Syria: My View from Washington

“We cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy for all the bombs and guns we may heap up in our arsenals than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country. Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source”.

Adlai Stevenson

Washington DC, 7 April. What are the strategic implications of President Trump’s decisive but limited missile strike yesterday against a remote desert airstrip in Syria? Ironically, I spent much of yesterday in the White House, and elsewhere in DC, discussing US foreign and security policy, including Syria. There is no question that the loosing of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles by two US warships in the Eastern Mediterranean marks a change from the policy of the Obama administration, but to what extent? Is the strike an emotional response by President Trump to this week’s disgusting footage of children dying in chemically-induced agony, is it an act to deter Assad from further use of toxic weapons, or is it the start of a new phase of US engagement?

My sense of the state of the Administration’s putative foreign and security policy today is that it is again a work in progress.  Talking to senior Americans across a political divide that runs through this city far wider and deeper than the mighty River Potomac is that the Administration is slowly moving towards a some form of concept for global engagement/grand strategy…even if thinks it is not. The primary impulse of President Trump in ordering the strikes was to punish Assad for a blatant use of ‘CW’ against his own people. However, by simply reinstalling some of President Obama’s tattered and faded red-lines, but not defining what or where they are, President Trump has already forced both Damascus and Moscow off-balance.

In Syria itself the implication is that the fight against Assad might now be accorded the same status as the fight against Islamic State (IS). Moscow clearly understands that which is why today Russia has suspended the agreement designed to ‘de-conflict’ air operations by Russia and the US-led coalition. By implicitly raising the level of risk to allied aircraft operating against IS Moscow hopes to relieve the pressure on its client Assad, which overnight the Americans increased.

At the regional-strategic level the strike has clearly reassured some American allies that unlike the Obama administration the new White House will not talk itself constantly and consistently into inaction. The Americans have certainly disturbed Tehran’s composure. Washington seems also to have sufficiently impressed Ankara for Turkey’s President Erdogan to back the strikes, thus suggesting President Putin will need to work far harder to achieve his policy goal of detaching Turkey from NATO. Still, the White House will need to be very clear-headed about what if any policy outcomes it seeks in the regional-strategic chess-cum-rugby match that is the Middle East and North Africa today.

It is at the grand strategic level where perhaps the strikes perhaps resonate most profoundly. One can almost palpably feel the disappointment/disturbance in Moscow that its concerted effort to shape American policy is failing. One has to feel things about Moscow today because the truth died some time ago in Russia. For a few years Moscow has forced Washington on the back foot and forced Washington to answer a simple but profound question; what are you going to do about us?  It is a question Washington has been unable to answer, thus sending the currency of US leadership into a nose dive. This morning at least America is posing the same question; what are you Moscow going to do about us?

Which brings me back to the twin issues of US strategy and leadership. Right now the very uncertainty over the Administration’s position has Putin, Assad and others holding their breath. What will President Trump do next? Will he call the Putin-Assad bluff and escalate further? Or, having returned a remote, secondary airstrip back to the desert will Washington now stop? If it is the former then President Trump is beginning a new era of American engagement and it will become rapidly clear that the target audience of US action is allies and adversaries alike that America means business (and I use that word advisedly). If it is the latter then the aim of the strike will have been little more than to assuage the moral outrage of the ‘something must be done but we are not sure what and why’ lobby in the West. In which case, plus ca change…

Europe? This week the French foreign minister called for the US to do more in Syria. Of course, the language employed by the Quai D’Orsay was wreathed in the mist and mystery of Talleyrand. The British were not far behind offering ‘full support’ to the US short of doing anything. Oh, Britain, what have you become? One point I made in the White House yesterday was that the Administration should be clear to its European allies; if they want the US to act, then they too must act.

For all that after a week here I do sense a profound shift in US policy is underway. First, President Trump IS abandoning the neo-isolationism that marked much of his rhetoric throughout the presidential campaign. That may have something to do with the growing influence of Secretary of State Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis, and National Security Advisor McMaster, who are beginning to hunt like a pack. Second, the over-intellectualised nothingness of US foreign and security policy under President Obama is being replaced by something far more rugged.

Which brings me in conclusion to my core question; is this policy? After all, one missile strike does not a policy make. The paradox of the Trump administration is that when one talks privately to pivotal members of it, as I have done this week, one does get the sense of serious work underway to reset US foreign and security policy and cast it clearly into a series of hard-headed but realistic goals and desired outcomes.

What next? At some point it would be nice for the Allie to hear just what that policy is. For the American people, particularly those that backed President Trump, it will be interesting to see what they think. Putin? Let’s see how he reacts.

Oh, and by the way, President Xi of China has just landed.

Julian Lindley-French         

Allied Command Innovation?

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference”.

Robert Frost

Norfolk, Virginia. 4 April. Yesterday I had the honour of addressing NATO’s Allied Command Transformation as a guest of the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General Denis Mercier. The title of my talk was “The Innovation Game”, whilst the essence of my argument was that NATO must become a security and defence thinking machine if Allied defence and deterrence are to be credible in a non-linear age. How does NATO get from where it is today to where we need it to be? The Alliance must innovate with ‘ACT’ NATO’s great agent of change.

Nor did I pull my punches; if the Alliance is to prevail in its mission it must completely rethink its own role in security and defence and, indeed, the very way we think about security and defence. Through ACT the Alliance must reach out to innovators across many fields if it is to forge innovation and the best practice it fosters in pursuit of comparative strategic advantage. And, there is no question that ACT is doing some excellent work to foster such goals. After all, why bother inviting a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad like me to speak?

The other week, in the wake of a big conference in Budapest, I had roasted the political and diplomatic leadership of the Alliance for talking innovation, but not walking it. Which brings me to the anomaly of ACT. NATO has a command ready-made to think, to experiment, and to take innovative risk. What impressed me was the quality of the people at ACT, the first and most important battle any organisation must win if permanency of innovation is to be built into its DNA.

But there is a ‘but’. There are at least two barriers to ACT acting to effect as NATO’s innovation hub. The first barrier is NATO itself. ACT should be the elite think-tank of the Alliance, the experimenter, the simulator. And yet, the NATO system does not allow SACT to choose the best and the brightest from across the Alliance. Tellingly, one officer said to me that “eighty percent of the work is done by twenty percent of the people”.  

The other barrier was the cynicism of some ACT staff members. The civilians at ACT have no career progression beyond ACT and can become ‘parked’. Military officers come and go and, I suspect, many of them leave little creative turbulence in their wake. Now, having worked in my time at both NATO and the EU I know how easy it is to be crushed by the stultifying preponderance of lowest common denominator bureaucracy. After a time it is simply too easy to say, “oh well, I tried”. THAT is perhaps NATO’s biggest trap right now.

Why does ACT matter? If the Alliance cannot prove it adds value to US security it will fade. As I write this I am on the train from Norfolk to Washington DC for high-level discussions on the future of NATO. This week President Trump and his team are preparing for the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and considering what to do with a dangerously predictable North Korea.

NATO faces a crisis of ends, ways, and means. Innovation, with ACT in the lead, would not only demonstrate to an increasingly sceptical Washington that the Allies ‘get it’ and that Canadian and European security is as much about keeping America strong where it needs to be strong, as it is about American troops defending the NATO space. It is that implicit ‘contract’ that is the very essence of the twenty-first century Alliance.

If an ambitious innovation agenda is to be realised the whole command must become an innovator, established on an innovation culture. Innovation would thus become a vital component in NATO’s strategic communications to allies and adversaries alike about the ability of the Alliance to adapt.  However, for that messaging to be generated ACT needs to be systematic in its approach to innovation. That means ACT must build a development programme that can act as a vehicle for innovation, reach out to new partners in innovation, and establish a knowledge-led approach to the understanding of risks, challenges, and opportunities. That also means everyone at ACT buying into the effort. Innovation only ever works if people really believe in it.   

Innovation to what end? The Alliance must adopt what I call an outcomes-based approach to security and defence.  That means big and bold thinking about ends, ways and means, and what tools – both civil and military – the Alliance and its nations will need to generate such outcomes.  At the very least NATO will need to strike a radical new balance between efficiency and effectiveness.

NATO is at a fork in its long road, albeit deep in a dark wood called uncertainty. Innovation is where strategy meets practice to close the gap between ends, ways, and means and thus create clarity. To that end, ACT should be equipped with the tools, but above all the people to think radically about how NATO innovates. In other words, ACT must cut a new path through that dark wood because Allied Command Future Operations (for that is what ACT is) IS the future of NATO.

Allied Command Innovation?

Julian Lindley-French       

    

1957: The Real Story of the Rome Treaties

“Resolved by thus pooling their resources to preserve and strengthen peace and liberty, and calling upon the other peoples of Europe who share their ideal to join in their efforts.”

Preamble to the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, 25 March, 1957

Alphen, Netherlands. 28 March. What is the real story behind the 1957 Treaty of Rome? Last Saturday in Rome there was a big EU bash to celebrate sixty years since the signing of the treaty. As to be expected the High Priests of High European Political Integration were out in force, speaking of the ‘Founding Fathers’ who signed as the twelve Olympian Gods. This is hardly surprising given that tomorrow British Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger Article 50 and take one of the EU’s major powers out of it. Indeed, one symmetry between Rome on Saturday and 1957 was the absence of a British prime minister at either event. The reality of Rome was at one and the same time more prosaic and more strategic than the vaguely elegiac Commission narrative.

‘Rome’ was not the first treaty setting Europe on the pot-holed road towards some form of political union/super-state/empire depending on your preference. The 1950 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the real foundation treaty of the EU forged in the belief that if French coal and German steel were not separated by fifty kilometres and an international order war between the two could be avoided. There was also more than one treaty signed at Rome. The so-called Euratom Treaty, or Treaty to Establish the European Atomic Energy Community, was designed to set the standards for the then burgeoning European atomic industry at a European rather than a national level. Both treaties had six signatories; Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and critically, the Federal Republic or West Germany.

For a proper understanding of the political motivations that led to Rome one must consider the strategic context of the treaties. In 1950 the ECSC was demanded by France, which in the absence of Britain was at the time the leading European power (if one excludes the 352 divisions of the Red Army just over the then inner-German border). This was the price Paris, under intense American pressure at the time, exacted on the Federal Republic to stop dismantling West German industry as a form of war reparation. Washington wanted the three post-war occupation zones, controlled respectively by Britain, the US and France, to return to some form of economic, and in time political normalcy.

In 1991 at the Treaty of Maastricht France demanded a similar price for the reunification of Germany. Paris feared that a united Germany would come to dominate Europe and that the German Bundesbank would be the main architect of that dominance. Therefore, French President Francois Mitterand demanded the Euro as the price for the New Berlin, with a European Central Bank that would both oversee the currency, and ensure it was European, not German.

Mitterand was right to be concerned; Germany IS now the dominant power in Europe, albeit a very different Germany (which sort of makes it OK). And, by placing people in key positions in Brussels Germany now effectively controls the EU. One reason why Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, is so keen to impose reparations on Britain (now there’s an historical irony) for Brexit, is to prevent Britain emerging for the third time in a century as the leader of a counter-coalition to challenge German dominance of Europe, euphemistically called ‘leadership’ these days.

Back in 1957 the key issue was the rearmament of Germany and its 1955 admittance to both NATO and the Western European Union. Since 1952 the Americans had placed the French under intense pressure to allow Germany to rearm to ease the pressure on US military manpower. With echoes of today all too clear the 1952 Korean War (which is not technically over) saw US forces split between defending its European Allies, and defending a key ally, South Korea, in Asia-Pacific.

Initially France resisted the very idea of German rearmament. After all, in 1952 it was only a dozen years since the Wehrmacht had marched down the Champs Elysée. Then, in 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman came up with the Schuman Plan and called for the creation of a European Defence Community. The ‘EDC’ would have seen all national forces forged into a form of European Army under a command structure that would have looked not unlike today’s European Commission, and probably have been just as popular and effective.

Two implacable opponents killed the EDC. First, the French themselves were very uncomfortable with the idea that the descendants of the ‘Grande Armée’ would have been lost to the EDC. Second, the limits of the alleged Europhilia of the Grand Old Man and Wellingtonian figure of British politics, Sir Winston Churchill, were revealed by the EDC. In May 1953 he famously remarked when asked if Britain would join the EDC, “we are with them, but not of them”.  Little really has changed ever since, apart from Britain is now far weaker as both a power and a polis.

In October 1954 the EDC collapsed, and in one of those moments of British diplomatic fudgery for which London is renowned West Germany was permitted to join both NATO and the Western European Union in return for the permanent stationing of British forces in Germany (British Army of the Rhine).

Lessons for today? The question of a European Germany or a German Europe remains pertinent, particularly so now that Britain the Balancer is leaving the EU. And, for all the EU-babble one hears on such occasions European state interests are still the driving force in European politics on a continent where history never sleeps. With a broke France and a broken Britain it is clear that Germany will decide Europe’s course. German interests WILL come first. Thankfully, it is today’s Germany not some other Germany.

That said, a word of warning from history Germany…

Julian Lindley-French

PS for a full understanding of the history of all this buy my book “A Chronology of European Security and Defence 1945-2007” (Oxford: Oxford University Press) which is, of course, brilliant and very reasonably-priced.

NATO: Strategic Miscommunication

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”.

Dante Alighieri

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 March. Budapest stands likes a sentinel either side of the majestic River Danube as it flows through time on its stately course to the Black Sea. There are two key issues NATO must deal with at present: how to make President Trump if not like NATO, at least recognise its utility; and how to properly prepare NATO for the future shocks coming our way. For the past two days I have been in the Hotel Marriott in beautiful Budapest listening to NATO’s ‘best and brightest’ destroy NATO’s future. It was probably just as well I was barred from speaking on a panel in the main meeting because as a NATO citizen I would have given the assembled, dissembling ‘Permanent Representatives’ (NATO ambassadors) to the North Atlantic Council (NAC) a firm piece of my Yorkshire mind. NATO’s political elite is failing both the Alliance and me the citizen.

President Trump first. Much was made at the conference about the need for effective strategic communications – the use of information to generate influence and effect. Clearly, NATO does not understand its own jargon. In May President Trump will visit Brussels to open the new NATO HQ. Apparently, the President will be invited to cut the ribbon at an empty, over-priced ($1.3bn), long overdue building, for which the American taxpayer has stumped up too much. I can see the Trump Tweets already: “At over-due, empty new NATO HQ listening to empty words from pompous Europeans. Burden-sharing? We Americans paid how much? That’s a lotta guns we trashed for this Euro-butter. #getmeoutahere”.

The Allies must convince President Trump that NATO really is a good thing for America. Here’s my idea. The President is due to make a state visit to Britain in October. Last month Trump made a speech from the hangar of the new 104,000 ton aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford. Now, before I make my suggestion, I know some pedant somewhere will say the new British ship has not been commissioned yet, and that she is doing sea trials, and there is this fault and that fault. Sod that! The bloody thing floats and looks great! So, in October NATO should hold a meeting of the NAC at Heads of State and Government level in the hangar of the new 75,000 ton, £3bn British aircraft-carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. President Trump then tweets: “Standing on enormous, new, beautiful, aircraft-carrier. Guess what? No Stars and Stripes. UK’s historic, majestic White Ensign. And Brits have 2 of them. #burdensharinginaction”.      

Future shocks. Yet again, much of NATO’s political leadership seem hell-bent on sacrificing strategy and the medium-to-long term for the sake of politics and the short-term…and doing their eloquent damnedest to pretend otherwise. There was a lot of good sense spoken by a lot of good people over the past two days, together with a lot of crap about ‘eco-systems’ and NATO solving climate-change. Most of the real-thinking came from NATO officials desperately trying to find ways to close a yawning and ever-widening gap between NATO’s ends, ways and means, Europe’s other-planet political class, and the people who speak for them. And, in between I had to listen to a lot of academics who know an awful lot less about NATO than I do, although some friends of mine were thankfully on hand to breathe at least some good sense into proceedings.

Allied Command Transformation (ACT) is really trying very hard to breathe life into the latest political mantras of adaptation, innovation, and transformation. There was some really good stuff presented by senior NATO officials. And yet, when it came to the last session I sat there with my head in my hands. It was clear that apart maybe from the Germans, who are doing some really interesting work on adaptation, most of the rest of ‘Their Excellencies’ were scraping around on the political floor of pretence at the speed of irrelevance.

The bottom-line is this; NATO must not end up trapped in a kind of persistent vegetative approach. The world is getting dangerous out there, and in here, as this week’s tragic events in London attest. Strategic unity of effort and purpose is what NATO is meant for – to turn collective political action into collective defence. And it is here where the Trump challenge and future shock come together. The longer the nations and their diplomatic representatives ‘play NATO’, which is what is happening at present, the more marginal NATO will become to reality and the less able it will be to defend me.

Let me play out a brief scenario; a desperate Russia led by an unstable, quixotic regime in Moscow actually does what it is now threatening to do – attack the Baltic States. In the teeth of such a crisis do ‘Their Excellencies’ really believe that NATO would be in the front-line? Of course not. The West’s first response would be led by the Americans, (assuming the Americans are not busy elsewhere) with strategic command firmly in the White House, and main operational control run from US CENTCOM in Tampa (with US EUCOM in support). The few close allies (UK, France, Germany, Poland, Norway and the Balts, plus possibly Sweden and Finland) who could offer something would be firmly under American command. NATO would only be brought in when things had calmed down. If the Americans are busy elsewhere? Europe is screwed, at least until the Germans have the heavier formations they are developing in place.  However, that will not be until at least 2021 or 2022.

Which brings me to the real paradox of these two days past. NATO is now only a deterrent. It is not a credible warfighting alliance. The problem is that if NATO is not a war-fighting alliance, it is not a credible deterrent.

And, the river flows on… 

Julian Lindley-French   

Why the Old West is at War with Itself?

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”.

Plato

Budapest, Hungary, 21 March. Plato’s Republic is in many ways a treatise against political extremism. There is an argument to be made that the ‘extremist’ Great Revolt against the Old West’s liberal, mainstream elite began here in Hungary. Long suspicious of Brussels control-freakery the 2015 migration crisis saw a full-on revolt from Viktor Orban’s government and much of the Hungarian population against EU fiat. Since then the West has seen Brexit and the election of President Trump. And yet, on the face of it at least, last week’s Dutch elections suggest that the ‘populist wave’ (whatever that is) might just be on the wane. Think again. So, why is the West at war with itself?

Sad bustard that I am I spent much of yesterday afternoon glued to CNN watching the testimony of FBI Director, James Coney and NSA Director, Admiral James Rogers. To be honest, I had tuned in to hear about how Russia had allegedly conducted a sustained campaign against the 2016 US presidential elections. Instead, I was treated to several hours of absurdly partisan questioning that had little or nothing to do with the purported mission of the House Intelligence Committee; to understand more about the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between members of the Trump campaign and President Putin’s Russia.

What was far more illuminating was the commentary thereafter. Democrats tried to suggest that President Trump is all but guilty of some form of treason. Republicans, by and large, painted the testimony as an attempt to smear the President. A few commentators suggested it was a good day for the American constitution because checks and balances were being seen to work, whilst others said the only winner was Putin. All avoided the real question; how on earth did America, and by extension, the Old West get into this mess?

To answer that poser one has to travel closer to home – the Netherlands. The Dutch campaign was fascinating. You have to hand it to Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. He is the ultimate bendy-rubber politician. To see off a challenge from the hard-right Geert Wilders liberal Rutte tacked hard right in his campaign, at one point telling Dutch Muslims effectively to ‘get normal or get out’, on another occasion forcibly expelling one of President Erdogan’s ministers from the Netherlands, a most un-Dutch act.

Rutte is nothing if not smart. He realised a fundamental truism (tortology?); if the mainstream do not deal with the legitimate concerns of vast numbers of perfectly reasonable citizens who fear the big change they are living at some point out of desperation they will look to the had right and hard left of the political spectrum. In other words, the reason there is a crisis in the centre of Old West politics is because for too long the centre has been incompetent. The good news is that the moment a mainstream politician such as Rutte, or Theresa May in the UK, appears (and I stress appears) to deal with the big issues voters stream back to the centre.

Let me be Euro-parochial for a moment. The three main political issues in Europe are mass immigration, money, and who actually holds power. For years the mainstream has hidden behind the Blairite myth that globalisation is an unstoppable force and that people must embrace it or be engulfed by it. This is nonsense. The Great Revolt happened for three reasons: the mainstream liberal elite failed to understand just how deep national identity runs; they also failed to grasp just how strong the simple idea that in a democracy one should not only know who decides policy, but actually have the chance to vote directly for them; and because the elite itself in Europe became a caste apart from the people.

The Old West is the home of the old democracies. Democracies need effective centrists to preserve effective democracy. Whatever the short-term allure of the political fringes at times of stress, such as now, the sheer complexity of the world today is that simple prescriptions are as unlikely to succeed, as the pie-in-the-sky theorists who have driven the centre to political self-destruction.   

It is not centrism per se that is needed, but effective centrism that meets the concerns of a majority of people whilst helping them at the same time prepare them for the future. That means in turn politicians willing to re-embrace patriotism (dirty word amongst much of the elite), globalism, and realism at one and the same time, and strike a politically acceptable balance between them. In practice that means recognition of the importance of immigration for economic progress, but clear, demonstrable, and effective limits on it. It means fiscal and monetary policies that enriches people, not impoverishes them. The Euro has been an unmitigated disaster precisely because it is an elite political project that defies economic logic and which can only survive at the expense of the very people it is meant to support. It means recognition that for most people the nation-state remains the core of identity, and that they expect it to be the focus of democracy, security, and defence. Finally, it means serving the needs of the majority as well as protecting minorities.   

The inference from yesterday’s testimony on the Hill was that President Putin is waging a successful war against the Old democracies. That is wrong. The Old West and an out of touch mainstream elite simply make it too easy for him to cause mischief. Plato would certainly have understood that. After all, the Old West is Athens, whilst Putin is Sparta. That begs a further question. Where is the next Rome?

Julian Lindley-French  

Stop Playing Defence Pretence, London

“No matter how enmeshed a commander [or politician] becomes in the elaboration of his [or her] own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account”.

Winston Spencer Churchill

Alphen, Netherlands. 17 March. London is sinking the Royal Navy! Now, before I get into British defence pretence I must admit I was going to write this morning about the strategic implications of this week’s Dutch elections. The problem is there aren’t any. As my Dutch wife said to me before the election, “Whoever I vote for we will end up with Mark Rutte as prime minister. Whatever he has promised to do during the campaign he will not be able to do in practice”. Wise woman, my wife. Back to the Royal Navy.

Britain’s armed forces are in a mess because the ends and means of Britain’s defence policy do not add up. This mess has been caused by politicians trying to get both a strategic nuclear deterrent AND a power-projection force on the cheap, and pretending otherwise. For some years I have been warning about the consequences of Britain’s underfunded ‘little bit of everything, not much of anything’ force, so why do Britain’s political leaders play defence pretence?

Let me give you an example to better illustrate my case. Yesterday, a report was issued by London’s National Audit Office which warned that the planned move of the first of two new 72,500 ton large aircraft-carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth from Rosyth, Scotland, where she was put together, to the Royal Navy base in Portsmouth, from where she will conduct sea trials, has been delayed by some three months. The report goes into a raft of technical and financial challenges faced by the ship and the F-35 Lightning II and Merlin aircraft she will fly.

To be honest, technical problems never really bother me because they are entirely usual for such a big and complex project that will serve the nation for fifty years, and possibly beyond. Nor am I that bothered by cost overruns. Neither politicians nor defence chiefs ever tell the truth at the beginning about the eventual cost of big defence projects. As a matter of course I always double the planned cost and time such a project will take to be delivered by the British government. My ‘model’ seems to work.

However, there is a deeper problem with the new aircraft carriers that is indicative of the yawning gulf between ends and means that stretches across the British armed forces; the amount of money invested in defence bears no relation to the cost of the force London says it wants. Worse, the very politicians who tend to talk big about Britain’s armed forces also view defence as a cost not a value, which in turn suggest they do not in reality place much political value on security and defence. They might have gotten away with such strategic illiteracy in a previous age, but not this one.

And yet, and I am bloody good at this, my analysis of Britain’s strategic and political interests clearly shows the need for Britain to invest in a balanced, deep-joint, properly-funded and powerful core or command military force able to support an over-stretched US or, if needs be, act as a leader of coalitions of other powers. Why? NATO is at the core of British defence strategy and if Britain does not step up to the NATO plate then no-one else will. Consequence? Sooner or later post-Brexit Britain could be lost somewhere in mid-Atlantic between a hasta la vista America, and a Franco-German led Europe, unable to influence either.

Unfortunately, London has played defence pretence for so long now I think it must be a habit. Whenever Prime Minister May, Chancellor Hammond, or Defence Secretary Fallon are challenged about the ends-means gap they trot out the same old nonsense; Britain is investing £178bn in new equipment over ten years in our beloved armed forces (which are, of course, always “the finest in the world”), or Britain is one of only five NATO members that maintain 2% GDP on defence.

Take the £178bn. Much of that investment is being made on a lot of new kit needed to rebuild a force effectively broken over thirteen years of campaigning in Iraq and Afghanistan that went way beyond the so-called defence planning assumptions. The NATO 2%?  Pure political artifice, as I proved in my November 2015 evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. 2% can only be achieved by including the cost (since 2015) of British intelligence (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) in the defence budget (c £2bn per annum), together with (since 2009) the cost of the strategic nuclear deterrent (£2-2.4bn per annum), not to mention a whole of so-called ‘administrative costs’ that prior to 2015 were not seen as part of the defence budget. 

The problem with NATO’s so-called Defence Investment Pledge is that it is designed to give a bunch of recalcitrant European allies the easiest path to be seen to spend 2% GDP on defence. Britain has simply exploited to the full a very slack set of slack defence criteria. Critically, China, India, Russia, and the US would not dream of including many of the items NATO does as ‘defence expenditure’.

So yes, Britain may well be building (some) new and ‘exquisite’ kit, but the way the defence funding model has been constructed means the only way to pay for them is to cut the very people who will man the stuff, and hollow out the very services and systems needed to keep them running and fighting. The stress this unworkable imbalance places on the British military is clear to me every time I support them, something I regard as my patriotic duty. Or to use military-speak, the politicians are dumping crap from on-high on Britain’s fighting men and women!    

Defence pretence also reveals the political cluelessness of the British Establishment. Now, I am a Briton first, and an Englishman second, who like many millions of others is desperate to believe in my country after the shocks of recent years.  With Brexit looming, and the Scottish nationalist-fanatic Nicola Sturgeon hell-bent on tearing the UK apart, that means for me a Britain and its leaders who re-embrace patriotism, globalism and realism – the three are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, that challenge will be the real test of Prime Minister May.

It is against that strategic and political backdrop HMS Queen Elizabeth must be seen. Indeed, she is far more than a ship. She is a national strategic asset, a metaphor for Britain as a leading power, and a symbol of Britain itself. In other words, London has an enormous opportunity to show Britain and the world just what Prime Minister May’s “strong, self-governing, global Britain’ could actually look like.

Ultimately, it is the gap between ends and means of Prime Minister May’s rhetoric that is in danger of screwing up Britain’s armed forces. The strategy-free, micro-financing fingerprints of Chancellor Philip ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ Hammond and his Treasury ‘Minderins’ are about to make an almighty mess of Britain and its armed forces because the only big picture they see concerns debt and deficit. Don’t get me wrong, sound public finances are important. However, there are moments in politics and history when it is necessary to invest and things upon which proper investment must be made. This is one such moment and defence one of those issues if May is to create a new narrative for a new post-Brexit Britain. And yet, one can almost guarantee, that the Westminster-Whitehall political sausage machine will make a complete Horlicks of the launch of this ship, because that is what they do.

London wants to give the impression of power and influence without properly paying for it. So, London either fund Britain’s armed forces properly at a time of growing danger, or come clean and stop telling we Britons just how powerful Britain is if you do not believe that to be the case. Do not impose on a small force a job that is far too big for them. 

History is littered with examples of just how horribly wrong such defence pretence can go when reality finally sticks its large jack-nailed boot in the face of the pretenders!

Julian Lindley-French  

NATO: What’s in 2% Between Friends?

“Is your plan as cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?”

Blackadder

Alphen, Netherlands. 13 March. I have a cunning plan. Bear with me. Last week I was in Reykjavik, you know the one in Iceland, and attended the fascinating NATO Resource Conference 2017 (well, it was for me). There I gave a brilliant and very reasonably-priced speech entitled “The Global Cost of Adaptation”. At the centre of the debate were three issues: the habit NATO Europeans have acquired of relying on the US Bank of Mom and Dad when they cannot be bothered to spend enough on their own security and defence; will aforesaid NATO Europeans ever discover the Holy Grail of Alliance, aka the 2014 Wales Summit Defence Investment Pledge (the DIP), of 2% GDP on defence of which 20% must be invested in new defence equipment; and upon just what should NATO and the Allies spend any additional moneys?  

The goodish news first. Apparently, the decline in NATO Europe’s defence spending stopped in 2015, and even increased a bit (3.8% or some $10 bn) in 2016. And, if NATO Europe ever does honour the DIP, the biggest ‘if’ since ‘if’ was introduced into the English language by King Ethelred the Literately Uncertain, NATO (or someone) would suddenly have an additional $100 bn to spend.

On the European side the message was clear as mud…hurry up and wait! Yes, NATO Europeans are fully committed to spending 2% GDP on defence…but. Why the ‘but’? Europe is still driven by the assumption that sooner or later the US Bank of Mom and Dad will come out late on a dark, stormy night to pick up their siblings who not only forgot to save the bus fare home, but got hammered on a toxic brew called ‘Welfare’ and thus completely missed the last bus. The trouble is that Mom and Dad might not always be there. First, there is growing irritation in some parts of the Administration why Euro-Junior refuses to get off its fat ass and get a job. Second, Mom and Dad are not as flush as they used to be. Third, Mom and Dad now have to deal with noisy neighbours at the other end of the street.

Throughout the gathering rafts of judgement shot down upon the throng from high in the rafters like the latter day Gods in a Viking saga of old. One bolt in particular struck home; even if the DIP’s fabled $100 bn was ever to see the light of political day what would it actually be spent on? One group, for sake of argument the Easterners, wanted it spent on high-end, expensive, big bang stuff that would render the NATO Defence and Deterrence Posture credible not just in the eyes of the Brigade of Budgeteers, but also Russia. Another group, for sake of argument the Southerners, think this is nonsense and want the bulk of the money spent on counter-terrorism and counter-criminal activities, most notably human trafficking. Very few want NATO to have the money and most would prefer to spend it on themselves.

Now, here’s the cruncher as the Yanks would say; if NATO is to remain Valhalla’s insurance company on earth, then NATO must both deter and defend at the high-end of conflict, i.e. prepare to fight and if needs be win a war, and play a full role in protecting its home base from penetration and attack by terrorists and globally-capable criminals.

Whatever way one looks at this challenge any new money should be spent on reinforcing the NATO Command Structure to cope with a complex and potentially vast array of risks, threats and challenges, AND a modernised NATO Force Structure able to get the right type and mix of national forces in both coalition and alliance to the right place at the right time. Cunning? It is not even rocket science.

Which brings me back to the DIP and the need for outcomes not inputs. Yes, I am the first to say that 2% GDP spent on defence is better than 1%, however ‘brilliantly’ that 1% is spent. Canada, are you listening? What concerns me is the growing obsession amongst the NATO Europeans with inputs as a way to avoid seriously looking at outcomes, which at the end of the day is what security and defence must be about. Worse, I am not at all sure any NATO nation really knows what it is really spending its defence budget on these days, let alone how it can get from say 1% GDP to 2% GDP. Other, that is, than fiddling the figures. Britain, are you listening?

There is one other issue; should all NATO states spend 2% GDP on defence? This week Chancellor Merkel will meet President Trump. High on the agenda will be German defence spending, or as the Americans see it, the lack of it. Last Friday the 2018 German defence budget was released at 1.2% GDP, way below the 2% target (albeit set for 2024). In 2017 it is estimated that the German economy will be worth $3.62 trillion of which $43.4 bn is planned to be spent on defence. Whilst this figure is significantly smaller than the planned defence expenditures of both Britain and France, it is still a significant sum.

Which brings me back to my cunning plan. Whilst I personally have no problem with Germany spending 2% GDP on defence, history is still powerfully eloquent in Europe and the fact of German power is already an issue. Therefore, to my mind it might instead make more sense for Germany to spend the gap of between 1.2% GDP and 2% GDP by investing an additional $30 bn on some form of debt forgiveness for heavily-indebted Eurozone states. Now, I would not offset such investment against the DIP target, because 2% GDP on defence is already an historic low and at some point (2024?) Germany should meet that target.  However, right now it would make sense to permit Berlin a ‘defence holiday’ if Germany in return was prepared to make a security investment in the financial stability of Europe.

As for NATO it must be far more rigorous about what the nations currently spend on defence, what they should spend on defence, and how best to spend it. Until political leaders in NATO capitals stop sacrificing sound, long-term strategy for the sake of facile, short-term politics, which is the real reason why hard truths are hidden, then I fear the artifice of input will continue to exercise tyranny over the strategy of outcomes.

Julian Lindley-French