were British again, more than 900 people were dead, and the government that ordered the invasion had fallen.
Why the junta did it
Argentina was ruled by a military junta under General Leopoldo Galtieri that had murdered and disappeared tens of thousands of its own citizens and was presiding over inflation above 100 percent and a shrinking economy. The Malvinas claim was the one thing that unified Argentines across the political spectrum.
The junta also read the signals, and read them plausibly. Britain had announced the withdrawal of its ice patrol ship from the South Atlantic, was cutting the Navy hard in a 1981 defense review, and had shown no appetite for the islands in years of desultory talks. Galtieri expected a fait accompli, international shrugging, and a domestic surge. He got the surge, for about a week.
Why Britain fought
Margaret Thatcher, herself deeply unpopular in early 1982, dispatched a task force within days, before anyone had established that it could work. The reasoning combined principle and politics: a democracy that lets a dictatorship seize its territory and its citizens invites a queue of imitators, and a British government that lost the islands without fighting would not survive.
The operation was on the edge of feasible. The nearest usable base was Ascension Island, halfway there. The task force sailed with no airborne early warning, two small carriers with Sea Harriers heavily outnumbered by Argentine aircraft, and merchant ships requisitioned to carry troops, including the liner Canberra and the container ship Atlantic Conveyor.
The war
The UN Security Council passed Resolution 502 demanding Argentine withdrawal, which gave Britain diplomatic cover. On 2 May the submarine HMS Conqueror sank the cruiser General Belgrano, killing 323, the single largest loss of the war. The ship was outside the exclusion zone and steaming away, and the sinking is still argued about in both countries; its military effect was unambiguous, as the Argentine navy returned to port and stayed there.
Two days later an Exocet missile hit HMS Sheffield. Argentine pilots flew with skill and courage against a fleet in confined water, and would have done far more damage had a large share of their bombs not failed to fuse at low release heights.
British troops landed at San Carlos on 21 May, fought their way across the island through Goose Green and the ridges above Stanley, and accepted the Argentine surrender on 14 June. The dead: 649 Argentines, 255 British, and three Falkland Islanders killed by British shellfire.
The consequences
They were larger in Argentina than in Britain. Galtieri was removed within days, the junta lost the last of its authority, and elections in 1983 ended seven years of military rule and opened the way to prosecuting the generals for the Dirty War. A defeat abroad did what domestic opposition had not managed.
In Britain, Thatcher went from the least popular prime minister on record to a landslide in 1983, and the war became the founding legend of her premiership. The Navy learned that carriers, however small, and merchant shipping capacity were not luxuries, and the planned cuts were reversed.
The echo
The Falklands is the standard case study in two failures of estimation. Argentina misjudged Britain's willingness to fight, a mistake authoritarian governments make repeatedly because they read a democracy's domestic quarreling as weakness. Britain misjudged Argentina's willingness to invade, because it had been signaling disengagement while assuming its resolve was obvious.
There is a third lesson, less comfortable in London. Britain could only just do it in 1982, with a fleet built for the North Atlantic and a great deal of luck over unexploded bombs. It could not do it now. The war is remembered in Britain as proof of reach, and is more accurately the last demonstration of a reach that was already going away.