Analysis: Disease, Debt and Defence

“In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and the executors of the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out”.

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (describing the effects of the Black Death in Florence in 1348).

Headline: Since World War One European democracies have failed to plan adequately for shock, with systems and structures routinely collapsing at such moments of crisis.  Over time Europeans respond to effect, but such efforts are profoundly undermined by a tendency to sacrifice the medium-to-long term for the short-term. This is caused by the primacy of politics over strategy. That same dynamic is again apparent in the response to the COVID-19 crisis, during which an understandable choice has been made to place human security before state security. However, as the economic cost of the crisis becomes apparent European governments must avoid another now ‘traditional’ response: the sacrifice of sound defence to manage debt. Trade-offs will, indeed, need to be made, but through far more effective use of NATO, and a meaningful strategic partnership between NATO and the EU, Europeans can strike a new balance between security and defence and between efficiency and effectiveness, and begin to close the yawning gap between ends, ways and means from which Europe and its defence suffers.  

Trends

The Centre for Business and Economic Research predicts world GDP will fall by as much as 4% this year with the subsequent economic contraction possibly twice as big as the Great Financial Crash of 2008-2010, from which many European economies have yet to recover.  Take France as a European example. France’s government debt prior to the crisis was over 100 per cent of GDP, with France routinely breaching the EU budget deficit ceiling of three per cent per annum of GDP. The French statistical agency (INSEE) states that French economic output is down by 35 per cent and three percentage points could be wiped off France’s GDP if the lockdown lasts another month, up to six points over two months.  According to Econographics the impact on the US economy will be significantly worse than the 5% fall in GDP that occurred in the wake of the 2008 crisis. 

The history of plague and its reckoning

Every major pestilence in European has had profound strategic consequences. Between 1347 and 1353 the population of Boccaccio’s Florence fell from 110,000 to 50,000, a mortality rate that was reflected across Europe where some 40% of the population perished. Wage inflation and aristocratic debt soared, destabilising an already fragile European polis, and ending feudalism once and for all.  There were profound geopolitical consequences as power shifted tectonically resulting in a series of conflicts, such as the Hundred Years War between England and France which was intensified as a consequence of the Black Death.  Thankfully, COVID-19 whilst tragic is not the Black Death, but it will have profound economic, political and strategic consequences, most notably in Europe.

The reckoning, when it inevitably comes, will test to the limit Europe’s tenuous relationship between rhetoric and structure, the state and the individual, as well as debt and defence, just as it did in the fourteenth century.  France, like many European states, is devoting huge additional resources to the struggle against COVID-19, with profound implications for public expenditure in Europe.  The Euro already looks very vulnerable. A major row is developing between Germany and the richer, northern EU member-states, and France, Italy, Spain and other EU member-states.  The latter want the former to pay for the crisis in the form of debt mutualisation.  Consequently, COVID-19 and its implications will again shake the EU to its political and institutional foundations.

Human security versus national defence.

There are also profound implications for ‘welfarised’ European states as they seek a new balance between the security of the individual and defence of the state:

First, there will be a debt-defence paradox. Spiralling public debt will be a singular consequence of COVID-19, and yet the immediate political reaction of big government Europeans will be for even more government. Equally, more government could also mean less defence.  Most Europeans spend an average of around 9% GDP on healthcare and 1.2% GDP on defence.  European defence expenditure was expected to reach $300 billion/€275 billion in 2021.  That is now unlikely. Word has it that the UK’s Integrated Security, Defence and Foreign Policy Review has already been derailed by the borrowing to which London is committed to offset the worst economic impacts of the crisis.

Second, a profound shift will take place in what constitutes ‘security’.  More of the European state will likely be committed to cocooning the individual and the economy from risk in the form of health-care, social security, crisis subsidy and elevated levels of admittedly 'cheap' borrowing. The result will be that whilst the individual might in time have access to more resilient locally-afforded protection, the state itself will become progressively more vulnerable to externally-generated strategic shock.

Third, Europeans could retreat further from power and influence projection. The already limited ability of Europeans to project coercive power upon which credible twenty-first century defence and deterrence depends could well be effectively abandoned in favour of seeing armed forces as little more than a reserve for domestic civilian crisis management.

Moving Mountains amid a Crisis: Increasing Military Mobility across Europe https://www.cepa.org/moving-mountains-increasing-militar  (1000 hours EST/1600 hours CET)

Today, I will take part in a virtual conference, which you are welcome to join, organised by my old friend Lieutenant-General (Ret.d) Ben Hodges and CEPA. Entitled Moving Mountains amid a Crisis: Increasing Military Mobility across Europe the panel will consider an issue that points the inevitable way towards Europe’s defence future – how to rebalance the ends, ways and means of Europe’s future defence:

First, military mobility is, in fact, crisis mobility - the ability, capability and capacity to move relevant resources across Europe in sufficient mass to prevent crises, respond to them and mitigate their consequences. As such, work to enhance political, legal and physical 'infrastructure' across Europe will be critical to more effective crisis management, an enhanced ability to receive, organise and manage force and resource, and move it rapidly, securely and efficiently to where it is needed.

Second, any significant resource-shift by Europeans away from defence would take place just at the moment the US faces growing world-wide and domestic pressures. If Washington is to maintain the security guarantee through NATO it will need its European allies to do more not less for their own defence. In such circumstances, the effective defence of Europe will only be possible if a far tighter relationship is forged by Europeans between force and resource efficiency and effectiveness. 

Third, efforts to increase military mobility could well provide the model for partnerships between and within states that will be essential to the realisation of credible European defence and deterrence in the twenty-first century. Consequently, the very nature and concept of 'defence spending' will change, as will the way Europe’s defence is organised and structured.

Fourth, NATO/SHAPE will (and must) remain the exclusive command hub for the organisation of military effect across Article 4 and Article 5 high-end contingencies, but will also need to become far more agile and adaptive. This is because warfare will stretch across what I call 5Ds - disinformation, deception, destabilisation, disruption and tailored destruction. Deterring and defending against it will need to do the same.

S**t happens!

The current crisis has also shown the scale and range of threats facing Europe. Many years ago I coined the phrase ‘strategic vacation’ in a piece I wrote for the International Herald Tribune.  That vacation must now finally end, or rather the seeming inability or willingness of European leaders to confront Europe’s rapidly deteriorating, cross-spectrum, threat horizon and the atomisation of effort all-too-apparent during crises over recent years.  The 'grand strategy' of Europe's future security and defence will thus rely on the much more efficient application of great means in pursuit of high political and strategic ends. Unfortunately, the current crisis has once again demonstrated that not only does European solidarity (and with it the EU) tend to fail at such moments, but the concomitant renationalisation of response leaves NATO with little or no role. If that happened in a worst-case military emergency a few of the larger nation-states, led by the US, would simply by-pass both NATO and the EU.

New political and strategic realities will also need to be faced. With Britain outside the EU the organisation and enabling of transatlantic effects will be increasingly established on two pillars: a NATO-focused 'Anglosphere', in which efficient collective action is the ethos, and a 'Eurosphere' of continental Europeans which will need to become increasingly common, or at the very least collective to the point of fusion, if EU Member-States are to close Europe’s yawning ends, ways and means gap. Bluntly, the more common the EU effort, the less Britain could, or would, play any role for a host of complex political and legal reasons mainly on the side of a profoundly legalistic EU.  Put simply, Britain cannot be outside the EU and part of a common EU effort. Critically, the EU-NATO strategic partnership will become more, not less important. However, it will also need to become far more than the talk-shop it is today, a real force and resource generator and command and control hub at the juncture between people protection and power projection.

In short, now is the moment EU member-states must prove they are committed to a common approach, or abandon it. 

Disease, debt, defence…and decline

Looking to the future COVID-19, or something like it, is just how a future war could begin, albeit with no space permitted by an enemy for civilian systems of government to recover and respond. Therefore, any NATO ‘strategic concept' must be built on an assumption of a much greater strategic whole of government approach. Counter-intuitive though it may seem such an assumption will need a far stronger European security and defence effort. At the high-end of conflict prevention, and for even minimum deterrence to remain credible, which is in fact NATO’s real purpose, Europeans will need a NATO European first responder future force able to operate across seven domains of contested advantage - air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge.

The alternative is more of the same accelerated relative decline apparent since 2010, only far more accelerated. The consequence of decline for Europeans will be where it always is, at the sharp end of reality. If Europeans continue to talk the talk of defence or retreat into ersatz defence in which their respective armed forces become little more than a paramilitary reserve for domestic civilian crisis management, then Alliance defence and deterrence will fail.

Therefore, European governments must confront the false dichotomy they are fast barrelling towards between disease, debt and defence.  Put simply, far better use of the Alliance must be made as a mechanism for the further promotion of transatlantic defence and deterrence effectiveness, alongside and in parallel to EU efforts to act as the cradle for the high-end aggregated support of civilian authorities, focussed on an improved capacity to move immense capabilities across Europe in time and to place.  

Europeans will soon have a profound choice to make; for once let sound strategic judgement make it the right one.

Scritta Posta: Boccaccio’s The Decameron has a personal angle for me. It is set in a farmhouse close to the wonderful village of Fiesole which sits majestically in the hills overlooking Florence.  Boccaccio and his companions shared stories in Fiesole as they sat out the Plague. For four years I lived in Fiesole where I wrote my doctorate…on the future defence of Europe. As Boccaccio once wrote, “You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, and you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.”

Julian Lindley-French