More Banging On About Defence

I finished the piece, Banging On About Defence, with the conclusion that the Government should link defence posture to foreign policy – to decide what is essential precious and valuable to us as a Nation and to allocate resources to defend it accordingly.  It may be that our policy ambitions would cost too much to defend; in which case we should cut our coat to match.  It follows that the foreign policy and defence debate is an iterative process.  It may be helpful, therefore if we examined what sort of thing we could expect our armed forces to do on our behalf since what we are prepared to defend on defence will normally limit our policy ambitions in the first place.  Presumably we require our armed forces to do more than look pretty on parade as Max Hastings suggested he believed to be the general public’s aspiration?

To simplify the discussion it could be helpful to examine only conventional forces – to leave the submarine based nuclear deterrent out of the argument.  The threat of nuclear retaliation would probably deter a rogue state from loosing off a nuclear weapon in our direction but potential aggressors may calculate that the UK may not be prepared to fire a Trident missile in retribution for a conventionally armed attack, say on a British flagged vessel, overseas territory or even, more problematic, a terrorist or rogue state attack on our infrastructure, utilities or services.  To protect ourselves from conventional attack in the first place we sufficient conventional force in the right places to convince a potential attacker that it would not be worth the while.

The right level of forces would comprise an armed force equipped with a variety of weapons and capabilities sufficient to wage war, to some extent or other, in the circumstances required by our foreign policy.  This almost certainly does not mean the capability to wage all-out total war of the sort of conflict we last saw in WWII.  Since 1945, wars have been “limited” and our armed forces have been structured such that we could only engage in a total conflict as part of a US led coalition.  On our own, we could only achieve very limited military objectives without the risk of catastrophic failure because of lack of supporting capabilities.  Think of it in terms of getting the landing party on the beach but then being unable to sustain the fight because a better equipped enemy had cut our supply lines and take control of the sky above.  Specifically, imagine the level of support we would require to sustain one of aircraft carriers should we decide to sail her into harms way?

NATO, of course, provided a solution.  By pooling resources and specialising within a coherent alliance structure, the North Atlantic Alliance has maintained a credible deterrent posture throughout the Cold War and even some time after.  Alliances are by their very nature usually limited by the duration of the threat and since the collapse of the Soviet Union that threat has become ever more difficult to define.  NATO worked just fine when everyone agreed on the enemy but today that is not so clear. NATO also depended upon the Americans – of course for a nuclear umbrella but also for vast conventional forces large numbers of which were based in Europe during peacetime.  What should we make of NATO today with President Trump shifting US focus to China and the Pacific whilst regularly accusing Europeans of not pulling their weight, President Macron questioning the very NATO relevance and the disgraceful evidence of every European Nation spending far too little and taking far too much, to say nothing of a fragile political commitment to defence.  Article 5 of the NATO Treaty requires all the signatories to come to each other’s aid in the event one of them is attacked – the principle of collective defence.  Can that be relied upon today? Following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 , Julian Roepcke, writing in Standpoint, reports a black joke in the German security community:  “if Russia invades the Baltic states, Germany will of course honour its NATO commitment and defend them – once the German public approves this in a binding referendum.”  As for EU defence initiatives, they offer a full spectrum of military assistance short of actual fighting capablity and could be safely ignored.  As Richard Barrons put it, their several Headquarters "provide day care for middle-aged officers" and are "unable to deploy anywhere robustly and quickly."

There is a growing feeling, not least in Germany and in our own Corbynista, that we should never use armed force and that all disputes should be resolved through dialogue.  Fine in theory but it takes two to tango – and we don’t negotiate with terrorists, do we?  So, if we don’t negotiate, to what extent do we respond with force?  Do we aim to destroy our enemy completely and deny him the ability to cause us further harm or are we more “civilised,” employing proportional force, limited in time and scope?  This decision obviously depends a lot on geography – if the enemy is sailing up the Thames the use of force is more urgent than if some hostages have been taken somewhere in Africa. In calculating the sort of forces we might need to maintain we need a lot of intelligent foresight in defining the threat.  It probably is not helpful to rely on history as a guide and we must look at the way warfare and technology are advancing.  For example, to what extent will robotics and artificial intelligence replace the traditional concept of boots on the ground. Do we need lots of men in uniform training on Salisbury Plain or lots of civilian nerds guarding cyber space? I remember meeting a friend for lunch in London in the late 70s.  He had just been posted to the MOD Procurement Executive and I was in Defence Intelligence.  I asked him what it was like and he replied, wearily that there was a whole army of civil servants there with slide rules poised just waiting to develop the next generation of V Bombers.  Nevertheless, the defence and security review must not be rushed because hasty, politically convenient, decisions now could have catastrophic consequences in the future.  That said, we must get on with it since delay merely prolongs our weakness.  Above all, it will be expensive and I am a little reassured by some of the noises from Whitehall that say it will not (necessarily) be a cost cutting exercise.  But let us be clear, as military man I fully accept the politics of cutting costs, just so long as commitments are cut concomitantly.

However, all the above is straight forward only if our potential enemies identify themselves and behave in reasonable and predictable ways.  Arguably the greatest danger we face is not from conventional armed force but from unconventional enemies who could chose to attack our infrastructure, water and food supplies, banking and money transfer systems, national grid, and health services or worse infect our population with debilitating disease, with the aim of imposing their will.  Alongside our military armed forces we must ensure that our society is resilient in face of such attacks – the cost of which could put the military spending, required above, into perspective. Any one care to put their hand in their pocket for a resilient 5G network, nuclear power station, or HS2 train?