Today's Analysis is necessarily a long one as it serves as my submission to the UK Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR 2020). It has been seen and commented upon by very senior people from across the Euro-Atlantic Community and is designed to challenge prevailing assumptions in London, not only about defence policy and the Review, but Britain's place in a fast-changing world. It does not pull its punches. JLF
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FOOD
FOR THOUGHT PAPER
Integrated
Review 2020 and the United Kingdom Future Force
By
Julian
Lindley-French
September
3rd, 2020
Abstract: IR 2020 and the United Kingdom Future Force 2030
considers the essential issues all strategic reviews should address given the
challenges Britain faces today: health security versus national security, British
defence strategy today and options for the future, the other Brexit and
Britain’s abandonment of a continental strategy, the role of HM Treasury in
national defence and the vital need for a threat not cost-led defence
strategy. The ‘strategy’ which IR 2020
crafts will have profound implications for Britain’s role in NATO and for the
Alliance itself. To that end, Britain must invest the Alliance with the
necessary strategic ambition and military capability needed to maintain
all-important Allied defence and deterrence. The piece also considers the
growing implications of US military over-stretch for the defence of Britain and
wider Europe. Consequently, it calls on Britain to lead a Combined Arms
approach to the development of a high-end, first responder European Future
Force that exploits new Emerging and Disruptive Technologies. Critically, the
piece considers what it would take for Britain to remain a real Tier
One military power via a new look defence strategy and concludes by suggesting
IR 2020 will be a tipping point not just for British defence but for Britain
itself in an uncertain world with an uncertain future. Are Britain’s political leaders up to the
task?
Anchor
Quote
“We seriously doubt the
MoD’s ability to generate the efficiencies required to deliver the equipment
plan. In the past, the MoD has proven incapable of doing so—for example, in
2015, when only 65% of planned ‘efficiency savings’ were achieved. Even if all
the efficiencies are realised, there will be little room for manoeuvre, in the
absence of sufficient financial ‘headroom’ and contingency funding. This is not
an adequate basis for delivering major projects at the heart of the UK’s
defence capability.”
House
of Commons Defence Select Committee, 2017 (before the COVID-19 crisis)
Bat power
Today is the anniversary of
the outbreak of World War Two so consider this! Somewhere in China, sometime in
2019, deep in a dark Wuhan ‘wet market’ someone allegedly contracts a virus
from a bat. A year or so later British defence policy, funding and investment
plans, as well as many of its defence planning assumptions (DPA), lie in
tatters. Meanwhile, Beijing forges ahead with a massive military modernisation programme
that is exerting growing pressure on Britain’s critical ally, the United
States. Just to reinforce the point last week China ‘tested’ DF21D and DF-26
anti-ship missiles in a move the Pentagon called “destabilising”. That is the
unpromising back-drop to Britain’s delayed but finally forthcoming Integrated
Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR 2020). The Times suggests “…several billion
pounds could be wiped off the MoD’s annual budget, which is £41.5bn this year”.
The fact that the Review is being undertaken at the worst moment in the midst
of the COVID-19 economic crisis as part of a wider comprehensive spending
review (CSR) says everything one needs to know about the politics behind it.
More ‘efficiencies’, more cuts.
The political purpose of the
Review is thus clear: to find ways to raid the defence, aid and foreign policy
budgets to pay for a COVID-19 crisis which has taken the national debt to over
£2 trillion, whilst avoid giving any such impression. By weakening Britain’s
defences further simply to pay for COVID-19 London risks swapping one pandemic crisis
for another just as dangerous geopolitical crisis. Equally, if imbued with the
necessary strategic ambition this era-defining Review could afford both London
and the British defence establishment an opportunity. What are the defence
policy options available to Britain’s beleaguered government?
Conceit, deceit and the magic
military
Health security versus national security: Like
many of my colleagues in academic and think-tankery I have been invited to
submit my views as part of the usual feeding frenzy that accompanies such
reviews. Is it worth it? First, HM
Treasury and Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s Chief Advisor for Everything, seem
to have already decided Britain’s defence course of action – more decline
management. Second, should I legitimise (the real purpose of such submissions)
a review that will almost certainly see health security funded at the expense
of national security? Third, is IR 2020 really a strategic defence review
worthy of the name? Since the 1998 Strategic Defence Review British defence strategy
has had four essential strands all of which mask a growing gulf between ends,
ways and means. Cloaked in political
hyperbole such reviews have driven an inexorable decline in the fighting power
of Britain’s armed forces and the ‘hollowing out’ of its ever-smaller
front-line force.
British defence strategy today: The result is what
passes for defence strategy today. The use of nuclear weapons as an absolute
guarantee against any existential threat to the British Isles with just enough intelligence
capacity and expeditionary/high-end military intervention capability to
convince Washington that London still remains an important ally, whilst maintaining
the pretence that Britain remains a Tier One military power through commitments
to the NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) that London cannot possibly meet
while stonewalling NATO concerns about declining British fighting power,
particularly in the Land Domain. Fourth, placing the Alliance at the centre of
British defence strategy whilst withdrawing from the continent.
Strategic
defence and security reviews 1998-2020: SDR 1998 began this process of wishful
defence policy projection when Tony Blair established his doctrine of liberal
humanitarian interventionism and the use of the British armed forces as ‘force
for good’. Unfortunately, the defence
planning assumptions underpinning the Blair Doctrine were blown away by 911,
the Afghanistan War and the concomitant Iraq War. Consequently, the distance
between the ends, ways and means of Britain’s defence policy became ever wider.
By the time of the 2010 Strategic Defence
and Security Review (SDSR) Britain’s armed forces were effectively broken.
Worse, the banking crisis in which Britain found itself deeply mired forced the
then British government to impose swingeing cuts of up to 20% on an already
worn-out force. SDSR 2010 also established a ‘method’ that has, in effect,
become a mantra for the ‘management’ of Britain’s military decline by claiming that
central to its purpose was the need to “avoid
the twin mistakes of retaining too much legacy equipment for which there is no
requirement, or tying ourselves into unnecessarily ambitious future
capabilities”.
SDSR 2015 was a partial
attempt to begin the long-term recovery of Britain’s armed forces. It re-confirmed
a commitment Britain had made at the 2014 NATO Wales Summit to make defence
spending 2% of GDP of which 20% would be spent on new equipment. SDSR 2015 also saw the adoption of two other
British defence political ‘stratagems’: creative defence accounting and the use
of magic military solutions. In the 2015
SDSR the magic military ‘solution’ was ‘beefed up’ Special Forces that were to
be the go to cure all for all and any pressures Britain’s markedly smaller Future
Force might face.
Falling GDP due to COVID-19 means
by definition a falling defence budget. Cue IR 2020. The political inference
thus far is that IR 2020 is yet another metaphor for multi-dimensional cuts to
the foreign, security, development and foreign policy budgets just at the
moment when Britain no longer has access to the EU and its institutions. It also takes place at precisely the moment
when US forces are beginning to feel the heat of China’s military rise and the growing
pressures that places on Washington’s ability to guarantee the defence of
Europe, despite a predatory Russia.
The magic military: The magic military bit of IR
2020 (or 2021, or whenever it will be published) is cyberspace and black hole
space. Cyber and space are important theatres of contest as I discuss in my
forthcoming new Oxford book, Future War
and the Defence of Europe. The role
of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (E&DT) in future defence will also
be vital. The real question, given there is already a £20 plus billion funding
gap in the defence equipment budget, is where exactly should Britain invest in
such technologies. My fear is cyberspace
and space are both perfect for defence ‘cutateers’ because they are
unfathomable black holes the depth of which can never be measured. As the
pioneer of the concept of 5D warfare in which complex strategic coercion is
exerted across disinformation, deception, destabilisation, disruption and implied
or actual destruction I am fully aware of the important role cyber could play
in modernising deterrence and defence. The same goes for artificial
intelligence (AI). What AI?
Critically, cyber cannot and
will not replace fighting power and the platforms, systems and people that will
be needed in sufficient quantity and at a level of quality needed to win the
hard yards of twenty-first century peace. The advocates of ‘winning to the left
of combat’ with cyber et al find it impossible to explain how.
Tank politics, cost-neutrality
and the other Brexit
Cutting, investing and influencing: Sir
Max Hastings has suggested that one should not be emotional about the scrapping
of outmoded defence kit. He is absolutely right! He was responding to leaks
from within Whitehall that Britain might scrap all of its ageing fleet of two
hundred and twenty-two Challenger 2
main battle tanks and assorted other armoured vehicles. There is also talk of
Britain’s frigate fleet being reduced from the already miniscule thirteen to
the hardly noticeable eight, and slashing orders for F-35 Lightning 2s. Britain
used to have a little bit of everything, but not much of anything, soon it will
not have very much of anything at all. This is important because if a small
force cannot be in two places at once, a minute force cannot really be credible
as a force anywhere at all. A lack of
mass means a lack of that most vital of commodities, influence. This, in turn,
is critical for the most important function of any force – the power not to
fight at all. Worse, the danger is not only that tanks, aircraft or ships might
be cut, but that just a few of each are kept for political reasons to assuage
lobbies of tankers, airmen and sailors thus further destabilising an already
unbalanced force.
If such cuts were made due to
sound military-strategic reasons then so be it. Just because Britain invented
the tank does not mean it needs them a century later if they serve no practical
defence purpose, although I know of no one in the infantry who does not feel
safer (and is safer) for the presence of friendly armour. In reality the
floating of such cuts by those inside the Review is simply because once again
IR 2020 is being cost not threat-led. HM Treasury is insisting Britain’s
smaller defence books be balanced at a lower level of funding and whatever cost
to a force that to the budgeteers is all cost and no value. The obsession with
‘cost neutral’ defence reviews assumes that an ‘all things being equal’
strategic environment in which threats never increase or change. Look at the world in 2020 even compared with
2020!
Fixing the defence-procurement shambles: Britain’s
defence procurement is also a farce constantly subject to the shifting sands of
political will with equipment programmes both cut and stretched in equal
measure. One thing IR 2020 could do is to grip the defence industrial
implications of the changing character of warfare and the technologies ‘defence’
will need. The very concept of the defence industrial base will need to change
as AI and in time quantum computing enter the fray and massively accelerate the
speed of both war and command. Indeed,
only a new form of a strategic public private partnership could master the
change that is fast coming, allied to a new kind of Defence Growth Partnership
(DGP).
Threat-led or cost-led?
Britain desperately needs IR
2020 to be a genuinely threat-led review, the first since the Cold War. However,
given that any such review will need to be paid for the economic and financial
context is not at all promising. The crisis in British public finances is, indeed,
very real with the national deficit now over £300 billion. However, the public
finance crisis is also fast becoming a defence, NATO, transatlantic relations
crisis because British governments continue to see defence as a peacetime luxury,
even if they routinely speak as if the fight against COVID-19 is a form of
‘war’. One cannot win wars with either a
peacetime mind-set or a peacetime view of investment and London urgently needs
to see both COVID 19 AND the deteriorating strategic environment as part of the
same set of challenges. The choices are stark. London can either accept that
the national debt is already so high that adding more defence costs to it will
make little difference. Alternatively, they will have to look for other sources
of funding, such as the £15.8 billion devoted the aid budget. Either way, any meaningful attempt to close
Britain’s threat-rhetoric-defence gap would necessarily see the British defence
budget rise to at least 2.5% GDP and see all the costs associated with the
nuclear deterrent removed from the defence budget.
HM Treasury and national defence: The
worse nightmare of HM Treasury is a no deal Brexit and COVID-19 combining to
drastically reduce the tax base and thus bankrupt Britain. Fair enough. However,
simply making IR 2020 a slave of HM Treasury is self-defeating. To serve any
purpose any such review must address the big picture of British security,
defence and influence. The role of government is to strike a balance. It is not
to recognise only as much threat as HM Treasury says it can afford. If Britain is at ‘war’, as the Government
suggests, then the spending guidelines need to reflect that imperative, as they
did during World War One and World War Two. Any such expenditures must thus be
seen as a form of war debt to be paid off at historically low fixed interest
rates over many years and in combination with higher taxation. That is the only possible way that Britain’s national
ends, ways and means can be afforded in the wake of this crisis, let alone its
military ends, ways and means.
Rational defence policy-making: It is vital IR 2020 establishes
a rational for policy choices based on a real strategic assessment (not the
political PR that are the UK National Security Strategies and the National Risk
Register). However, there is little or no evidence the current regime has the
political will or the vision or, indeed, a strategic culture that would enable
it to undertake an exercise that would inevitably throw up some nasty and
expensive surprises. Worse, so long as Government policy is driven primarily by
‘all things being equal’ HM Treasury economists secure money will always come
before a secure Britain.
IR 2020, NATO and the military
Brexit
The vital role of NATO defence and deterrence: NATO
is the lodestar for modern defence and deterrence and it is vital the Concept
for the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) is implemented
in full. At the core of the effort is the modernising enhanced NATO Response
Force (eNRF) and Britain needs to be front and centre of that effort. It is
not. Indeed, the greater the stated commitment London makes to the Alliance in
IR 2020 the greater the likely cuts to Britain’s forces. For London NATO has become a metaphor for “we
can no longer really afford to do this or that, so you our allies will have to
do it”. The problem is that every other
European ally is doing the same thing, apart from the Americans and, yes, the
Turks. The result is a NATO that is fast beginning to look like one of those
Soviet propaganda movies of old which were all façade and no substance and in
which ‘cohesion’ is everything. There
could come a day when NATO is forced out of the Baltic States due to American
military over-stretch and European military weakness, but the ensuing communique
would no doubt state that in spite of the ‘set back’ the Alliance maintained
its ‘cohesion’.
The other Brexit: In August 2019, Britain conducted
a military Brexit abandoning the land defence of the European continent by
withdrawing the massive bulk of its remaining forces back to the UK. The remnant
is a forward-deployed battlegroup in Estonia, a few units in Germany and some
Special Forces stuff. How can such a posture possibly reinforce the two centres
of gravity of NATO defence, deterrence and security? How could cyber possibly
help NATO maintain high-end deterrence against Russia to NATO’s east and engaged
support for front-line states facing the Mediterranean to NATO’s south? Britain’s military contribution to both is already
minimal which is demonstrated by Britain’s effective absence from any or all
diplomatic efforts of any weight anywhere these days. Indeed, there is a very
great danger that Prime Minister Johnson’s Global Britain will simply no longer
matter even in its own strategic backyard - Europe. Given the still vital link
between power and influence could IR 2020 make Britain matter even less?
Combined Arms and the UK
Future Force 2030?
UK Future Force 2030? For IR 2020 to succeed it
must look purposively out towards 2030 and mirror US efforts to modernise its
forces by moving away from a focus on counter-insurgency operations in the
Middle East and back to high-end power projection. However, the USMC is an intrinsically
joint force. For such a vision to succeed Britain’s defence chiefs would not
only have to stop fighting each other (and stop engaging in competitive
leaking) they would also have to speak hard truth to political power and do so,
for once, with one voice. If the National Security Council had any weight it
could assist that, but it is a pale shadow of its US counterpart.
A new look defence strategy: If the nuclear
deterrent is taken as a given (although all current and future programme costs
should be removed from the defence budget), and assuming cyber defence (and
offence) would be as much a civilian as a military cost, the centre of gravity
of IR 2020 will necessarily concern the future of Britain’s high-end expeditionary/intervention
forces. Given the fact that any such British
future force will need for the most part to rely on US enablers it is therefore
logical to look to the US for a possible vision.
USMC and UKAF: The future of Britain’s expeditionary
capability must be a deep joint force supported by Emerging and Disruptive
Technologies (E&DT). In that sense, the US Marine Corps (USMC) is the most
obvious parallel to the UK Armed Forces. Whilst the USMC has some 182,000
active personnel supported by some 38,000 reserves, the UK Armed Forces have
some 149,000 active personnel supported by 44,900 reserves. Both the US Marine Corps
and UK military are power projection forces, with both increasingly focussed on
admittedly vulnerable carrier-enabled power projection (CAPP). Not only is the USMC a possible source of
vision it is also the natural partner of the British force and will operate F-35s from Britain’s two new aircraft
carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.
Combined Arms? Both the USMC and UKAF share other ‘virtue
out of necessity’ attributes relevant to IR 2020. London’s abandonment of a
continental strategy and the centrality of the nuclear deterrent in Britain’s
defence strategy leads inexorably to a kind of rough military logic about the
future of intervention. First, any such posture precludes the kind of mass force
that would be needed to fight a high-end war with the likes of China and Russia.
Second, the focus then becomes the creation of a small, but high quality, deep
joint ‘strategic raider’ force focussed on one Strategic Command. Third, given
the small size of such a British force and its ‘lightness’, like the USMC it
would need to maintain a high degree of interoperability with the US Army and access
US enablers. Indeed, it would be little more than an adjunct of US forces. For
even this vision to be realised ‘UKAF’ would need to properly grip the concept
of Combined Arms in much the same way the US Marine Corps sees it as central to
its DNA.
Size and force structure: The role of a small high-end force would be
to undertake relatively long-reach but short duration 'kick down the door'
Littoral plus operations in conjunction with allies, most notably the Americans.
Given Britain’s existing defence investments any such scenario would
necessarily see the Army providing a follow-on force for small spearhead
formations of beefed up Special Air
Service/Special Boat Squadron, Royal
Marines, and whatever name is given to the Parachute Regiment given that drifting down into the twenty-first
century battlespace a la Arnhem is no longer particularly safe (more on the
role of the British Army later). The future of ‘airborne’ is assured, but it
will be a very different form of airborne, possibly one in which even
helicopters are replaced and the future airborne soldier is borne aloft by
jetpacks operating with artificially intelligent drones acting as ‘friendly
wingmen’. In other words, a smaller force package version of how F-35s might
operate.
The Royal Air Force would have
four primary roles: to support the Royal Navy by providing carrier strike; to
ensure an assured level of sophisticated anti-access/ areas denial (A2AD) over
British airspace and, with the P8 Maritime Patrol Aircraft, under British
waters; to afford limited strategic lift for supply and re-supply of deployed
forces; and, of course, to protect the nuclear deterrent as the submarines
enter and exit Faslane (both the Vanguard-class
and in time the new Dreadnought class
nuclear-powered ballistic missile boats).
Level of ambition, area of operations: The
good news is that whilst the military reach of the USMC is across the
maritime-amphibious global battlespace of the Indo-Pacific where, of course,
the USMC gained its stellar reputation, Britain is a European power and can
focus its main effort far closer to home.
Interestingly for Britain the choices the Americans are making the
implications for the future force structure of the ‘Corps’ include a much
tighter joint ‘culture’ with the US Navy, even if the USMC is unlikely ever
again to mount large scale forced entry amphibious operations. For the
Americans the emphasis will thus be on high-speed, short-term, maximum shock,
high technology raids (strategic raiders) against vulnerable parts of a high
end peer adversary’s force posture. Britain?
Tier One and the cost of readiness? Like
all recent defence reviews (and the fluff they are cloaked in) IR 2020 will no
doubt claim that Britain will remain a ‘Tier One’ military power. The true test
of such a claim will be the role of the British Army. Here ‘UKAF’ would part company with USMC. The
difference with the US Marine Corps would be the transformation of the British
Army into a twenty-first century ‘heavy’ force that whilst relatively small
would still be able to operate to high-end effect across the battlespace. The political benefits of such a plan would be
clear. First, Britain would still be able to exert leadership within the
Alliance to which it claims to aspire. Second, such a ‘command hub force’ would
also enable non-US allies to ‘plug’ into UK-led coalitions if the US was busy
elsewhere. Third, it would enable the French and the Germans to ‘buy into’ a
new British commitment to European defence.
However, the British would also need to keep a significant part of what
would be a significant high readiness force at high readiness for significant
periods. Not cheap!
Little force, little Britain: If IR 2020 really is to be another, “we cannot afford
everything we really should” review it is hard to see the Army ‘winning’ given
the changing character of warfare and Britain’s diminishing role within
it. If that were to be the case, and given
how much money Britain has already ‘sunk’ (excuse the deliberate pun) into big
ships and very complicated fast jets the logic would then be to invest in an
all-out genuine and muscular maritime-amphibious strategy, with an air force
tailored to support. At least such a capability would afford London more
discretion over the use of force in complex scenarios, as naval forces can come
and go albeit at the expense of reach. However, given the trade-offs implicit
therein the Army would be reduced to little more than a lower-readiness,
support for the civil authority, home defence force. If such a choice is indeed
made Britain should at least have the decency to say to NATO and other allies
that Britain no longer really does big land stuff, but will make a serious
material contribution to collective allied maritime and air security.
That IS the essential defence choice IR 2020
must now make and whilst painful it might just allow Britain to retain a seat
at top tables, and possibly ensure Britain holds onto NATO’s Deputy Supreme
Allied Commander, Europe. The worst
thing for Britain to do would be to continue doing what it is now doing –
pretending to its allies, most notably the United States, that Britain remains
a serious land power when it can no longer field anything like the force the
NATO Military Strategy and Defence Plan assumes. The furtherance of such deceit
could, in time, lead NATO into disaster.
Britain and the European
Future Force
IR 2020 and US military over-stretch: There
is another change factor IR 2020 must grip. The attrition of a decade of full
engagement operations, allied to the rise of peer competitors means the
Americans are also facing an ends, ways and means crisis that the new
Administration (whatever it is) will need to address. It is a crisis (for that is what it is) that will
have profound implications for the future defence of Europe because it will put
transatlantic burden-sharing front and centre of the US policy agenda. They will have no other choice. Indeed, without
the full and combined leadership commitment of Britain, France and Germany
across the multi-domains of contemporary and future warfare the US will be
simply unable to any longer guarantee the defence of a free Europe.
A
European Future Force: Europeans desperately need to build a European Future
Force worthy of the name to ease pressure on the Americans, and to reinforce
the credibility of Alliance defence and deterrence if, as would be likely,
future enemies force the Americans to fight in multiple theatres the world over
at the same time. Such a European force would also need to be a deeply joint,
multi-domain, multi-national force and plugged into a tight command security
and defence apparatus (an adapted NATO?). Britain, France and Germany would also
need to act as ‘high framework powers’ by enabling force generation, command
and control of coalitions by acting as autonomous command hubs. Therefore, in
the wake of Brexit, IR 2020 should commit Britain to play a committed
leadership role in the forging of such a command group by updating and
expanding the 2010 UK-French Defence Co-operation Treaty with the aim of
forging a new European fast, first responder and high-end force designed to reinforce
effective deterrence in and around Europe, even if the Americans are busy
elsewhere. A necessary reality check must be inserted at this point. Any such
European Future Force would need to be weaned off US strategic enablers to be
truly autonomous. For example, the US today provides 65% of NATO’s ‘fast air’
and 90% of refuelling aircraft. Indeed, if IR 2020 is to have a scintilla of
strategic ambition or imagination it is just such a vision it must espouse.
Otherwise…
IR 2020: yet another strategic
pretence and insecurity review?
Some will consider this
‘intervention’ unhelpful. It is necessary. This is because the future of
defence is on the offensive. The
lethality and range of modern weapons systems, both offensive and defensive,
allows ‘defence’ to be prosecuted by forward forces supported by ground, air
and maritime-based weapons deployed at depths well-outside the tactical defence
area. Deterrence by Denial is now not simply the presence of massed heavy
metal, but the integration of so-called ‘fires’. In that light, IR 2020 must
not be judged by its political, but its strategic value. It must also answer
three questions: does it set Britain on a course to play the military role a
still major European power of its size and strength should play in the defence
of Europe? Does it enable Britain to support US leadership and make an adequate
contribution to the sharing of transatlantic burdens? And, does it help to
prevent the possible defeat of NATO by revealing a British future force able
and willing to act in extremis?
My fear is that none of those
questions will be answered by IR 2020 and it will be the same ol’ British same
ol’. More of the same old defence
pretence at which London has become the acknowledged master in which there is much
talk of ‘ambition’ where there is none, more ‘commitments’ are made, even as
the ability to meet them declines, yet more ‘efficiencies’ are called for that
are little more than euphemisms for deep cuts, and in which defending Britain
is a cost not a value. In other words, the same old mix of conceit and deceit
that has done so much damage to Britain’s credibility and reputation as a
power. For once it would be nice to be surprised by a British government that
actually ‘gets’ the nature of twenty-first century power and is willing to
prove it.
The domestic political
implications of IR 2020 must also be gripped.
The recent spat between the BBC and huge numbers of the British people
over whether or not Rule Britannia
should be sung at this year’s Last Night
of the Proms is sadly indicative of modern Britain. For the BBC the song is
a nationalistic anachronism that reeks of jingoism. To millions of Britons it
remains a leitmotif of national defiance. However, behind the culture wars there
is something quite profound, the systematic deconstruction of British
patriotism and national self-belief. As a trained Oxford historian I am the
first to acknowledge the sins of the past and I am in sympathy with much of the
‘new thinking’, although I am profoundly concerned about the imposition of contemporary
values on past actions. In that light the state of Britain’s armed forces is something
of a metaphor for the state of Britain itself. With separatists in power in
Scotland, and many citizens seeming no longer to care about Britain and its
role in the world, could IR 2020 mark the beginning of the end of Britain itself? After all, if the British establishment no
longer believes in Britain as a power then how can the rest of us? No state can be a power if it is deeply
divided or is led by people for whom power is just pretend.
If that is indeed the journey
upon which Britain is embarked then the implications for Britain, Europe, and
all the world’s democracies are profound. Freedom cannot be defended by values
alone, however well-intentioned. Indeed, freedom, power and defence are
inexorably and intrinsically-linked. Freedom’s defence must thus always involve
a sufficiency (no more) of military power given the scope and nature of the threats
democracy faces. To be credible any such power must also communicate to allies,
adversaries and enemies alike both the determination and the capability to
fight if needs be. That was the lesson of the 1930s. Britain 2020?
IR 2020: tipping Britain into
an uncertain future
Basil Liddell Hart once
famously said that between 1919 and 1939 the British were ostriches, and when
their heads were jerked from the sand their eyes were too angrily bloodshot to
keep clear sight. IR 2020 is a tipping point for a declining Britain and thus should
not be seen as simply another review. As such, it will reveal the extent to
which Britain is a serious power to be treated seriously by friend or foe
alike, or a posturing, paper, pretend power in which the appearance of strength
is far more important than strength itself.
Indeed, watching Britain from abroad it is hard not to conclude that
much of the London establishment suffer from what is known as the
Dunning-Kruger Effect, a type of cognitive bias in which they believe their
nation/organisation is smarter and more capable than it actually is, and that
allies and partners share such bias. Ultimately, Britain’s greatest weakness is
not its inability to close its defence ends, ways and means gap, but the poor
quality of Britain’s leaders, their strategic illiteracy and ingrained
short-‘termness’, allied to a determined refusal and/or inability to lead
Britain to the strategic role to which a state of its power and importance could
still aspire. Prime Minister Johnson aspires to emulate his hero Winston
Churchill. IR 2020 is his chance to begin that journey. Churchill was great not
because he succeeded in easy times, but because he prevailed in appalling
times. Over to you, Prime Minister!
The bottom-line of IR 2020 is
thus: military threats are emerging and the nature of warfare is changing. The
conditions for shock to happen are not only created through the design of
aggressors but also the neglect of defenders. Given the strategic
responsibilities of an advanced global trading power of some sixty seven
million people that is a leading member of NATO and a Permanent Member of the
UN Security Council Britain’s armed forces are fast becoming absurdly weak in
relation to the threats they must face and the roles and tasks they are expected
to perform. No amount of clever drafting can or will hide that reality! Indeed, if Integrated Review 2020 is, indeed,
more strategic pretence it is only to be hoped that some future enemy will be
obliging enough to act in such a way that Britain’s defence planning
assumptions do not simply collapse like the pack of cards they are, just as the
Wehrmacht did in 1940.
Let me finish with the words
of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, “…now we are losing again, everything has taken a
turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top if we succeed in
being defeated”. IR 2020?
Julian
Lindley-French, September
2020
