The Future of European Militaries

“European militaries will need (at the very least) to undertake three security and defence roles, possibly simultaneously. First, to deter Russia and if needs be defend NATO and the EU from an armed Russian incursion. Second, to help stabilise states and regions in chaos, which in turn threatens European security. Third, to ensure and assure interoperability with the US future force”.

Report on the high-level conference The Future of European Militaries, Wilton Park, 25-27 September, 2017

Download my conference report at:

https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP1559-Report.pdf

Alphen, Netherlands. 4 December.  My reports are rather liked the ill-famed urban legend about London busses of old. You wait for ages for one and then four come along at the same time.  For those of us schooled many years ago by waiting in the bloody rain for the dreaded ‘216’ non-bus service this story is more than legend. It is where soggy characters were formed and drenched backbones stiffened. Indeed, there were times after a particularly long wait I wondered if the bloody bus itself was mere legend.

A month ago you had my paper co-written with Allen, Breedlove and Zambellas on Future War NATO (https://www.globsec.org/publications/future-war-nato-hybrid-war-hyper-war-via-cyber-war/). Three weeks ago you had my report for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute on Brexit and the Shifting Pillars of NATO (http://www.cgai.ca/brexit_and_the_shifting_pillars_of_nato). Last week you had the entire opus of the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative Final Report plus all supporting papers (https://www.globsec.org/publications/one-alliance-future-tasks-adapted-alliance/). Of course, they are all brilliant and particularly reasonably-priced – they cost nowt!  Today, for your delight and delectation, I offer you my latest scribbling my Wilton Park report entitled The Future of European Militaries. You lucky, lucky people. And you thought Christmas was still weeks away?  

First, my thanks.  The report emerges from a great conference held at the Foreign and Commonwealth Agency Wilton Park deep in the beautiful Sussex countryside between 25^th and 27^th September.  My dear friend, Wilton Park Programme Director Dr Robert Grant and I had the pleasure of co-chairing the conference with me acting as Scribbler-in-Chief or Rapporteur. My thanks go also to the staff at Wilton Park who do such a fantastic job looking after the conference delegates. My good friend Dr Holger Mey at Airbus, and Cdr Jeroen de Jonge at the Dutch scientific research company TNO stumped up much of the sponsorship for the conference, along with the UK Ministry of Defence (thank you chaps!), and my old friend Dr Jeff Larsen at the NATO Defence College in Rome.

So, what, after all the necessary formalities, did we actually conclude about the future of European militaries, other than it would be a very good idea if they had a future, and that said future was a together future?  The conference focused on six themes: force structure, threat and response, the implications of Brexit for European security and defence, technology and future war, institutional and command relationships, and the future of European militaries.

The conference also endeavoured to answer pivotal questions that the leaders of European states need to answer right now. What will be the centre of gravity of European forces in the twenty-first century? Should a European future force be focused on the warfighting high-end of the conflict spectrum, or the medium to low end? What balance between force mass and force manoeuvre should European militaries aspire to? Is there sufficient consensus among, and between Europeans to fashion what would look like a European force credible across the conflict spectrum?

The conference concluded that if those questions are to be answered positively then European militaries will need to “embrace broad spectrum innovation” that combines technologies, skills and knowledge into an affordable, but necessarily radical future force concept”.

Key findings (inter alia) from the conference were:

·       European defence planning must be able to satisfy national requirements, enable pan-European cooperation, and ensure interoperability with US, Canadian and other forces.

·       Credible deterrence and defence rest on the twin pillars of military capabilities and capacity.

·       The European command and control (C2) structure needs to be sufficiently robust to enable Europeans to be force providers, command European operations, and organise European militaries into a far more coherent and consistent force.

·       No single European country can any longer afford complete strategic autonomy.

·       Smaller European states should be organised into EU and NATO compatible groupings. PESCO can help with the development of such groupings.

·       The NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) should act as the “interoperability pivot” by promoting “enhanced transatlantic interoperability”.

·       Procurement and acquisition must be re-established on new, common and shared requirements that underpin national, EU and NATO defence industrial policy.

·       Acquisition and innovation cycles must be accelerated.

·       NATO and the European Defence Agency (EDA) must harmonise their respective efforts to operationalise innovation and to ensure security of supply and re-supply.

·       NATO and the EU must be far better able to talk to each other at all levels, and during all stages of a crisis.

·       The US needs to be clearer about the future strategic partnership it seeks with its European allies.

·       Europeans must better understand the role of force across the conflict spectrum from hybrid war to cyber war to hyper war.

·       NATO needs more forces throughout the command structure.

·       Speed of recognition during a crisis is vital to understand when an attack is an attack.

·       The Allies should create an A2/AD bubble over the Baltic States.

To conclude, future war will demand a smart mass of forces able to exert influence and effect across great distance very quickly, particularly as new technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing massively and irrevocably speed up the command pace of war. Therefore, given the threat array Europe’s armed forces need to be bigger, stronger, and more agile, smarter and with far more capability and capacity than they enjoy today. They will also need to be allied more deeply to sharper intelligence-led indicators that are better able to warn of pending danger.

Or, in other words, Europeans will need a combined future force able to undertake at least one major joint operation and three smaller joint operations. And, to create such a force in the current strategic, political, financial and economic environment Europeans together need to act now.

Britain?  Brexit or no the British must be at the core of such efforts as the UK provides 30% of Europe’s high-end military capability. The message? United we stand, or divided we fall. One final thing – the conference concluded that there was a vital missing ingredient in the goulash of European militaries: political leadership! Ho hum…

Julian Lindley-French

One Alliance: Adaptation and Deterrence

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity to take things for granted”.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Download ALL the new GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative main reports and supporting papers at:

https://www.globsec.org/initiatives/globsec-nato-adaptation-initiative/

Alphen, Netherlands. 1 December. What a week! On Monday I had the honour of being part of a delegation presenting the new GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report to NATO Deputy Secretary-General Goettemoeller in Brussels. The next day I flew to Rome to attend a high-level conference on NATO and nuclear deterrence at the NATO Defence College, and which was organised by my friend Dr Jeff Larsen. Now? I am knackered.

First, NATO adaptation. Fifty years on from the last great attempt to ‘adapt’ NATO with the 1967 Harmel Report, and the Alliance adoption of the then new doctrine of Flexible Response (to replace Massive Retaliation) the new report considers the future of the Alliance in the round.  To that end, and for for some fifteen months past, I have had the pleasure of being a member of, and lead writer for a steering committee which included a former NATO Deputy Secretary-General, a former minister of defence and chairman of the NATO Military Committee, a former ambassador to the North Atlantic Council and former senior NATO commanders.  Led by General John R. Allen of the US, the Steering Committee comprised Admiral Giampaolo di Paola of Italy, General Wolf Langheld of Germany, Ambassador Alexander Vershbow of the US, Ambassador Tomas Valasek of Slovakia…and me of Sheffield, Yorkshire, ardent Sheffield United fan, but apart from that no other claim to fame whatsoever.

This massive project was also reinforced with some truly excellent supporting papers by leading practitioners and thinkers such as General Knud Bartels (Denmark), General Philip M. Breedlove (US), Ian Brzezinski (US), Professor Paul Cornish (UK), Professor Karl-Heinz Kamp (Germany), Professor Michael O’Hanlon, Ambassador Stefano Stefanini (Italy), Jim Townsend (US), Admiral George Zambellas (UK) and organised by the excellent Slovak think-tank GLOBSEC and their brilliant young leaders Robert Vass and Alena Kudzko.

The main report One Alliance: The Future Tasks of the Adapted Alliance has over fifty considered recommendations across thirteen main domains that can be thus summarised: embrace new geostrategic and transatlantic realities; further strengthen NATO’s deterrence and defence posture; re-establish a high-level of NATO military ambition; strengthen NATO’s role in counter-terrorism; engage with Russia and Ukraine on the basis of principle, promote a broad NATO security agenda; craft a smarter NATO; create an ambitious and comprehensive NATO-EU Strategic Partnership; foster wider strategic partnerships; better equip and afford NATO; deepen relations with established defence industries; forge deep partnerships with new defence sectors with leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence such as SparkCognition; and purposively equip NATO for the future of war.  

How will the Alliance adapt? NATO faces the same problem as the poor American traveller in that corny, but nevertheless telling Irish joke about if one wants to get to Dublin one would not start here.  NATO will need to do something for which it is politically, constitutionally and institutionally ill-suited; be radical.  Indeed, as the Executive Summary of the report states: “To lay the basis for long-term adaptation, NATO leaders should commission a strategy review at the July 2018 Summit that could be completed by the seventieth anniversary summit in 2019, and which might be embodied in a new Strategic Concept.  NATO needs a forward-looking strategy that sets out how NATO will meet the challenges of an unpredictable and fast-changing world”.

Second, Rome, the Alliance and the future of nuclear deterrence.  NATO is a defensive alliance, but it is also unashamedly a nuclear alliance. Now, I know such language horrifies many people but nuclear weapons are a vital part of the “appropriate mix” of defensive and deterrent weapons the Alliance needs to maintain a credible Deterrence and Defence Posture (DDPR).  Back in 1967 when Pierre Harmel and his team completed his seminal report The Future Tasks of the Alliance ‘deterrence’ was maintained by a sufficiency of conventional and nuclear forces.  Today, new technology has rendered conceivable the rapid destruction by an adversary of the critical functioning of an Alliance state or states via a mix of disabling disinformation, crippling ‘de-organisation’, critical infrastructure collapse and mass disruption, even before mass destruction is unleashed.  Holistic dismantling is clearly the mix of offensive strategies Russia has adopted.

By way of credible deterrent response the Alliance will need new ways to protect its people and its societies (resiliency) and ‘project’ deterrence. Indeed, deterrence without resiliency is impossible. That will, in turn, need a new way of thinking about deterrence to enable it to reach across the new coercion/escalation spectrum from hybrid war to hyper war via cyber war, further underpinned by new critical relationships between civilian and military expertise. Nuclear deterrence? Nuclear weapons exist to check-mate nuclear weapons until the political conditions exist to enable their verifiable eradication.  

The message from both Brussels and Rome? If NATO does not adapt to the dangerous but very changed and rapidly changing strategic environment of the twenty-first century NATO could fail. Unless as part of adaptation nuclear deterrence is modernised in line with a new concept of deterrence that stretches across a resiliency, conventional, unconventional, nuclear deterrence paradigm then the Alliance itself could unwittingly lower the threshold for nuclear use as through our collective weakness we inadvertently return to an implicit doctrine of Massive Retaliation.

One final thing. At the start of my 2014 Oxford Handbook of War (which is brilliant and very reasonably-priced) I quote Plato. “Only the dead have seen the end of war”.  Sadly, I fear the great man was right then and is right today. You see NOTHING can be taken for granted in this brave new world by NATO, our countries or even you and me. NATO is there to prevent war, but only a properly adapted NATO can do that.

Julian Lindley-French

Brexit: The Geopolitical Price for Humiliating Britain

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 November. In January 2016 I stood in the snow near Trakai, Lithuania and made an important decision.  In spite of my profound concerns about the EU and the future direction of travel towards an over-centralised ‘Europe’, as the Commission endeavoured to build its ‘tower’ ever closer to Euro-heaven, and the danger it poses to substantive democracy on the Continent I would reject Brexit.  My decision came after listening to H.E. Linas Linkevicius, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, at the famous Snowmeeting.  At that moment I became a ‘Big Picture Remainer’ and decided geopolitics, particularly the threat posed by Russia to my friends in the Baltic States, Poland and elsewhere trumped my concerns about who governs me.  I have not changed my position. However, I now fear for the Brexit humiliation of Britain and the geopolitical consequences that will ensue.

Yesterday, I read carefully the 20 November Brexit speech Chief EU Negotiator Michel Barnier made to a Brussels conference organised by Charles Grant’s Centre for European Reform. Now, I know that M. Barnier is at the negotiating schwerpunkt of Brexit and that he has ambitions to become the next President of the European Commission.  And, for much of the speech he merely stated the obvious – “Brexit must mean Brexit” and the “orderly withdrawal” of Britain from the EU must see solutions found for the divorce bill, citizens’ rights, the inner-Irish border, and so-called ‘pass-porting rights’ for banks based in the City of London post-Brexit.

However, by far the most unconvincing part of his speech was when he said his objective was not to punish Britain. Yes, it is. As former Minister and TV pundit Michael Portillo said last night, Barnier’s aim is to discourage others from making “a break for the prison walls”. Now, I might use different language but Barnier and his colleagues of course need to be seen to punish Britain if for no other reason…pour encourager les autres. Indeed, to the EU Britain has become a latter day Admiral Byng.

This morning Prime Minister May is in Brussels to discuss with European Council President Donald Tusk upping the Brexit divorce bill to some £40bn in return for a written commitment that the EU will begin trade talks.  Good luck with that.  She is also there to attend the EU’s Eastern Partnership Summit (I wonder if in future there will be EU Western Partnership summits) with six states, as the name suggests, to the east of the EU.  May will not only confirm, and rightly so, that Britain will maintain its commitment to the security and defence of Eastern Europe post-Brexit, she will also offer some £100m of British taxpayer’s money to counter disinformation in the region.

So, all well and good? No. First, beyond the liberal chattering classes one finds in London, British think-tanks, and politically mono-cultural EUtopian British universities there is growing public anger at what is perceived as the Brexit humiliation of Britain by the EU. Mine is not a scientific survey but the more ‘ordinary’ Brits to whom I speak, both erstwhile Brexiteers and Remainers, I detect growing anger as what many see now as an attack on Britain. Whatever May and the Establishment say it could well become very hard to convince British citizens to risk geld and lives for what one called those, “bastards trying to damage us”. They thought democracy meant they had a legitimate choice.

Second, if one examines ‘planned’ cuts to the British armed forces under the forthcoming National Security Capability Review that National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill is conducting, much of the axe will (again) fall on those very high-end expeditionary forces needed to defend allies in an emergency, such as the Royal Marines.  Given the cuts it is hard to escape the impression that Britain is retreating behind its nuclear deterrent.  After all, Britain is a nuclear island power.

Third, will Britain’s expeditionary spirit survive Brexit and Trump? In an email exchange this week with a very close friend, who happens also to be a former US Ambassador to NATO, he warned me to get used to the end of the ‘special relationship’ with the Americans and recognise that henceforth London can expect no more than a “transactional relationship” with Washington.  By way of return, Washington had better get used to the British being 'non-actional'. The only thing that has been keeping Britain’s expeditionary spirit alive these past decades is history and the demand by the Americans for British support. If the Americans don’t give a damn about Britain, and Europeans simply want to damn Britain, and a significant part of the population does not believe in British military power anyway then beyond the inevitably rhetorical we could be witnessing the beginning of the end, if not the very end, of British expeditionary internationalism.

On Monday I will launch the massive GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report at NATO HQ.  As a member of a high-level Steering Committee I am proud of the work we have done looking to the future of NATO and the many papers that have been produced under the orb of the project by some of the West’s best strategists.  And yet, I cannot but feel a sense of foreboding, particularly concerning four of the central assumptions that underpin the Alliance.  Firstly, that the Americans will really remain committed to NATO and the defence of Europe in the future.  Secondly, that Europeans really will spend enough on defence, and organise sufficiently well, to justify the American taxpayer continuing to guarantee European security and defence.  Thirdly, that NATO and the EU really will forge an effective partnership that will ensure sound security across the conflict spectrum. Fourthly, that in spite of Britain’s Brexit humiliation, a country which remains for the moment a leading economic and military power, will also remain not only committed to the defence of Europe, but able to play its full and appropriate role in defending Europe.  Much of that role will also rely on a continuing close strategic relationship between London and Paris. However, as my well-placed sources tell me, Paris under President Macron is in the vanguard of those EU countries wanting to punish/damage Britain for Brexit. Pas bon, mes amis!

To conclude, I remain a ‘Big Picture Remainer’. However, the simple geopolitical truth is it is impossible to separate Brexit from the EU from European defence from NATO. Let’s hope a Brexit breakthrough is made this December, even though with Germany in such a political shambles it is hard to see how such a leap forward can take place. If the current tensions pertain for too long then not only will the EU lose Britain, but also I fear the US will lose Britain, and possibly even NATO in all but name. In which case, Britain would become like any other European – talking about defence, investing little in it, and able to do little for it.  PESCO?

As for my country being humiliated, that is certainly how I feel right now. Sadly, as our Irish friends revealed this week, such humiliation is in no small part due to the incompetence of the people who lead it, and the profound divisions between them over Brexit. 

Europe must see the Big Picture of Brexit and sort it out quickly, before it becomes any more toxic.

Julian Lindley-French 

Brexit and the Shifting Pillars of the Alliance

Alphen, Netherlands. 21 November.  It is my honour to announce the publication by the Canadian Global Affairs Institute of my latest paper Brexit and the Shifting Pillars of the Alliance. The paper can be downloaded at:

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cdfai/pages/3016/attachments/original/1510852023/Brexit_and_the_Shifting_Pillars_of_NATO.pdf?1510852023

Will Britain’s departure from the EU lead to the creation of an Anglosphere and a Eurosphere within NATO? Unfortunately, there are a range of challenges to such a formulation. First, if the EU continues to drive a hard post-Brexit relationship with the British, it may be increasingly difficult for any government in London to convince the British people that other Europeans are worth defending. Second, would the United States, Canada and others entertain such an idea? Third, France is not going to abandon its strategic relationship with Britain – Brexit or no Brexit. Fourth, there will be a Brexit deal and Britain will remain a key factor in European defence. Fifth, “events, dear boy, events!” However, Brexit or no Brexit, NATO’s pillars are shifting. The United States will demand more of its allies if Washington is to maintain a credible security and defence guarantee for Europe. The changing nature of conflict will tend to emphasise intelligence and power projection, both of which play to Britain’s residual strengths. 

Canada? It is hard for an outsider to discern Canadian defence policy, other than bumbling along in strategic suburbia with the desire to be seen as the good neighbour. This is a mistake. NATO’s shifting pillars will have profound implications for Canadian security and defence policy. A formal Anglosphere and Eurosphere within NATO? Most likely not. A U.S.-sphere and German-sphere? Quite possibly, but don’t mention it in polite company. Canada? Who knows?

Julian Lindley-French