“In preparing for
battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is
indispensable”.
Dwight D.
Eisenhower
Strategy and planning
What is strategy and what is planning? Let
me start with a spoiler alert. This is not one of those many commentaries one
reads these days in which a writer with no responsibility criticises those
doing their utmost to cope with an immense crisis in the face of uncertainty
and imperfect knowledge. To them I pay tribute. However, COVID-19 has again revealed
the dearth of effective strategy and planning in Europe, as well as a lack of
strategic culture and an inability or unwillingness to consider the worst-case
and prepare for it.
Helmut von Moltke’s dictum on planning has
passed into history: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the
first encounter with the enemy’s main strength”. He saw strategy as the practical
art of adapting means to ends to ensure a balance between action, resources and
environment. And yet, like Eisenhower,
he famously questioned the utility of a plan given that most events are dynamic
and conceal and generate a myriad of unknowns.
During the COVID-19 crisis most European
governments have been desperate to demonstrate to their respective publics that
they have a ‘plan’. In fact, much of the
‘plan’ is political spin – the appearance of considered, concerted and cohesive
action when in fact there is none. Crisis
management has thus become a crisis of governance. For example, whilst the British
government has not performed as abjectly as some of its critics claim, the
crisis has revealed the extent to which ‘spinitis’ has penetrated government to
the point where many policy-makers and practitioners seem unable to distinguish
between the two. It has also left millions of Britons, for example, wondering
why there often seems little relationship between the stated goals of
government and actual reality on the ground.
There has also been routine high-level
confusion over strategy and planning. In essence, strategy in a crisis concerns
the pulling of big levers of power in the right sequence and at the right time in
pursuit of an overarching goal: in this case a return to a secure, stable and
relatively prosperous society. Strategy
thus involves hard policy choices at times between those three end states.
Planning should be an adaptive process that constantly fine tunes forces and
resources to ensure strategy and the goals it supports can be realised. However, if ‘strategy’ is in fact a political
mechanism for the avoidance of such choices, it is spin.
Spinitis and strategic fragility
For the past twelve years, in the wake the
economic and financial crash, most of Europe has been desperately trying to
reduce deficits and public debt to restore balance whilst often avoiding hard
choices, although the Greeks might beg to differ. This is primarily because politicians
have avoided doing what was necessary for fear of being punished. The result is
a Europe locked into a form of low-level crisis psychosis in which politicians
give the impression of strength and stability where little or none exists. The masking and protection of fragility has thus
been the purpose of strategy.
Cue COVID-19 and the effective collapse of
a fragile edifice. The coming
consequence will be seen in the very hard policy choices European governments
will soon be forced to make. The very
kind of choices elected politicians have spent their entire careers trying to
avoid. However, the very nature of Europe’s political elite raises a further
profound question: are they equipped and able even to make such choices?
Spin, power and strategy
The paradox of strategy is that whilst it
is ultimately about power and resource, it is far more important for the weak
than the strong. COVID-19 is changing the all-important balance between risk, stability,
security and defence. It will also
demand that European leaders are called upon to do far more with far less. This is because COVID-19 has critically
weakened the assumptions upon which traditionally strategy and planning in
Europe has been based. Europe is no
longer a region of relatively powerful states.
The problem for Europe’s political leaders is their wish to maintain the
appearance of power where little power exists. Spin.
The coming and consequent political crisis
will be made more intense by the public clamour to ensure ‘this never happens
again’. Such clamour will almost certainly mean much limited resource is wasted
giving the impression that government is far better prepared to deal with any such
future pandemic. However, better
protection against the past offers little or no protection against an
inevitably different future. In other words, spin will be king and real
strategy and planning subordinated to it.
What makes spin so dangerous is the
purposeful sacrificing of strategy for politics. Both strategy and planning
depend on sound analysis, and such analysis can only be generated by government
machinery free to make analyses. When
spin is king such analysis becomes inconvenient and the virus of ‘spinitis’
spreads like a pandemic across all organs of government. Thereafter, the main purpose of government
becomes the maintenance of spin, with governments hoping desperately that all
the other risks and threats of which they are also aware remain quiescent, at
least on their watch. Specifically, any balance between health security and
other critical public investments will probably be abandoned as political
leaders embark on the policy equivalent of ambulance chasing. Standing policy will thus be sacrificed to
meet the short-term goal of being seen to deal with COVID-19-type threats,
critically undermining national defence and the ability to respond to any and
all other threats.
Future consequences
The appearance of a plan when in fact
neither strategy nor planning really exists has profound consequences for
Europe’s future. Spin kills strategic analysis and strategic thinking and
destroys any hope of a strategic culture.
Paradoxically, Europe does not lack for strategic analysis, thinking or
thinkers, it is simply very little such analysis and thinking is close to
power. For example, Britain’s inability to see the risks posed by Xi’s China is
not simply a consequence of mercantilism and the allure of Chinese
investment. There is simply no strategic
thinking in government in London about China or, frankly, much else these
days. If Britain no longer thinks
strategically, then there is little chance the rest of Europe will. France
retains some vestigial strategic culture, but it lacks the weight to convince
the rest of Europe of Paris’s admittedly often parti pris thinking. Berlin,
the natural leader of contemporary Europe, lacks any such culture. This lacuna
represents perhaps the greatest danger to the transatlantic relationship. It is
not simply that Germans increasingly disagree with the Americans, they are
simply unable to understand how and why the Americans think the way they do. The irony is that Germans in many ways invented
the idea of strategy and planning.
Moltke also understood the relationship between
strategy, planning and complexity. Specifically, in a complex environment force
and resource must be able to act autonomously from each other, even as they act
upon each other. Consequently, absolute
control from any one centre is impossible because no commander can be aware of all
the factors that are acting upon strategy. Consequently, effective strategy and
planning depends on the capacity to generate great means efficiently and apply
them both systematically and flexibly, which in turn demands devolution of
authority to trusted subordinates. Spin destroys any such trust because the
maintenance of a big political lie relies on absolute control.
Ends, ways and means
Moltke saw the ultimate purpose of
planning and the application of resources as the reduction of risk to strategy.
Ends, ways and means are thus the Holy Trinity of strategy and planning and are
themselves dependent on a mix of capability, decentralisation and redundancy and
the forging of a robust relationship between strategy and planning, control and
desired effect. In the real world European governments would together now consider
four lines of planning action in support of a new strategic balance between
human security and national defence: a broad post-COVID-19 scan of the threat
horizon; proper consideration of the nature and likelihood of risk;
prioritisation risk and the apportioning of resources accordingly; adaptation
of structure to ensure responsiveness and readiness across a range of
contingencies. The Euro-world?
Will Europeans ever learn? More
importantly, can Europeans learn in time?
Julian
Lindley-French
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