“We know that in tough times, cynicism is just another way to give
up, and in the military we consider cynicism
or giving up as another form of cowardice”
James Mattis
Britain’s
Defence Crisis
Alphen,
Netherlands. 26 June. Britain’s ends,
ways and means do not add up, which means the ends, ways and means of Britain’s
armed forces do not add up either.
Consequently, the defence of the realm is in crisis. Chief Secretary to
the Treasury Liz Truss hinted as much when she warned last night that London
would continue to only recognise as much threat as the Treasury would permit
and that Britain’s Potemkin defence ‘effort’ would continue. Defence now joins a whole raft of crises NOT
being dealt with by Government. With knife
crime soaring justice is in crisis. With the population swelling, Britain faces an enormous housing crisis. With
double-decker buses now being swallowed up by pot-holes,
the size of Slough Britain’s infrastructure is crumbling. Well, that is a bit
of an exaggeration but the trains really are in crisis
but arrive too late for anyone to notice.
Then there is Brexit; there is always bloody Brexit!
And yet, top
of the flops one finds the health crisis. As the Holy National Health Service (NHS)
approaches its seventieth birthday there are real concerns that the United
Kingdom will be unable to survive this black hole at the heart of the British state. Prime Minister May has managed to buy some
time on health, as she does, by again sacrificing the strategical for the
political by depriving the long-awaited Defence Modernisation Programme of the
up to £2bn per annum or £20bn in total that would be needed to put the words
‘defence’ and ‘modernisation’ in the same phrase and mean it. It is amazing what damage an ideological
commitment to low taxes, low spending and high demand can do to help those in
charge ignore danger.
The
consequences? At least the Germans are honest about free-riding on the
Americans, even if they over-play the eloquence of history stuff. Years ago, I
got into trouble (a much-visited place for me) by writing in the International Herald Tribune that for
decades the Americans, French and British had told Germans not to spend too
much on defence because of World War Two, whilst for the past decade Germans
have told Americans and Britons they cannot spend too much on defence because of
World War Two. Plus ça change? For years
British ministers have banged on about the UK Armed Forces (UKAF) being the
finest in the world, just as they were about to plunge a knife into what is left.
Arise Sir Max
Arise Sir Max
Hasting. Now, Sir Max is
something of a hero of mine whom I have followed for many years. My Mattis
quote at the top of this piece is not aimed at him, although his ‘depressive realism’
about contemporary Britain is so hard at times that it to borders on cynicism.
Rather, it is the culture of ‘managing decline’ that pervades the elite
Establishment and which so undermines Britain’s strategic ambition. Writing in The Times Sir Max revealed put his finger on an essential reality
of contemporary Britain: neither the country’s national strategy (in as much as
there is one) nor its defence strategy are coherent and because they are not
coherent nor are they sustainable. And yet I profoundly disagree with the
conclusions Sir Max reaches. Reading the piece it is hard to escape the
conclusion that Sir Max thinks Britain should abandon, Dante-esque, all hope of
remaining a substantial power in the world and that its armed forces have ‘had
it’. Sir Max believes that Little Britain
is now so diminished and its people so decadent that London should simply concentrate
on counter-terrorism because that is all a snowflake population understand. And, that if a real shooting war were to break
out, say, with Russia Britain would simply not want to fight it. Sorry, Baltics! In fact, I do not think Britain would have much choice but to fight.
The article is
less convincing when it discusses the now
regular ‘not one of us’ Establishment sneer about the Defence Secretary Gavin
Williamson. At least, Williamson, a
fellow Yorkshireman, is trying to stand up for defence and embed Britain’s
defence effort in some form of considered strategic logic, even if at times I too
wonder if his manner may be self-defeating for himself and for the department
he leads. ‘Crass’ is ‘la parole du jour’ to use against Williamson these days as
he fights Prime Minister May and Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond. However,
for all Williamson’s supposed rough edges the real political problem with
defence is caused by May, who has yet to demonstrate any understanding of or
empathy for security and defence policy, and Hammond who views the nation’s
finances as little more than an exercise in cash flow management rather than
the directing of vital public resources in essential public services, of which
defence is one. Worse, it is hard to
escape the conclusion that for May and Hammond
(Clarkson?) the defence budget is little more than a secret contingency reserve
for the NHS.
Still Managing
Decline
There are now
some seventy Conservative MPs threatening to vote down the forthcoming budget
if the UKAF are not ‘properly’ funded but they also seem muddle-headed. The real question should not simply concern
how much, but rather to what end? It is
the three issues of purpose, structure and capability where the ends, ways and
means crisis faced by UKAF really strike home.
There is a profound and growing gap between the defence roles and missions
assigned to UKAF, the military task-list such roles generate and the capability
and the capacity to meet such demand.
This crisis is not just strategically challenging it is also politically
disastrous. For years Britain’s shrinking but highly-competent armed forces
have been used to mask a culture of ‘managing decline’ which courses through
the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster (Post-Traumatic Suez
Disorder?). Central to Britain’s
strategic brand, UKAF have tended to mask such declinism even as they declines
and have thus been an essential generator of influence in key capitals such as
Washington, Paris and Berlin.
Not anymore. UKAF
may just about still be a ‘Tier One’ (to use the armchair analysts slogan of
the week) force if such a force is defined as one that possesses nuclear
weapons, some high-end strike and forced entry capability and a little bit of strategic
lift. Indeed, a little bit of everything
but not much of anything just about sums up UKAF these days. Ask any American
in the know and even if they are being polite UKAF are now seen as little more
than a Bonzai force – very pretty, still quite sharp, but very small.
Why has this
happened? Leaving aside London’s
lamentable conduct of Brexit negotiations (Brussels AND Whitehall on the ‘let’s
limit the damage to the EU’ side and David Davis on the ‘let’s get the best for
Britain but no clue how’ side) the state of UKAF reeks of the smelly culture of
decline management that pervades the Whitehall elite. It also demonstrates once
again that the Westminster political elite completely fail to understand the
twin and linked concepts of influence and leverage in international relations.
Worse, it also suggests that London does not think UKAF are actually meant to fight
a major war if, in the worst-case, one should break out. Therefore, if UKAF no longer have a role, and
if even limited military capability might lead to the Americans actually asking
their British counterparts to again fight alongside them, would it not be best
to reduce the force to the point of incapacity? No force, no Washington demand, no problem. One certainly cannot explain the state, size or
nature of contemporary UKAF by trying to link the force to the threat.
New Thinking
about ‘New’ Thinking
What is
urgently needed is new thinking about ‘new’ thinking at the top in London. Brexit
is having the same effect on Britain’s elite Establishment as the 1956 Suez
Crisis did on their well-heeled forebears: a wonderful excuse to slide deeper
into cynicism, exaggerated decline and, yes, policy cowardice. There is no reason
if led with ambition grounded in realism, why a state with the power of post-Brexit
Britain (a top 5 or 6 world economic power and a top 5 or 6 defence investor)
could not far better align its national strategic effort with threat, power and
ambition. Even though I remain a Big
Picture Remainer I reject this nonsense that Britain’s departure from the ‘glorious’
EU will inevitably mark Britain’s demise. Put simply, no one knows. The EU is dysfunctional, as this week’s
migration non-summit attests, and still far too obsessed with curtailing the
power of bigger states in Europe than
magnifying the collective or common influence of Europeans beyond Europe.
Where I
really part company with Sir Max is over his elite Establishment defeatism. The other night in Rome I had a delightful
dinner with a senior British officer and, yes, we probably drank a tad too much
Brunello, or whatever it was. We both
agreed that if one can look beyond the mess that is London an opportunity
exists for Britain and its armed forces IF Britain’s leaders have the courage
to seize the moment. Carpe diem, and all
that!
The Americans
are stretched thin the world over. The
Germans have no intention of spending the c$70bn on defence that meeting the
NATO Defence Investment Pledge of 2% GDP on defence would require for fear that
defending Europe will lead to accusations of dominating Europe. Put simply, a hole in the market exists for
Britain to provide a modest but powerful command hub for a host of allies
increasingly aware that the conduct of medium-to-high end operations will be
via coalitions rather than either the Alliance or the Union. Twenty years on
from the St Malo Declaration the French clearly understand that which is why President Macron convinced
London to sign-up yesterday to the distinctly non-EU European Intervention
Initiative.
Balancing
Ends, Ways and Means
Which brings
me to where Britain’s ends, ways and means should meet UKAF ends, ways and
means. To ‘modernise’ defence, ‘defence’ itself must be re-considered in the
round if London is to engineer a new defence that strikes a credible balance
between resiliency, protection and force projection. Yes, Britain lacks the heavy industrial base
of old. However, the country still retains a whole raft of advanced science and
engineering capabilities across the supply chain together with cutting-edge
expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine-learning, cyber
and intelligence where much future war will be fought and future deterrence
centred. The Defence Modernisation Plan
is good as far as it goes but goes
nothing like far enough. What this again
reveals is a critical lack of imagination at the heights and heart of Government
about twenty-first century threat and Britain’s role in dealing with it. At the
very least, if Britain is to fix the broken supply, re-supply and procurement
shambles UKAF need a twenty-first century version of the pre-war Weir Plan
which helped ensure the country’s industrial base was better prepared in 1939 for
a long war than Nazi Germany. Indeed, the source of the threat posed by Russia
is essentially its re-focusing of much of its state, intellectual and industrial
capacity on coercing others.
UKAF also need
a new balance to be found and afforded between mass and manoeuvre and between
human and technological capital. Years ago I had dinner with General Sir Mike
Jackson at Ditchley Park in which he emphasised the value of a force having
mass and that the UK had sacrificed it. He is right. And yet, with twenty-first century warfare
now likely to stretch across a broad and new spectrum of coercion from hybrid war
to hyper war via cyber war (see the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report John Allen,
Sandy Vershbow, Giampaolo di Paola, Wolf Langheld, Tom Valacek and I completed
late last year) ‘mass’ need not simply be generated by boots or metal. The
emergence of new fighting technologies such as swarm and AI suggest virtual
mass is now a very real option.
What about
the here and now? Is the existing and near-future force really that
hopeless? Yes, UKAF have been hollowed
out to the point at which combat support services no longer meaningfully exist.
However, take the Royal Navy as an example.
Yes, the Naval Service has too few hulls but IF the two new heavy
aircraft carriers (Sir Max calls them ‘behemoths’) are properly-resourced,
reasonably-equipped and appropriately-protected (big ‘ifs’ I know) the UK will
create a new strike force with platforms available to US Marine Corps that will
also act as a command hub for Allied power projection and protection of
deployed land forces. At the very least such a force will ease the increasing
world-wide pressure on the United States Navy in a very meaningful way, which
will afford Britain some influence in Washington and over American military
choices.
It is to the
future that Britain should look. Future UKAF will need to be competent war
fighters across seven domains – air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and
knowledge. Indeed, as a ‘Command Force,’ it is not beyond reasonable ambition
for Britain to be at the forefront of such defence and deterrence efforts aimed
at reinforcing comparative advantage over adversaries. Therefore, what is really needed is a
considered analysis of where best to invest British defence resources that will
always be constrained, whether Britain spends 2%, 2.5% or 3% GDP on defence, as
a report last week by House of Commons Defence Committee report called
for.
For that to
happen the obsession must end with judging comparative defence capability
simply on comparative headline defence spending. Defence purchasing power
parity is what matters together with the outcomes it generates. Therefore, before a British government suddenly
and miraculously discovers that reasonably-strong UKAF is an investment in real
influence and splurges out money on some ill-defined end, the Defence
Modernisation Programme should be expanded to consider what mix of forces,
capabilities and people and what level of capacity will really be needed to
meet considered defence ends. Then, and only then, will sound defence be seen
as an investment rather than a cost, and defence and influence finally seen as
a public good, not a public burden.
Si Vis Pacem…?
In his piece
in The Times Sir Max referred to a
dinner at which, ‘there were the brightest and best brains in the war studies
universe’. They were probably also the most accommodating as according to Lord
Heseltine, who also attended, the collected ‘stars’ offered little by way of new
thinking. Now, there’s a surprise. My
limited experience of such events has been one of carefully-controlled
get-togethers put together by defensive senior defence civil servants ostensibly
to ‘inform’ a minister or two, but in reality to ‘protect’ him or her from
dangerous new ideas. Thus, such events are
normally where the elite Establishment meet their ‘chums’ in the academic
aristocracy in some nice, inevitably genteel setting where no-one speaks truth
unto power for fear of not being invited back. No doubt these days there is
also obligatory ‘diversity’. Disruptive thinkers? Not a chance. And guess what? Such groups, group-think, which inevitably leads
to yet another ‘successful’ exercise in decline management…and so on and so
forth.
The British
elite Establishment are trapped in a virtual Ten Year Rule, all too happy to
delude themselves that a major war involving Britain will not break out in the
next decade. All they need so is look
around! In the early Thirties, Britain at least had the sense to
scrap the original Ten Year Rule which had been established in 1919 in the
immediate aftermath of World War One. Vegetius
once wrote, “Si vis pacem para bellum”, or if you want peace prepare for
war. It is not warlike but prudent for
Britain to again think about war because only by so doing can an innovative
defence be mounted and deterrence re-established. If Sir Max is right and Britain is about to
go into strategic retirement and that the main concern of Government really is
to maintain a childlike public in its childlike state then Britain, Europe,
America and the wider world will be a far more dangerous place for it.
Now, it is customary
in conclusions of such pieces for writers to say that none of the above can be resolved until
Britain has decided what kind of country and what level of power it aspires to
be. This is nonsense. The world imposes roles on countries. The more powerful a
country the more its own relative power imposes responsibilities upon it. The
only choice Britain has is to face those responsibilities, and thus help the
cause of peace, or shirk them and make the world a more dangerous place. Making even that limited choice will require
leadership. Sadly, there are precious few leaders in London these days and on
that Sir Max and I are in violent agreement.
Julian
Lindley-French
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