I wanted to say a few short words about the annual chief of the defence staff lecture. There have been some online comments saying General Carter didn’t really say much of significance. Having now read the transcript – I disagree.
The international scene General Carter described in his speech won’t have been news to anyone in the room. Yet I think it is worth drawing out in plain English, what I argue is the central message of that description – that we live in a geopolitical world of constant and unremitting activity.
Regional powers, perceiving challenges that are clearer to them than perhaps are own are to us, continue every day to innovate to advance their own policy goals. This innovation, energised by a keen clarity of purpose, is being refined and given a competitive edge by constant activity and engagement.
The obvious response to this dynamism and the risk of being left-behind is as argued by General Carter in his speech – to “recreate the innovation and ingenuity seen in wartime”. We must do this, he argues, “if we are to succeed in this environment”.
How can this be done when we are ostensibly at peace?
Innovation, as General Carter rightly says, is not just a matter of technological advances and developments. The research and development of new kit and platforms is not going to be enough. Innovation, where it involves technology at all, means absorbing that technology so that it adds value.
Driving innovation to the extent that you can out-compete a rival actor essentially requires exposure to competition – it requires, in other words exactly what our challengers are doing: activity and conducting operations (conventional operations as well as so-called “greyzone” and clandestine activity).
Whilst direct exposure to competition is arguably the fastest driver of innovation (only failure drives it faster) the military is also able to simulate competition through exercise and experimentation. General Carter says that he wants to “place emphasis on experimentation by allocating resources, force structure, training and exercise activity to stimulate innovation”.
So you do, so you learn.
Activity will drive change, but it won’t be enough by itself to give us a complete edge. Although being active will help learning by thrusting problems into the faces of the services, there must still be a culture that is willing to not just acknowledge problems and lessons, but to implement them and make changes.
This sounds incredibly obvious, but as many will know, there’s often a huge gulf between the rhetoric of a learning organisation, and the actual amount of learning an organisation does. Culture matters and culture comes from the top.
By expressing the need to “transform to become curious, challenging and constantly adaptable” and by expressing the intention to resource experimentation in a key-note speech, there is hope that this is being taken seriously.
The key strategic risk therefore is that our challengers, themselves recreating a wartime level of innovation via their constant activity, simply outmanoeuvre us again and again, slowly boiling the frog.
The key strategic response is simple: it is to be as adaptive, to be as innovative – to out-compete. A culture that is receptive to innovation, that resources experimentation, and has in-place all the enabling factors General Carter lists, goes some way to achieving this.
However, to truly get to that wartime level of innovation General Carter sees as a goal requires constant dynamic activity, either via exercises or often more preferably, real-world operations. The “greyzone” General Carter speaks of cuts both ways, offering excellent opportunities for us to be proactive and aggressive, whilst defence engagement and real-world conventional operations offers the opportunity for a more visible set of activity to drive conventional force innovation if the political will is there.
Conclusion
I can understand why many felt underwhelmed by the speech, but I argue that General Carter, amongst a lot else, presented a clear, fundamental grand challenge, and presented a clear intention to respond to it. A political will for defence engagement and resolve for conducting varied defensive and aggressive operations in the physical and non-physical domains will be fundamental to bringing the means and ways together to achieve the ends of out-competing our challengers.
Missives from Wales 