NATO: The Future of Western Military Power

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. 27 January.  I am sitting in the lounge at Schiphol Airport en route to Washington to speak at the CSIS-NATO Transatlantic Forum on the future of the Alliance.  This is fortuitous…for NATO and the Americans.  It is about time Washington was again subjected to the Yorkshire world view. In the way these things are done in London the Ministry of Defence last week ‘leaked’ a report.  It is not clear if this was an official or not-so-official leak but the message was interesting and speaks volumes about Britain and the wider West’s future military posture.

 

The report suggests that Britain’s ever-expanding kaleidoscope of ethnic minorities have a problem with British troops tromping around their former/current homelands in the way British troops tromp.  Therefore, the report suggests, future British operations will no longer be based on the kind of big footprint one saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

To be frank this is one British change that cannot be pinned on immigration.  The massive bulk of the population, most senior officers and even strategy wonks like your faithful Blogonaut find it difficult to see how sending a small force a long way for a long time into a hopelessly complex political space makes strategic sense.  This is simply another of those moments when the common sense of the British people regardless of ethnicity trumps the tortured policy logic of Planet Whitehall.

In my new book Little Britain (www.amazon.com) my chapter on Britain’s Future Force calls for a radical rethink about the role and nature of force and its relationship with a changing world and changing society.  It also informs much of what I am going to say in Washington about NATO.

By 2050 most serious analysts (Exxon Mobil, CSIS, International Energy Authority, Goldman Sachs and Citibank) foresee a major shift in power from west to east.  To my mind it is exaggerated but it does at least point to a hyper-competitive and instable 21^st century.  It is a future that will not only see the littoralisation and urbanisation of the world population but also the emergence of peer military power competitors.  Indeed, the military expenditures of China, Russia and other powers are burgeoning.   

For military planners this implies a radical assumption check. First, the use of force to change societies will become almost impossible even if the friction generated by societal change will increase.  Strategic security and human security will be clearly one and the same.  Second, good old-fashioned geopolitics will make a stunning comeback and with it Machtpolitik and Realpolitik. Third, technology will mass-multiply force.  However, given the nature of future operations it will need to be intelligent force.  Fourth, political will and global stability will inseparable.  Europeans will not assure security by sticking their heads in the Brussels sand and hoping change beyond Europe ignores change in Europe.

Small Western militaries in a huge cross-dimensional strategic space will need a single strategic mind-set overseeing strategic operating practice via connectivity and interoperability.  Given that assumption the West’s future force will need to be organically-joint and able to reach and dominate across air, sea, land, cyber and space.  And, given the balance to be struck between strategy, technology, manpower and affordability the core force will need to be small, intelligent and demonstrably lethal.  Equally, the force will need to be strategically and intellectually interoperable across government, with allies and partners and much more deeply embedded within society.

Forces that can simply operate to a very limited extent at the lower end of the conflict spectrum to the effective exclusion of all else will soon be obsolete – much like the Dutch military today.  Indeed, by sacrificing both capacity and capability even that limited low-end aim is now unachievable for the Dutch and many European forces.  Rather, the West’s future force must be built around a tight high-end military capability that can credibly engage to prevent conflict, to stop conflict and if needs be act as a strategic conventional deterrent.

By hook or by crook that is where the British are going – and partly why I wrote the book.  The British Future Force will be constructed around two large aircraft carriers.  They will be central to future task groups that can offer power projection and political discretion at one and the same time.  They will be platforms run by the Royal Navy but from which both the Royal Air Force and the British Army will operate.  They will also act as force hubs for colaitions. Critically, if the radical new concept of the Reserve Army can be made to work the Future Force will be plugged into wider society enabling a rapid surge of capacity if a high-end crisis develops…as it could.

NATO should look hard at the British experiment.  NATO is not the EU.  It is a politically-realist, hard-edged politico-military alliance built around worse-case scenario planning.  Future NATO must therefore be considering how best to generate and command the West’s future force via a hard-nosed analysis of the post-2014 world. 

Many think the withdrawal from Afghanistan is the end of NATO’s test.  In fact it is just the beginning.

Julian Lindley-French

Little Britain Book Extract 2: (Introduction) Wilful Decline

Britain faces profound strategic choices all of which will demand the generation of real diplomatic and military power and influence and its intelligent application in Washington, Europe and the world beyond.  Britain’s armed forces will necessarily be at the core of strategy but will need a sufficiency of high-end military capabilities to establish Britain’s soft power influence on a hard power foundation.  That is the essential message of this book.

 

In August 2013 General Sir Nick Houghton, the Chief of the British Defence Staff warned that because of defence cuts Britain needed to “re-calibrate our expectations” of the global role and capacity of British armed forces.  He might well have suggested that Britain as a whole needed to recalibrate its expectations.  It would be almost comforting to think that any such ‘recalibration’ would simply be a short-term reflection of the financial challenges of this age.  Certainly, for the foreseeable future British governments will have precious little money to spend.

 

However, attend any meeting in Whitehall or Westminster and a profound divide becomes apparent.  The bureaucratic elite believes its task is to manage inevitable decline and a political elite that seems to revel in a false strategic consciousness that Britain is far more powerful than it actually is.  There is even a term invented to offer a chimera of strategic respectability – managing decline.  In fact, ‘managing decline’ too often simply masks a lack of imagination of a political class and a bureaucratic elite who have for so long seen strategy made elsewhere that they now take decline for granted.  In short, British strategy has for too long been the fruitless search for common ground between the American world-view, the French and German European view and the search thereafter for a political and bureaucratic consensus about which bits of both to support. 

 

The retreat from big thinking at the top of Britain’s government is reinforced by an inability by Britain’s civil service to implement big thinking.  Three failures are apparent: an inability of the civil service to manage big, complex projects successfully; a refusal by ministers to permit the civil service to think long-term or about big policy issues; and the politicisation of the civil service.  All three contribute to a culture of denial and a refusal to tell ministers hard facts even when giving guidance.

 

Such failings are apparent across government.  A September 2013 report by the National Audit Office (NAO) highlighted the failure of management for an IT programme to support the new system of so-called Universal Credit. The report highlighted a recurring theme of failure in the civil service.  Problems are suppressed or denied by a culture that always seeks to protect ministers from hard truths.  When a problem is finally too great to suppress both ministers and the civil service claim the problem has been solved only for failure to be admitted long after those responsible have moved on.  Be it IT programmes or building aircraft carriers a culture of incompetence exists at the heart of government that has also helped to cripple British national strategy.  For a long time Britain’s relative power in the world could mask such failure but no longer.  Indeed, as Britain declines strategy will become more important not less, but as yet government – both political and bureaucratic – has proved itself incapable.

 

The motivation for writing this book emerged from the cold realisation that the two essential ‘truisms’ upon which post-war British national strategy is established are in fact myth.  The first myth concerns the so-called special relationship with the United States.  After over ten years of painful sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq my many visits to Washington have demonstrated to me all-too-clearly that Britain’s relationship with the American is ‘special’ only in the minds of fifty per cent of London’s elite Establishment, mainly those responsible for Britain’s defence.  One senior American said to me recently that the relationship is only special if Britain does not test it.  The August 2013 decision by Parliament to block Prime Minister Cameron’s use of British military forces to punish Syria’s President Assad over the use of chemical weapons demonstrates this new reality; the special relationship is not what it used to be.

 

The second myth adhered to by the other half of the London elite Establishment is that Britain can be a leader of what European federalists dub the European Project.  The Eurozone and the existential crisis it has created, demonstrates once and for all the utter impracticality and impossibility of Britain playing such a role.  Indeed, to do so would in effect mean the abandonment of Britain’s vital and enduring role in Europe – to balance power.  Not only will neither Germany nor France ever allow Britain to play such a role as the EU and the Eurozone become one, over time Britain will be further marginalised.  Britain is today in the worst of all Euro-worlds – paying an exorbitant cost for little or no influence.

 

Julian Lindley-French

The book can be downloaded at www.amazon.com

Grand Strategy for Dummies (and Economists) in Davos

Alphen, Netherlands. 23 January. This is Grand Strategy for Dummies (and Economists).  No wonder it is called the dismal science.  I have just been listening to a leading economist being interviewed in Davos by the BBC - nice work if you can get it.  His line was that conflict between China and Japan is impossible because they are economically-interdependent.  Let's face it most economists cannot even get predictions right in their own field let alone in mine.

 

The 'war is impossible between the economically-dependent' argument was shot dead - literally - a century ago in 1914.  Much of continental Europe was economically-interdependent at the time but war still broke out.  This is because international relations is about so much more than economics.  The drivers of systemic change include structural political shift, identity, nationalism and, of course, the domestic political and personal interests and imperatives of hard-pressed elites.  This potent and potentially parlous mix is particularly powerful and persuasive in emerging, illiberal states that seek to challenge the world status quo.

 

During this interview one of the BBC's many strategically-illiterate, air-brain interviewers said she could not understand why China and Japan could possibly have a shooting match over a few small islands (Diaoyu/Senkaku).  Der! The conflict between the two great East Asian powers is about for more than the islands.  At one level it is about the potentially massive amount of hydrocarbons that lie beneath the islands and at the grand strategic other level it is about the strategic pecking order in what will be the twenty-first century's global security crucible.  Where do the BBC find these people?

 

There is one other question I must pose this morning.  Does anyone know what Davos is for and what value if any it adds to anything or anybody?

 

Julian Lindley-French

From Kiev to Damascus: The Retreat of International Community

Alphen, Netherlands. 22 January.  From Kiev to Damascus and beyond liberal ideas of international community are in retreat.  In what is the last remnant of a once-ancient sea that separated Europe from Africa Lac Leman sits below a soaring Alp known as the Devil’s Teeth.  This rocky statement provides the dramatic backdrop for the Syrian peace talks which start today in the Swiss lakeside resort of Montreux.  The omens are not good.  The Syrian opposition had its arm twisted to attend, those attending seem to have little real influence and a new report suggests the Syrian regime has murdered at least 11000 detainees.  And yet what is at stake in Montreux and Geneva is not simply the alleviating of the suffering of a wretched people but the very future of global governance.  Is the twenty-first century going to be some ghastly repeat of the nineteenth century balance of power or can some semblance of international community be properly created? 

 

The idea of international community has been around a long-time.  In the modern era it can be traced back to the origins of public international law, the Justinian legal tradition and Catholic canon law.  However, the idea of international community really gained ground in the immediate aftermath of Europe’s twentieth century struggles. 

The idea of a rules-based international order reached its zenith with the UN adoption of “Responsibility to Protect” in the wake of the tragedies in the western Balkans and Rwanda.  This flagship of liberal humanitarianism and human security placed the duty of states to protect the rights of citizens above state sovereignty.  As such ‘R2P’ chimed with a brief moment of optimism and determination when it seemed the American-led mighty West and its values would rule supreme.  Today, in the wake of two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a self-generated economic disaster and the re-emergence of two illiberal great powers – China and Russia- the West, its strategy and values and are in open retreat.  Worse, the world is steadily slipping back into a twenty-first century version of Machtpolitik where might and only might is right. 

In Europe Ukraine’s President Yanukovich snubs overtures by the EU and this morning a pro-EU, anti-government protester was shot by police.  In Minsk Soviet relic Lukashenko clings tenaciously onto power.  Three years ago last month Mohammed Bouazizi consumed his Tunisian life in flame and by so doing started the turmoil that boils across the Middle East and North Africa.  Today, much of the region teeters dangerously between autocracy and chaos as weak intolerant regimes cling to power whilst around them and under them people die in their tens of thousands in the face of oppression and sectarian hatred.

Syria’s suffering and Ukraine’s freedom is unlikely to be assured until the geopolitics of both the region and the wider world are resolved. Sadly, the suffering of millions and the deaths of even hundreds of thousands is in and of itself no longer sufficient motive for concerted action, precisely because such action could disturb the new, sensitive regional and global power balances.   

Consequently, a geopolitical fault-line runs from Kiev to Damascus and beyond.  On one side of the line Chinese, Russian, Iranian and the leaders of other illiberal, less-than-democratic and often corrupt states that see themselves as new power albeit suffused by a very traditional concept of power and influence.  On the other side of the line they see hand-wringing, flabby, decadent European liberals who talk the talk of freedom and liberty but who have no intention of walking the walk overseen by an uncertain America retreating from the world with its tail between its legs.

If international community is to be restored and through it the entire edifice of United Nations re-energised the West must rediscover its strategic mojo.  That means political leaders who look up and out from the trenches of austerity and together demonstrate the necessary vision, will and means vital to twenty-first century influence. 

The new balance to be struck between Realpolitik and community is perhaps the last strategic choice the West as the West can make.  In Kiev it is the Kremlin not Brussels that is dictating events.  In Syria even the removal of Syrian chemical weapons is a Russian plan dictated by Russian interests.  In East Asia China takes the view that the US is a has-been power lacking the will and soon the means to challenge Beijing’s nascent hegemony.  Privately Japanese leaders share the same concerns.

Winston Churchill once said that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war” and the Geneva II talks in and of themselves must be welcomed.  However, such suffering will not be ended if the West retreats into gesture politics.  The paradox for Europe and indeed the wider West is that for ‘international community’ to exist Europeans must rediscover at least a modicum of Machtpolitik and Americans must rediscover the West.   

Julian Lindley-French

Strategy, Politics, Privacy and Intelligence

Alphen, Netherlands. 20 January.  President Obama said Friday that, “People around the world should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security”.  The reforms Obama has ordered of the National Security Agency and its practices come as Edward Snowden released details of the Dishfire programme and the collection by the US of some 200 million text messages daily.  Civil rights groups say that Obama’s reforms go nothing like far enough to protect privacy.  Any yet full disclosure would effectively wreck the national security strategies not just of the US but the UK and other Western democracies.  Is a new balance possible between strategy, politics, privacy and intelligence?

 

The essential dilemma that Snowden has highlighted is the enormous gulf in the world views of those responsible for national security and those not.  Just before Christmas I had a conversation with a senior British officer with responsibility for signals intelligence.  He told me that Britain was under daily “massive and rapacious” cyber-attack from Chinese, Russian and other intelligence agencies in addition to the very real terrorist threat. 

Contrast that perspective with the world-view of Snowden and his supporters such as Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald.  They appear to live in a virtual world of perfect civil liberties and much like 1960s hippies and ‘free love’ they want information to be unbounded.  They are part of Generation X that was spawned by the borderless-ness of the Internet and information idealism and any power that constrains information anarchy is an enemy.

That is not to say Western-states do not have a very real duty of care for the privacy of citizens both their own and others.  And, it could well be that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ crossed privacy thresholds in pursuit of security.  911, the pressing intelligence needs of the Afghan and Iraq wars and the march of technology brought motive, opportunity and capability together. Proper and legitimate oversight of such power is what distinguishes between democracies and non-democracies. 

The politics of Obama’s speech reflect transatlantic tensions over strategy and politics.  To hear the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel say on Friday that Germans were “rightfully concerned” by American and British intelligence practices is a bit rich to say the least.  First, German intelligence and its French and other European counterparts benefit hugely from the data gathering of the NSA and GCHQ.  Second, German and French intelligence in particular are excellent practitioners of what the information anarchists regard as dark arts. 

The smell of hypocrisy is emerging from Berlin and not for the first time.  It was particularly irritating recently to see German politicians affecting mock outrage that Britain was trying to discover Berlin’s policy intentions.  As a British citizen I would be outraged if Britain was not trying to discern German intentions by all possible means.  Germany is Europe’s most powerful state and the decisions it takes on the future of the EU have the most profound strategic implications for Britain.  Even this weekend the new German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned David Cameron that some of his views on the EU were beginning to “affect German interests”.

There is a very real danger that British Intelligence will be most damaged.  London is trapped between an America engaged in a dark real world and a European political elite obsessed only with the European order.

At root the cause of this seemingly endless controversy is the refusal of elites in many Western democracies to be honest about the dangerous nature of the twenty-first century world.  The West failure in Afghanistan and Iraq has much to do with strategic dissonance between the US and its European allies.  Whilst the US was on a war-footing much of Europe was determinedly not.  Transatlantic strategic dissonance is reinforced by a European elite culture particularly that tries to lock the citizen into a false sense of security.  This state is most apparent in relation to the Eurozone crisis but it extends across the security spectrum. 

Therefore, by creating false security the individual citizen is left in a child-like state led to believe that his or her freedoms are like the air that they breathe.  The thousands of men and women working in intelligence across the West walk daily past their fellow citizens to and fro work but might as well be on a different planet.  The world they engage on behalf of their citizens is massively different from that perceived by ordinary people and dangerously and ideologically different from the world of information anarchists such as Assange, Greenwald and Snowden.

The greatest immediate threat to the cohesion of the West is breakdown in the balance between strategy, politics, privacy and intelligence.  Indeed, without agreement over a new balance and soon the West as security actor will cease to exist.

Julian Lindley-French

Little Britain? Book Extract 1: Foreword by General (Retd.) Sir David Richards

General (Retd.) Sir David Richards, late Chief of the British Defence Staff

The British armed forces have been engaged the world over for centuries.  In recent years I have had the honour to lead those armed forces in places as challenging and diverse as East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.  As a soldier leading the army of one of Europe’s and the world’s leading democracies the importance of national strategy is paramount.  In democracies, whilst we may be of influence, it is not soldiers that decide the role of a state in world affairs and rightly so.  From my own experience, in spite of the many challenges the British armed forces have faced over the past years trying to bring peace and stability to troubled places, it is Britain’s political and strategic standing which is the vital and yet unquantifiable quality that is so often vital to mission success.  Britain is no longer a global power but it remains a country held in high regard the world over for the length of its international experience and the strategic wisdom it has gained.

Britain’s strategic role has not been without controversy, as evidenced by Prime Minister Cameron expressing deep regret for the massacre of Indian protesters at Amritsar in 1919.  However, overall the world can be said to be a better place because of Britain and the role it has played and continues to play.

 

For the British, national strategy is not something that historically has been designed by committee.  Strategy has rather emerged as an evolution of debate between all those charged with great responsibilities, both within the departments of state engaged daily in Britain’s foreign and security policy and those without.  In the past the ability to make sound strategic judgements seemed to be part of Whitehall’s DNA and thus not in need of formulation or categorisation.  This was partly a reflection of Britain’s genuine power in the world and London’s ability to influence events.  After all, the truly powerful are less in need of strategy.

However, as Britain has become more modest in terms of both power and ambition it has had to begin properly considering its vital, essential and general interests and values in a more systematic and dispassionate light.  This has meant some tough decisions that when seen in the light of history may seem prematurely to signal retreat rather than reflect the strategic realities of an unstable era and the latent influence of a still powerful state.  That was certainly the case with the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review which had to address difficult questions in an especially testing period.

However, the spirit of Britain’s greatness both past and present was apparent even in this the toughest of times.  All those charged with considering Britain’s future strategy do so and did so not in the belief that Britain is about to withdraw from the world but firm in the belief that with the right use of national resources and the immense network of influence Britain enjoys the country can, and should, continue to play a positive and constructive role the world over.

How Britain plays that role is the purpose of Professor Lindley-French’s book.  He examines the balance to be struck between the civilian and the military applications of power; how process, diplomacy, force and resource are blended in order to decide appropriate strategies.  In reading it I was particularly struck by the centrality he places on Britain’s role as a champion of international institutions and the legitimate use of force such memberships confer.

As with most such books I do not agree with all the good professor’s prescriptions. Equally, as a valued adviser and loyal friend I know his views always to be worth taking into account.  They are born or years of exacting scholarship reinforced by remorseless logic and a rare intuition.  I commend this book.  It will be of great assistance to those charged with considering the next chapter in Britain’s great strategic story.

 General (Retd.) Sir David Richards GCB, CBE, DSO

Late Chief of the British Defence Staff, London

The Retreat of Free Thinking

Alphen, Netherlands. 16 January. You know the parable about the emperor's new clothes.  Yesterday, a very senior academic warned me that I was challenging power and that it is dangerous.  That comment in a nutshell explains why Europe and European academia is in such a mess and how political leaders so easily avoid reality. 

 

The job of academia is to challenge prescription with analysis and political orthodoxy with rigour.  Today there are too many academics examining the irrelevant, too many leaders of think tanks who prevent independent thought to ingratiate themselves with power.  The result of the great kow-tow are endless statements of the obvious dressed up as research and think-tank reports that deliberately miss the real point to tell power what it wants to hear.  "Do not cut off our funding", the research masses cry.  "Tell us what we want to hear then", came the power reply.  

 

At this time of truly momentous change in the world and in Europe the thinking citizen must become the loyal opposition.  Indeed, as power shifts inexorably away from Europe to the wider world and away from the citizen to the unelected this is precisely the moment for thinkers to become doers.  If not the short-term will trump the long-term, the political will trump the strategic and the power expedient will in time trump liberty.

 

So sir, I demur from your assertion that I must desist from challenging power.  Instead I call on you to break out of the means by which thought is controlled - be it project funding or research assessment frameworks - and return independent thought to its purpose; to challenge orthodoxy.

 

To mix my parables it is not the job of academia to sup from the table of power but to question the very existence of that table.  As T.S. Eliot once wrote, "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind, Cannot bear too much reality.  Time past and time future, What might have been and what has been, Point to one end, which is always present". 

 

If ever there was a time for elite human kind to be forced to face reality it is now.  If ever there was a place it is Europe.  And, if neither academia nor think-tanks take risk then power is merely rubber-stamped. And, if institutes of inquisition retreat into the little questions then who is answering the big ones?

 

Julian Lindley-French