“An incessant change of means to attain unalterable ends is
always going on; we must take care not to let these sundry means undo eminence
in the perspective of our minds; for, since the beginning, there has been an
unending cycle of them, and for each its advocates have claimed adoption as the
sole solution of successful war.”
General
George S. Patton
Network NATO
Alphen, Netherlands.
November 21. At the NATO Foreign Minister’s Meeting in Brussels yesterday,
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called on the nations to recognise space as
a domain of Allied defence and deterrence, alongside air, land, sea, and
cyber. To those five ‘domains’ I would
add critical information and knowledge.
Stoltenberg was clear: “Space is essential to the Alliance’s defence and
deterrence, for early warning, communication and navigation”. So, what happens
when such ‘networks collapse? If the military net was ‘killed’ could Western
militaries still take a coherent and cohesive fight to the enemy? Denied the
direct command relationship between supreme commander and ‘strategic
lieutenants’ implicit in networked warfare could NATO mount any sort of
defence, beyond a series of local uncoordinated actions? As space-based
communications, robotics and networked architectures become THE essential
components of NATO doctrine, are potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities also
being built into Allied defence and deterrence?
I
n the eighteenth, and
for much of the nineteenth century, Royal Navy squadrons and individual frigates
were dispatched to claim far-flung corners of the world for His/Her Imperial
Britannic Majesty. They were armed by
Their Lordships of the Admiralty with little more than the broad strategic
intent of the government of the day. Thereafter, remote from London, they went
‘dark’, and possibly for years. How their Lordships ‘intent’ was interpreted
was entrusted to individual commanding officers. So long as they were successful in their
mission, or died trying, honour was said to have been served. In 1757, Admiral
John Byng was executed by firing squad in His Majesty’s Naval Base, Portsmouth on
the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch precisely
for failing that trust, although King George II also played a dark political
hand in this tragic affair.
Some of my best
conversations take place in the unlikeliest of places. Last Wednesday night I
was having a ‘mind my own business’ pizza in a Roman trattoria as I prepared to
brief NATO admirals and generals on the future of NATO at the excellent NATO
Defence College, two old friends walked in, Professors Stefano Silvestri and
Holger Mey. Some fifteen years ago
Stefano and I collaborated on a series of reports into the future of European
defence for the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Venusberg Group. Brilliant, and very
reasonably-priced (free), they are still worth a read http://www.cap.lmu.de/download/2004/2004_Venusberg_Report.pdf.
Holger
is a fellow member of The Alphen Group strategy network, or TAG, https://thealphengroup.home.blog/2019/04/25/welcome-to-the-alphen-group/,
which I have the honour to chair. Thereafter, a very convivial evening was had
by all.
What if NATO crashes?
Napoleon said one should
“never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake”. Holger raised a vital
point, as he so often does, that has been of concern to me for some time. What
if all the digital, networked, increasingly ‘AI’ and space-based architectures
upon which the future Western way of warfare is being predicated were to
collapse? Too often Western defence planners seem to think that the West
adversaries are stupid, will do exactly what they expect them to do, and will only
attack Western forces, and indeed society, where it is intrinsically
strong. It is a message Holger hammers
home to great effect in his brilliant briefings on the changing relationship
between strategy, technology, mindset and effects.
What some call ‘hybrid
warfare’ I prefer to call 5D warfare; the considered and relentless application
of complex strategic coercion across disinformation, deception, disruption,
destabilisation, and destruction. It is a form of perpetual warfare at the
seams and margins of open societies, soft critical infrastructures, and
insufficiently-hardened military command chains that is purposefully designed
to keep the armed forces of democracies permanently off-balance.
In May 1940, the
numerically superior French and British armies collapsed in the face of the far
smaller Wehrmacht. This was primarily
because the Wehrmacht’s offensive doctrine (the military way of doing
business), which combined strategy, tactics and technology to great effect in
the form of Blitzkrieg, critically
and catastrophically overcame Allied defensive doctrine. The success of the Wehrmacht was almost symbiotic with the
nature of the force-on-force conflict. Allied armies were either too static, the
French Maginot Line, or suffering from
the false assumptions of France’s General Gamelin and Britain’s Lord Gort about
how the Wehrmacht would employ
manoeuvre warfare. The result was that
in the six weeks following May 10 the Allied armies became rapidly separated,
whilst their respective command chains became increasingly incoherent as individual
formations were either isolated and by-passed (Maginot Line), or became ever
more separated from their own command chains. Patton was surely right when he
said, “fixed fortifications are monument’s to man’s stupidity”. The over-extended, and far too small, British
Expeditionary Force had been sent to deter, not to fight.
London and the Audit of
Alliance Vulnerabilities
Patton also said
something else, NATO leaders might wish to consider at the forthcoming
‘Leader’s Meeting’ in London: “If everybody is thinking alike, someone is not
thinking”. The gathering is nominally to
celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the April 1949 (???) founding of the
Alliance. London could well be dominated
by a major Macron-inspired spat over whether, seventy years on, NATO even has a
future. Anything to deny the British a
political and diplomatic success, eh Paris? As an aside, I do ‘admire’ the
French ability to turn an essentially good idea – Europeans should do more for
their own defence – into an unmitigated political disaster – but not so much
with the Americans, and possibly without NATO.
If the leaders can get over that particular querelle most of a brief discussion will be devoted to the modernisation
of Alliance collective deterrence and defence.
If NATO’s leaders really
want to go beyond simply ‘fact-checking’ progress on the 2014 NATO Defence
Investment Pledge, the leaders could instigate an Audit of Alliance
Vulnerabilities, and order NATO to imagine how it would fight a war in the
worst-case. The Russian General Staff believe they have a great advantage in
any future ‘kinetic’ war, which day-after-day they are planning, even if,
hopefully, it is never activated. This potentially critical advantage lies not
in any belief about the relative superiority of the Russian Armed Forces.
Rather, it is the belief that with the clever application of 5D warfare the
entire NATO command and control edifice could collapse like a pack of cards, or
be by-passed like some latter day virtual Maginot Line. Therefore, if ‘London’
is to reaffirm Allied deterrence and defence NATO must demonstrate that Maginot
NATO is but a Gerasimov wet-dream.
As for Admiral Byng, he
was deemed by Their Lordships to have failed under the Articles of War to take the fight to the French with sufficient
vigour, courage and imagination. As Voltaire observed in Candide his wonderful satire on misplaced optimism, Byng was executed “pour
encourager les autres” – to encourage the other British admirals. Now, there’s
an idea.
Julian Lindley-French
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