COVID-19 and the Disease of ‘Spinitis’

“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. 

'Spinitis'

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