Adjust:
‘to adapt oneself to one’s environment’; ‘Cuts’; ‘to reduce expenditure, to
prune.’
The Concise
Oxford Dictionary
Cuts;
‘to adapt oneself to one’s [political] environment’; Adjust: ‘to reduce expenditure,
to prune’.
British
Ministry of Defence Speak
Alphen,
Netherlands. 10 October. I am on nonsense-watch this morning. This blog emerged from a weekend debate I had with
a British friend with very senior experience at the top of the Whitehall
machine. He raised two interesting questions
about defence policy, not just in Britain but across Europe. First, if what is desirable/necessary is
politically impossible should one call for its enactment? Second, would an
alternative not be to point out the consequences of political choices and
failure? This raised in my mind a third question. Why are
Europe’s leaders destroying Europe’s armed forces?
Take Britain. If the British defence budget
goes on increasing at the rate the British government claims, the British armed
forces will soon cease to exist! London is in the midst of yet another of those
‘defence reviews’, which I am assured is an ‘adjustment’ to the defence budget,
not a further ‘cut’. It is a cut. This one is euphemistically called the National
Security Capabilities Review which will see Britain’s already woefully small
armed forces lose yet more military capabilities. These were capabilities that as recently as
2015 were not only deemed ‘critical’, but irreducible. If, for no other reason than to demonstrate and
reinforce Britain’s continuing importance to the post-Brexit defence of Europe
one might think London would desist from such a further cut to defence. But no.
Unfortunately, Britain is not alone in pursuing politics at the expense of
strategy.
Why? Too many leaders prefer,
i.e. choose sound money at the expense of sound defence. Take Britain again. Yes, the annual deficit
and national debt are far higher than should ideally (in an ideal world) be the
case, although both are far lower than they were for much of the twentieth
century. However, London does not live in an ideal world and yet chooses
to emphasise not an ineffective policy of austerity, whilst at the same time favouring
a relatively low tax regime. Now, I am (absolutely) no Corbynite, but at a time
of high demand on the public purse, and a relatively small said purse something
clearly has to give. Unfortunately, sound defence and sound money are at opposing
poles between income and expenditure, and between strategic responsibility and
political benefit, with everything else in between. London has adopted
arbitrary austerity targets based on dodgy statistics whilst pursuing relatively
low taxes, and yet maintains relatively high spending on areas such as health,
and education for a fast-growing population clamouring for ever more
entitlement and threatening political mayhem (Corbyn) if denied. Consequently,
London chooses to make the armed forces weak, and thus accepts a higher degree
of defence risk. It is not even grown-up politics, let alone sound strategy.
Unfortunately, Britain is by no means alone. Defying defence gravity (in
both senses of the word) is also the position of Berlin, which is critical to
what happens across the rest of Europe. This is why the Germans are rowing back
(along with the Belgians, Dutch, and other Europeans) from meeting the solemn
commitment Berlin made at the 2014 NATO Wales Summit to spend 2% GDP on defence
by 2024. Now, one can argue until the
few defence cows we Europeans have left about the utility and/or
appropriateness of the ‘2%’ Defence Investment Pledge. Put it this way, 2%
spent reasonably well on defence is at least twice as effective as the roughly
‘1%’ many Europeans on average spend on defence, and spend badly.
Germany’s defence effort is, not unreasonably, still influenced by the
dark eloquence of Germany’s none-too-distant history, and Berlin’s legitimate
concerns about the structural weaknesses of the euro, and the cost of keeping
the single currency stable. And, given history, sound money is sound defence
for Berlin – period. However, by placing
sound money above sound defence, Berlin imposes its own neuroses on the rest of
the Europe it leads through the EU, and enables other Europeans to slide away
from solemn defence commitments.
Why is a gap between sound money and sound defence so dangerous? Danger develops when the balance between sound
defence and sound money becomes so out of kilter that one or the other effectively
collapses. Russia suffers from the diametrically opposing problem; unsound
defence at the expense of both a sound economy and sound money. The problem for European defence, as I
implied in my last blog, is that whilst both unsound money and unsound defence
can blow up in your face, only one is could at some point produce an unheralded
nuclear mushroom cloud!
Here is my point (and there is
one) if a European political leader accepts a higher degree of security and
defence risk by cutting the very military capabilities and capacities upon
which credible deterrence and defence sit then one at least ought to try and
balance that by being more command and efficient and resource effective.
Unfortunately, such ‘integration’ is impossible for a host of political
reasons. The result is that all Europeans, NATO and EU members alike, are
trapped in a kind of defence black hole between dangerously low defence
investment and growing risk. In other
words, Europe’s 'leaders' are helping to create the very ‘risk space’ through
which a politically unstable, economically weak, but militarily over-bearing
Russia, could, in extremis, drive a new Armata tank (and many of its ilk).
Does all of
the above really matter? The problem is not only do European leaders actually believe
their own defence-blind rhetoric, the very real impact on European armed forces
is already proving fatal. Last week the Dutch Research Council for Security
published a report on Dutch UN peacekeeping operations in Mali that was so
damning that both the Dutch Defence Minister and the Chief of the Netherlands
Defence Staff stepped down. The essence of the report was that in April 2016 two
Dutch soldiers were killed, and one gravely injured, because in 2006 the Dutch had
bought cheap and untested mortars from the Bulgarians for operations in
Afghanistan. The implications of the
report are clear; old, and clearly ‘dodgy’ second-hand munitions were in use only
because a Dutch government deployed over-stretched, but under-funded forces for
political reasons, and for which Dutch soldiers payed the ultimate price. The continual under-funding of the
Netherlands Armed Forces over twenty years and more (See my 2010 co-authored
RUSI Whitehall Report on the state of the Dutch armed forces entitled “Between
the Polder and a Hard Place”) meant the force was thus deployed at a far higher
level of risk to its own safety than should have been the case, if they were
properly funded and equipped.
Therein lies the essential problem of European
defence – too many of Europe’s political leaders are strategically-illiterate
and defence-blind, and only listen to political advice, not strategic
guidance. Worse, they listen to
economists! Unfortunately, if governments in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, go
on treating defence budgets as contingency reserves for funding politically
convenient projects. If, in so doing,
they abandon the proper management of strategic risk. And, if sound money is
deemed to be more important than sound defence and at any cost, then at some
point risk will be replaced with disaster.
Back to the British. The reason for the ‘adjustment’
is to counter the fall in the value of the pound since the Brexit vote and the
impact of said fall on the cost of defence imports and thus defence cost
inflation. The ‘cost’ is believed to be
as high as £30bn. In the past London would have made such an adjustment by
drawing money from the contingency reserve. Today, London merely cuts the
force, proving conclusively that both the 2015 National Security Strategy and
the Strategic Defence and Security Review were not worth the paper they were
written on.
My
British friend answered the question at the head of this blog in his usual
succinct and crafted manner; “Strategic circumstances demand certain measures;
if political decisions prevent those measures being taken, then the consequences
are a high strategic risk. That has to be weighed against the arguments for
those decisions. Both strategy and politics in the present world are about
choices: denying that is not grown up and could prove (literally) fatal”.
At other times in history perhaps European leaders
could get away with defence blindness. However, as Professor Sir Lawrence
Freedman suggests in his new book, “The Future of War: A History” (London:
Allen Lane), war most definitely has a future. So, why are Europe’s leaders
destroying Europe’s armed forces?
Because too many of them are in denial, and history could well damn them
(and us) for it. Worse, by consistently weakening their own defences the defence blind make
future war more likely.
Julian Lindley-French
