hms iron duke

hms iron duke

Thursday 4 April 2019

Why the Free World STILL needs NATO


“When American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept." There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe today? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands”.
Winston Spencer Churchill, Fulton, Missouri, March 6, 1946

The eternal challenge of defending freedom

Alphen, Netherlands. 4 April. The Free World still needs NATO because the unfree world is again threatening it. However, the unfree world is becoming far more sophisticated in the way it threatens the Free World. Therefore, NATO must thus become much better at countering the threats of the twenty-first century.

Seventy years ago today the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by (inter alia) the prime ministers and foreign ministers of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States. Since 1949 NATO has been joined (in order) by Greece, Turkey, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia and Montenegro.

Article 5 was enshrined at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty and effectively committed all member nations of the Alliance to consider an attack on one ally as an attack on all. What was regarded as the Doomsday clause during the Cold War was invoked only once, on 12 September 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Adapting NATO

In 2017 I had the honour to be the lead writer for the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report. Under the leadership of General John R. Allen the steering committee comprised one former deputy secretary-general, a chairman of the Military Committee, a former ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, and one of Germany’s top generals. The report was crystal clear in its challenge to the Alliance, “NATO is at a crucial decision point. The Alliance has adapted well in response to the watershed events of 2014 – rebuilding deterrence against threats from the East, increasing its engagement with the Middle East, and forging a closer partnership with the European Union. But as it nears its seventieth birthday, NATO risks falling behind the pace of political change and technological developments that could alter the character of warfare, the structure of international relations and the role of the Alliance itself”.

There has been a lot of academic nonsense spoken about NATO as it approached today’s landmark. Some of it from Moscow’s fellow travellers, some of it by people who spend far too much time floating in clouds of theory. Frankly, I have lost count of the number of times I have heard academics cite ‘alliance theory’ to suggest NATO is doomed. It has become so bad of late that I have been reminded repeatedly of an alleged exchange between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald. After a particularly fierce ‘hand-bagging’ by Thatcher about the need for action Fitzgerald is alleged to have responded, “That’s all well and good, Prime Minister. What you propose may indeed work in practice but does it work in theory”. However, if NATO is to do more than merely hang after around after its seventieth the Alliance also needs to answer with honesty a series of profound questions.

NATO: A beast of burdens

Do North Americans and Europeans agree about the purpose of NATO? The Alliance is under threat, and not only from the likes of a Russia that wants to turn back the clock of European history, and extremists who simply want their interpretation of medievalism imposed upon the rest of us. The greatest danger faced by NATO today is from Americans who do not realise they are growing relatively weaker and thus need allies more not less, and from Europeans who refuse to recognise that the security guarantee America affords Europe can and will only be maintained if Europeans do far more for their own defence, the Alliance and the wider transatlantic relationship.

Back in April 1949 the strategic equation was simple if stark. America was the only atomic power and the ‘bomb’ offset a huge advantage in conventional forces enjoyed by the Soviet Union on the then inner-German border. Today, many former Warsaw Pact adversaries are friends and NATO allies. However, as the Free World has become freer, the unfree world has become more assertive as they espy an opportunity to fill a strategic vacuum. Much of this vacuum has been created by strategically-inept Europeans who for too long have been suffering from a post-Cold War peace hangover. Whilst this new tepid war of today lacks the ideological sharpness of the early Cold War it is nevertheless extremely dangerous, and every bit as cynical.

It also explains constant American pressure on Europeans to improve their defence performance. Indeed, such pressure was implicit in the North Atlantic Treaty and has regularly re-surfaced since 1949. The Korean War, Germany rearmament and the European Defence Community of the 1950s, the missile gap, Berlin crisis, Cuban missile crisis, France’s 1966 withdrawal from NATO’s military command structure, Vietnam and containment, Ostpolitik and the Harmel declaration of the 1960s, the Euromissiles crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession of the 1990s, and 911, Afghanistan and Iraq have all, in some part, reflected American frustration with a Europe that Washington believes makes an insufficient commitment to its own defence and the obligations both explicit and implicit in the North Atlantic Treaty.
 
These tensions have been encapsulated since October 1949 in a series of so-called strategic concepts – the what, the why, the when, the how and the with what and whom of Alliance action. From New Look to Massive Retaliation and then from Flexible Response to the post-Cold War concepts of cooperation, reconciliation and enlargement the Alliance has been constantly adapting to strike a new balance between environment, strategy, capability, military capacity, technology and affordability.
    
Brittle NATO

How secure is the Alliance? The unfree world is engaged in a continuous war at the seams and margins of the Alliance employing disinformation, destabilisation, disruption, deception and destruction for comparative strategic advantage. The very freedom that NATO defended during the Cold War is being subverted precisely to undermine the strategic and political cohesion of the Alliance. One might also add a sixth ‘D’ debt to this 5D warfare. Russia, to some extent, and China, to a very much greater extent, are ‘investing’ in NATO Europeans. The strategic aim is clear – to influence countries such as Italy and Greece so that their policies become more Moscow and Beijing-friendly.   Even mighty Germany is not free from such influence as Berlin ludicrously seeks to portray the Nordstream 2 direct gas pipeline between the two countries as a commercial project that lacks and strategic implications.

The unfree world is also benefiting from the other-worldliness of many Western Europeans and their refusal to see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. As the armed forces of China and Russia are being modernised to operate to effect across the seven domains of future war - air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge, too many European armed forces remain analogue anachronisms.
 
Why worry, many Europeans aver? After all, NATO has always really been American. First, such complacency represents a profound misunderstanding of Alliance history. For example, the largest land force under NATO command for much of the Cold War was Germany’s Bundeswehr. Second, US forces are stretched thin the world over. The Americans could be faced with multiple crises simultaneously the world over. The only way that future NATO can possibly continue to function as a credible deterrent and defence for over 1 billion free people is if Europeans help keep America strong where America needs to be strong. First and foremost, that means Europeans being able to act to far greater effect in emergencies in and around Europe.

A twenty-first century Maginot Line?

Is NATO a twenty first century Maginot Line? In May 1940 Britain’s Lord Gort and France’s General Gamelin failed the true test of any alliance on the battlefield.  When confronted with surprise and shock their front collapsed.  As the Germans broke through the Ardennes the pictorially impressive but utterly useless Maginot Line was bypassed and the allies forced back to Dunkirk. NATO is NOT a twenty-first century Maginot Line but it could become one.

The litmus test of a NATO that is truly future-proofed will be the ability of the Alliance to move forces rapidly and securely from North America to Europe, and then move them on across Europe to where they are needed. The hard truth today is that the Americans lack the means to move large forces quickly across the Atlantic that one once saw during the four massive REFORGER (Reinforcement of Germany) exercises during the Cold War.  Europeans lack the forces and resources to regenerate a meaningful defence quickly and the basic infrastructure – both actual and legal – that would ensure they could act as effective first responders.

Another test for the Alliance will be the extent, or otherwise, to which European allies embrace the emerging hyperwar concepts and capabilities the Americans, Chinese and others are developing. Any military alliance ultimately stands or falls on the ability of armed forces to operate together under pressure in a crisis, the very test Gort and Gamelin failed. Parade ground marches can look very smart, table top exercises can appear impressive, and real exercises can create the sensation of power. However, if such efforts do not actually address weaknesses in relation the enemy they can also become a form of self-delusion. It is the anachronism of European ideas about security and defence, allied to a refusal to properly consider the nature of future war that represents a major threat to contemporary NATO, just as the British and French in the 1930s wilfully refused to accept the threat posed by Guderian’s concept of Blitzkrieg and do anything purposeful to counter it.

Today, a revolution in military technology is underway that will be applied in future on the twenty-first battlespace against Alliance forces by enemies armed with artificial intelligence, big data, machine-learning and quantum-computing. If Europe does not stop talking and start doing the possibility of another Maginot Line or worse a twenty-first century Pearl Harbor cannot be ruled out – and this time with no chance of recovery and fightback.

A 360 degree Alliance?

There are signs that NATO is slowly being allowed by its member-states to address the fundamental division at its core, between NATO easterners who believe Russia is the main threat, and NATO southerners who believe instability and fundamentalism in the Middle East and North Africa is the main threat.  Since the 2014 Wales Summit, European defence expenditure has begun to slowly recover from the disastrous systemic cuts that took place in the wake of the Cold War and the banking and financial crises from 2008 on and markedly which accelerated the relative decline of America and the West.

NATO command structure reform has led to the creation of new commands to strength Alliance control over the North Atlantic and to strengthen the ability of forces to operate together across an ever-widening battlespace. Some improvements have also been made to the readiness and responsiveness of Allied forces. NATO has also made some efforts to consider its role in future war and to improve the Alliance’s ability to counter cyber operations and information warfare. The Enhanced Forward Presence to the eastern Alliance and the Tailored Forward Presence to south-eastern Europe have also brought some degree of strategic reassurance to allies. But, is it anything like enough? As Ukraine’s continuing agony attests, there can be no room for complacency in dealing with a nationalist Russia that is both militarily-resurgent and economically-backward at one and the same time. However, there is also a danger that NATO becomes a dumping ground for issues the allies find too hard to deal with.  If that happens this relatively small organisation with its relatively small budget and few personnel will be diluted to the point of irrelevance. 

If NATO and its members are really committed to a 360 degree alliance that is credibly capable of engaging threats from whatever angle and in whatever form they may emerge, then it is going to have to be endowed with far more armed mass, and that armed mass will need to be far more nimble and agile.

Too much of this important debate has been reduced to whether or not the European allies fulfil a commitment to spend 2% on defence by 2024 and President Trump.  Germany’s recent decision to maintain defence spending nearer 1% than 2% for the foreseeable future effectively kills off the so-called Defence Investment Pledge. It also reveals one of the Alliance’s major weakness - the US-Germany relationship. With the Brexit defeat and strategic demise of Britain the importance of the Berlin-Washington relationship for the Alliance cannot be overstated, but essential though it is it is anything but special.

Whatever one might think about the 2% debate and the arbitrary setting of defence spending goals, 2% of GDP spent on defence well is low compared with adversaries. And, if spent well 2% would realise at least twice as much legitimate military capability and all-important capacity than 1% spent badly…which is the case today. Importantly, the DIP also called on all allies to spend 20% per annum on new equipment. As for President Trump, he has become the latest European alibi to avoid doing enough for their own defence when, in fact, the American commitment to Europe’s defence as part of the so-called European Defense Initiative has increased under the Trump administration.            

Whither NATO at seventy?

What of future NATO? The West today is not a place but a global idea. Globalisation has connected free peoples the world over for which the defence of whom NATO should be central. The transatlantic relationship is a cornerstone of global security thus NATO cannot be seen in isolation from the security of other free peoples the world over. That does not mean NATO is going to enlarge to Asia, although one of its members, Turkey, is already a major Asian power. Rather, for all of its complexity the Alliance is, and will remain, the model for all legitimate military alliances of democracies and the most tested mechanism for the generation of democratic defence. In other words, NATO at seventy has a great opportunity to strengthen its service of peace. Will it?

Regular readers of these pages know I can be one of NATO’s fiercest critics, something ‘tell us what we want to hear’ officials at NATO HQ have not always thanked me for. The reason I am so hard on NATO is that I am both a NATO citizen and one of its biggest supporters. Equally, as a truly-informed NATO citizen I also demand performance and too often I do not get it. Words yes, strategic performance no. That is not the fault of the Alliance, but rather its members who hide comfortably behind the fact of NATO without doing enough to makes its reality credible.

Too often NATO is reduced to little more than a summit organising committee designed to generate communiques that make strategically-illiterate leaders feel warm and fuzzy when they should be concerned and anxious. It is precisely because NATO cannot deliver the feel good feeling too many European leaders seek that the Alliance’s seventieth anniversary celebrations are today so muted. THAT, says more about the leaders than anything worth hearing about the Alliance.  

Twenty-first century Flexible Response

NATO post seventy must be empowered by all its nations to properly consider the threats we all face, to create the forces a credible twenty-first century Article 5 demands, and endowed with the forces and resources necessary to maintain Allied defence at a level of readiness relevant to the environment in which they might be called upon at short notice to operate. The Alliance needs a new strategic concept with a new idea of Flexible Response. Until that happens, and it is not happening yet, NATO will continue to be undermined by a lack of political and military ambition in a world where such ambition lies elsewhere in spades. 

Flexible Reponse 21 could do worse than hark back to Churchill sage words of 1946. The over-all strategic concept to which we all the free peoples of the Alliance should inscribe today is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the NATO lands. Nothing more, nothing less.

Happy birthday NATO! Time to get real. The strategic vacation is over. Now, get on with it!

Julian Lindley-French
    

Monday 1 April 2019

Cambridge: The Geopolitics of Brexit



Alphen, Netherlands. 1 April. On Friday last, on what was meant to be Britain’s day of departure from the EU, I took part on a panel at Tim Less’s excellent Europe after Brexit (???) conference at The Forum on Geopolitics at Cambridge University. As ever, I had prepared carefully-tailored remarks which I include below and, as ever, I strayed from them to be part of an unfolding discussion. In considering the geopolitics of Brexit I set myself three questions. First, would the EU and its creed of a big, ever more centralised Europe be any good at dealing with the dark side of globalisation and the big threats implicit therein? Second, is contemporary Britain so Little Britain that its only option is to be part of a big Europe run, in effect, by a few very elite people who are not British?  Third, can the US continue to afford Europeans a security and defence guarantee in the absence of a big defence Europe?

My answers were thus: there is no evidence that ‘more Europe’ would be a more effective at dealing with geopolitical threat; Britain might no longer be a global power but with the right leadership it remains a very significant regional power. It is precisely because Britain does not have the right leadership that a very significant country is being reduced into a small one; and, whatever Brexit outcome emerges from Britain’s elite Establishment created political fiasco the only way the US will be able to afford all Europeans a security and defence guarantee is if Europeans do far more for their own defence and do it together. First and foremost, that means Britain, France and Germany maintain a serious level of strategic and political cohesion, the very cohesion Brexit is undermining.   

Here are my remarks.

Cambridge. March 29, 2019. Let me put my cards on the table – I am a Euro-sceptic Remainer with Brexiteer sympathies. I am also a democrat and on this day of profound failure of British government and parliament I suspect I feel like many of my fellow citizens; appalled and disgusted at how the High Establishment both political and high bureaucratic, have systematically retreated from the June 2016 referendum that the same political class willed in large numbers. And yet, like anyone who has considered the issue of Brexit at any length, and beyond the tired mantras of the ‘Ultras’ on both sides, I am also deeply conflicted about it. The Withdrawal Agreement was bad enough but what parliament seems now to be willing as ‘Brexit’ will be so bad for Britain as both a power and a country, that it could well mark the beginning of the end of the latter and certainly the end of the former. With Britain broken and effectively contracting itself out of the responsibilities imposed upon it by its still significant power the entire European and global balance of power could well be destabilised. THIS is the geopolitics of Brexit.

It need not be this way. I have long believed in a ‘l’europe des nations’ but I am far less enamoured with the EU and the globalist-centralisers in Brussels who use the fig-leaf of globalism to focus ever more power on themselves in the name of efficiency and effectiveness and in so doing erode any meaningful link between the people and real power. I worked for EU. I have seen too often the anti-democratic tendencies of the Brussels elite. The growing gap between voting, power and real accountability in Europe should be a concern to any democrat. Nor is their much efficiency or effectiveness on show in Brussels but rather a kind of sovereignty deficit that gnaws away at the heart of the European project. For all the weakening of the nation-states that ever more Europe entails, and the oft soaring rhetoric about ‘common’ this and ‘common’ that, the EU is crap at geopolitics. It talks endlessly about geopolitics but is rotten at doing it – particularly hard geopolitics in accelerating extremis.

However, for all that, and after an exhaustive analysis, I decided to campaign for Remain and it was geopolitics that was the clincher.

Why? Just look at the already apparent strategic consequences of THIS Brexit. British influence has tanked, the EU is weakened, whilst NATO and the US are witnessing what could be the slow death of one of its major powers. Meanwhile, Presidents Putin and Xi are clear beneficiaries of the West’s loss of cohesion and the latest bout of European navel gazing. The strategic direction of travel is such that, for all the patent weakness of the EU, I considered it irresponsible for Britain to leave the EU and thus lose influence over it, and any influence from it. My position has not changed.

There are a range of specific geopolitical implications?

First, Brexit ‘Dunkirk’. Pre-Brexit Britain injected a level of strategic realism into the EU and was seen by many as a force for, and voice of, pragmatism in Brussels. That is over. As an Oxford historian (!!!!) I am careful about presenting Brexit as ‘war’ as I have heard too many allusions to 1940 of late. Bombs are not raining down on our cities and our soldiers are not dying in the fields of Flanders. And yet to all intents and purposes, Britain has been politically defeated by Brexit and like all defeated powers its elite is turning inwards. Unless a real leader emerges to replace the ersatz one in Downing Street the Brexit mess could well see Britain cease to be a power and even cease in time to be a country. Certainly, Britain has been profoundly weakened by Brexit and its political conduct.

Second, the reinforcement of Brussels legalism. The narrow legalistic tendency in Brussels has gained further ascendancy in the wake of their defeat of Britain. Brussels too often sees law as power in and of itself even if that law has neither real power of sanction nor action.  This in a world in which the really powerful see power as power and increasingly ‘law’ as inconvenience. A world in which for the first time in perhaps four hundred years Great Power beyond Europe set the non-rules of a power road made elsewhere, in a world once again governed ever more by Machtpolitik. Europe’s influence over those ‘rules’ i.e. the anarchy of hard Realism is being daily diminished and Britain’s Brexit demise is accelerating Europe’s retreat from strategic and political realism.

Third, the tyranny of small powers. The EU has long been a balance between bigger and small power in Europe. Brexit has profoundly disturbed that balance and will reinforce a political culture at the heart of the EU that enables small powers to constrain bigger powers from doing what necessarily they must do at times. This constraint, and the implicit alliance between small power and big EU bureaucracy that enshrines it, comes even at the expense of the efficient aggregation of European state power into some form of geopolitical handle beyond Europe.  Brexit is, in many ways, a small power victory over a bigger power and thus strengthens the defining implicit idea at the heart of the EU to turn all European powers (with the possible exception of one) into small powers to create the political space for more Europe.

Fourth, the possible death of Britain. The very idea of ‘Britain’ since its creation in 1707 has always been underpinned by a strategic, competitive narrative. Britain IS or WAS a strategic, competitive narrative. Those days are clearly over but a state must still act to its power if the system is to function. Without a clear vision of Britain as a power in Europe and its role beyond it is hard to see Britain as anything other than prey for the growing band of petty nationalists gnawing at its rotting carcass. One of the many failings of Prime Minister May has been her complete and total lack of understanding about the importance of Britain’s external power and influence to its internal cohesion.
Fifth, the resumed march of euro-federalism. Brexit has delayed the march of euro-federalism but it is not over. With Britain’s defeat the implicit war between the Euro-federalists and Euro inter-govermentalists will intensify with the Brexit defeat of Britain. The EU will not and cannot stop here. This means many years of internal struggle at the expense of effective external engagement. It also means strategic spoilers, such as Putin’s Russia, will be emboldened. Indeed, May’s conduct of Brexit and Britain’s retreat from strategic responsibility has already encouraged the strategic recklessness that defines Putin’s foreign and security policy.

Brexit cannot be blamed wholly for Britain’s strategic demise although it has certainly accelerated it. Indeed, Britain has long been in retreat from its 1890s zenith and, as an historian I see Brexit in the context of World War One, World War Two, Suez, treaties of Washington and Rome et al.  There are also a range of complicating factors that have also helped turn Britain from one time strategic predator into strategic prey. Britain’s elite no longer believe in Britain as a power, there are too many poles of power competing with Westminster in the land, and the very idea of Britain as a power is neither understood nor seemingly accepted by large swathes of its people.
 
Brexit represents a monumental failure of statecraft by Britain’s elite Establishment. It has also shown itself for the Mediocracy it is, an Establishment that has become so obsessed with values it has forgotten that a state has interests that must also be defended. As for Britain’s political class they are a byword for irresponsibility. The result is that Britain has become very bad at considering the long-term with much of what passes for foreign and security policy now reduced to a kind of short-termist virtue-signalling.

Therefore, unless the EU really learns to play geopolitics and Britain again learns to use its still not inconsiderable regional weight to strategic effect then I fear Europe and the world is only going to get more dangerous in the wake of the Brexit disaster – for that is what it is. You see, we do not live in a world community full of world citizens. We live in a balance of power, sphere of influence bear-pit red in tooth and claw. And, if democracies contract out of the renewed strategic competition that is the geopolitics du jour because it is all too ghastly and retreat into either an anachronistic nationalistic fantasy or some kind of values snowflake la la land, then all they do is accelerate and intensify the ghastliness.

At the beginning of my remarks I said I was a democrat. I am. Unlike many on the Remain side of Brexit I saw 23 June 2016 as a formal and binding commitment by the political class to the people. Unlike many Ultra Remainers I do not condemn the ‘peasantry’ for being too stupid to understand for what they were voting. If that is the case all elections should be cancelled. Nor, am I re-writing history about the contract implicit in the referendum which parliament seems determined to break now that the people have given the ‘wrong’ answer.  And yet, the position Britain is in today is so bad and the strategic consequences for Britain, Europe and the wider transatlantic relationship potentially so dire from THIS Brexit/non-Brexit, that to my mind a responsible leader would come clean about the defeat Britain has suffered and stop it.  Rather, once May and Juncker have been dumped in the dustbin of history where they both belong the search for a new and equitable place for Britain WITHIN a broader framework of European institutions must begin. If not, then expect Brexit to poison relations with its close European partners for years to come and for the fracturing of Britain itself to continue apace. THAT is the sad geopolitical reality of THIS Brexit for Britain, its allies and its partners.

Hard truth? Britain would be better off remaining a member of the EU than anything that is likely to emerge from next week’s round of “I’m a parliamentarian get me out of here’ indicative votes.
Brexit is a disaster. A solution must be found. It starts here.

Thank you.

Julian Lindley-French,
Cambridge,
March 2019   


Tuesday 26 March 2019

5D Warfare and China’s 5G Digital Silk Road


“…if some [EU] countries believe that they can do clever business with the Chinese, then they will be surprised when they wake up and find themselves dependent”.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, March 2019


Alphen, Netherlands. 26 March. Source code is the software ‘brain’ at the heart of a computer, its directing command. Control source code and one controls the machine. And, as man and the machine become ever more intertwined via the internet of things, control the machine and one controls mankind. It is that threat which is behind going Western concerns about China’s digital Silk Road, its funding of global 5G networks, and the role being played by its surrogate company Huawei.

5G Dreadnought?

The other day at Munich Airport I enjoyed a coffee with General James L. Jones, NATO’s one-time Supreme Allied Commander Europe. General Jones talked eloquently about the threat posed by China and its efforts to control Europe’s 5G future.  As he spoke my mind cast back to an earlier age when technology again changed the strategic balance at an instant. In 1906 the Royal Navy launched HMS Dreadnought – the world’s first all-big gun, big armour, turbine- driven battleship which made every other warship afloat obsolete. 5G threatens to do the same thing but on a much grander digital scale than any single ship could ever do.

In a sobering paper for the Strategic Insights Program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security General Jones is clear, “5G is a fifth generation “disruptive” technology which, when used in its secure mode, will transform our societies in ways that we are only starting to understand”.  At its heart, 5G is a way to fast super-network stand-alone computers undertaking a myriad of functions critical to our daily lives. At best, such a network offers life-transforming super-efficiency thus reducing the cost of actions for greatly increased output. At worst, control of such a network offers critical command over those same actions and, by extension, the lives of our states, institutions and ourselves.

5G will also have a host of military applications, not least as the beating heart of artificially-intelligent drone swarms – the digital ‘queen’, if one will, of an attack hive. During any major attack future war would see such swarms probe, fail, learn and finally overcome defences and then intelligently exploit such weakness to devastating effect. Digital decapitation?

Why China? At the centre of Jones’s paper is a profound warning about China’s role in developing digital coercion as part of wider complex strategic coercion. As Jones states, “Huawei is a tool of state power and a critical asset in China’s global economic and geopolitical competitions and ambitions”. Even the most cursory glance at Chinese national strategy confirms Beijing’s strategic intent to use whatever means at its disposal –financial, economic and, if needs be, military - to gain strategic advantage.

Beware Chinese bearing gifts

The specific danger from Huawei is that because it is an agent of the Chinese state it is significantly cheaper than its Western commercial competitors. What Huawei offers is not simply a 5G ‘product’ but an entire digital infrastructure.  Imagine a digital version of all the roads, railways and airport in your Western state that is what Huawei, and by extension China, is offering.  Now, imagine that as part of the ‘package’ your state effectively hands over access to your digital roads, railways and airports to China. The Huawei ‘deal’ is thus lucrative, seductive and utterly dangerous.

It is a threat reinforced by work the British have been doing to identify the controlling source codes of the Huawei capability. In 2010 British Intelligence set up the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Cell near Banbury as part of its National Cyber Security Centre with a specific remit to quantify the nature and scope of the threat. In late 2018 HCSEC stripped back networking gear and millions of lines of code to assess the extent to which Huawei afforded Beijing ‘Trojan horse’ industrial and military espionage and other ‘command’ capabilities.  Its findings were deeply concerning to London not least because Huawei tried to mask the real source codes from the British. Consequently, the head of MI6 warned against any 4G and 5G nework reliance on Huawei.  The EU and Britain’s other Five Eyes allies, such as Australia, and New Zealand are beginning to join the Americans to warn of the threat posed by Huawei, although the British Government has yet to divest itself of much of the investment it has already made in Huawei technology.

5D warfare and China’s 5G digital Silk Road

So why does this all matter? Now, it would be easy to suggest that this is some form of American ‘dog in a manger’ warning not dissimilar to the ‘reds under the bed’ hysteria that swept the US during the 1960s. The evidence suggests otherwise. Much of my work of late has been focused on pioneering the concept of 5D warfare – the planned and systematic application of disinformation, deception, destabilisation, disruption and implied destruction against open societies by the strategic autocracies, most notably China and Russia.  Much of Europe is making such warfare plausible by its refusal to consider the worst-case and the dangerous interaction that a fusion of strategy, capability and technology affords adversaries. In other words, too many Western European states simply refused to believe the post-Cold War peace is over and that, like it or not, Europeans must again face strategic competition red in tooth and claw.
   
Worse, the determined European focus on the cheap and the short-term is creating the conditions for an externally-driven digital diktat.  And, it may be that the Silk Road policy has already achieved its strategic goal by fracturing European political solidarity and defence cohesion as countries desperate for Chinese investment effectively sell their strategic soul in some form of latter day Faustian pact. President Macron this week implicitly warned the Italians about being naive in their dealings with China, even as President Xi was about to visit France.

Jones’s 5G defence

If the West, in general, or more specifically Europe, is to avoid waking up one day to find itself facing a digital Dreadnought against which it has no defence far more digital realism is needed.   General Jones recommends a series of actions to prevent Chinese 5G digital dominance built on awareness-raising and systems-hardening. Crucially, Jones calls on the US and its allies to halt work with Huawei and use “alternate companies” whilst “technical standards be designed to withstand cyber attacks. He also calls on the US to establish a “…long-term national spectrum strategy” that confirms federal control over all aspects of 5G and its application, as well as the streamlining of US federal procurement practices that build cost into bids for 5G development work that Huawei simply does not have to consider.

General Jones also highlights a fundamental flaw in the West’s privatisation of structural security technology and China’s one-way exploitation of it.  There are some emerging technologies that are of such profound capability that they must be prescribed for fear they will be instrumentalised against the West and its peoples.

China’s Silk Road policy is an unashamed attempt to compete with the West and extend its influence. On the face of it there is nothing wrong in that. A peaceful China trading assertively but fairly is to be welcomed. However, Beijing is also in the business of strategic dominance. The invisible silk strings that run alongside the Silk Road combine debt dependency with aggressive cyber and espionage that is far more dangerous than some mutually-beneficial trade agreement.  There is, of course, one easy test to which China could subject itself if it wished to demonstrate at a stroke that the fears of General Jones and others are ill-founded. It could open up its market to Huawei’s competitors, show a willingness to purchase significant parts of its own burgeoning 5G network from American and other contractors, and cede control of Huawei’s source codes to its customers thus making it impossible for Beijing to manipulate to advantage. Unlikely.

Julian Lindley-French                        

Thursday 14 March 2019

Simulating Smart NATO: the Scheer-Gaulle of it!


“…they should know when we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies, ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting’”.
Winston Spencer Churchill (No, I am not raising the ghost of Winston to make a point about Brexit!)

Can NATO REALLY adapt?

Izmir, Turkey. 14 March. How can we better engage Alliance leaders with the security and defence of their own citizens in a dangerous world? A shifting balance of military power is often glacial and takes place over many years but at times it can also act like an earthquake as a fault-line gives a bit. This week the fault-line definitely gave a bit. On Tuesday, I had the honour to speak to NATO commanders at the LC3 conference hosted by Lt. General Thompson and his excellent team at NATO LANDCOM here in Izmir. My speech, on NATO and Future War, came a week after Russia’s now long-serving Chief of the General Staff, General Valerij Gerasimov, had laid out his thinking on Russia’s future military strategy. It was also a week in which the US launched a $718bn defence budget, whilst also announcing the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman will be paid off early to enable the US to afford an entirely new generation of weapons to match those being developed and deployed by China and Russia. In this week’s Defense News RAND’s David Ochmanek frankly admitted that, “In our [war] games, when we fight Russia and China blue [Allied forces] gets its ass handed to it”.
  
My message to NATO commanders was thus necessarily uncompromising – unless NATO REALLY adapts to the security environment, shapes it and fast the old West could be heading for catastrophe. The message I got back from a few of my senior military colleagues was equally and justly compromising – ‘We hear you, Julian, but do our leaders?’ It is this disconnect between NATO collective defence and much of the Alliance’s political leadership which is potentially the greatest vulnerability.

Which Trojan, which horse?

Let me deal with the nature and scope of the threat. A piece in Foreign Affairs this week by Chris Miller asked if economic stagnation is the new Russian normal. It would certainly seem so. Contrast that with a 4 March speech by the Russian Chief of the General Staff entitled The Development of Future Military Strategy at Moscow’s Academy of Military Sciences.  Gerasimov echoed (immodestly on my part) a lot of what I had written in my latest article for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, Complex Strategic Coercion and Russian Military Modernisation https://www.cgai.ca/complex_strategic_coercion_and_russian_military_modernization He talked of the transformation of military threat and the need for a “…system of knowledge and action for the prevention, preparation and conduct of war”. He placed particular emphasis on strategies of what he calls global war, nuclear deterrence and, critically, indirect action.

Gerasimov, predictably, painted the US as the aggressor state and accused the Americans of ‘Trojan horse’ policies designed to eliminate the statehood of “unwanted countries”, undermine state sovereignty, and impose enforced change on elected bodies. Russia see thyself? He also cited what he called Washington’s expansion of its military presence on Russia’s borders and the US abrogation of arms control treaties such as INF as proof positive of Russia’s need to deploy new, advanced missile systems…some of which breach INF. You get the picture.

5D warfare and the new method of struggle

Gerasimov also talked of new ‘methods of struggle’ and the shift towards the integrated use of political, economic, international, and other “non-military measures, albeit implemented with reliance on military force”. Critically, he re-stated his long-held conviction that the main effort for Russia’s military strategy must be the preparation for war and its conduct, primarily, but not exclusively, by the armed forces.
 
All of this chimes rather neatly with my own concept of 5D warfare – the systematic application of deception, disinformation, destabilisation, disruption, and implied destruction as strategy.  Gerasimov’s vision for the Russian future force also echoes American thinking about the coming conduct of warfare simultaneously across the seven domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge. Gerasimov placed particular emphasis on the prosecution of what I call war at the seams of our complex societies and war at the margins of our complex institutions, most notably NATO and the EU.

Shock and some limited aweski?

At the heart of Gerasimov’s remarks was a very Russian idea of shock and awe, albeit in pursuit of limited strategic objectives.  To that end, he highlighted the need for constant high combat readiness and rapid force mobilisation to achieve decisive surprise. To reinforce that aim he called specifically for the systematic identification and exploitation of the vulnerabilities of adversaries and the threat of “unacceptable damage” as a means of imposing influence and deterring a response.

Gerasimov’s Ultima Ratio Regum is that Russian force of arms be underpinned by strengthened Russian nuclear and non-nuclear ‘deterrence’ via the continued deployment of advanced weapons systems with his military art ‘enlightened’ by the strategic and operational lessons Russia has learnt in Syria for the conduct of what he calls “restricted actions”. Gerasimov also talked at some length about the large-scale use of military robotic and other unmanned systems allied to the enhanced exploitation of electronic warfare but again only as part of “strategy of limited action”. In other words, Russia still only envisages fighting a brutal but short war, if it fights one at all.

What particularly struck me was the level of understanding Gerasimov displayed of Allied vulnerabilities and weaknesses. There was also a particular emphasis on innovative thinking via so-called ‘Forecast Scenarios’ that would enable a better understanding of armed conflict might be started and exploited by Russia for maximum political effect.  In other words, Gerasimov is seriously thinking about war with NATO and how to fight it.

The problem for the Alliance is just how ‘limited’ is Gerasimov’s ‘limited’? A Norwegian friend and colleague at the meeting said that the real danger posed by Russia was that it was “risk willing”. In fact, threat is the consequence of President Putin’s ‘risk willingness’, the scope of his strategic ambition, and the risk aversion of many European leaders in combination. It is a threat that is further compounded by a very Russian idea of a strategic-economic ‘model’ – the weaker the economy becomes the more Moscow invests in ‘security’. History suggests this ‘model’ more often than not eventually falls apart and leads to catastrophe.

Simulating Smart NATO

How could a smart NATO counter Russia’s unsmartness?  This week also marked the twentieth anniversary of the moment when former Warsaw Pact states the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland exercised their right to self-determination and joined the Alliance. Thereafter, a wave of former Cold War adversaries became allies. Reading General Gerasimov it is clear how much this profound shift in the political and security geography of Europe still rankles with Moscow and the Kremlin’s determination to re-impose influence over many of those states around Russia’s western border with force a key component in Moscow’s complex coercive influence strategy.

Gerasimov has one clear advantage over his NATO counterparts – his boss President Putin has given him unequivocal instructions to do just that - coerce. President Putin routinely chairs exercises and simulations in which he plays himself. When one talks to NATO commanders the work they are doing to counter Gerasimov and his now several ‘doctrines’ is impressive. However, unlike Gerasimov, NATO commanders struggle with real political buy-in at the highest levels.

Part of the problem is political culture, particularly across much of Western Europe. There was a time when politicians would routinely take part in exercises and simulations to properly understand their own role during an emergency. Now such participation rarely, if ever, happens. And, one of the many seams Gerasimov is seeking to exploit is the yawning seam that too often exists between NATO’s political leaders and their military commanders.

It is not easy to get latter day Western European politicians (and this problem is to a large extent a Western European problem) to engage with such challenges beyond the routine but only occasional NATO Summit. One idea would be to tack a simulation onto such events – be they at Heads of State and Government level or foreign/defence ministerial level. NATO’s leaders need to see and understand why NATO needs to plan for the worst-case and how their own role would unfold during a fast-burning and inevitably multifaceted crisis of the sort General Gerasimov is planning.  

The Scheer Bloody Gaulle of it!

Simulating NATO would thus be a good step towards a smart NATO because a smart NATO is a vital part of a wider strategy that offers Moscow both a way out of the economic and strategic contradiction into which it is driving itself, and protects the free citizens of the Alliance from the very worst case consequences of Russia’s potentially catastrophic contradiction.  

Such an approach might also help Western European leaders stop their latest retreat into defence pretence. This was also the week when senior German CDU politician Kramp-Karrenbauer suggested France and Germany together build a new aircraft carrier. Given the state of Europe’s land forces there are many other things the French and Germans might consider building if they were serious about playing a serious role together in deterring Russia and projecting power.  Still, if they ever do build this thing (which of course they will not) I have come up with the perfect name for – the Scheer-Gaulle. Get it?

Julian Lindley-French      

Tuesday 5 March 2019

Could the Lamps go out all over Asia?


“I said to the German Ambassador that, as long as there was only a dispute between Austria and Serbia alone, I did not feel entitled to intervene, but that, directly it was a matter between Austria and Russia, it became a question of the peace of Europe, which concerned us all”.
Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, 1914

A trilogy of tensions

Alphen, Netherlands. 5 March. Is there a new Serbia in Asia? Three seemingly unrelated but potentially critical events took place in Asia this past week, the world’s new cockpit of Realpolitik. First, south Asia’s two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, exchanged fire and fatalities over disputed Jammu-Kashmir. Second, the second nuclear disarmament for sanctions relief summit between US President Donald J. Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un collapsed. Third, on Friday last, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured the Philippines that if Manila’s forces were attacked in the South China Sea American forces would come to their aid under the 1951 US-Philippines Mutual Defence Treaty.

The dispute over the status of Jammu-Kashmir is not merely between India and Pakistan. China also occupies part of Kashmir following its victory in the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the establishment of a so-called Line of Actual Control.  China also acts as the benefactor and de facto guarantor of Pakistan.  Since independence from Britain in 1947 and partition India and Pakistan have fought four wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. Relations between the two powers remains tense, even if on this occasion both Islamabad and New Delhi seem to have chosen to de-escalate the crisis. However, given New Delhi’s concerns about what it regards as terrorist training camps in Pakistani-held territory the threat of war remains.

The implications of the failure of the US-North Korean summit in Hanoi are yet to be understood. The distance between the two sides was evident. Pyongyang appeared to want complete sanction relief for partial disarmament. The Americans would only offer linkage between sanctions relief and disarmament. Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un clearly has no intention of scrapping his current nuclear programme. After talking with Beijing Pyongyang will be deciding this week whether to seek renewed high-level talks with the Americans (lower level talks will continue) or return to a policy of de facto nuclear blackmail of South Korea and a stand-off with the Americans.

Then there is the South China Sea. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was unequivocal during a visit to Manila last Friday, “China’s island-building activities in the South China Sea threaten your (Philippines) sovereignty, security and economic livelihood as well as the United States”. He went on to say that in the event Chinese forces attack Philippine forces the US would intervene militarily in support of the latter. The specific source of friction between China and the Philippines concerns the so-called ‘Nine-Dash Line’, a zone of self-declared Chinese sovereignty over much of the South China Sea plus unrecognised Chinese claim over all the islands and reefs therein.  In July 2016, China effectively lost a case brought before the UN by the Philippines known as South China Sea Arbitration, although Beijing has consistently refused to recognise the decision demanding instead such disputes are resolved bilaterally. In other words, divide and rule.

In recent years China has militarised a string of islands and reefs around the perimeter South China Sea to enforce its claim for an Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ which covers much of region. With the Americans determined to enforce freedom of navigation and China seemingly set on at some point closing the Sea to outsiders the scene is being set for possibly the world’s first truly systemic confrontation.

Asian Realpolitik

In his masterpiece Diplomacy Henry Kissinger wrote, “By 1890, the concept of balance of power had reached the end of its potential. It had been made necessary in the first place by the multitude of states emerging from the ashes of of medieval aspirations to universal empire. In the eighteenth century, its corollary of raison d’etat had led to frequent wars whose primary function was to prevent the emergence of a dominant power and the resurrection of a European empire. The balance of power had preserved the liberties of states, not the peace of Europe”. For nineteenth century Europe read twenty-first century Asia. European communitarians might not like it but it is Chinese Machtpolitik and Realpolitik in Asia (or what the Americans now call the Indo-Pacific) that is defining the strategic map of both its region and the wider world.

Chinese power is fast becoming a defining force that itself forces all other powers to react to it, most notably the United States. Chinese power comes in many forms, not just military. Beijing’s use of debt diplomacy in Europe is already beginning to warp the strategic decisions of several European states in which China is ‘investing’ thus undermining the cohesion of NATO and the EU.

The broader danger is that Asia is fast becoming to resemble pre-World War One Europe as it divides between China and US-backed states with India a kind of freelancing power within the broad orb a new ‘West’ that is defined not by place but by ideas. This division is something I witnessed a few years ago during a visit to Pakistan when I was briefed by their Inter-Services Intelligence. The closeness between Beijing and Islamabad was already evident. In much the same way that Europe divided into blocs around Imperial Germany, on the one hand, and Britain, France and Russia, on the other, Asia is today a monument to the enduring nature of balance of power politics. As in the Europe of old the balance of power can be maintained for an extended period and, for the moment at least, China seems to want to do precisely that, albeit insisting on bilateral solutions to conflicts that are mainly of its own creation and to its advantage. History suggests sooner or later such balance will collapse and with it the peace of much of Asia, and quite possibly the world beyond.

China, power and the rules-based order

Europe? If Europeans really do want to help convince China to return to a rules-based order they must invest in the real power that must underpin real rules. Europeans must also help keep America strong where she needs to be strong. In other words, like it or not, Europeans must invest in the global balance of power even as they work to reform and uphold the rules-based global order. That starts with an end to European strategic pretence and a proper commitment to regenerate NATO in Europe’s own strategic neighbourhood. It also means the end to empty European gestures. For example, the British have ‘threatened’ to send one of their two new aircraft carriers to the South China Sea (even as rumours persist that they will mothball the the other one) as a ‘gesture’ of solidarity with the Americans. It is an empty gesture by a hollow power and the Chinese know it.

The policy aim? To convince the Chinese to obey rules Beijing is today leveraging to its advantage by their persistent flouting. China is not the strategic spoiler that is Putin’s Russia. Beijing is, rather, a strange mix of nationalist power adolescent and sophisticated actor. Which direction China finally settles on is still up for grabs. Whilst that issue is being settled in Beijing Chinese assertiveness must be held in check by US-led power and further checks on Chinese attempts to buy acquiescence, not least in Europe. In parallel, there must be ongoing engagement with Beijing to convince it that Chinese interests in the bipolar world it is now creating will be best served by a China that invests in global norms for peaceful international relations.    

The Chinese century?

The danger China poses is the implicit presumption behind much of contemporary Chinese foreign and security policy that the twenty-first century will be shaped on Chinese terms. Whilst it is couched in the language of maintaining peace and stability much of the tone of such policy is ‘peace’ and ‘stability’ on Chinese terms. There is also a Chinese assumption of a coming confrontation with the United States, but only when the correlation of forces are so in China’s favour, and at a time and place of China’s choosing, that Chinese power alone, and with it the humiliation in Asia of the United States, will be the best guarantor of peace. A Chinese world order? What is really spooky for those of us versed in the strategic literature of the European century is how strikingly similar such presumptions and assumptions of ‘inevitable’ Chinese superiority and dominance are to their nineteenth century nationalist counterparts in Europe.

The lamps are going out?

On the eve of World War One a despairing Sir Edward Grey wrote, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. There is now a growing possibility that the lamps will go out in Asia and if they do much of the rest of the world. World War One was triggered by a regional dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. The system of blocs and alliances that had formed in Europe prior to 1914 were meant to prevent a wider systemic war. In the end they helped precipitate it.  This begs two questions; is there a new Serbia in Asia, and if so where? 
  
Julian Lindley-French