European Defence: Red Team Europe?

Alphen, Netherlands. 13 December.  Last Monday over dinner in Brussels NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow stressed the importance of what had been billed as the EU European Defence Summit next week.  He said it would generate momentum towards the September 2014 NATO summit due to take place in Britain and which would consider the Alliance beyond 2014.  Then the news broke that the EU summit would not discuss defence until lunch on the second day and then only for 90 minutes half of which would be devoted to defence-industrial matters.  Chatting Wednesday with a Royal Air Force fighter pilot of 100 Squadron next to his aircraft both the problems with European defence and a possible first-step solution presented themselves.

 

The problems:  European defence is stymied on several levels.  At the strategic level there is a growing cultural gap between the British and French, on the one hand, who remain committed to an expeditionary concept of military power, and much of the rest of Europe which is downsizing armed forces in line with Germany’s leap of faith into soft power.   

At the operational level the toxic effect of over a decade of national caveats and red lines in Afghanistan has sorely undermined trust.  The Americans, British and French can never be sure that the allies will be with them at the point of contact with danger.  Consequently, the three powers cannot afford to step over the sovereignty threshold and abandon a full spectrum capability even if for the two residual European powers that means armed forces with a little bit of everything but not much of anything.

At the defence-industrial level the absurd plethora of metal-bashing basic defence industries in Europe are kept afloat by narrow vested interests, the need to keep people employed in the midst of an economic crisis and a growing interoperability gap between Europeans.  The latter gap is now so acute that it is driving deep divergence in the capability choices that Europeans make.

The opportunity:  Military innovation is vital. Spending a day in my native Yorkshire with Group Captain Steve Reeves at RAF Leeming and his professional and enthusiastic team I was struck by the need to re-think how European armed forces see exercising and training.  The job of 100 Squadron is to provide “Red Air”, i.e. play the enemy, so that the latest generation of RAF fighters such as Typhoon and Lightning 2 (JSF) can preserve a vital war-fighting edge. 

Two challenges:  First, the Hawk aircraft used by 100 Squadron is over 30 years old and whilst good it will soon be unable to recreate the battle tactics of, say, the latest Chinese and Russian fighters.  Second, all Europeans need to conceive a wholly different way of organising military power over the next decade if they are to have any chance of balancing military capability with capacity and thus be maintained as credible war-fighters.

In my January 2014 book “Little Britain – Twenty-First Century Strategy for a Middling European Power” one of my arguments is that Britain’s armed forces must pioneer a revolutionary concept of deep or organic jointness.  Indeed, only though organic jointness will the British armed forces be credible across the five domains of twenty-first conflict; land, sea, air, cyber and space.  Britain has created a Joint Force Command to lead that process and in a sense RAF Leeming is fast becoming a Red Teaming hub.  However, the effort goes nowhere near far enough.

My vision for a base like Leeming would be a Red Team Hub supported by an exercising and training development programme built on scientific and operational rigour.  Leeming would become a place where knowledge, capability, technology and practice come together through synthetic simulation and exercising and training not just for the Royal Air Force, but also for the Royal Navy and the British Army.  Knowledge of strategic and operational developments would help generate realistic scenarios, the best technology would fully exploit simulation, and operational exercising and training would really test military practitioners for the coming challenges. 

Leeming's mission would be to drive organic jointness by bringing exercising and training properly in-line with force and equipment development and emerging challenges.  If not the exercising and training capability could soon fall off a cliff and Britain’s armed forces would only be able to prepare for what they can do rather than what they need to do.

The European angle?  The need to rebuild trust is vital.  RAF Leeming already supports European allies and partners.  By turning a base like RAF Leeming into a European Red Team hub European leaders could announce a defence win-win.  Momentum would be re-injected back into an EU and NATO defence effort that is close to imploding and value-for-money would be demonstrable in these austere times.  The good news is that in setting up the Operational Training Centre at RAF Leeming the Royal Air Force clearly shares at least some of my vision.

Sandy Vershbow said the NATO 2014 summit would be committed to 3Cs – capability, connectivity and co-operative security.  If nothing radical is done the summit instead will be yet another exercise in strategic pretence. European defence needs something positive to say and Red Team Europe is it. 

Julian Lindley-French 

EU-NATO: Playing at Defence

Brussels, Belgium. 10 December.  The EU and NATO are in deep crisis.  The EU because it is a) organised around Germany which for understandable historical reasons trades down military power as it trades up economic and political influence; b) Britain, one of its two serious military powers, is now so marginalised it is considering leaving; and c) the Eurozone cannot look beyond the Euro.  NATO is in crisis because its major shareholder is being stretched ever thinner the world over.  Like it or not, over-stretched and uncertain America will soon be unable to be credibly effective in both Asia and the Middle-East at one and the same time.  China and Russia are making sure of that.  Both are in crisis because too often Europe’s politicians confuse strategy with politics. 
 

This morning I had the honour to address the Atlantic Treaty Association’s conference on NATO post-2014.  At the conference I was asked to address four questions concerning the role of the EU in NATO’s Strategic Concept, actions the EU and NATO must take to increase co-operation and the concerns such co-operation creates to both institutions.  This was illuminating because it was the nearest the conference came to addressing the real question facing Europe – how can Europeans close the hard power strategy gap that is growing by the day and which is destroying the ability of Europeans to influence, secure and if needs be defend even their vital interests?

The need is pressing.  First, according to the International Energy Authority the United States will be self-sufficient in oil and gas by 2025.  Second, according to a 2010 Citigroup report whilst Western Europe represented 48% of world trade in 1990, it is 34% in 2013 and likely to fall to 19% in 2030 and 15% by 2050.  Russia aims to inject about $775 billion by 2022 for new armaments and a more professional military.  Beijing grew the Chinese defence budget by 11.2% in 2012 the latest double digit increase since 1989. 

 

In other words, (1) Europeans will need to do far more and be far more credible in future as security actors ‘in and around Europe’; (2) if Europe as a whole is to afford the tools of influence – diplomacy, aid and development and the hard military power upon which influence is built -it will collectively need to invest in capabilities and capacities and then radically re-organise.  Sadly, the 19-20 December EU CSDP summit will be another missed opportunity in which very little will be presented as very much. 

The EU-NATO Strategic Partnership should be established on a simple Euro-Atlantic strategic principle; keep America strong in Asia by filling the emerging strategy gap in and around Europe.  That will better inform crisis management, capability development and political consultations.  The retreat from this principle has Moscow scenting an opportunity to interfere the grand strategic and Euro-strategic consequences of which are all too clear in Ukraine.

What is happening instead is faced with political and institutional paralysis big power is stepping outside institutional frameworks.  In other words, both EU and NATO need big power to function and big power to function properly together.

My prescriptions for EU-NATO co-operation are thus radical.  Structure must follow power. First, the EU’s European External Action Service must be properly configured so that it moves beyond managing the daily crisis between the European Council and European Commission (not to mention the Member-States). 

Second, both the EU and NATO should be seen for what they are; means to a strategic end for the states involved.  Co-operation should thus be established on the pragmatic basis of the efficient and effective aggregation of power and influence.  That will mean looking beyond the moribund EU-NATO Strategic Partnership (which is neither strategic nor partnership) to focus instead on a co-operation development plan between now and 2020 established on several programmes. 

Programmes should include (inter alia) joint exercising and training based on lessons from over a decade of operations; promotion of procurement clusters; civil-military experimentation (the Comprehensive Approach), finding ways to spread the cost of military modernisation, investment in people through harmonised defence and security education; and for smaller European states the beginning of defence integration from the tail to the teeth.  Such integration would be needed to close Europe’s strategy gap irrespective of either the EU or NATO.  Indeed, the whole nonsensical debate over a European super-state is actually preventing defence integration not promoting it.

In November NATO Secretary-General Rasmussen said, “We need to develop capabilities, not bureaucracies…”  In Europe today no-one talks power any more, one only talks institutions. 

But here’s the rub; next week the much-heralded EU “European Defence Summit” is scheduled to take place.  Part of its remit was to pave the way to more constructive EU-NATO relations at the September 2014 NATO Summit.  Well-placed sources now tell me defence will not be discussed by Europe’s leaders until lunch on the second day, then only for 90 minutes and half of that will be devoted to defence-industrial matters.

EU-NATO - playing at defence.

Julian Lindley-French

Thank You, Mr Mandela

Alphen, Netherlands. 6 December.  There are not many events that have moved me to tears.  The first man on the moon in 1969, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did.  The other was watching Nelson Mandela walk into a freedom he used to set an example to the world.  I am not a religious man but I am a Mandela man.  Thank you, Mr Mandela.

Julian Lindley-French 

Re-Shoring - How China is Risking its Future

Alphen, Netherlands. 5 December.  British PR-Meister David Cameron was in Beijing this week selling Britain to the Chinese.  No, I mean literally selling Britain to the Chinese.  I think he got about twenty quid for Scotland, which to my mind is far too much especially as come next September they could well be offering themselves to anyone for next to nothing.  He also promised to raise the issue of human rights with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.  Given how desperate Dave is for money one can imagine the conversation.  Desperate for dodgy dosh Dave: “So, Li, how are human rights doing in China?” Li: “Fine”.  Dave: “Good.  How much will you give me for Manchester?  Thirty quid and I will throw in free delivery.” 

 

What was strange about Cameron’s trade visit was it seemed completely detached from the volcanic geopolitics in the East China Sea.  Having finally settled on something that to Cameron’s a-strategic mind looks like a strategy – mercantilism – nothing was going to get in the way of a deal.  Now, don’t get me wrong, with the EU a mutual impoverishment pact Dave is right to seek to open up the Chinese market to British business. 

However, the sudden vigour with which he has suddenly discovered China after over three years in office suggests that dear old Angela has told him that now she is in bed with the EU-hugging German Left there will be no EU reform.  Britain could soon be on a slow boat to China via an EU exit.

Dave is not great with timing.  As he was selling Britain China was unilaterally deepening its dangerous dispute with Japan (and by extension the US) by declaring air space sovereignty over the disputed Daioyu/Senkaku islands.  By adding Britain to its now extensive collection of Europeans desperate for Chinese money it would thus be easy to conclude Beijing has neatly split and neutered the old West.

So, has China pulled off a strategic masterstroke?  No.  In fact China’s creeping and burgeoning assertive nationalism is in danger of putting at risk the very thing that has made China rich – globalisation.  Yes, beneath the East China Sea there could well be huge reserves of oil and gas that the Chinese economy desperately needs.  However, the islands dispute is not really about energy, it is about power.

China has become rich precisely because of the relatively stable international order the West, mainly the Americans, created.  In spite of efforts to boost domestic demand the enormous developmental challenges China faces (town/country split, ageing population etc. etc. etc.) China is more developing power than superpower.  China will need to export for years to come.

Given that the last thing that the Chinese economy needs is strategic turbulence and yet that is precisely what China is creating.  The disputed islands are like small pebbles dropped into an enormous strategic pool causing ripples across the world. 

What could be that impact?  Re-shoring is the simple answer.  On November 25^th the Financial Times ran a piece in which it said, “One in six UK companies has brought production back over the past year or is in the process of doing so suggesting re-shoring is starting to gain traction.  The number of companies returning production from countries such as China is outstripping those moving output overseas according to a survey of more than 500 small and medium-sized companies”. 

Re-shoring is gathering momentum across the West with many companies now abandoning Asia to return production to their home markets.  The FT piece suggests that cost of production, lack of quality and long lead times are the primary factors.  Research at the University of Tilburg also cites problems of communication to which add concerns about the cost and reliability of regulatory regimes in Asia.

Now, imagine China really steps up the heat on Japan.  What is now still a trickle of re-shoring would very rapidly become a flood.  In effect, China would be killing the Chinese goose that laid several million golden eggs as the one thing business cannot stand is strategic turbulence.  If China pushes too far its many claims across what it has unilaterally termed its far-ranging Economic Exclusion Zone the ‘cost’ of doing business with or in China could become too great and China’s export-led boom would rapidly end.

Perhaps dear old Dave is not as strategically-challenged as his lightweight premiership might suggest.  It may well be that China needs influential friends in the West as much as Dave needs China.  Perhaps that was what Premier Li meant when he talked of an “indispensable partnership” and there really will be some Chinese give as well as the more normal take.  I wonder if Dave told Li that Britain might leave the EU?

As for Manchester.  Thirty quid?  You must be joking.  Five at best and you can collect it yourself.  Bring a bag.

Julian Lindley-French

Euro-Realism: Burke, Payne and the EU's Twenty-Ninth State

Alphen, Netherlands. 2 December.  A senior European Council official last week described the European Commission to me as “Europe’s twenty-ninth state”.  This got me thinking about the instinctive unease millions of we ordinary Europeans feel about the concentration of unaccountable powers taking place in Brussels.  Edmund Burke and Thomas Payne would undoubtedly have seen a passing resemblance between Brussels today and Louis XVI’s corrupt ancien regime (read Tocqueville) and George III’s remote and incompetent colonial government of British North America prior to the American and French revolutions.  So, where does the EU’s twenty-ninth government sit between Tom Payne’s principle of rights or Burke’s ideas about representation and taxation? 

 

With growing public scepticism over ‘Project Europe’ and with paralysis hard-set between those that pay and those that receive the EU has become unreformable.  Instead, Europe’s unofficial leader Chancellor Merkel has retreated into a kind of muddling through.  Faced with Merkel’s caution and innate public scepticism hard-line federalists such as Guy Verhofstadt and his Commission friends have of late resorted to talking only about the Euro and how to save it through deeper integration.  They thus avoid the bigger constitutional implications that such integration through the back door implies.

Burke was no fan of democracy but he did believe in representation.  He believed government demanded a level of intelligence and knowledge that at the time was to his mind only to be found amongst the elite…recognise it?  Indeed, Burke thought democracy would lead to demagoguery because it would arouse dangerous passions amongst the Great Unwashed.  Burke also warned that democracy could lead to the persecution of minorities if the ‘protection’ they enjoyed from the upper classes was removed.  Today’s debates over intra-EU immigration and free movement captures just a smidgen of Burke’s concerns.

Payne’s thinking was genuinely revolutionary.  His Rights of Man provided the philosophical underpinnings for both the American and French Revolutions.  Indeed, by placing the rights of the individual front and centre Payne was consciously cutting Hobbes’ Leviathan down to size.  Leviathan trades absolute freedom of the individual for a form of security by imposing equality - all individuals transfer all rights to Leviathan in return for security.  Paine instead believed in a form of utopian egalitarianism based upon an optimistic view of human nature. 

What Payne failed to realise was that far from building communities his concept of universal rights could actually destroy them.  Indeed, the essential difference between Burke and Payne came down to a view of community which was expressed in their war of words over the role of religion.  As Alexis de Tocqueville also suggested universal rights could create dangerous competition between individuals.  

However, both Burke and Payne rejected unelected, arbitrary and remote government.  And it is at that philosophical juncture at which the European Commission now resides – part Leviathan, part Rights of Man and part guardian of elitist experiment.  As Leviathan it is meant to ensure ‘fairness’ by establishing a level playing field between EU member-states.  It uses the Rights of Man to justify its role as the initiator of European legislation under the Lisbon Treaty.  And, it sees itself as the true guardian of the elitist concept of political union.

In the absence of effective oversight the Commission has been encouraged to compete for power with the very states that created it.  What is dangerous is the yawning legitimacy and sovereignty gap between me the citizen, the discredited European Parliament and the EU’s twenty-ninth state. 

In that light the constant attempts of the Great Unelected to extend their powers look to many of we the citizenry (and would certainly have appeared to a latter day Payne) as an attempt to shift arguments over power and its acquisition to one of competence.  This was the essential argument of Thomas Hobbes back in the seventeenth century and in their respectively corrupt forms it is what the ancien regime and British North America became.  

The parallels are striking.  Commission no-president-of-mine Barroso even echoes Hobbes when he warns that without further integration Europe will return to a ‘state of nature’ and “warre of all against all”.  This is dangerous self-serving nonsense.

Both Louis’s ancien regime and British North America ultimately fell because the costs they imposed were balanced neither by effectiveness nor representation for those outside the ruling caste.  The danger for the Commission is that as it seeks to replace the nation-state as the government of Europe it will be seen more as Hobbes’s unforgiving Leviathan than either Payne’s Rights of Man or Burke’s representative government.  That is why the Commission is not nor must it ever be the first or the twenty-ninth EU state.

When a form of governance is believed neither to be just nor effective by the people in whose name it governs in time it will lead to rupture. Just look at history. 

Julian Lindley-French

Future Force 2013

Amsterdam, Netherlands. 28 November.  Future Force 2013 – Joint Operations in the Land Environment.  These past two days I have had the honour of chairing a superb conference here in Amsterdam on behalf of the Commander, Royal Netherlands Army, Lieutenant-General Mart de Kruijf.  Two key messages came out of this conference. First, if we Europeans want to keep Americans engaged in NATO and by extension engaged in Europe’s security European armed forces will need to achieve a much deeper degree of co-operation and even integration.  Second, in talking about the future force Europeans must stop talking so much about the past. 

One of the mantra-ed nonsenses that one so often hears bandied around European militaries these days is that the absence of threat means there is nothing to plan for and more importantly nothing to plan together for.  Rubbish!  It was sobering to hear a Japanese colleague provide an assessment of insecurity in Asia-Pacific.  Add that to the collapse of the Middle East state, energy insecurity and a whole host of other frictions the problems is not the lack of things to plan together for…but too many.

And therein rests the problem.  European militaries and their political masters spend too much time looking in and down rather than up and out.  Europe’s armed forces have become another political pawn in the interminable story of Europe’s flawed integration and thus Europe’s interminable and much of it self-inflicted strategic shrinkage.

That said, whether the European Union existed or not one would still need to see bigger European states co-operating more closely on matters defence and many smaller Europeans integrating their armed forces.  Indeed, that is the only way Europeans are going to generate the credible military mass and manoeuvre, capability and capacity to underpin all other forms of power and influence – political, diplomatic and economic.

What struck me at the conference is the extent to which there is no longer a transatlantic divide but rather a trans-Channel divide.  The Netherlands is clearly no longer part of the Anglo-American strategic community but rather part of the German-led ‘European’ community.  That is both a shame and a contradiction because the one big country that is not thinking defence-strategically is Germany…and for good reason.

The essential take-away from this conference was that European armed forces will need to do more as one, more together and more with others.  More as ‘one’ means real ‘jointness’, i.e. all a state’s military forces thinking, experimenting, and acting as a single military organic entity on land, at sea, in the air and within cyber and space.  More together means Europeans across the Channel divide generating and deploying force far beyond Europe’s borders.  And, as the Dutch contemplate sending a force to Mali at French request (and unacknowledged British support) it will mean acting more with others.  That also means acting with other non-traditional allies and partners and critically the civilian agencies vital to mission success.

If we Europeans can together retain focus on the strategic by looking at the world together and having the courage to face up to its many challenges and frictions honestly then there is a chance that the vision implicit in this conference will be realised.  If, on the other hand, strategy continues to be polluted by the politics of a Europe that not only sees ‘strategy’ as alien, but also the utility and purpose of armed force then Europeans will remain utterly divided and their collective strategic voice will decline into nothing more than the murmurings of the strategically-deranged.

Europeans are part of world security however much many seem to wish to deny it and it is no good Europeans playing tactical chess whilst the rest of the world plays strategic poker.  Surely that was this week’s message from the two B-52s flying over disputed islands in the South China Sea.  Of course, a European strategic culture can be fashioned of a sort from the more cuddly parts of international engagement but it would be utterly without balance.  Europe’s armed forces must not become lightly-armed fig-leaves for European neo-pacifism.  Europe must have teeth and those teeth must be sharp. 

We British may not be flavour of the month in Europe (and we really do not care) but it is worth quoting the motto of the Royal Navy which within the next decade will again become Europe’s only truly strategic navy:  “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (if you wish for peace, prepare for war).  Europeans thankfully are not facing war at home but many around the world are.  Europeans must at least be thinking about that.

Faced with an ever-expanding military task-list and yet ever-shrinking military forces and resources for Europeans strategic unity of effort and purpose will be the critical politico-military ‘commodity’.  That in turn will demand European politicians and military leaders stop confusing politics with strategy. In other words, the future force must be a real force! 

As Plato once said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war”.

Julian Lindley-French

Iranian Nukes: Breakthrough or Cave-in?

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 November.  On the face of it the agreement between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Russia and US plus Germany) group of nations is one of those moments in geopolitics which could re-order security both regionally and globally.  Iran has agreed to slow efforts to enrich uranium to weapons-grade in return for the relief of some $7bn worth of sanctions.  With inflation running at around 40% per annum in Iran and the regime under growing domestic pressure Tehran clearly has a need to end its domestic isolation.  However, if this interim agreement is in six months hence to be confirmed as a permanent agreement it will need to pass two verifiable tests.  Does the agreement reflect a fundamental shift in Iran’s foreign and security policy posture?  Is the Middle East made safer (and by extension the world) by this agreement?

 

First the deal. In return for the easing of sanctions Iran has agreed to give International Atomic Energy Authority inspectors daily access to the Natanz and Fordo nuclear sites.  Sunday Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif tweeted (a sign of the times?) that under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Iran has an “inalienable” right to enrich uranium.  Technically he is correct as a state may indeed enrich uranium up to 5% beyond which weapons research can commence. 

Does the agreement reflect a fundamental shift in Iran’s foreign and security policy posture?  Critically, the test of Iran’s bona fides will not simply be adherence to this agreement but whether Tehran’s regional strategy also shifts.  That would mean a markedly less hostile posture towards Israel, including less support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, less interference in the Syrian civil war (and other neighbouring states) and less interference in the Gulf.  As yet there are no signs of such a shift.  Rather, President Obama seems to be gambling that this agreement could bolster President Rouhani and the ‘moderates’ in the Tehran regime and might in time build sufficient confidence to engender a shift in Tehran’s strategy.

Is the Middle East made safer (and by extension the world) by this agreement?  That depends.  Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have condemned this agreement.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has called it an “historic mistake” and that Israel reserves the right to defend itself.  Sunday morning the leaders of several Gulf States flew to Riyadh for talks with the Saudi leadership which has also privately condemned this agreement. 

Critically, if Iran is not seen to observe and more importantly held to observe this agreement then Saudi Arabia could well take forward already advanced talks with Pakistan for the development of a nuclear capability.  If that happened then the nuclear genie would be well and truly out of the bottle and the NPT would finally be seen the world over as a busted arms control flush. 

So, is this agreement worth the risk?  Yes but.  Yes, in that any attempt to break the deadlock with Iran could if successful help eventually (and I stress eventually) lead to an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians which is the cornerstone conflict in the Middle East.  However, France was absolutely right to insist on as tough a verification regime as possible.  Indeed, my own sources have told me that the talks three weeks ago came close to agreeing a very soft accord that would only have encouraged those in Tehran who believe that in the wake of Syria debacle Obama is so politically weak at home and so desperate for any foreign policy success that he would agree to anything.  It is in such ignorance that Tehran could make a dangerous miscalculation.

For the Europeans at the table there is also serious food for thought.  Let me for once pay tribute to Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy sort-of-supremo.  I have in the past been very critical of the Lady from Lancashire helped I might add by comments made to me by some of those close to her.  However, she has proven to be an able chair supported ably by diplomats from Britain, France and Germany.  If this is a way Europeans can begin to exert real influence then it could help end Europe’s interminable strategic shrinkage.

However, one of Ashton’s weaknesses is that she hails from the old CND (anti-nuclear) left of the old British Labour Party.  She has singularly failed to understand that Europe’s much-talked about soft power only makes sense if there is credible hard military power that underpins it.  If she and others in the Euro-elite believe this accord is proof that Europe can exert influence thought soft power alone then she and the rest of Europe are at some time in for a rude awakening.

As I wrote in a previous blog – Europe must together speak softly but work out how to carry a bigger stick!

Julian Lindley-French