Ends, Ways and Has-Beens?

“The model is known as ‘ends, ways and means’, where ENDS=WAYS + MEANS. Ends are defined as the strategic outcomes or end-states desired. Ways are defined as the methods, tactics, and procedures, practices, and strategies to achieve the ends. Means are defined as the resources required to achieve the ends, such as troops, weapons systems, money, political will, and time. The model is really an equation that balances what you want with what you are willing and able to pay for it, or what you can get for what you are willing and able to pay”.

Brigadier-General (Ret.d) Denis Laich

Another bloody British defence review?

Alphen, Netherlands. March 5, 2020. They’re off! Another British defence review feeding frenzy is underway. The 2020 Integrated Review is nothing less than an attempt to consider in the round Britain’s entire foreign, security, defence and development approach. Nominally led by civil servant Sir Alex Ellis, but greatly influenced by Dominic Cummings, the eminence grise of the Johnson administration, it is also charged with considering Britain’s future security and defence in the wake of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, far better value-for-money defence procurement, as well as how to best afford the new defence technologies that are entering the multi-domain battlespace. Implicit in the review is the re-positing of British strategic ambition not just to realign the ends, ways and means central to effective defence policy, but also to make a clear statement about the place of contemporary Britain in the world.

Having just this week completed a major new book for Oxford on Future War and the Defence of Europe, which I have co-written with two US generals John Allen and Ben Hodges, it is clear that the ambition implicit in the review (and correctly so) will be no mean feat if the Government successfully pulls it off.  Sir Max Hastings, writing in The Times, expressed some cynicism about the entire process. It is cynicism I share.  First, if the Integrated Review is simply a rerun of Strategic Defence and Security Review 2010, which was a defence cull presented as strategic efficiency, or Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, which was an unfunded set of aspirations that made worse the already dangerous imbalance between ends, ways and means from which Britain’s armed forces suffer, then it will be yet another exercise in defence-strategic pretence. Second, and no disrespect intended to anyone, for all Downing Street’s talk of a radical approach there is little or no evidence thereof in the method of the review.  Critically, there are no ‘red teams’ of acknowledged experts to challenge Establishment thinking. Indeed, I would be much more reassured if real experts, such as Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Professor Paul Cornish, and Professor Andrew Dorman had a formal role in support of the review.

The most important question the review must answer is clear: what is Britain’s place in the world?  The answer to that question will underpin all the assumptions about Britain’s relative power upon which any such review must draw. It is also relatively easy to measure. According to the International Monetary Fund Britain in 2019 enjoyed the seventh biggest economy in the world by nominal GDP, but only the ninth biggest economy by power purchasing parity. According to Globalfirepower.com Britain has nominally the fifth biggest defence budget in the world, but only the eighth largest when one considers military power purchasing parity.  In other words, Britain remains a very significant regional-strategic European power, and a power of some weight in the wider world. However, Britain is no longer a world power, let alone a ‘pocket superpower’, a phrase I rather mischievously invented years ago in a piece I wrote for the International Herald Tribune.

Britain’s defence-strategic assumptions

Given Britain’s relative weight of power what are the defence strategic assumptions that should underpin the review? 

First, whilst the United States will remain Britain’s closest security and defence ally, the Americans might, in extremis, no longer be able to defend either Britain or the Europe of which it is firmly a part without the British doing far more for their own defence and Europe through an adapted NATO. This is not because the Americans are withdrawing from Europe but rather the worsening global over-stretch from which US Armed Forces suffer.

Second, Britain will need to rely more on European allies, even as it leaves the EU, albeit through NATO. At the very least, and to demonstrate Britain is seriously committed to equitable transatlantic burden-sharing, London must be seen to be defence serious.  For example, Britain could seek to co-pioneer with France and Germany a high-end, twenty-first century ‘heavy’ fast, first responder European force able to deter and defend in and around the European theatre and across multiple domains.

Third, only Britain and France retain any globally-relevant defence-strategic weight in Europe. Therefore, Britain should join with France in promoting greater European defence-strategic responsibility, partly by buying into autonomous European strategic enablers. Much will depend on the strength of the Franco-British alliance ten years on from the 2010 Lancaster House Agreement. However, whilst Paris seems to keen shore up its defence-strategic relationship with Britain, it is also seeking to inflict real damage on the British economy as punishment for Brexit. In other words, Paris cannot both secure a good defence relationship with Britain without a good trade relationship because for London both are equally strategic.

Fourth, Britain will face both peer strategic competitors and sophisticated non-state actors employing complex strategic coercion against Britain and its people.  Therefore, Britain must balance both credible defence and deterrence with effective engagement. The mosaic of new threats Britain must confront in an information-digital age will range across 5Ds of disinformation, deception, destabilisation, disruption, and implied and actual destruction. It will also be a form of warfare in peacetime. Confronting, scaling and adapting to meet such threats will also require a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between civilian-led security and military-led defence, as well as a far more profound, efficient and intimate partnership between them.

Fifth, for a power such as Britain defence has at least two strategic roles to play: defence and deterrence as a public good per se, and defence as a lever of influence over allies.  Britain might be able to generate the high-end capabilities to undertake such roles, but it is unlikely to ever have the capacity to sustain them over time and distance.  Such tension could well be further exacerbated given the balance Britain might well have to strike between deterring/fighting a short, high-intensity conflict (possibly in mega-urban environments) and engaging in a long, low-intensity conflict.   

Sixth, in the third decade of the twenty-first century credible deterrence will demand of Britain’s armed forces the proven capacity to operate simultaneously across the multi-domain battlespace of air, sea, land, cyber and space.  British forces will also need to far better exploit information and knowledge to strategic advantage. This pre-supposes not only a deeply joint/integrated force (something the new UK Strategic Command at least implies), but also a British ability to influence combined forces, either in a NATO context or via coalitions of the willing. Specifically, Britain will need the command resources and structures to enable it to act as an alternative command hub if the Americans are busy elsewhere.  Such unity of effort and purpose will only be fashioned if the Service Chiefs of the Navy, Army and RAF speak with one voice to ministers. Sadly, all the signs are that even with the modest increase in UK defence expenditure that is being signalled, the Service Chiefs are again fighting each other over where those resources should be invested. That must stop!

Seventh, technology will drive defence strategy to an unprecedented extent over the next defence planning cycle.  Defence futurists tend to exaggerate the speed with which new technologies are entering the battlespace.  For example, whilst super-computing is playing an ever more influential role in warfighting it will be a decade and more before the kind of quantum-computing able to drive really artificially intelligent swarms of drones is likely to be realised. However, such technologies (and many more) are coming and must be factored in, alongside the increasingly ‘kinetic’ impact of offensive cyber. Hypersonic weaponry is already a fact.

Eighth, where one stands depends on where one sits. Britain is an island off the coast of northwest Europe. Therefore, it makes little or no sense for Britain to make a huge investment in a continental land strategy. That is the job for the Germans, French, Poles and others. Rather, Britain can add real value in pioneering multi-domain power projection relevant to high-end European defence and transatlantic burden-sharing, particularly for maritime, amphibious, air operations. Such a concept would necessarily be centred on a new and much broader concept of Air Power that would also include information power, cyber power, space power, as well as strike and air defence. Much of Britain’s future power projection, upon which almost all forms of future defence will rely, will also require a very tight technical relationship between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.  Such a vision in no way downplays the vital role of the future British Army. Edward Grey (not Lord Fisher), Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of World War One, once suggested the British Army should be a projectile fired by the Royal Navy. It should be very rapidly power-projectable alongside the Royal Marines. Indeed, Britain has an opportunity to lead the way to show how mid-sized powers can project military force. Ironically, with two new British heavy aircraft carriers just commissioned, and if they are properly protected, the Royal Navy is on track to develop into just such a force.

The true cost of defence-strategic pretence

Of course, there is always an alternative.  Britain could continue to do what it has been doing for more than a decade: muddle along in a defence-strategic fog, continue to draw down what is left of its small force in continental Europe, engage in a bit of strategic dabbling in places like Libya or Syria, but do nothing like enough to make any real difference, and possibly make things worse, and/or simply hide behind its nuclear deterrent.  Time after time I have heard leaders of other countries complain about Britain’s creeping propensity for strategic and defence pretence. Too often, British prime ministers, with David Cameron to the fore, have been obsessed with giving the impression Britain does more than it actually does, which has not only really annoyed Washington at times, but is unfair to the superb British servicemen and women too often asked to closed the yawning gulf between strategic and political reality. 

The greatest danger is that Britain’s leaders come themselves to believe this nonsense.  One only has to read q February 2020 National Audit Office report to realise there is a very real danger of this happening.  Entitled, “The Equipment Plan 2019-2029” the report is blunt: “We…consider that aspects of the Department’s [Ministry of Defence] affordability assessment continue to be over-optimistic”.  Worse, the funding shortfall for new equipment quite probably far higher than the £13 billion worst-case estimate of the MoD. Is this the real price of defence strategic pretence?  For that to change London will finally have to recognise that far from being a cost, effective defence of the realm has a very high value, both politically and strategically.

Ends, ways and has-beens?

In conclusion, the real choice implicit in the Integrated Review is essentially simple: given Britain’s relative weight in the world are the British willing and able to play a serious role with allies and partners commensurate with such power? Or, is the Integrated Review going to be yet another British exercise in dressing short-term parochial politics up as long-term defence strategy? If the latter then the real victims will be the ‘new few’; that ever smaller band of brave British and Commonwealth brothers and sisters in British uniform who again find themselves on the front-line of danger on our behalf, ill-protected, under-equipped and even more under-funded, and forced to act as a political and strategic fig-leaf for free-riding British politicians cynically masking their strategic illiteracy by routinely calling them the ‘best forces in the world’, even as they deny them the resources they need to do the jobs they must do.

One final thing: the Integrated Review will also reveal the extent to which the London Establishment actually believes in Britain, as a strategic brand, as a power, even as a country.  If the Integrated Review is, indeed, to be another monumental exercise in defence-strategic pretence then it will simply reveal to the rest of us that they don’t, in which case why the hell should the rest of us? There can be no place for nostalgia or sentimentality in Britain’s Integrated Review, not in this world. Equally, there can be no place for self-delusion or London’s continued appeasement of an increasingly dangerous reality.  The people of Britain, and the people who serve her, deserve better than that, Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings.

Ends, ways and has-beens? Only if London do deems it. You see, Britain is not simply a power, with its experience, Britain is an expert power, but only if London has the intelligence to use it! Critically, such intelligence will also demand of London the one thing that has been lacking for far too long – sound strategic judgement.

Julian Lindley-French