NATO and a Lost America

”We think the strategic priorities that were identified in the QDR [were] rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region: two, maintaining a strong commitment to security and stability in Europe and the Middle East; three, sustaining a global counterterrorism campaign; four, strengthening key allies and partnerships; five, and prioritizing key modernization efforts”.

US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, 28 January, 2015

Austin, Texas. 4 November. For me one of the pleasures in life is to come to America’s heartland and to get a feel for how everyday Americans feels about America and their place in the world. Thanks to my friend Sharyl Cross of the Kozmetsky Center at St Edward’s University and Global Austin I have had a chance this week to feel real America’s strategic pulse before I fly to the other end of NATO and the Riga Conference. My conclusion? There is a crisis of confidence and trust between DC power and the US people that feels not unlike Europe. Worse, the United States is drifting strategically, unable or unwilling to confront its many problems at home, and unsure and uncertain of its place in the world. My purpose in coming here was to talk about NATO and the EU. However, I will leave here with a profound sense that the greatest threat to the transatlantic relationship and the Alliance is posed neither by Russia nor ISIS, but by an America lost. America is tired.

The implications of a tired America for NATO are profound. Indeed, the Alliance is in danger of being ground down by Euro-isolationism and thirteen years of American over-exertion. The tragic irony is that Americans and Europeans have never needed each other more. NATO remains vital to a declining US and its over-stretched grand strategy. At the very least NATO should and could act as a force multiplier of US leadership and a legitimiser of US action. Indeed, NATO is as much America’s insurance against dangerous strategic change as Europe’s.

Domestic politics here is killing American strategy. Although a bipartisan deal was reached to extend the US federal budget for two more years at current levels and thus prevent federal shutdown the very fact that Washington is bumping along the bottom of politics in this way reflects the extent to which the US is lost in the strategic wilderness. The world is simply too dangerous for such nonsense.

A major victim of Washington’s seemingly endless political impasse is the US military which is still being ravaged by sequestration, which has in turn savaged US long-term defence planning. Worse, an awful lot of that money the US military does get is spent badly precisely because of stinky, pork barrel politics in Washington. The American taxpayer getting nothing like the bang for the buck they should expect.

America’s retreat is compounded by a Europe mired in Euro-isolationism with too much of the Continent obsessed with the shape of institutions, the workings or otherwise of the Euro, and the extent of social entitlements. This week’s decision by the British Government to shelve a parliamentary vote on extending RAF air-strikes to Syria simply reinforces the sense of decline, and irresolution at the top of power in Europe.

Consequently, the absence of US leadership will likely see Europeans continue to mouth platitudes about security and defence as they also continue to slash hard security to afford state-busting social security. Indeed, whilst the Allies agreed last year to try and spend 2% GDP on defence the NATO average (excluding the US) remains stubbornly stuck at c1.5%, whilst the EU average is around 1.3%.  Indeed, thirteen of the world’s top twenty defence cutters between 2012 and 2014 were to be found amongst NATO Europeans who sliced a further $90bn from already weak defence budgets over that period.  One simply cannot do more with less.

What to do? Crazy though it may seem the US should use NATO more not less. NATO is the European Wing of a US-led World-wide West that is today more an idea than a place. NATO is also the enabler of the West’s hard core - the Anglosphere. NATO Standards for force generation, command and control and military interoperability, and shared concepts of military transformation, also remain vital to a new balance that must be stuck between military efficiency and effectiveness that will help offset weakness (far more than the Pentagon’s latest gobbledygook called the 3^rd Offset Strategy).

However, if NATO is to reinvent itself in American eyes the Alliance will need to confront once and for all its many weaknesses. The most important challenge is establishing a new ‘contract’ so that NATO can remain relevant to twenty-first century US grand strategy and thus ensure an America committed to the twenty-first century defence of Europe.

At the very least, such a contract will mean a NATO finally released from short-term politics and the sham that is the NATO Defence Planning Process.  Indeed, if NATO collective defence and forward deterrence is to become credible it is vital the Allies together begin a proper consideration of the likely impact of new technologies and strategies on Alliance cohesion. This will include a proper analysis of such threats as area access, area denial (A2/AD) strategies and technologies, how to effectively balance so-called 6^th Generation warfare at the high-end of conflict with 4^th Generation ‘hybrid warfare’ at a lower level of conflict, as well as a collective grip of military nano-technology, cyber warfare, missile defence etc.

Critically, a new transatlantic contract will require Europeans to face a simple truth; their US-led defence can only be assured if Europe finally becomes a source of strength for the US not a bottomless pit of weakness and thus help take the pressure of an increasingly over-burdened America.  Since the early 1950s Europeans have played at burden-sharing knowing full well that America was strong enough and rich enough to effectively go it alone. Not anymore. Those days are over.   

My sense from being here in Austin this week that there is no room for any complacency on the part of Alliance leaders and yet complacent is precisely what Alliance leaders have become. Or, rather complacent and over-whelmed – a strange and acute condition. Whilst the people with whom I have spoken clearly remain committed to the transatlantic relationship they are by and large the converted. In truth here in Austin support for both the transatlantic relationship, and by extension NATO, is at the very best soft.

Therefore, European leaders must stop thinking that Europe’s defence is itself a form of ‘social’ security entitlement paid for by the American taxpayer. If not it may just be that real America here in Texas and elsewhere across this great country at some point concludes that America does not need entangling alliances like NATO and had best look after itself. In this complex and ever more dangerous world an America that seeks to combine exceptionalism, isolationism, and relative weakness would be as much a disaster for the West and the world as an irresolute Europe obsessed with petty and not-so-petty institutionalism.  

As Winston Churchill once said, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies. That is to fight without them”.

Julian Lindley-French

Testament of Youth

“Politics is the executive expression of human immaturity”.

Vera Brittan

Detroit, Michigan. 1 November. I am sitting in the Sky Club lounge at Detroit Airport bored out of my brain awaiting my delayed connection to Austin, Texas. So, I decided to write a blog. It may surprise regular readers of this modest blog that one of my favourite books is Testament of Youth, Vera Brittan’s war memoir to end all war memoirs. It is a story of indescribable loss. Loss of family, friends and love on the charnel fields of the First World War. It is also a story of immeasurable hope as women begin their long journey to rightful and righteous equality. At times the book touches me personally. Brittan’s description of her entry into Oxford University and her fight to be treated with the respect her mind deserved chimes sharply with my own experience amidst the ivory towers and dreaming spires some sixty years later. Indeed, I was the first, or at least one of the first, to gain entry to Oxford from an ordinary state, comprehensive school utterly ill-prepared for my entry into a society of whom I had had little experience.  It was more than intimidating. It was terrifying.  I simply did not belong.

Brittan’s elegiac eloquence speaks for a slaughtered generation. Indeed, the book marks the end of innocence at so many levels, a Cri de Coeur of a young woman trying to make sense of staggering loss. In so doing Brittan pleads across a century to understand the place, the role and the rights of the individual in the face of dark, distant, and unimaginably dangerous power. Having worked as a nurse at the front Brittan became a pacifist, blaming war itself for her loss. However, war was only the agent of death for it was a failure of vision, politics and strategy at the top that doomed those she loved.  Above all, it was a failure at the top of power to understand how an apparently enduring peace could so quickly become industrial, total war.

A century on as I cast my mind across today’s Europe there is none of the nationalistic “it will all be over by Christmas” hubris from which all the soon-to-be warring nations suffered in 1914. Rather, the opposite is happening. As illiberal predators emerge from the dark recesses of intolerance and gather at Europe’s periphery they see Europe not as strong and steadfast. No, they see Europe as prey full of the weak, the hapless and the irresponsibly well-meaning. Indeed, it is as though Europe has become one vast ivory tower, a vast ‘Oxford’ in which a hallowed elite see very real risk, threat and danger as some abstract concept to be debated but not acted upon.

If ever there was a case of lions being led by donkeys it is Europe today.  With society-breaking migration destroying free movement by moving all too freely; with a resurgent Russia ‘righting’ imaginary ‘wrongs’ on its reeling region; and with a woeful world growing more dangerous by the day European leaders are clueless. Instead, they have resorted to a form of pacifism to mask the extent of their impotence and the implications of their incompetence from Europe’s people. It is a pacifism that is so pacific that it wallows in a mire of liberal contradictions, self-denying and self-paralysing in equal measure.

When I cast my eye across this world what I see is coming war - big war as frictions and falsehoods are magnified by self-willed liberal retreat and self-obsessed illiberal challenge. It is a world in which unscrupulous and intolerant power seeks dominion over the innocent and/or irresolute through warped history, faith, and warped world a view.

Oxford taught me that one must have the ambition to think and to think big for it is ideas that change worlds and I see such thinking in all three works of the Testament trilogy. Indeed, what I love about Testament of Youth is its bigness, its grandeur. Its bigness of spirit, its bigness of humanity, and its bigness of idea. Brittan’s bigness is that she manages to turn her yawning loss into a quest for peace. Her testimony to the four lost loves in her life is not some carved headstone but an idea; that war must never again happen. However, in celebrating innocence Testament of Youth is also a stark warning to all free citizens not to be reduced to impotent innocence by self-interested ‘leave it all to us’ politicians, to blindly trust power like children trust parents.

Testament of Youth is a book I have read many times because each time I read it I discover something new about myself, the society I help shape, and the liberal values which I cherish but which I believe need defending. Where Brittan and I part company is how best to prevent war. For her war was an intrinsic evil which she hints via her feminist creed is endemic to all men. Like many of her traumatised generation she also believed that if one removes the ability to wage war then war will be ended. There are strains of both schools of thought in today’s debate over the nature and method of European security and defence.  However, for me war is a function of a structure broken by the eternal struggle between different views of power. One can never prevent war by the free rendering themselves powerless in the hope that tyranny will see their reason.

Julian Lindley-French

  

NATO: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

“Laws are silent in times of war”

Cicero

Rome, Italy. 27 October. War is unthinkable. Therefore, it must be thought about. I am back in the Eternal City reading about Cicero and his ultimately fatal tryst with Caesar over the age-old struggle between law and power. In a sense it is that struggle which is the theme of my blog today. Tomorrow I address the NATO Defence College on the future of NATO against the backdrop of two challenges to Western ideas of power and law. ISIS seeks to impose extreme religious law on the world, whilst President Putin simply wants power to trump law. My presence in Rome is certainly timely as I have just returned from an outstanding conference organised by Dr Robert Grant of Wilton Park on NATO and Russia. What was for me fascinating and worrying in equal measure was the inability of many of the ‘dips’ and officials around the table to admit that Russia’s actions of late have moved Europe closer to a major war than at any time since World War Two. Therefore, as the Alliance prepares for the 2016 Warsaw Summit it should heed the fourth century AD words of Roman philosopher Vegetius in De Re Militari, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” (If you want peace, prepare for war).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am no militarist. I am far too much the historian for that. Equally, I am very much a political realist and thus all too aware that illiberal regimes thrive by intimidating liberal regimes and people’s by the very implication of their power irrationality.

At the Wilton Park conference much was made of the new NATO “Russia Strategy”. The debate moved up and down, back and forth but it did not address the real issue; the possibility of war. The trouble was I could not ignore the ‘war’ word and intervened to suggest that if Russia’s warlike preparations on NATO’s Eastern Flank look like a war-duck, quack like a war-duck, and all-too-often violate air-space by flying like a war-duck, maybe just maybe we should listen to the signals President Putin is sending us and thus prepare for war. Naturally, my intervention was greeted like a bad fart at a diplomatic reception; clearly apparent but best politely ignored.

By ‘war’ I do not mean the Band-Aid, pretend strategy NATO currently has on offer.  Reassurance Action Plans, Spearhead Forces et al are all very well and good. However, they bear little relation to what is needed to properly establish credible forward deterrence on NATO’s eastern flank. This sense of playing at deterrence ran through the conference. Indeed, one has only to see the gap between the rhetoric at the September 2014 Wales Summit about the need to strengthen deterrence via increased defence spending (eventually) and increased investment in defence equipment (occasionally), and today’s unforgiving reality. Indeed, for a new report by Price Waterhouse Coopers states that in the period 2014-2015 the only region in the world to actually reduce its defence expenditure was Western Europe – hardly the hard signalling of steely resolve.

Rather, conference seemed to place the preservation of fragile unity before political and military credibility.  Naturally, much was made of various ‘action’ plans to be discussed at the Summit but all fell far short of the reformed full spectrum capability that NATO’s twenty-first century collective defence will need if the Alliance is to meet the challenges posed by Russia, ISIS, and by extension US over-stretch. It is as though the Alliance is lost in a strategy vacuum, mouthing the right words but prevented from turning pious words into proper policy, planning, and action.

The most pressing danger to NATO is a lack of leadership at the top. Indeed, the fault lies not with those diplomats and officials who valiantly try to eek some sense of strategic unity of effort and purpose out of irresolution and weakness. As I indicated in my interview last week with European Geostrategy the fault lies with the political minnows who pass themselves off as our leaders and for whom pulling the short-term political wool over the eyes of the people is far more important than preparing for their sound defence.

In such a leadership vacuum no diplomat or official, however skilled in the art of statecraft can fashion credibility from craven strategic illiteracy. The hard reality is that Europe’s political class from Chancellor Merkel down are simply unable or unwilling to bring themselves to face hard reality. That is why Europe is so crap at crisis management, any crisis, and why President Putin can get away with his power super-bluff.

What to do? The only way for NATO (not the EU, OSCE or UN) to restore credible deterrence (the primary mission of the Alliance) is to return to the principles of worst-case planning which informed the Alliance at its founding back in 1949.  Indeed, it is the Alliance’s wilful retreat from the principles of traditional defence planning that have reinforced the strategy vacuum that President Putin is now exploiting.

When it came my turn to present at Wilton Park I offered a sobering worst-case scenario. It is 2020. The Russian economy has suffered repeated energy shocks and the domestic position of President Putin has become vulnerable, possibly unsustainable.  Suddenly a crisis erupts in East China Sea involving key US allies and the US is forced to respond in force.  After weeks of de-stabilisation, disinformation and deception power and information networks suddenly crash in the Baltic States, and across much of Eastern Europe.  Alarming reports begin to appear of ‘Little Green Men’ at Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius airports. Military exercises underway in Kaliningrad and Belarus intensify and expand and the Kremlin begins to talk of NATO aggression and cites violations of Russian air, sea and land space, as well as attacks via cyberspace.

Russian forces begin to cross into the Baltic States to “restore peace and stability” and to consolidate a “peace buffer” between Russia and an “aggressive NATO”.  Russian nuclear forces – both strategic and tactical – are placed on full alert. In a national TV address President Putin tells the Russian people he is simply straightening Russia’s “strategic defensive line”, acting to prevent the “oppression” of Russian minorities, and removing a final “anomaly” that has threatened Russia ever since the end of the Cold War.

Shortly thereafter Putin rings President Clinton and German Chancellor Merkel (surprisingly still in power) and tells her he had no alternative and does not seek a wider war with the West.  He apologises for the ten American, five British and five French servicemen killed during Russia’s advance. He also offers compensation to the families and his “sincere condolences”, together with the immediate return of all those captured in what is now the Occupation Zone. He also offers free gas supplies to several EU member-states as a mark of his bona fides. At home flushed by apparent ‘success’ President Putin nationalist credentials are now on a par with Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great.

In effect, Putin’s fait accompli offers President Clinton and Chancellor Merkel the same choice Britain and France faced in 1939 over Poland – space for time. In other words, having been unable to defend the Baltic States Putin poses NATO leaders a chilling question; does the rest of the Alliance really want to go to war with nuclear Russia to free them? After all, US forces are too over-stretched to respond in force in both Asia-Pacific and Europe (“the US  cannot make 30,000 into 300,000”), and NATO Europeans are too militarily-weak and politically-divided to act as effective first responders. Surely, Putin implies, would it not be best for all concerned to negotiate the best terms possible for the people of the Baltic States now again under Russian rule?

If the Warsaw Summit does nothing else it must re-consider how to properly establish credible forward deterrence. That means a NATO that must think again about war, big war. Allied Command Operations and Allied Command Transformation must be instructed to do just that. For, as Thomas Hobbes once said, “Covenants without the sword are but words”. After all, it is Russia who is doing the intimidating and escalating, not NATO.

Quod, si vis pacem, para bellum. Thus, if we want peace, we must prepare for war…or at least be seen to be thinking properly about it.

Julian Lindley-French

            

The Lessons of Agincourt

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Henry V, William Shakespeare

Alphen, Netherlands. 25 October. What are the lessons of Agincourt? Six hundred years ago today King Henry V of England won the most famous English victory over the French. Even if one peers through the many layers of propaganda that have been laid over the battle, most famously by William Shakespeare, Agincourt remains a stunning victory for English arms. The English wracked by hunger and disease were out-numbered by at least four-to-one, and probably more by the French.  Critically, the French possessed the heavy armour of their day, the mounted knights on heavy horse. And yet some four hours after the battle commenced the flower of the French nobility lay shattered on the field of Agincourt, with between 7-10,000 French dead of a force that probably numbered between 25-35,000 men.  The English suffered at worst 200 killed, and by some estimates as few as 112, although amongst them lay the king’s brother Edward, Duke of York.  Leadership, tactics, technology and timing won the day for ‘Harry’ and England.

Leadership & Command: “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility, but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the actions of the tiger…” Henry V (1413-1422) had a dubious claim to the English throne. Indeed, his father Henry Bolingbroke had usurped it from Richard II in 1399. And was complicit in Richard’s murder in 1400. However, the younger Henry was an inspirational war leader.  Henry thus offered the English force a clear purpose and ensured unity of effort through his leadership, unlike the French who were riven with jealousies and petty rivalries at the highest levels of command. 

Tactics: “A very little, little let us do. And all is done”.  The French rode and marched without due regard for the carefully laid trap that had been laid before them, so dismissive of the tiny force before them were the French Constable, the Dauphin and the rest of the French command. Some years ago I walked the battlefield next to ‘Azincourt’ and was surprised by how little has apparently changed. Indeed, it is still relatively easy to imagine the French heavy horse and their men-at-arms advancing downhill into the v-shaped trap where up to 8,000 English archers lay in wait.

Technology: "For many of our princes - woe awhile - lie drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs in blood of princes; and their wounded steeds fret fetlock deep in gore and with wild rage yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters" Prior to the invention and proper military application of cannon and musket the English longbow was the decisive military technology of its European age. Whilst the French crossbow was more sophisticated it took far longer to load and could not carry a similar weight of weapon to the longbow. Thus, the English had the advantage in rate, weight, and indeed range of firepower and were this able to stand off and mercilessly tear French ranks to pieces.  Some years ago I stood next to a longbow. Made of English yew it was some five feet (1.5m) long with arrows of a similar length, some of which mounted armour piercing warheads (bodkins) and some flesh-tearing warheads. It was a truly awesome weapon and it is not surprising that the exhumed skeletons of English archers all share a deformation caused by the strength required to launch arrows from the longbow.

Timing: “This day is call’d the feast of Crispian”. The day itself played a vital role in England’s victory. 25 October was deep into a French autumn and the field of Agincourt was wet.  As the French man-at-arms advanced downhill towards the English lines they did so over a field deep in the mud ploughed up by the French heavy horse. In other words the French became quite simply stuck and it was this mud that not only destroyed French order but enabled the English longbowmen to pour volley after volley into the French. Thereafter, English men-at-arms moved onto the field alongside archers transformed into infantry to finish off the French and claim French nobles for ransom.

There is another lesson of Agincourt and it comes in the form of a big ‘but’. If the strategy of a campaign is essentially misguided however stunning a military victory gained it can never compensate for misplaced and ill-executed ambition.  Indeed, whilst much is made of Henry’s stunning victory the fact he had to fight the battle at all reflected his strategic failure.  Worse, whilst Agincourt damaged the French monarchy, the blow was not fatal.

Henry had landed in France on 13 August, 1415 to stake a claim to the French throne to reinforce his own. By October 1415 he was desperately seeking the sanctuary of then English-controlled Calais. Moreover, within seven years of Agincourt Henry was dead. With the victory of Jean d’Arc at Orleans in 1429 the French effectively won the Hundred Years War and ended English (or to be more precisely Anglo-Norman) claims to the French throne once and for all. Thereafter, and in spite of a brief respite England descended into the Wars of the Roses with the authority of the monarchy only established by the victory of the Lancastrians/Tudors at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

The lesson of Agincourt for today? This past week I attended a meeting that was meant to be about NATO and Russia, but was really about the agenda for the 2016 NATO Warsaw Summit. At one point I lobbed in a verbal grenade; why are there so many NATO summits? My point was that too many NATO nations seem to place more importance on preparing summits and writing the declarations thereof, than actually preparing the military force vital to deterrence of threats. It is summitry before strategy, form before substance, eloquence before efficiency and effectiveness.

Henry V demonstrated on that fateful day in 1415 just what a small force, brilliantly-led, properly-deployed, and armed with decisive technology could achieve against a much larger force, divided at the top of command, badly-organised, and poorly-led in the field.  As NATO commanders consider the role of Allied forces both on its eastern and southern flanks they may wish to re-consider the Battle of Agincourt. Indeed, with cyber and disinformation possibly the new longbows unless NATO re-establishes credible unity of effort and purpose at both the political and military levels it could be the Alliance that one day finds itself cast in the role of the French Constable at Agincourt, and President Putin an unlikely Henry V.

Julian Lindley-French   

Britain's Nuclear Nanking: Kowtowing to China

“HER MAJESTY the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and His Majesty the Emperor of China, being desirous of putting an end to the misunderstandings and consequent hostilities which have arisen between the two countries, have resolved to conclude a Treaty for that purpose . . .” The Treaty of Nanking, August 1842

Alphen, Netherlands. 19 October.  Kowtow: Chinese custom of touching ground with forehead as a sign of worship or absolute submission. (Oxford English Dictionary). There will be senior Mandarins in Beijing smiling this morning at the satisfying irony of what is in effect the nuclear equivalent of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking.  On 29 August 1842, at the end of the First Opium War, Britain imposed the Treaty of Nanking on the Chinese Emperor under the then mighty guns of the Royal Navy. It was the first of the so-called ‘unequal treaties’. This week Britain will touch the ground with its forehead to seek Chinese money and technology at outrageously advantageous terms to Beijing to fund three nuclear energy plants. It is nothing short of a nuclear Nanking, and pay-back for China’s past humiliation at British hands. In a desperate bid to close Britain’s looming energy gap is Britain about to make a dangerous choice between America and China?

Naturally, no mention will be made of Nanking as President Xi Jinping arrives today in Britain to begin a four day state visit which Beijing is heralding as the start of a “golden era” in Anglo-Chinese relations. However, even as President Xi sets foot on British soil America’s most modern fleet is on course to enter the South and East China Seas in a ‘freedom of navigation’ exercise to challenge China’s occupation of 209 islands and what looks like the construction of military bases on some of them.

Since the early 1970s Britain has had a foreign, security and defence policy that is at best a contradiction; the former focused on the EU, with the latter focused on the United States.  Amongst friends such a contradiction could for the most part be massaged away by Whitehall’s many political masseurs. However, British Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) and true architect of government policy George Osborne, wants to take the art of strategic massage into even more intimate spaces by in effect giving much of Britain’s civil nuclear energy policy to China.

In spite of warnings from Britain’s security services, and in spite of a series of announcements that will be made this week about ‘guarantees’ to UK-Chinese cyber ‘relations’, the deal is replete with risk to Britain and indeed its allies.  Indeed, not long ago I was told by a senior British military officer that Britain was under ‘daily industrial cyber-attack’ from China. Now, China is Britain's new “best friend”. Have I missed something?

The deal is as ever being driven by those masters of the short-term HM Treasury, who never seem to miss an opportunity to make the wrong strategic decision for all the wrong short-term reasons. Yes, a strong trading relationship with China is of course desirable, but not at the expense of Britain’s security and defence.

Whitehall likes to hide Britain’s supine and abject weakness at such moments with a blast of hubris. By ‘engaging’ China in such a way Britain is not selling its defence-strategic soul for energy, but rather helping to make China a responsible world citizen. To demonstrate Britain’s lofty ambitions, the official line goes, London will again raise China’s abuse of human rights.

Let me tell you how Britain ‘raises human rights’ with China. The last time David Cameron went to China there was a box marked ‘human rights’. Yes, a box. The box was given to the Chinese Foreign Ministry by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. During Cameron’s visit a junior British official met with the most junior of Chinese officials to ‘discuss’ human rights. By that ruse Cameron could say he had raised human rights with the Chinese. It is of course complete and utter nonsense. Indeed, it would be far better to simply admit the truth; trade with China is far more important to Britain than China’s abuse of human rights. If such supine kowtowing to dodgy, rich regimes is what future British life outside the EU will look like it almost makes me want to stay in…almost.  

In for a penny, in for a pound (or is that yuan)? If the government is prepared to offer China the equivalent of a nuclear Nanking, why not go the whole nuclear hog and ask Beijing to pay for Britain’s other big nuclear project; the planned replacement of the Trident nuclear missile system and the four nuclear submarines that would carry them. At the very least Britain could ask the Chinese to lease Britain the nuclear submarines upon which the US-built missiles would be carried? Surely, the US Navy would not mind and in any case it would be good for trade.

My cynicism is well-founded. Those same smiling Mandarins will be fully aware of the impact this deal will have on London’s taut and fraught strategic relationship with Washington. It is a consequence that will not have been lost on Beijing as it seeks to isolate America from its broke European allies via the strategic application of sovereign wealth. Indeed, this nuclear Nanking will only reinforce a perception gained in Washington when Britain backed China’s Asian Investment Bank that London no longer thinks strategically. And, that Britain can no longer be relied upon as an ally in dealing with an increasingly aggressive and assertive strategic competitor.

In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was the product of a Britain at the height of its imperial power and reflected a foreign policy crafted by Lord Palmerston that was predicated purely and simply on mercantilism – the enrichment of Britain through ‘free trade’ on British terms. Today, Britain’s leaders are still obsessed with mercantilism but see themselves as powerless. That is why George Osborne is kowtowing to the Chinese. Indeed, this nuclear Nanking has Little Britain written all over it!

A year after the Treaty of Nanking Hong Kong Island was given to the British in perpetuity. Therefore, it would only be fair to offer President Xi the Isle of Wight...in perpetuity. No, no, no! I was only joking London.  Is Britain about to make a dangerous choice between America and China? Only time will tell but London at least needs to think about it!

Julian Lindley-French      

The MH17 Report

"The inflight disintegration of the aeroplane near the Ukrainian/Russian border was the result of the detonation of a warhead. The detonation occurred above the left-hand side of the cockpit. The weapon used was a 9N314M-model warhead carried on the 9M38-series of missiles, as installed on the Buk surface-to-air missile system. Other scenarios that could have led to the disintegration of the aeroplane were considered, analysed and excluded."

Dutch Safety Board

Alphen, Netherlands. 14 October. It is not with a certain irony that as the Dutch Safety Board was releasing its technical report into the destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 I was briefing Air Marshal Sir Christopher Harper and his team at the International Military Staff at NATO HQ on “The Aims, Method and Application of Russia’s Ambiguous Foreign, Security and Defence Policy”. The irony, such as it is, is that Gilze-Rijen airbase where the report was launched, and where the remains of the doomed airliner rest, is right next door to where I live.

Some seven hundred pages long and divided into six volumes the report is the product of a seven country, fifteen month investigation and addresses several key technical questions concerning the destruction of the Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The questions can be thus summarised: the exact sequence of destruction; the suffering if any of the passengers and crew prior to death; and the likely launch site of the missile.  However, the report does not apportion blame for the massacre as a parallel criminal investigation is underway.

The main finding is that at 1620 hours local on the afternoon of 17 July, 2014 193 Dutch citizens, 43 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, 10 Britons, 4 Germans, 4 Belgians, 3 Philippine citizens, 1 Canadian and 1 New Zealander were murdered by a Russian-built Buk 9M38 series anti-aircraft missile which detonated some 1 metre above and to left of the aircraft’s cockpit. The three crew on the flight deck were killed instantly. However, the report suggests that at least some passengers to the rear of the aircraft were not killed by the explosive decompression caused when the forward section of the plane detached from the main fuselage due to the force of the warhead’s detonation and the impact of many thousands of shaped steel fragments from the Buk’s warhead. Indeed, the report suggests that some passengers may have survived up to ninety seconds before they became unconscious and died.  

The report also states that the missile was launched from an almost two hundred square kilometre area south of the town of Snizhne, then controlled by separatists supported by Moscow. Whilst the report implies blame rests with Moscow and the separatists it arms, Kiev is not exonerated.  Indeed, the report is firm in its condemnation of Ukrainian authorities for not closing the air space over the conflict zone prior to the disaster.   Indeed, a further one hundred and sixty civilian aircraft flew over the area the same day before the air space was closed after MH17 crashed.

Upon release of the report Russian authorities moved swiftly to discredit it. Moscow asserted that the missile in question was not the 9N314M variant but an older version, implying that the missile that shot MH17 down could have been fired by the Ukrainians. Moscow also contested the area from which the missile was fired suggesting a much larger area than the report, again implying the Ukrainians could have been responsible.

Thus, a tragedy high above Ukraine involving the nationals of ten nations is still being compounded by a Moscow that simply refuses to come clean. Well-informed sources with whom I have had contact over the past few weeks have confirmed to me from where the missile was launched.  As time passes the now incontrovertible evidence will mount. Therefore, it would do Russia credit and give the relatives of the victims some sense of justice if Moscow simply admitted that the downing of MH17 was a terrible tragedy, resulting from a series of errors, misconceptions and mistakes on the part of poorly-trained Ukrainian separatists recently-returned from a training camp in southern Russia, and their GRU (Russian military intelligence) handlers.

The tragic mistake that is the MH17 disaster was compounded by the inability of the radar tracking system to identify the transponder on MH17 that would have confirmed the civilian identity of the airliner. Sadly, at the time of launch the main command and radar trailer was not attached to the launch vehicle.  Consequently, those responsible thought initially that they had shot down a Ukrainian AN-26 military transport aircraft. Although a Boeing 777 is far larger than an AN-26 the radar signature on the small auxiliary radar on the Buk launcher would not have afforded the operator the ability to distinguish between the two aircraft at a height of some 33,000 feet (10,000 metres).

There are two further ironies that echo from that terrible day. Ninety of the victims came from Noord Brabant where I live. Indeed, my wife lost a colleague at the University of Tilburg, together with his wife and two children. Moreover, I was at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport that day and quite probably walked past some of the victims who just a few hours later were blown out of the sky by a Russian missile.

Russia did not intend for this to happen but its recklessness created the circumstances in which this massacre could happen.  One of my many reflections from MH17 was the inspiring class and dignity shown by the Dutch nation and people in the aftermath of the disaster. It is time for Moscow to show some class and dignity and not just honour the victims of MH17, but all the victims of the conflict in Ukraine, on both sides. Therefore, Russia must sit down within the Minsk framework and Normandy format to resolve grievances peacefully...and apologise.

In honour of the crew and passengers lost on Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, 17 July 2014.

Julian Lindley-French

Cybridity

“There are three people who understand the Schleswig Holstein question. One is dead, the other quite mad, and I am the third, and I have forgotten”.

Lord Palmerston

Alphen, Netherlands. 12 October. What role does cyber and hybrid warfare actually play in strategy? Hybrid warfare is the strategic flavour of the month at present and at times I feel pretty much like Lord Palmerston about the Schleswig Holstein question, particularly when hybrid and cyber warfare merge. Therefore, this Monday morning in an attempt to better understand how cyber and hybrid warfare interact, and there place in the order of strategy/battle I have determined to fashion a new concept - cybridity. Brilliant, eh?

Now, as far as I can fathom (or not) ‘hybrid’ to most practitioners actually means anything or anyone ‘we’ do not much understand, doing things ‘we’ cannot fathom, in ways that seem to make little clear strategic sense, in pursuit of ‘interests’ that by and large seem utter madness. In other words, hybrid is simply not cricket. Add cyber warfare to the mix and our misunderstanding is compounded.

Cyber ‘warfare’ ranges from the irritation caused by some kid with Asperger’s, to states and wannabe states engaged in systematic mass disruption. By the way, why is it these kids are always kids, and why is it they always have Asperger’s? Until recently I thought Asperger’s was a posh, upper class English public (private) school somewhere in deepest bucolic Hampshire. Worse, bring ‘hybrid’ and ‘cyber’ specialists together and I am reminded of worst nightmare conferences of international relations theorists – the unintelligible in pursuit of the utterly incomprehensible. Thankfully, last Thursday at a conference in The Hague, at which I was of course brilliant, a senior NATO official, who is also a friend of mine, finally cast all the guff that is spoken about ‘cybridity’ into some form of strategic shape.

In effect cybridity is a function of globalisation in which hybrid and cyber warfare together act as the most significant agents of change – multiplying strength, magnifying weakness, and offsetting both. In other words, hybrid warfare is a form of strategy and cyber warfare a form of, er, warfare. Therefore, the importance of cybridity as a means of attack and defence in the twenty-first century is clear and must not be under-estimated. The scale of warfare is stunning. For example, NATO deals with some 20 million cyber incidents against its 32 networks each day.  A senior British officer told me on a visit to RAF Leeming that Britain is under ‘industrial’ cyber attack daily from China and Russia.

Cybridity works on several levels of power. At the softest level of power cybridity helps attackers manipulate history by employing influence to generate an alternative narrative that undermines political cohesion in the West and the legitimacy of any course of action. At the interface between soft and hard power cybridity complicates policy and defence planning by generating offensive disruption below the level of offensive destruction and thus further complicates the very idea of what constitutes an ‘attack’. At the high-end of hard power cyber can generate a readiness to escalate rapidly to the use of conventional force by destabilising an opponent and keeping opposing military power off-balance. Such action can either be taken directly by state or through hard-to-nail proxies. For example, Russia uses criminal gangs and networks necessitating the fusion of military and criminal intelligence by way of response.

Cybridity also penetrates modern society by dint of its very openness. The stability of a modern Western societies is dependent on so-called critical infrastructure. Such infrastructure incorporates both public and private systems and networks both of which are vital to the functioning of aforesaid societies.  In modern Europe some 85% of critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector which means any aspiration to render a society more resilient is dependent on robust co-operation between and across government, the private sector, and given the cross-border nature of cyber international systems and structures.  In other words, cybridity demands a holistic view of security that incorporates classical defence and goes far beyond in terms of the ambition required to mount a credible response.  

How is NATO defending against cybridity? By properly understanding the place of cybridity on the conflict spectrum and its crucial role in force escalation NATO is endeavouring to craft a new form of collective defence.  First, the Alliance is beefing-up situational awareness by creating new early-warning indicators that enable leaders to know exactly what it is they need to look for to confirm an attack. Second, NATO is seeking to speed up the decision-making cycle to enable early intervention, never easy in a multi-national organisation like the Alliance that acts through consensus. The particular focus of the Alliance is on searching for the strategic design behind cyber events.  Third, the Alliance is in the vanguard of efforts to generate a much closer set of relationships between international and national responses. Such an effort runs in parallel with similar efforts across the road in Brussels at the EU, and thus affords both organisations new areas for co-operation. In 2016 NATO and the EU will undertake their first joint exercise since 2003 to test co-operation in the face of cybridity. Finally, NATO is reinforcing the credibility of NATO’s military readiness and responsiveness by better understanding the place of both hybrid and cyber warfare in the order of strategy and battle. The focus is on countering Russian cybridity, particularly in Poland and the Baltic States, and primarily through forward-deployed Special Forces.

However, for counter-cybridity to work a new partnership between the state, NATO, the EU, and the individual citizen will also be needed. During the Cold War for all the Protect and Survive nonsense which encouraged people to hide under the kitchen table in the event of a nuclear attack, there was a legitimising partnership between the state and the citizen in the defence of both – the state and the people that is, not the kitchen table. 

One of the many retreats of the past twenty-five years has been the retreat from transparency by the state in matters security and defence. Consequently, strategy has been sacrificed for short-term politics. The result is that security and defence have come to be seen by much of the population as somebody else’s business.  The danger posed by cybridity means that the age of strategic childishness must end.  Indeed, the greatest defence against cybridity will be the resilience of the responsible, aware citizen, because the greatest threat cybridity poses is that to the relationship between the citizen and the legitimate use of force on his or her behalf.

In the final analysis both hybrid and cyber warfare are simply the latest ‘ways’ to achieve ‘ends’ via the continuation of policy by all ‘means’ available.   Ironically, the most powerful exponents of cybridity can be found in the West itself, not least in the teenage lay-about-hood who lurk in bedrooms across the West. Therefore, if the likes of Russia, China and ISIS can use cybridity to mess around with us, it is nothing compared with ‘our’ capacity to mess around with them.

Let me finish with quote from Professor Paul Cornish of RAND, one of the relatively few other experts who properly understand the role of cyber and hybrid warfare in war and strategy - cybridity.  “At the level of states and governments, it is clear that in some quarters the Internet is becoming viewed as a battlefield where conflict can be won or lost. The threats can inter-connect when circumstances demand – terrorist groups, for example, can be sophisticated users of the Internet but can also make use of low-level criminal methods such as hacking in order to raise funds. The challenge to cyber security policy-makers is therefore not only broad, but complex and evolutionary”.  Some of us would suggest the challenge is now revolutionary.

Julian Lindley-French