A Strategic Assessment of the Situation on NATO’s Northern and Eastern Flanks

Date: 16 December, 2016

Headline: 

Given the current 'correlation of forces' and uncertainty over Western political solidarity Russia today poses a greater military threat to NATO’s northern and eastern flanks than at any time since the founding of the Alliance in 1949. Russian aggression on either flank is more likely to succeed than at any time since 1949. The Baltic States, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as northern Norway, face a range of credible hybrid and direct military threats.  In spite of commitments made at the 2014 Wales and 2016 Warsaw Summits uncertainty over the political firmness and relative military power of NATO are contributing to the threat perception.

Key facts:

•       Russian armed forces conducted 4000 separate exercises in 2016, including major combat readiness exercises on NATO’s northern and eastern Flanks;
•         Russia remains committed to a $290 bn force modernisation programme aimed at improving and professionalising 70% of its force by 2020;
•         According to the Russian Finance Ministry in October 2016 the defence budget will shrink from 3.1 trillion Roubles ($50.35 bn) in 2015 to 2.6 trillion Roubles ($45.48 bn) by 2018. This compares with the 2016 UK defence budget of £45.5 bn ($57.1 bn) or 2.1% GDP. However, SIPRI states the real level of Russian defence spending in 2015 was $66.4 bn or 4.5% GDP
•       In May 2016 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ‘approved’ the new programme for the development of the military-industrial complex 2016-2020. Medvedev stated: “We are currently upgrading the entire army, air forces, navy with new weapons, there are specific goals to be fulfilled, and of course, the (necessary) to ensure the competitiveness of what we do on a global stage”.
•      There are currently some 350,000 Russian troops in Kaliningrad and the Western Military Oblast adjacent to NATO territory. Several of these formations are powerful spearhead forces. NATO’s forward deployed forces can best be described as a presence, rather than a defence in the face of such forces.

Military Assessment: In spite of the apparent planned reduction in Russian military expenditure Moscow is close to gaining a decisive military advantage on NATO’s northern and eastern flank

Recent improvements since 2010 in Russian military capability and enhancements to its military capacities, particularly strike and manoeuvre forces are such that NATO would be unable to prevent large-scale incursions from the North Cape to the Black Sea. Russia is close to perfecting through its programme of large-scale, snap and push-button exercises simultaneous operations on both NATO’s northern and eastern flanks. Russia has succeeded in developing an integrated concept of non-linear warfare that includes the use of hybrid warfare (information, cyber and other disruptions) in possible conjunction with conventional and nuclear forces to create a new force escalation ladder. By stationing both short and intermediate nuclear forces in Kaliningrad and close to the NATO’s eastern flank, allied to enhanced anti-access, area denial (A2AD) defences, Russia has succeeded in decoupling NATO’s conventional deterrent from its nuclear deterrent. The stationing of treaty-illegal nuclear forces close to NATO territory is consistent with President Putin’s objective of establishing a dominant ‘nuclear de-escalation’ (nuclear blackmail) strategy that would help Russia consolidate any land seized. Russia has gained critical local force superiority on both NATO flanks and could successfully seize key parts of NATO territory as part of a limited war strategy. However, Russian forces remain ill-prepared as yet for a major, sustained war with the West. Neither the VJTF (Very High Readiness Joint Task Force) nor eNRF (enhanced NATO Response Force) would be able to respond quickly enough or in sufficient strength to prevent Moscow realising its limited war strategy. Whilst the US in particular is re-positioning some forces back in Europe, and pre-positioning others, the scale of the response is inadequate.

Political Assessment: President Putin is close to creating the military conditions that would enable him to ‘change the political reality on the ground’:

The force build-up is in line with President Putin’s stated ambition to create a buffer zone between Russia and NATO that would stretch from Romania through Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, Finland and including northern Norway and elements of the Arctic. The latter is important to protect egress and ingress for the increasingly powerful attack and ballistic submarine forces of the Russian Northern Fleet based at Severomorsk. Such superiority does not of course mean President Putin will use those forces to occupy territory on NATO’s northern and eastern flanks. However, the very existence of those forces in their current posture, and at their current state of readiness, enables Moscow to exert considerable coercive political influence over EU member-states and NATO nations. Moscow correctly assesses both the EU and NATO to be as divided as at any time since 1949.  This is in spite of several well-documented disagreements between the Allies over that period. The strategic rapprochement with Turkey is in line with President Putin’s plan to turn the Russian fleet base at Sevastopol, together with the Russian air and sea bases in Syria, into platforms to stymy NATO operations in the Mediterranean.  The Syrian bases will also serve as platforms for exerting coercive influence in Southern Europe and ‘co-optive’ influence across the Middle East and North Africa.

Possible Courses of Action: Expect little or no change in Russian policy or strategy.

The Russian economy is likely to be sustained by an oil price that is predicted to hover between $60 and $70 per barrel for the foreseeable future. This is enough for Moscow to maintain a basic economy (by Western standards) and a burgeoning military capability for the foreseeable future. Much will depend on the attitude taken by the incoming Administration in Washington both towards the regime in Moscow and the Alliance. Unlike in Washington there are next-to-no political, or indeed any other domestic constraints on President Putin. Therefore, Russian foreign and security policy simply reflects and will continue to reflect his own prejudices, views, and aspirations. Western ideas of what constitutes a rational foreign and security policy are by and large inapplicable. Indeed, applying such ideas to President Putin could lead to yet more dangerous complacency. In the worst-case President Putin might well conclude that an opportunity exists for him to unite his people by correcting an ‘historic wrong’ and re-establish a security buffer zone between Russia and NATO.

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    Conclusion: 

    President Putin’s belief in the opportunistic use of force in pursuit of his strategic and political goals would be reinforced if the new Administration in Washington sees US NATO obligations as merely ‘transactional’, US military over-stretch worsens in relation to China, Russia and other potential adversaries, Europeans continue to under-invest in their own defence, and remain deeply divided on how to deal with a resurgent and aggressive Russia. Consequently, NATO’s northern and eastern flanks are vulnerable to Russian military adventurism which cannot at all be ruled out.

     Julian Lindley-French     

Something Big…

Alphen, Netherlands. 12 December. Something big will happen. Very big. It will probably be big and nasty, and it is probably coming to a town near you. If you do not believe me then look at the dark side of globalisation that since the year 2000 has driven the West into retreat and rapidly shifted the world balance of power.

The failures of campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; the successful Russian seizure of Crimea and much of Ukraine; the murder of 298 people aboard MH17; the collapse of Syria and the expansion of Russian influence across the Levant at the expense of the West; the creation of a Russian, Iranian, Syrian axis; the egregious use of disinformation and cyber warfare against NATO and EU members with little by way of response; the development of an expeditionary-capable Russian military; the emerging Chinese-Russian strategic accommodation; the strategically-vital loss of Turkey to the West; the cutting of 40% of Europe’s military capacity and some 30% of Europe’s military capability; the banking and Eurozone crises and the collapse of European economic growth since 2008; the various ‘peasants’’ revolts via Brexit, the election of Donald L. Trump, the loss of the Italian referendum, and the rise of the populist left and right; aggressive Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea allied to a massive enhancement in Chinese military capability following 27 years of annual double-digit increases in defence expenditure; sequestration in the US and the loss of US military supremacy; the rise of global-reach Islamism, most notably the development of Al Qaeda and Islamic State networks that now reach deep into Western societies; proxy wars across the Middle East and North Africa as geopolitical and regional powers compete in the vacuum caused by the retreat of the West; the weakening of Western-led institutional security as major states begin to withdraw from the International Criminal Court and Machtpolitik again becomes the main currency of power and change in international relations; the growing ungovernability of European states as multiple identities undermine social cohesion, a fracturing of Western society reinforced by the ‘post-truth’ anarchy of social media; hyper-immigration allied to the loss of faith of indigenous economically-enfeebled populations in the judgement of ruling elites; growing food and water stress…and so on and so on.

The result? In Europe there is certainly a fin de siècle feeling these days as if a not-so-golden, but by no means bad age is fast coming to an end to be replaced by a new, but ill-defined  ‘something’ that will be far more sinister. Perhaps thinkers back in 1910 or 1935 had the same sense of foreboding and frustration that I do as I survey the ‘something big’ consequences of the interaction between power and weakness, change and events.

Why do I feel this way? You see analysis for me is not simply about wading through a catalogue of events and trying to impart some sense to each in turn. It is about insight driven by the interactions between events set against a backdrop of history and data, which is in turn illuminated by the grand strategies of power and weakness. The really strange thing about Europe today is that it is wilfully weak, as though it has lost the will to compete in a hyper-competitive world. It is a strange almost ideological weakism born of an intellectual political, over-institutionalised elite too many of whom seem detached from power, people and perspective, lost in another world of theoretical, see the world as they would like it, rather than what it is, politics. The politics of ‘isms’.

And yet this year alone should have awoken Europe’s elite from their strategic slumber. Shock has followed shock as the great plates of economic, social, and military structure have begun to crack under the growing tectonic political tension between the hoped for and the what is. Europe today is not about the management of decline, it is about the management of paralysis.   

Set that paralysis against the megatrends driving change in the World and the events and processes impacting upon Europe begin to form a toxic mosaic. The ‘something big’ that these megatrends is spawning will change the relationship forever between the once powerful, the newly powerful, and the wilfully weak, between values and interests, and between the ‘man’, the state and, quite possibly, war.

Too many of Europe’s elite still seem unable to see such change. They remain in thrall to a beautiful, Utopian, Panglossian idea of globalisation in which open borders, multiculturalism, and interdependence will somehow lead to a promised land in which all the old vices of humanity would simply melt away. Now unleashed the mega-forces of globalisation cannot be stopped and they are by no means all benign. Rapid population growth and shift, the digital destruction of law, order and borders, rapid shifts in wealth patterns, global-reach terrorism and criminality, the spread of weapons of mass destruction many of them reflective of new technologies are all symptoms of dark globalisation in which aspiration and desperation merge, and which erodes the very structure and order the West gave to the world.

Yes, it is true that the hollow people who ‘lead’ Pangloss, or rather who calculate electoral success, are indeed to blame for much that is wrong. However, the forces now at play are far, far bigger than the little people we Europeans have by large charged with ‘leadership’. For that reason alone we the citizens must also bear some responsibility for allowing ourselves to be treated like children. Unable to conceive of, let alone cope with the forces now at play leaders have instead chosen to mask change from us in the hope that when the inevitable is rendered unavoidable it will not be on their watch. They treat we the people like children because we the people prefer to be treated like children, to go on pretending that change is in fact no change, even as we drown daily in evidence of change all around us.

The result is that Europe today has become Eurovision Europe, Strictly Come Dancing Europe, a ‘nul points’, song contest Europe in which the mediocre is acclaimed and false friendships proclaimed. As realism has been rejected for weakism the once great temples of our ambition and hope have become empty shells forced by the siphoning away of their power to endeavour to maintain the appearance of power, but in fact hollowed-out to the point of collapse. The United Nations is not. The European Union is yesterday’s child simply unable to cope with a new age of grand disorder and popular anarchy. Our tired leaders trot out tired mantras about NATO the cornerstone of our security and defence, even as they turn the Alliance into a gigantic and transparent bluff by denying the very tools needed to fashion that defence. And, with each passing day we grown weaker and more vulnerable to ‘something big’.

It is the forces of reaction that seem to best appreciate the scale of the ‘something big’ that is coming our way for it is ‘progressives’ are now the out-of-touch reactionaries. As the gap between the ‘progressive’ and the reactionary grows the elite retreat ever higher up their Utopian tower into irrelevance, spouting ever grander, ever more vacuous sentiments, whilst reaction occupies the lost ground of hope promising an embittered people they can go on being children for just that little bit longer. Only if globalisation can be made to work for the teeming masses will ‘progressives’ again progress. Instead, by retreating ever deeper into the la-la Neverland of politics the ‘progressives’ have ceded the field to the reactionaries who by their very nature tend to understand the dark globalisation of which they are part.

This elite retreat is often masked by the sneering language of dismissal, to call anyone who challenges fading elite authority as ‘populists’.  And yet only populism can re-connect power and people. If the elite are to regain lost authority they too must embrace some form of populism. Why? Because the case must again be made for elites. In Europe that means embracing those that simply point out the inconvenient but blindingly bloody obvious that the elitist European grand dessin has failed utterly to help Europe meet the challenges of the age. If that is populism then I am guilty as charged. Indeed, what I want, what I have always wanted, is for elites to get better so that they may better cope with the ‘something big’ that is coming; to prepare, to plan, and ultimately to prevail.

The real enemies of the people are not the elites, we need them, but rather the grand reactionaries this age is spawning.  Marine le Pen in France, Vladimir Putin in Russia, maybe Donald Trump in America, all tap into a popular and correct sense that the weakism of traditional elites is responsible for much of the failure they see around them. Their analysis is sound, even if in reality they offer nothing but political dust. The most important difference between weakist liberal elites and the grand reactionary populists is that at least the latter have the political courage to recognise ‘something big’ is coming, even if they will certainly make ‘it’ far more nasty than ‘it’ need be, when ‘it’ eventually arrives.

Ultimately, it is the creed of weakism that is to blame for the retreat of the West in which I believe and of a Europe that is and must be central to that West. It is retreat caused by elites who wilfully choose to look at a receding sunny sky and refuse to turn round and see the dark storm that is fast approaching behind them. Who endlessly file away big dangers in the not-for-today, too difficult, somebody else’s problem for another day dossier. Who spend far much time obsessing over their own status rather than trying to make the million small changes for the better that really decide between power and weakness.  

Is it too late? No, but only if our leaders wake up and break-out of their determinedly, wilfully, short-termist, little thinking dressed up as weighty grandiloquence mindset. This week in Brussels another EU European Council will take place. Yawn. Will they discuss something big. Yes, of course they will. Will the do anything about it? No, not really.

Something big is coming to a town near you. I do not know what it is, but it is big and it is coming because we Europeans have chosen to be victims of this world not shapers of it. But then again I am not at all sure who the hell ‘we’ are anymore, and that is an entirely different but parallel story.

Merry Christmas!

Julian Lindley-French              

Weakism, Wishful Thinking, and Yalta 2

“If Hitler invaded hell I would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”.

Winston Churchill

Alphen, Netherlands. 9 December. Funny old week. The Great European Mess is deepening inexorably. Last weekend, at the excellent GLOBSEC Chateau Bela conference somewhere in deepest Slovakia, elite wishful thinking was at its most egregious. First, I was told by a Polish academic that Britain must be punished for voting to leave the EU. When I pointed out any such attempt to punish the British would probably damage Britain’s commitment to the defence of central Europe, and thus NATO, I was accused of ‘again’ betraying Poland. Second, a senior former Polish politician said that only those who swear an oath of allegiance to the EU should be allowed to stand for election to the European Parliament. When I asked about the right of dissent which defines democracy all I got in reply was a not untypical sneer. Finally, a British commentator, whom I both like and respect, tried to convince an all-too-keen to agree audience that last week’s victory of the Liberal Democrat minnows at the Richmond Park by-election was somehow indicative of a huge shift in British public opinion against Brexit. Dream on! So, what I hear you say, has any of the above got to do with Yalta 2?  Wishful thinking.

Let me take you back to Yalta 1. The Yalta Conference of 4-11 February, 1945 saw Europe effectively carved up between a rampant Soviet Union and an overly optimistic America, with a fading Britain invited along as strategic wallpaper. It was the last great get-together of ‘The Big Three’; a supreme Stalin, an ailing Roosevelt, and a strategically-eclipsed Churchill. In spite of Churchill’s clearly expressed concerns to a dying Roosevelt that Stalin could not be trusted to be a partner in the post-war world of the ‘United Nations’, the Western Allies signed-up to what in effect was a divided, spheres of influence Europe, and an incubating Cold War .

Under the utterly cynical rubric of the so-called Declaration of Liberated Europe, Europeans were to be given the right to “create democratic institutions of their own choice”. The Declaration went on to call for, “…the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people”. In fact, the Declaration was little more than a fig-leaf to hide the fact that the Western allies would do nothing to stop Stalin turning Central and Eastern Europe into a giant Soviet collective farm.

Fast forward some seventy-plus years. In his new book, Thank You for Being Late, Thomas Friedman cites me and my concept of ‘weakism’. By ‘weakism’ I mean the breaking down of political structure into small, divided groups, allied to the wilful belief of the liberal elite that diversity is strength, and weakness is security. Sadly, weakism is rife in Europe, based on the idea that if one is too weak to act then one will not be asked to, nor can one offend nor threaten anyone else. Such nonsense is so far from the power Darwinism that is once again rampant in the world that what should be a strong Europe has once again become political prey to power predators, as it was in the 1930s.  We Europeans would rather wallow endlessly in the mighty, empty words of mighty, empty institutions than face the consequences of someone else’s dangerous might.

At Chateau Bela there was significant talk of a Yalta 2; a Europe again carved up into spheres of Machtpolitik influence. As if to ram home the message this week a full page advert appeared in the New York Times that purported to come from Russia. In a ghostly reminder of Yalta it called for the establishment of a new ‘Big Three’ – China, the US and Russia. Given the Russian economy is half the size of the UK’s the call for such a ‘big three’ would be laughable were it not for the fact that Russia’s armed forces (both conventional and nuclear) are now the most capable in Europe – at least for the time-being. This new and dangerous reality is still something too many of the ‘wishful thinking’ foreign ministers meeting at this week’s NATO ministerial still refuse to acknowledge.

Yalta 1 happened because in spite of being economically immensely stronger than the Soviet Union in 1945 America had no intention of fighting another war with Stalin over the future shape of Europe. At least not a hot war. Britain was broke and broken by World War Two. Churchill saw Stalin as little better than Hitler, and only forged an alliance with Moscow in the Machiavellian belief that the enemy’s enemy must by default be Britain’s friend, at least for the duration of the war. America was always thinking about ‘bringing the boys home’. In February 1945 the Americans still had the Pacific War to win. Europe was weak and abject, with much of it in ruins. Yalta was thus simply an exercise in strategic realism and political expediency.

Déjà vu all over again? This week I had the honour to address some of Britain’s most senior soldiers during the Cavalry Colonels Dinner at the Cavalry and Guards Club in London. In fact, those present were almost all generals. My theme was British power and the need for Britain to again begin behaving like a top five world economy and military actor. Why? Not because I harbour any illusions about a new golden British strategic age. London’s Little Britain elite has for too long been infected by weakism, as well as power and strategic pretence, for such an age to be possible. Indeed, the only ‘good’ news for Britain is that much of the Continent has been far worse. The problem is that British weakism, allied to the weakism of other Europeans, is actively helping to make Europe and the world a far more dangerous place than it should be. It is also encouraging rusty oil can economies like Russia to believe that they can again decide the fate of Europe.

Next week there will be yet another EU defence talkfest at which the very little will be presented as the very big. There will be the usual nonsensical talk of ‘historic moments’ and ‘breakthroughs’, when in fact eloquent weakism will once again be the entrée on the table in Brussels. Little of substance will be done to change the EU’s non-policies towards IS/Daesh, the transformation of Aleppo into Grozny, the slow, pitiful steps being taken towards legitimising Russian aggression in Ukraine, or the what is now laughable idea of a credible EU defence without Britain.  

Yalta 1 happened because Europe was weak due to World War Two and because of wishful American thinking of the time. Yalta 2 could happen because Europe is again pitifully weak, but this time wilfully so. For too long Europe’s elite have been trying to match hard power with soft power. The result? No power. Wishful thinking is no defence, as I discovered to my concern in the rolling hills of Slovakia.

Julian Lindley-French                 

Could Pearl Harbor Happen Again?

“Tora, Tora, Tora”

Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, Mission Commander, Air Component, Imperial Japanese Navy,  Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941 to signal achievement of complete surprise two minutes before commencement of attack on US Pacific Fleet.

Alphen, Netherlands. 7 December. Could Pearl Harbor happen again? Seventy-five years ago today, at 0605 hours Central Pacific Time, Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo hoisted the signal “Climb Mount Niitaka” aboard his fleet flagship the aircraft-carrier Akagi.  Five minutes later the first of 353 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy rose from the decks of six Japanese fleet ‘carriers’ some 136 nautical miles NNE of Pearl Harbor. Three hours later four US battleships of the US Pacific Fleet lay sunk, together with a host of cruisers and other warships as the last Japanese warplanes headed back to their fleet leaving 2403 Americans dead, 1778 wounded, and having also destroyed 188 US aircraft.  

To answer the question at hand one has to compare the current relationship between Western policy, strategy and military capability with that of the US in 1941. The key policy decision that led the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor was the July 1941 decision by the US, Britain and the Netherlands (government-in-exile) to impose a complete oil embargo on Japan as Tokyo moved to seize the vital oil and rubber resources in the Dutch East Indies. Washington had been moving towards such a decision ever since the Japanese had launched a policy of expansionism in East Asia during the 1930s.  

Whilst President Roosevelt was fully aware that war with Japan was a possible eventuality there was little or no relationship at the time between US policy and strategy.  Worse, there was absolutely no relationship between US policy, strategy, and military capability. Even whilst the ‘appeasing’ British rearmed in the 1930s US forces remained stuck in a post-World War One time-warp. This was particularly the case for the US Navy. Whilst the Americans possessed three fleet aircraft-carriers at the time the ‘van’ of the fighting fleet was comprised of ageing World War One battleships. These ships also formed the backbone of the US Pacific Fleet. US military air and land power was also markedly inferior at the time of Pearl Harbor to its German, Japanese and British counterparts.

Fast forward to today and there is a growing gap between Western policy, strategy, and military capability, on the one hand, and strategic reality, on the other, as the balance of power shifts away from the West. As in the days prior to Pearl Harbor too many Western leaders believe the West’s illiberal adversaries will somehow heed calls to respect toothless international law and weak and weakly-applied Western economic sanctions – covenants without the sword as Thomas Hobbes would once have called them. In other words a ‘Pearl Harbor syndrome’ again stalks the corridors of Western political impotence.

A ‘Pearl Harbor’ today would of course take a very different form from the carrier-strike of 1941, although a surprise military attack on NATO forces cannot and must not be ruled out. More likely is that such an attack would take place in conjunction with a wave of mass destruction terrorism, information warfare, and some attempt at cyber-Armageddon. After all, the use of carrier air power in 1941 was simply a surprising means to a shocking end with the aim of effectively knock the US out of a war Imperial Japan saw as inevitable. Tokyo hoped at the time that such a strike would enable Japan to gain a decisive advantage that would enable her to successfully fight a war with an intrinsically far stronger America.

In the event of a new ‘Pearl Harbor’ the West would be forced into a long war to prevail as it was in 1941. Equally, as in 1941, once the Western democracies began to mobilise the immense and intelligent resources available to them they would likely eventually prevail. The problem is that the application of such Western liberal rationalism is not normally what prevents illiberal regimes from acting. Moreover, the cost of failed deterrence would be enormous be it in terms of lives, geld, and political credibility. There is another problem; an eventual victory could not be guaranteed. Therefore, for the sake of re-establishing credible deterrence what matters now is that unlike in 1941 Western policy, strategy and military capability must again be aligned.

In the event the Japanese failed at Pearl Harbor because they also failed militarily and strategically. They failed strategically because they did no damage to the US homeland, which became the ‘great arsenal of democracy’ as American industrial capacity was rapidly transformed into military might as American genius was applied to the war. They failed militarily because the Imperial Japanese Navy failed to locate and sink Admiral William (Bill) Halsey’s aircraft carriers which were fortuitously not present at Pearl Harbor.

The absence of the carriers on that fateful day was both indicative and decisive. First, Admiral Halsey agreed with Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese fleet commander, that in the vast expanse of the Pacific aircraft carriers not slow battleships were the decisive power-projecting naval weapon of the age. Whilst in the wake of Pearl Harbor Yamamoto lost the carrier v. battleship battle in the ultra-conservative Tokyo of the time, US carrier air power was to prove vital in the later conduct of the war. Second, one of the carriers absent from Pearl Harbor, the USS Enterprise, was to play a vital role in the decisive American victory at the Battle of Midway six months later which took place between 4 and 7 June 1942. The Japanese lost four carriers at Midway, whilst the US lost only one, a defeat which decisively tipped the balance of naval power in the Pacific in America’s favour and opened the way to the brilliant island-hopping strategy with which America won the war in the Pacific.    

   

The irony is that the Japanese had been inspired to carry out Operation AI by Operation Judgement, the Royal Navy’s 11-12 November 1940 attack against the Italian fleet base at Taranto. At Taranto 21 Swordfish bombers and torpedo-bombers, under the command of Lt Cdr M. W. Williamson RN, 815 Squadron Fleet Air Arm, sank one Italian battleship and badly-damaged two others.  

There is one final irony. Today, the last operational British aircraft-carrier HMS Illustrious will be towed from Portsmouth en route to Turkey and scrapping. In five months the first of the two new Queen Elizabeth-class super-carriers will arrive in Portsmouth to begin sea trials. It was a forebear of the soon-to-be no more ‘Lusty’ that launched the attack on Taranto that so inspired the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.

Could Pearl Harbor happen again? Yes, if Western leaders fail to properly align policy, strategy and military capability and in so doing render deterrence no longer credible. Indeed, such an attack would be the preferred 'weapon' of choice of an enemy.

In memory of the servicemen of both the United States and Imperial Japan who lost their lives serving their countries on 7 December, 1941.

Julian Lindley-French  

Gibraltar: Rock of Power

Gibraltar, 1 December. The Rock stands 426m (1,398 feet) high. This massif of carboniferous limestone is a portal, a great gateway, between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. Since 1713, and the Treaty of Utrecht, Gibraltar has also been both fact and symbol of British power. That was the theme of my talk at a delightful dinner hosted this week at his official residence the Convent by my friend, His Excellency the Governor of Gibraltar, Lt. General Ed Davis. The dinner was held in honour of another friend, General Ben Hodges, Commander, US Army Europe. My theme? The place of Gibraltar in Britain’s past, present and future story of power. It is a story that is far from over.

Everywhere one goes in ‘Gib’ one finds layers of Britain’s power past. Great military bastions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries jostle with each other in silent testimony to the waves of history that have crashed upon the rocky shores of the Straits over which ‘Gib’ still stands sentinel. These great bastions underpin new layers of financial and commercial power as an exciting twenty-first century Gibraltar is being cast. Before ‘Gib’ there is the Great Mole that once protected the mighty fleets of the Royal Navy when my grandfather sailed from this place to guard the sea lanes of Empire. Today it protects the mighty ships of commerce that drive the great engines of globalisation.

It would be easy to suggest that as the sun has set on Britain’s once great empire, so it is now setting on Britain as a power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brexit will soon force London to again think about hard matters strategic and hard matters power.  Russia is snapping at NATO’s eastern heels, whilst much of the Middle East and North Africa teeter on the edge of a potentially abyssal epoch. In the face of such forces Britain and Gibraltar will once again be called upon to stand firm – two rocks of stability in a sea of change.

Britain once possessed many ‘Gibraltars’, a ‘string of pearls’ that stretched from London to Delhi and far beyond. Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Aden, and Singapore all guarded the imperial sea lanes between Mother England, the far-flung eastern Empire and Australasia. Today, only Gibraltar and the British Sovereign Base Area on Cyprus remain, but they are as vitally strategic as they ever were, and London must understand that.   

Indeed, Gibraltar’s vital importance to British, European, and the security of a wider world cannot be over-stated. The great post-Cold War hiatus in power is now at an end. The world is entering a new age of contested power. China understands that, which is why Beijing is constructing a string of power pearls to close off the South China Sea. Britain has no such need to act illegally as she already possesses such a ‘string of pearls’, with Gibraltar perhaps the most important.

Britain herself is now one such ‘pearl’. An island off the shores of Europe that will again underpin and guarantee the defence of Europe as parts of Europe again become contested. Gibraltar, as she always has, still guards the entrance and exit from the Mediterranean, something I am sure Moscow is only too aware off as she seeks to extend her own global footprint. Cyprus, the other pearl, offers Britain (and her allies) a platform from which to see and help influence much that happens in the Black Sea region, the Middle East and North Africa.

Soon the first of Britain’s new super aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth will visit Gibraltar, the largest British warships ever to have sailed past the Great Mole. My guess is that she will spend much of her life operating from ‘Gib’ deep into the Mediterranean. Critically, such operations will help ease the pressure on the US Navy to be everywhere, in strength, all of the time. Together with HMS Prince of Wales the two ships will also demonstrate the unrivalled ability of America’s British ally to ease the many burdens on an over-stretched United States. If, that is, Downing Street, the Ministry of Defence, and the Naval Staff in London can face down the naysayers, the short-termists, and the whingers to realise just what national strategic assets of power and influence projection Britain is again about to possess. The latter day heirs of a re-building Royal Navy’s once powerful Mediterranean Fleet.

Together with allies and partners the new fleet will be able to project power, influence and stability into the Mediterranean world and thus give real meaning to NATO’s 360 Degree Approach – hard deterrence to NATO’s east, discreet stabilising power to NATO’s south. That is why I plead humbly and respectfully with my great friends in Spain to see the bigger strategic picture in which Gibraltar is a gilded pillar. Gibraltar is not just a vital adjunct to Spain’s economy, but in strategic partnership with Britain and the people of Gibraltar, the Rock will again be vital to Spain’s security. A Spain that is again on the front-line between security and insecurity, stability and instability, poverty and wealth, hope and despair.

Old-fashioned thinking? I can almost hear the decline managers and maudlin soft power merchants of Whitehall tut-tutting at the very idea of British hard power. However, it is they who are out-of-date, not me. The Europe, of which Britain is and will remain an integral part, has made the world a more dangerous place by failing to invest their great institutions of soft power with the necessary hard power. This massive strategic failure makes all the talk of ‘values’ one so often hears from our leaders little more than a hollow lie.

In fact, Britain (and Europe) will need all forms of power in the coming age. For Britain its immense soft power must now be underpinned by credible hard military power. If a new power-balanced Britain again emerges Gibraltar will act as both power platform and power multiplier. As an aside, it is power that will ultimately shape Britain’s future relationship with Europe, not petty-fogging negotiations over irrelevant tactical details.

Gibraltar is a delightful place. It is also an important place. Like Britain, if it so chooses its future lays not behind it, but before it; a rock of stability, a rock of prosperity, but above all a rock of British power in an age when such power must again be to the fore. Indeed, there are two things that clearly never cease here on the Rock; history and power.

Gibraltar: rock of power.

Julian Lindley-French        

                  

Why is London so Crap at Brexit?

“Nature abhors a vacuum”.

Aristotle

Alphen, Netherlands. 21 November. Why is London so crap at Brexit? In my 2015 book Little Britain: Twenty-First Century Strategy for a Middling European Power (which is of course brilliant and very reasonably-priced, and can be bought incredibly reasonably at www.amazon.co.uk) I state, “…managing decline has become the ethos of so many British governments and too often simply masks the damaging 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”. The book goes on, “Such failings are now apparent across government, reflective of a Westminster culture that routinely places politics before strategy”. I wrote that passage well before this year’s Brexit referendum. Sadly, as expected, London’s political and bureaucratic elite are making a mess of Brexit. Here are eleven reasons why.

Devolution: there are now several competing poles of power in Britain thanks to Tony Blair’s disastrous experiment in devolution. The Westminster Parliament looks increasingly like an English parliament in which the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish rule on English matters. One of the many implicit battles of Brexit is the sovereignty of Westminster versus the encroaching sovereignty of politically inimical devolved parliaments and assemblies.

The Ruling Caste: This past weekend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, the man who drafted Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, said that the British need mass immigration because we British are “so bloody stupid”. Sadly, this comment typifies the arrogance of what has become an unaccountable ruling bureaucratic elite for whom national sovereignty and democracy are simply inconveniences. In Riga I challenged bluntly another member of that EU governing caste who suggested openly that the British people were too ignorant to know why they voted to leave. The EU gets blamed for a lot that is not of its own making, but there is no question that the EU has also fostered a ruling bureaucratic uber-elite that treats the people with utter contempt.    

   

Irreconcilable Remoaners: Such elite arrogance provides the political momentum for the Remoaners. Democracy works by people accepting the results of votes. Too many Remoaners are simply refusing to accept the referendum result thus turning a crisis into a disaster. Forget all the guff about respecting the vote 'but' that one hear’s from such people. There are many Remoaners in very high places determined to ensure Britain never leaves the EU.

Incompetent Brexiteers: Too many of the leading Brexiteers abandoned the political field of battle in the wake of the referendum in the belief the decision had been made. And, at a political level Theresa May decapitated the Brexit campaign by taking three of the leaders into government, in effect muzzling them. This left the field open for Remoaners to cause trouble. A political opportunist if ever there was one it now looks like even Tony Blair senses a chance to return from the land of the walking political dead to scupper Brexit.

A Divided Cabinet: Theresa May’s Cabinet is itself hopelessly split. On one side of the split are the so-called soft Brexiteers, i.e. Remoaners, led by Philip Hammond, who want Britain to remain part of the Single Market. This means Britain would have to accept free movement of citizens (as agreed in the amended 1991 Maastricht Treaty), pay into the EU budget, and remain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. In other words, they want Britain to remain a member of the EU, albeit without any voting rights, the worst of all Euro-worlds. On the other side of the split are the increasingly frustrated Brexiteers. This weekend the latter set up the European Research Group in an attempt to hold Government to account over Brexit.  

   

A Politicised Civil Service: During the thirteen years of the Blair-Brown governments the civil services became progressively politicised. This process was reinforced by the use of legions of so-called Special Advisors (SPADS) and years of politically-correct recruitment. Whereas once the Civil Service was patrician conservative with a small ‘c’, it is now overwhelmingly bourgeois, pro-EU and soft left. Yes, making Brexit happen is technically difficult, and yes, there are still excellent senior civil servants trying to make inchoate politics work in the finest traditions of a once fine service. However, there are too many senior civil servants quietly trying to frustrate Brexit. The extent of this dissembling was made clear by Cameron Downing Street insider Daniel Korski in a recent piece in Politico.

A Hard Brexit or No Brexit: ‘Soft Brexit’, ‘hard Brexit’, ‘clean Brexit’, ‘cliff-edge Brexit’, ‘transition Brexit’, ‘one-minute past midnight Brexit’. There are now so many Brexit options an already complex political challenge is fast becoming a strategic nightmare. In fact, there are only two Brexit options – a hard Brexit or no Brexit.   This reality was reinforced to me by a senior German politician over dinner in Brussels last Wednesday.  For the EU anything else would probably presage the unravelling of an already vulnerable and fragile Union.

The Hollowed-Out British State: The EU has hollowed-out much of the British state through the transfer of ‘competences’ from London to Brussels. Proof positive of how successive British governments quietly transferred huge amounts of British power to Brussels, whilst telling the British people quite the opposite. Two leaked memos this past week have revealed the lacunae in skills in Whitehall needed to negotiate Brexit. This has (of course) been denied by Downing Street, but from my experience it rings horribly true, particularly when it comes to trade negotiators.   

A Politicised Judiciary: I am not one of those who attacks the judiciary for judgements made, as I believe strongly in the separation of powers. However, the same process that shifted the political centre of gravity from soft right to soft left in Whitehall, and all the assumptions that go with it, was also applied to the judiciary by Tony Blair. Unlike many I have read the judgement of the three High Court judges on the case brought by Gina Miller to the effect that the Government cannot use Royal Prerogative to invoke Article 50. Sorry, but some of the ‘legal’ assumptions in the ruling strike me as essentially, and quite clearly political. 

Political Weakness: It may be that in staying ‘mum’ Theresa May is playing a wonderfully canny game in preparing the ground for Article 50 and Britain’s subsequent departure from the EU. I cannot see nor have I heard any evidence to that effect. Rather, the same old Whitehall-Westminster foreign policy tendency of wanting to appease all and sundry without appearing to do so seems to be in play. It is precisely this weakness that has encouraged German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble to state this weekend that Britain will be forced to pay into the EU budget even after it leaves the EU. The consequence? Even though Britain is a top five world economic and military power it does not act like one. Britain will need to fight (politically) if it is to realise Brexit.

A Lack of Elite Belief in Britain: At root the Brexit fiasco reflects a London political and bureaucratic elite too many of whom simply do not believe in Britain. Some of them even want to break the UK into its four constituent ‘nations’ so that they could in time become part of a new ‘state’ called ‘Europe’. Too much of the London elite spend too much time lost in the intellectual desert that is universalism having abandoned the very idea of patriotism and the nation-state. This sets them at odds with huge swathes of the British people who remain stubbornly patriotic. It also creates a political gap that the likes of Nigel Farage (and Donald Trump in the US) are filling. If the elite do not actually believe in Britain how can they fashion a sense of the national interest other than some vague extension of their even vaguer notions of universalism and globalism?    

In spite of my profound misgivings about the EU, its governance, its efficiency, its unworldliness, and its erosion of democratic oversight and political accountabuility I eventually turned against Brexit. This was partly due to reasons of geopolitics, but also because I foresaw the almighty strategic and political mess Brexit is fast becoming.  Soft Brexit? Hard Brexit? No, we need quick Brexit, not lingering death Brexit, which is what the elite is now conspiring to deliver. 

For the sake of Britain, the EU, and indeed NATO, it is vital that Brexit is resolved in a quick, orderly and friendly manner. A responsible elite would recognise this strategic truism, honour the vote that was taken on June 23^rd as I have, and move to re-establish a new relationship with the EU outside of the institutions. In so doing they would pull together to realise the will of the people in what was a UK-wide vote and make it so.

Is that going to happen? No. Why? Brexit is precisely the big, complex, strategic, substantive process London has become useless at. And, because too much of the British political and bureaucratic elite is not only irresponsible…it is also crap!

Julian Lindley-French    

NATO-EU: Cybrid Jawfare?

“Boost our ability to counter hybrid threats, including by bolstering resilience, working together on analysis, prevention, and early detection, through timely information sharing and, to the extent possible, intelligence sharing between staffs; and cooperating on strategic communication and response. The development of coordinated procedures through our respective playbooks will substantially contribute to implementing our efforts”.

EU-NATO Joint Declaration, 8 July, 2016

Alphen, Netherlands. 18 November. On Wednesday, in my capacity as Vice-President of the Atlantic Treaty Association (ATA), I had the honour of chairing a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels on NATO-EU co-operation on hybrid warfare. To be honest, as someone who knows a bit about hybrid warfare, my definition of it – the use of all state and many extra state means to exploit the seams and vulnerabilities of an opponent via disruption, destabilisation and disinformation – was also a pretty good description of NATO-EU relations up until recently. Anything changed?

In fact, the ATA pulled off something of a coup in having such a meeting take place in the august if somewhat labyrinthine bafflement that is the European Parliament. The fact that a NATO Assistant Secretary-General spoke at the meeting was also a sign that relations between the Alliance and the Union are improving.

Here’s the ‘but’. Many people think hybrid warfare is cyber warfare. And yes, in an age of ‘digitisation’, as outgoing President Obama yesterday called it in Berlin, cyber is a very important line of hybrid warfare operations. However, cyber warfare is only a part of hybrid warfare. The problem with the meeting was that I got the distinct impression that apart from me very few of the speakers knew what hybrid warfare actually is, and just how dangerous it can be if practised by an opponent that does know what it is – Russia. Consequently, what happened is what happens at all such meetings when those present do not really know what they are talking about. The meeting rapidly elevated into the upper atmosphere of strategic semantics, whilst at one and the same time retreating into the weeds of technical cybernetics.

One reason much of the meeting focused on what I rather disparagingly call ‘cybrid jawfare’ is precisely because ‘we’, be it the Western ‘we’, the NATO ‘we’, the European ‘we’, or the EU ‘we’, (and therein lies a very big problem) simply lack a counter-hybrid strategy worthy of the name.  Yes, we have the EU-NATO Joint Declaration and it is a start, but there have been so many starts in EU-NATO relations. Speak in the margins of any such meeting and as ever the gap between rhetoric and reality is precisely one of those seams adversaries can exploit.

There was the usual talk about the need for accelerated decision-making, better sharing of information and intelligence, the enhancing of societal resiliency, and the reinforcing of national efforts. However, when I pushed it was clear to me that far from preparing both the Alliance and the Union for a new form of warfare, much of it is still simply jawfare.  Why? Because the single most effective defence against hybrid warfare is still missing – political solidarity.

This is dangerous. The time for talking about doing needs to be rapidly replaced by simply doing. Yesterday, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linus Linkevicius said he was very worried that Russia would ‘test’ NATO before the Trump administration is sworn in on January 20^th next. So am I. That ‘test’ could well come in the form of hybrid warfare and an attempt to destabilise the Baltic States via an aggressive strategic communications campaign, cyber-interference, and the use of military power to intimidate the three countries. This week the Estonian government fell giving Moscow a gold-plated opportunity to interfere in the coming elections.

The threat is profound. If ‘we’ cannot protect the home base, ‘we’ will be unable to project power. Hybrid warfare is not half warfare, or pretend warfare, it is part of full-on warfare. Quite simply, we Europeans are still unable to protect our frighteningly open societies from destabilising political and social penetration. As such we are also unable to safeguard the political and societal resilience which effective policy and strategy requires. Therefore, we are unlikely to be able to project the influence, power and effect vital to preserving a credible security and defence, let alone a credible defence and deterrence posture.

The good news was that such a meeting took place at all in the European Parliament. It simply would not have been possible even five years ago. For that reason I very much applaud the initiative and it was an honour to chair it. However, the dictates of institutionalism come well before the rigours of policy and the disciplines of action. That can only happen because those in power see inter-institutional games as more important than forging a real partnership. In other words, complacency still reigns precisely because power does not as yet take the threat seriously enough.

There can be no security in contemporary Europe without the creation of a new ‘iron triangle’ – the US, NATO and the EU. Right now, ‘reality’ looks more like a meringue triangle – the appearance of a hard crust on the outside, very soft in the middle. Until the hybrid threat is seen as the strategic threat it is NATO and the EU will continue to act like two wary bull elephants dancing around each other on the head of a shrinking pin. Real progress will only be seen when effective and real strategy is crafted and the agility and adaptability central to the conduct of effective hybrid warfare is realised.

In May 1935, Winston Churchill wrote: “There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline Books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong, these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history”.

EU-NATO: cybrid jawfare?

Julian Lindley-French