Introduction
So, there’s no new money for defence. In one sense this probably entirely correct. From a Whitehall perspective, where the MoD is not an exceptional department and is most certainly not excused gaining value for public money, it will still have the third largest Resources Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) and second largest Capital DEL within Whitehall over the next 3 years by far.
However, given the financial and procurement pressures the MoD is under, the decision to not increase resourcing seriously threatens the UKs defence posture, and in-turn places into serious jeopardy our current national security strategy.
Arguably defence is now in the position whereby it if cannot achieve sought after efficiencies, and get its costs under better control, rationally speaking, the UK should be forced to adopt a completely different strategy and associated defence posture / force structure.
I argue in this blog post that our current posture and force structure is driven, at the highest level, by a coherent strategy. This post is intended to be a thought experiment in how our defence posture might look if we changed just one or two key considerations or aspects of our strategy. It is in a number of parts which I will write over the next couple of weeks.
In this part the aim is introduce what I believe is current security thinking. It briefly explores the current national security strategy, the overall defence dimension to security, and our associated defence posture. I view the strategy through a high level lens, a grand strategic view if that helps the reader to understand the level of analysis.
It looks at what I believe are the key considerations that our current national security strategy hinges upon. By exploring the strategy at the highest level, and focusing on key considerations, I hope to offer insight around why we have adopted the broad force structures that we have, or rather, in the case of the Army, aspire to have and how they match our “grand” strategy.
The other parts of this post will then explore if there is scope to deliver the current strategy in a different way, and then conduct a thought experiment whereby a key element of the strategy is changed – what might the armed forces, in a broad sense, then look like?
UK Strategy – a View
At the highest level I argue that our defence posture is one of anticipation and this posture hinges on three key considerations.
When managing risks and hazards, a hypothetical spectrum of aims exists. The extreme aim at one end of the spectrum is to manage risks by adopting an anticipatory posture – in other words investing resources in preventing something from occurring in the first place. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the aim of managing risks by mitigating the impact of them after they have occurred. It perhaps seems at first glance that an anticipatory strategy is easily the best – why would you wait for something to happen before trying to manage it?
However this posture comes with three main drawbacks: (a) in terms of defence policy, its usually financially expensive requiring upfront investment, (b) linked to that fact is that it is also politically very expensive since it requires allocating scarce resourcing from other high priority domestic issues during periods when, by definition, nothing is happening to immediately warrant that level of resourcing and (c) it is often very difficult to anticipate what risks might be faced introducing the danger of resources being wasted. A resilience posture, as the other option is called, is less immediately resource intensive, is politically rewarding since resources can be allocated to more immediate domestic issues, and there is something to be said for waiting and seeing what happens and then building a force structure. The obvious Achilles of the resilience approach is time. You need time to recognise an emerging threat and time to develop the capabilities to meet it. This dilemma underpins our defence posture options.
Anticipation
This therefore is the first of the three key considerations I mentioned earlier around which our posture hinges – within this dilemma or spectrum we have made our choice. Our choice and therefore our aim is to maintain an anticipatory posture – we have not chosen to wait and see.
Of course, the spectrum I mention above, at the extremes, is theoretical. In practice there will always be various nuances and deviations from purely anticipatory or resilience postures – the reality will see elements of both. And so it is with our defence posture. We see elements of the resilience posture – a renewed lip-service to “regeneration” or the refusal to rebuild a NATO committed British Corps for example. But I argue that overall, our approach is overwhelmingly anticipatory. This is clearly apparent within the National Security Strategy.
The National Security Strategy delineates, broadly speaking, three strategies which conform to a proactive, anticipatory posture: defence engagement (or upstream engagement), crisis intervention (to prevent the spread of instability and to restore peace and order) and deterrence – “we will deter” the strategy says. There’s considerably more text in the document, particularly around non-defence, non-military aspects and non-traditional military activities but essentially, from a defence perspective it boils down to the fact that we’re going to be proactive and we’re going to “global”.
Collective Defence
Most importantly, all three of the strategies within the NSS are and will be delivered through the context of collective defence, as part of NATO. NATO is such a part of the defence fabric of this country that it is easy to overlook that being a NATO member is voluntary – it maintains an “open door”. We have made a distinct choice to be part of a collective alliance and above all, to pay the cost of its membership.
I do not believe that it can be stressed enough what a fundamental pillar of UK security collective defence and our membership of NATO is. If UK national security strategy, defence policy, grand strategy or whatever one wishes to talk about, is not viewed through the lens of collective security and our role in NATO then I argue that any ensuing viewpoint or discussion is essentially meaningless. Partnership and alliance runs through every aspect of defence.
UK defence posture, capabilities and service structures must therefore be viewed through the lens of NATO membership. This requires two concessions to that reality. The first concession is that we must contribute toward NATO standing forces and military initiatives on some level and as the 5th or 6th largest economy in the world, it would be politically difficult to credibly defend too small a commitment. The second concession is that NATO is a coherent alliance, and it has a standing Military Structure. In any conflict in Europe it is not the individual capabilities of the NATO members that will matter as much as the sum of their capabilities when “chopped” to the NATO Military Structures. It is the NATO whole that matters, not the individual sums and it is the aggregated capabilities of the NATO Military Structure that concerns Russia.
NATO is the most developed, integrated and sophisticated collective defence effort in history. It is an alliance whose Military Structure is cohered around a clear Strategic Concept which was agreed in 2010. When we look at NATOs Strategic Concept we see a clear anticipatory posture. This is shown within the document by delineating three essential core tasks, all of which are anticipatory and proactive in nature. These are: crisis management, cooperative security, and most importantly, deterrence. As the document states, “deterrence, based on an appropriate mix of nuclear and conventional capabilities, remains a core element of [NATO] overall strategy”.
Collective defence, and the concessions to it, I believe is the second key consideration around which our posture hinges. Indeed, I would argue, that it is the central and primary consideration out of the three. It links with both the first consideration and the third consideration (more of the third later).
Thus, we are part of a collective defence alliance which at its core is executing a strategy of reassurance, deterrence and if needs be, defence. If we are to be a member of this alliance, we must commit to work hand-in-glove toward the same core task – if we fundamentally don’t agree we must leave or fundamentally alter our relationship with the alliance. But what we see written in the National Security Strategy is instead the following: “In NATO, we will lead a renewed focus on deterrence to address current and future threats”.
Ignoring for the moment the term “lead”, the question which goes begging from that statement is, who are we deterring and what are the threats?
RD2 – Reassure, Deter, Defend
This question brings us onto the third key consideration around which our strategy hinges – we are aiming to deter a peer-state, namely of course Russia. Whilst NATO officially recognises no current foe, it as ever looks East. When we look at NATO operations today what we actually see is the implementation of a three stage strategy aimed at Russia: namely Reassure, Deter and Defend (RD2 I shall call it in an attempt to be in vogue). By deploying an enhanced forward presence it seeks to strip away ambiguity about its resolve. It seeks to reassure and to deter by the creation of a clear “tripwire” and by structurally locking its members into Article 5.
The deterrence of “Russia” is a key point – credibly deterring a nuclear armed peer state requires a full-spectrum of capabilities which is far beyond than those necessarily required to conduct an anticipatory posture via the strategies of crisis management and defence engagement. Deterring a peer-state is an extremely demanding task.
If we are going to deter a peer-state we need to allocate considerable resources within the alliance, continuously and for all intents and purposes, indefinitely. However, going back to the previous point about it being the NATO Military Structures that will do the fighting, it is NATO, in aggregate which has to maintain the full-spectrum of capabilities, not necessarily the individual member states. The astute reader will understand the implications of this in a discussion around defence posture and MoD resourcing, and I will come to it later.
What the deterrence task means in practice for UK defence, and in particular the British Army, is that we have emerged from a best-effort conflict in Afghanistan into a peacetime mission which is, in almost all ways, far more demanding and requires far more sophisticated capabilities than the recently ended fighting. Our most important strategy, deterrence, is aimed at a peer-state armed with nuclear weapons without the usual wartime dividend of kit. It’s going to take considerable investment, under current intentions, to “lead” the deterrence task as part of NATO.
This is now looking like it is simply too politically expensive to achieve, and in the future parts of this post I will look at how this circle might squared.
Summary of Part One
To summarise this part – when we’ve looked closely at UK defence posture, of the defence dimension of our security, we see three clear fundamental choices, all interlinked with one another, and which completely shape our defence policy.
Firstly, we have decided to adopt a broadly anticipatory posture across our entire defence mission, from the most demanding task of deterring a peer-state to the less demanding and complex tasks of defence engagement – we will anticipate threats to our security, our people and our prosperity by actively engaging with the international order during the “violent peace” – in 2015 our ambitions were global – it is hard to see the rhetoric change as we edge closer to BREXIT.
Secondly, we have chosen to be members of a collective defence alliance with a coherent Strategic Concept and standing Military Structure which is engaged in the core task of deterrence, the same strategy articulated within the National Security Strategy.
Thirdly and finally, in-line with our overall anticipatory posture, and membership of an alliance primarily tasked with deterrence, we’ve decided to contribute toward deterring a peer-state armed with nuclear weapons.
To change any of those three key considerations (anticipatory stance, collective defence, and deterring a peer-state) would allow us to amend, and even probably require us to amend, our force structures.
Part Two…
The next part of this series I will look at how the current and aspirational broad force structures under SDSR15 are intended to cohere with the strategic choices we have made. Perhaps, given we aim to anticipate trouble and deter a peer-state, the reader can begin to see the rationale, at least on paper, behind promulgating and developing certain capabilities and force structure choices – not least the ground component of Joint Force 2025 – the heavy division.
Missives from Wales 