Alphen, Netherlands. 23 May.
Europe’s leaders are Europe’s greatest weakness. Stockholm is a beautiful city,
both solid and enticing in equal measure as it cavorts between land, sea, and sky.
And yet behind the façade of Swedish steadiness worry lurks. So much so that
Sweden is quietly resurrecting its old Total Defence Concept as it becomes ever
clearer that Russia regards Swedes as part of their self-declared special zone
of influence.
My reason for being in Sweden was
to attend a NATO-backed Advanced Research Workshop organised by my own Atlantic
Treaty Association. The subject; hybrid warfare and the need for societal
resilience. The meeting addressed the particular threats posed by cyber, and
other Janus-faced technologies, to the very connectivities that make modern
Western society function. As the meeting unfolded news spread that the main
radar at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport had gone down, and that two important Swedish radio masts had been sabotaged. The prevailing view was that both installations
had been attacked, and that Russia could well have been responsible.
Now, if it was the Russians then
it would be nice (for me at least) to think that the attack took place to mark
my arrival in Stockholm to talk about the threat posed by Russia through hybrid
warfare at a NATO-backed meeting. However, peering through the fog of my own
ego the attack just may have had more to do with the parallel launch of the new
Saab Grippen E fighter, and/or Montenegro becoming the latest member of NATO.
The ARW meeting was excellent.
Lots of intelligence, academic, and business specialists got up to frighten the
life out of me about what could be done to my life by some spotty-nosed oick in
the back of beyond armed with a lap-top and zit-fuelled attitude. It was
especially frightening if, aforesaid specialists said, aforesaid oick was
backed by an adversary state (no names, no pack drill). In such circumstances
there was every chance apparently I could be remotely switched off, and
millions like me,and transformed into a can of sardines. I would prefer tuna.
Now, as is often the case with
such meetings, I was held back for its finale for which I had prepared a worthy
presentation entitled: “Hybrid Threats? What Should NATO Stand Ready For (not
my title)? Instead, I tore the thing up in front of my audience. Why? Because I
am getting tired of making ‘should’ presentations. Indeed, I wasted ten years
of my life with ‘should’ presentations on the so-called Comprehensive Approach,
whereby everyone was meant to do everything, all together, at exactly the same
time, to make Afghanistan and other places safer. Why am I so tired of making such
presentations? Politicians. Or, to be exact, the inability of a European political leadership in denial to properly consider worst-case scenarios.
Given that the Stockholm ‘ARW’
was meant to be part of the preparations for July’s NATO Warsaw Summit one
would have hoped that it was part of a Great Awakening on the part of
Europe’s leaders as to the threats Europe really faces. However, be it the
threat posed by Russia and/or ISIS there seems little appetite to break out of
the ‘let’s be friends with Russia at all costs’, or the ‘all hyper-immigration is wonderful’
political psychosis into which much of Europe’s political caste has retreated bereft as they are of solutions.
By coincidence, as I was speaking
in Stockholm my old friend General Sir Richard Shirreff was addressing another
question head on; ‘what if’ Russia attacked the Baltic States. In his new novel
entitled 2017: War with Russia Richard
describes an attack by Moscow that in effect removes the Baltic States from the
EU and NATO by military means. Fantasy? You would think so listening to the usual
coterie of bleeding heart luvvies who stepped out of the woodwork of
uninformity to criticise Richard. Wake up and smell the real world!
Some time ago I was Head of the
Commander’s Initiative Group of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. The commander?
Richard Shirreff. Richard then went on to become NATO’s No.2 military man as
deputy supreme allied commander, Europe (DSACEUR). As DSACEUR Richard witnessed
daily what the Russians and indeed ISIS are trying to do to Europe.
The book has all the hallmarks of
another great work of faction back in the 1980s, General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War. Yes, at
some level such works need to be treated with a pinch cum dose of political salt. They
also need to be taken deadly seriously. Reading between the lines Shirreff’s
book is pretty much making the same point as Hackett’s book; the threat is not
simply that posed by an adversary like Russia or ISIS. It is the threat posed
by Western European political leaders in denial and the consequent obsession of
such ‘leaders-lite’ with political news management rather than, and at the expense of, crisis resolution.
The hard truth is that until and
unless ‘leaders’ like David Cameron, Francois Hollande, and Angela Merkel, and the careerist yes men and women with whom they surround themselves, really start to listen to the intelligence briefings they get, Europe will go on
becoming steadily less defended and less defensible. Sadly, such briefings are
still too often filed in the ‘what is politically possible’ dodgy dossier,
rather than the ‘what is strategically necessary’ action dossier.
The true test of that switch will
be when meetings like Stockholm cease to be interesting, but by and large
irrelevant, exercises with little or no planning traction, and instead start to
inform real defence planning. For, as I said in my remarks, if our societies
remain as vulnerable as they do today to disrupting and destabilising attacks
at the many seams that today exist within them, politicians will be unwilling to project the
influence and force needed to keep Europeans safe.
Sadly, Europe’s leaders are not
as yet willing to face the hard realities of hard Realism the twenty-first century is
incubating. One would hope the coming NATO Warsaw Summit would be the Great Awakening.
Don’t hold your breath. My fear is that only the coming mega-shock will awake
Europe’s weak leaders from their strategic slumber. Until they do awake
Europe’s politicians, their lack of strategic imagination, and their collective
weakness, will continue to pose the greatest threat to Europe.
Julian Lindley-French
