Britain's continued military presence East of Suez for nearly a quarter of a century beyond the Second World War in many ways seems to run against the prevailing economic and political logic of Britain's reduced circumstances after the war. While the loss of India logically should have dictated a rundown of the defence establishment in the Indian Ocean in short order, instead the prewar apparatus was resurrected and the region came to be one of the last principal areas where British defence capabilities were extended out of the North Atlantic/European theatre. 1

There were a number of compelling arguments for retrenchment from overseas obligations, including those East of Suez. Perhaps the most permanent of these was Britain's economic difficulties, particularly acute after the war but more or less continuing up to the present. In his The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, Paul M. Kennedy clearly demonstrates the economic underpinnings of the decline of the once-invincible British navy to less than a 'good second-class navy'. His observations are directed at the navy but they are just as applicable to the entire nexus of the British defence dilemma:

For maritime strength depends, as it always did, upon commercial and industrial strength: if the latter is declining relatively, the former is bound to follow. As Britain's naval rise was rooted in its economic advancement, so too its naval collapse is rooted in its steady loss of economic primacy. We have come full circle. 2

Concomitantly, as Britain's Gross National Product fell behind that of its wartime adversaries, its defence spending declined steadily in proportion to social expenditures while the cost of military equipment skyrocketed. Nevertheless, for reasons explained below, the costs of an East -of-Suez presence were never thoroughly debated until severe economic straits in the 1960s finally meant that it could not be avoided.