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124worked to our advantage. When you do have a plan, events never runquite as expected so you are constantly having to amend it, while tryingto stick as closely as possible to the original concept. Since there was noplan to follow in this case, it all had to be done ad hoc, which, if nothingelse, gave us considerable scope for freedom of action. We mademistakes, of course, but everybody was trying to achieve the same thingand I think that, as Sir John Curtiss was saying, the relationship betweenthe staffs at the Ministry, and at Command level, generally workedextremely smoothly.Problem areas? I think the first that I would highlight would be ourpoor Intelligence. All of our Intelligence resources had been focused onNATO, on the Cold War and the Russian threat. As a result, ourcoverage of Latin America really was abysmal, and it never reallyrecovered. The Intelligence briefings we used to get in the MOD weresadly deficient in many areas.Another deficiency, for which we had to rely on the Task Force, wasair reconnaissance. After the first Vulcan raid, for example, we needed toknow precisely what had been achieved. We kept asking for photographsbut they never materialised. I can, of course, understand that the TaskForce Commander was anxious to preserve his Harriers and thus,perhaps, reluctant to use them for photography. But we really did needthose pictures. Perhaps this was a symptom of a general lack of navalunderstanding of some aspects of air power. With all due respect to theNavy, I don%u2019t think that many of them had a very sound appreciation ofthe ability of aircraft to sink their surface ships. I have already referred tothat crucial 400 mile-range factor; we were constantly urging the fleet tostay a little further to the east but they would sometimes stray closer tothe islands in their anxiety to get at the enemy which we felt, inWhitehall, was taking an unnecessary risk.One last point, one which CAS raised and which was referred to inRon Dick%u2019s paper -%u2013 Public Relations. We had all sorts of armchairexperts on the television, telling us what our plans were, what ouroptions were for invasion and so on. We didn%u2019t actually have too manyoptions but, all the same, it was very frustrating to have to sit and watchsome retired senior officer pontificating on what we were likely to donext. When there aren%u2019t many options, this sort of thing can be far tooaccurate for comfort. I just hope that the Argentineans weren%u2019t watching,but they probably were. While it was difficult for us to control the flow