ABSTRACT
The South Atlantic conflict was a strange little war. It was fought in one of the most remote parts of the world. As remote and unlikely a war as the South Atlantic conflict was, perhaps because it was so remote and unlikely, it offers a host of politico-military lessons that are applicable to crises and contingencies that the United States and other Western powers are likely to face during the remainder of this century. It is commonly agreed by all who have thus far evaluated the South Atlantic conflict that the outbreak of hostilities was due to a fundamental Argentine miscalculation of the consequences of their seizing the islands. The Franks Report, the official United Kingdom (UK) government post mortem on the outbreak of hostilities, implicitly rejected Cable’s would-have-been solution in light of the very complex set of factors surrounding the future of the islands, factors over which the UK government had only partial control.
