May 13th, 2020
This Analysis is the guidance I am
about to give to the Secretary-General’s NATO Reflection Group concerning my
vision of NATO 2030.
“Power is as power
does”.
J.K. Galbraith
Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon. Let
me begin by quoting J.K. Galbraith, “power is as power does”.
This briefing has five elements germane to
your mission: 1. a strategic appreciation; 2. the worst defence-strategic
consequence of COVID-19 for NATO; 3. NATO’s strategic paradoxes and dilemma; 4,
NATO’s critical needs; and 5. (and finally) my vision for NATO 2030. Given the
importance of your mission I will choose my words carefully. You have the text
of my remarks to assist you and all the arguments herein are much more
deeply-developed in my forthcoming Oxford book Future War and the Defence of Europe, co-written with Generals
Allen and Hodges.
Core messages
1.
Far
from adding more tasks to NATO’s already wide but shallow capabilities and
capacities, the Alliance should be ditching tasks that do not conform to its
core mission of the defence and deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic area. Indeed,
adding new tasks shorn of significantly increased resources would profoundly
undermine the credibility of the Alliance.
2.
Even
as NATO re-focuses on its core mission it must also properly consider the
changing nature of that mission in the face of the revolution in military
technology underway and how the future hybrid, cyber, hyper war mosaic will
affect the Alliance’s ability to defend and deter.
3.
If
the Alliance adapts together NATO could continue to be organised around a North
American and a European political pillar. If not, function and capability will
become the new organising Alliance principle, with NATO divided between a
high-end, hi-tech, digital future pillar, and a low-tech, analogue, legacy
force ‘pillar’.
4.
Or,
in an emergency, NATO’s stronger members will simply step outside of the
Alliance framework and function as a coalition of the willing and able.
Strategic
Appreciation
Europeans are in denial about the nature,
scope and speed of strategic change. COVID-19 could be the tipping point
towards conflict for an increasingly precarious global balance of military
power. However, whilst COVID-19 will doubtless accelerate change, it is
unlikely to radically transform the nature of change itself. Indeed, if the strategic consequences
of COVID-19 conform to past pandemics far from ending the threat of war, it
could well accelerate it.
2030? Europeans are locked in a virtual
Ten Year Rule. They do not believe a major war could happen in the next decade.
COVID-19 could further detach Europe’s virtual world from strategic reality by
creating a profound tension between human (health security) and national
defence.
Critically, few Europeans understand the
revolution in warfare underway, nor the implications of the growing
over-stretch of US forces for the Alliance and European defence. Europeans, I
fear, have also lost the political capacity to consider the geopolitical worst
case. Specifically, the danger that the Alliance could face a simultaneous
multi-theatre crisis in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa, as
well as on the Alliance’s Eastern and Northern flanks across the conventional
and nuclear, and the analogue and digital spectrum.
At the very least, Europeans must begin to
grip the implications of fast-shifting military power purchasing parity. First,
by 2030, on current trajectories, the relative military power of China and
Russia could have surpassed the Western democracies unless Europeans
drastically improve their future war, future defence effort. Second, China and
Russia will be able to exert pressure on the US and its allies at the weakest
seams of the Alliance. Third, such power could well do what it can. Beijing and
Moscow are not European liberal democrats.
Worst defence-strategic consequence of
COVID-19 for NATO
If Europeans effectively abandon the
modernisation of national defence for health security in the face of a changing
military balance of power they will force the Americans into a dangerous
choice: defend Europe by offsetting European military weaknesses, and thus make
their own armed forces relatively weaker, or effectively abandon Europe for the
Indo-Pacific. As COVID-19 has demonstrated: shock happens!
NATO’s Strategic Paradoxes and dilemma
NATO suffers from a series of strategic
paradoxes and a strategic dilemma that the NATO Reflection Group should
consider:
NATO’s strategic paradoxes:
- - European
defence under-investment will likely deepen post-COVID-19, but the scope of
NATO missions will likely expand;
- - China’s
military rise will exacerbate US military over-stretch, but European military
capability and capacity will be unable to meet the challenge of a European
worst-case military emergency;
- -Deterring
Future War should be the centre of gravity of Alliance Adaptation, with a
specific mandate to consider the impact of new technologies in the battlespace,
such as artificial intelligence, machine-learning, super-computing etc and et
al. However, too many Europeans either want to fight past campaigns better, or
adapt NATO to managing crises for which it is ill-suited (such as terrorism and
assistance to civil authorities);
- - Future
war will demand an Alliance deterrence and defence posture that stretches
across complex strategic coercion and 5D warfare from deception to
disinformation, from disruption to destabilisation, and destruction. That, in
turn, will require a deep strategic partnership with the EU and the nations.
Such synergy simply does not exist;
- - Real
Adaptation would see a new and critical balance struck between the digitalised
military power projection upon which all credible 2030 Allied defence and
deterrence will depend, and far more assured people protection via a more
secure home base. There is no such ambition apparent.
NATO’s Strategic
Dilemma:
Crises will not
come in single packages. The specific dilemma is thus: how to ensure NATO has
the tailored mass and high-end manoeuvre to simultaneously defend and deter on
its Eastern and Northern Flanks and support Allies on its Southern Flank in the
event of chaos across the Middle East and North Africa?
NATO’s Critical Needs
Given the defence and deterrence challenge
NATO’s critical needs now are thus:
-
Drastically
improved European force interoperability with their US counterparts;
-
Far
faster political consultations over what constitutes an attack;
-
Far
faster and more nuanced indicators, better shared analysis, much faster
responsiveness, with forces and resources constantly at a higher state of
readiness and able to seamlessly rotate during a crisis; and
-
Above
all, much greater devolved command authority to SACEUR and SHAPE from the
earliest stages of a crisis and throughout the conflict cycle.
My vision for NATO 2030?
1.
A
new strategic concept that prioritises future-proofed Allied defence focused on
a new system of deterrence across the hybrid-cyber-hyper war mosaic which
intelligently adapts existing conventional and nuclear counterforce deterrence
with digital counterforce.
2.
A
Euro-centric twenty-first century Allied Command Operations heavy mobile force
that closes the posture gap from which Alliance forces suffer and which could
assure defence and deterrence in an emergency and when US forces are engaged
across multiple theatres and multiple domains.
3.
Allied
Command Transformation is charged with properly developing such a European
high-end, first response digital-centric future force that can also act as a
development platform for a future AI, big data, and increasingly
robotic-enabled defence, via such programmes as the NATO Unmanned Systems Initiative.
4.
That
such a force can also meet the interoperability challenge with the US future
force. The European future force must,
therefore, also be able to operate with US forces or autonomously across air,
sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge, and critically able to gain
comparative advantage in contact.
5.
A
NATO-EU strategic partnership worthy of the name that can project power and
protect people by moving forces and resources quickly in and around Europe in
an emergency to underpin deterrence, mount a defence, and respond to
consequence.
Conclusion
The tendency since the end of the Cold
War, and indeed for much of it, has been to place political compromise before
defence and deterrent effect. The 2019 NATO Military Strategy was reflective of
such a tradition. However, NATO and its nations will soon face hard choices and
it is those choices the NATO Reflection Group should address.
NATO is ultimately strategic insurance
against war in an unstable world in which strategy, technology, capability and
affordability are combining for allies and adversaries alike. NATO must thus be a high-end, warfighting
military deterrent. It is NOT a military
EU.
Above all, Europeans must realise that in
the coming decade a hard-pressed US will only be able to ‘guarantee’ Europe’s
future defence if Europeans do far more for their own defence. COVID-19 or no!
For once, the future of NATO really is at stake. If we fail to modernise our
Alliance one day power really could do to some of us, what malicious and
malevolent power can, indeed, do if not deterred.
Julian
Lindley-French
