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The Future Defence Review: Red Teaming a Green Paper - Part of the RUSI Future Defence Review Event Series

Speech delivered to the RUSI Future Defence Review Conference by Tom McKane, Director-General Strategy, Ministry of Defence

Introduction

There are obviously constraints on what it is possible for me to say when the Green Paper is still in the process of being drafted, let alone being presented to Parliament.  However, as a number of those present know, we have tried to be inclusive and open in our approach to the task.  And one significant contribution to the Green Paper process - the work on the future character of conflict - has already been presented to you by Major General Paul Newton.  So while I cannot say what the Green Paper will or will not say about particular issues, I hope to give you sufficient sense of the ground it will cover to provide a starting point for today's proceedings.

When the Secretary of State for Defence announced the decision to produce a Green Paper he said, and I quote:

"... the Government is beginning a process that will enable a Strategic Defence Review early in the next Parliament ...  As a first step, we will undertake an examination of a range of issues, including the strategic context for defence ...  I intend to publish the results of this work in the form of a Green Paper in early 2010.  I ... hope the Green Paper will help build a consensus on these critical underlying issues for defence."

It is worth making two points by way of amplification:

• First, the Defence Secretary's determination to be as inclusive as possible and to establish a consensus about the starting point for the defence review, which all the main political parties have committed themselves to carrying out after the general election. As well as taking part in conferences such as today's and initiating a small number of seminars on topics such as 'soft power' and looking back to the 1997/98 Strategic Defence Review, we have undertaken some on-line testing of public opinion and made use of the Kings College London Kings of War blog. And the Defence Secretary established a Defence Advisory Forum, with senior cross-party participation to act as a sounding board on aspects of the Green Paper work.
• Second, the Green Paper is a preliminary part of the defence review and its scope reflects that fact. It will describe the landscape within which the review will take place and identify key issues or themes for the review. But it will not tackle questions of force structure, detailed capability requirements or lay-down.

Previous Reviews

The phrase 'Strategic Defence Review' - and it has been used both by the Government and opposition party spokesmen - implies that the methodology of the 1997/98 Review is the exemplar, which should be followed in 2010.  Certainly the approach taken then - what has been widely described as a policy-led review - won many plaudits.  But there is a certain amount of mythology about it.  The idea that there were no financial constraints on the development of policy is plainly not true.  Otherwise what would there have been to prevent the review team from producing a policy that would have required an army of 200,000, several carrier strike battle groups and an air force many times the size of what actually emerged?  Equally, it is untrue that there was no serious attempt to cost the resultant force structure and equipment plans until after the event - though it is the case that the force structure was approved before the budget was finalised and that, as a consequence, efficiency assumptions which turned out to be over-optimistic were incorporated into the arithmetic.

The fact is - as a reading of the Defence White Papers which followed Defence Reviews since the 1950s reveals - that there is no single pattern for these reviews, though a number of themes emerge, including the huge reduction in the size of the Armed Forces, the reduction in the share of GDP devoted to defence - from 10% in 1957 to around 2.5% today, and aircraft carriers.  Most of the Reviews have taken place against the background of a defence programme which was becoming increasingly difficult to afford.  Some of them - particularly those in the 1960s and 1970s - were held in a difficult economic climate, and were explicit about the need to secure a sound economic platform as a pre-requisite for sound defence. 

Let me read to you a couple of quotes from previous Reviews:

"Britain's influence in the world depends first and foremost on the health of her internal economy and the success of her export trade.  Without these military power cannot in the long run be supported.  It is therefore in the true interests of defence that the claims of military expenditure should be considered in conjunction with the need to maintain the country's financial and economic strength." (1957)

"... the Government must strike a balance between the best estimate it can now make of Britain's probable defence requirements and the degree of flexibility it can afford as an insurance against the inherent fallibility of judgement." (1968)

There is nothing new under the sun!  The second of these quotes, in particular, strikes me as a timeless summation of the task of those undertaking defence reviews. 

Foreign Policy Baseline vs National Security Strategy

The 1997/98 SDR started from a Foreign Policy Baseline, which was not published, but was summarised in the SDR White Paper.  Some have asked why we haven't started the current Green Paper exercise with a fresh Foreign Policy Baseline.  The answer is that today we have the National Security Strategy, including last year's update which contained a description of the United Kingdom's interests.  We have drawn extensively on this in our work on the Green Paper.

The June 2009 update to the National Security Strategy  set out a set of planning assumptions about the drivers of insecurity, the threat actors and the domains in which these threats might arise.  There was for the foreseeable future no state with the intent and capability to threaten the independence, integrity and self government of the United Kingdom, though the re-emergence of such a threat could not be ruled out.  In our work we have identified a number of trends that will shape the international context for defence:  the rise of Asia, the continuing march of globalisation, climate change, growing inequality and wider access to advanced technologies.

Today's Circumstances

If I were to pick out two distinctive features of the circumstances in which the next Defence Review will be conducted, they would be:

• the continuing international military engagement in Afghanistan
• the fiscal climate

Starting with Afghanistan, it would be extraordinary if a defence review taking place today were not to be substantially coloured by our experience there.  The costs, in both human and financial terms, have been far greater for the UK than they were in the Balkans in the 1990s.  As a consequence of our experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we have had to re-learn lessons about counter-insurgency operations.  Afghanistan today and for the next few years will be our main effort.  And, as the Defence Secretary's 15 December announcement made clear, we will do everything we can to shift priorities within the defence programme accordingly.  But the big question remains to what extent we need to re-shape defence capabilities into the longer term in the expectation that tomorrow's wars will be more like today's than those of previous decades.  Paul Newton touched on this subject when he spoke here in October and I will return to it later.

The impact of the fiscal crisis on public expenditure will be substantial.  As for defence, in the absence of continuing real terms growth in the size of the budget there will inevitably be further difficult decisions to be taken about the size and shape of the armed forces.  This is not to say that overall defence capability will reduce.  Clearly successive generations of military equipment are not only more expensive but also more capable.  But however much greater efficiency and technical innovation can compensate, the fact remains that real terms increases in the costs of manpower must result in lower overall numbers.

Defence as an Insurance Policy

The future is unknowable and defence planners have a poor record in predicting the location and character of UK military engagements.  Afghanistan was outside the 'core regions' for the 1998 Strategic Defence Review.  HMS Endurance was to be withdrawn from the South Atlantic following the 1981 Defence Review.  Predicting the course of events even at short range is fraught with difficulty:  we expected limited and inexpert opposition in Suez and feared prolonged irregular resistance in Bosnia.  Dstl have mapped conflicts since 1945.  They found no pattern towards or away from larger, more symmetric or more deadly conflicts.  And concluded that extrapolation of recent behaviours proves a poor guide to future conflicts.

It is this very uncertainty which explains why, however secure we may feel as a nation, it makes sense to continue to devote part of our tax revenue to defence.  As has been said many times before, it is our premium on an insurance policy.  It is not for the MOD to decide what size of premium the tax-payer should pay for defence, but the MOD does need to be able to explain what can be bought by the defence budget and why it costs what it does.  In an era of greater transparency about all aspects of Government the MOD will have to do better.  It will be in the interests of defence to be more transparent, whatever the particular embarrassments. 

But to say that defence is an insurance policy does not take you far towards deciding how best to spend limited resources.  We have to decide, for example: 

• how much influence in the world we should aspire to including in the field of conflict prevention
• whether it is realistic to continue to assume, as we did in the past, that by planning for high intensity war we will be ready for lower-intensity operations
• whether role-specialisation provides a sensible approach to certain capabilities
• whether the Defence Planning Assumptions, which have remained largely unchanged since 1998, continue to make sense as we look ahead.

Green Paper Methodology

The method we followed in preparing for the Green Paper was to commission more than 20 separate pieces of work on subjects ranging from the lessons learned from operations since 1998 to alliances and partnerships, from the cost pressures in defence to Service personnel issues.  The Green Paper will in effect be a distillation of all of these pieces of work, blended to reflect their consideration by officials from across Whitehall, informal contact with industry and academia, the Defence Advisory Forum and the Defence Ministerial Committee.

Lessons Learned

We have considered the lessons of the past decade.  We must not brush unpalatable truths under the carpet.  Equally we need to avoid turning this into an exercise in self-flagellation.  Because the truth is that there have been many successes.  Our people have performed outstandingly well and many of the principles of the 1998 Review - the Joint approach and the importance of 'key enablers', for example - have proved right.  But some things we got wrong.  The most glaring, as we all know, is the assumption that we would be first into a crisis and quickly out of it. 

Future Character of Conflict

One of the most significant pieces of work was the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre's study of the Future Character of Conflict.  You will recall Paul Newton's description of the future battlefield as:

• Contested
• Congested
• Cluttered
• Connected

This has not only won plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic, it has become an indispensable shorthand mnemonic for the type of battlefield we can expect to face in future - one in which

• there is a need to fight for access and freedom of manoeuvre even in the deployment phase of an operation.
• there is the probability of being drawn into urban areas, the seas close to the coast and lower air space.
• it is difficult to in identify targets when hostile forces, friendly forces, media, NGOs and local population are mixed up together.
• lines of communication are to attack and disruption

Since Paul spoke to you, we have added a further characteristic - constrained.  Legal and societal norms, which are essential to the legitimacy of our actions, will limit us but not our adversaries.

As we approach the forthcoming Review we need to do more work to get a better understanding of what this means for future defence capabilities and force structure.  However, as the Chief of the Defence Staff in his annual RUSI speech before Christmas pointed out, we need to beware of some of the hype surrounding ideas such as hybrid warfare and asymmetric warfare.  'So what's new?' he asked.  And 'Just because we've rediscovered that the enemy gets a vote doesn't mean that everything which was said about the Revolution in Military Affairs was wrong.  No one, for example, would decry the vital importance on today's battlefield of Network Enabled Capability or the ability to take actionable intelligence and use it before the enemy can.

Adaptability

The big question for defence planners remains the extent to which we should reshape future defence capabilities to reflect the requirements of today.  My answer to this question is that of course we must do so to some extent.  But possibly more important is that we become more adaptable - or versatile or agile, depending on which adjective you prefer.  Again, this may not be a new idea but it is more important today than ever before.

The Defence Industrial Strategy adopted this theme in the form of spiral development.  We need to ask ourselves whether we have really lived up to this principle.  We need to task ourselves whether we have struck the right balance between investment in research and the equipment programme.  But it goes beyond the equipment procurement field into the way that we train and organise our Armed Forces and their civilian and contractor support.

As an aside, I think that the question of 'reconstitution' which was popular in the early 1990s but has been largely forgotten about in the interim is worth revisiting.  There are mixed views about the usefulness of studying this question and I would welcome the reaction of this conference.

Partnership

If adaptability is one theme, partnership is another.  Partnership takes many forms:

• At one level it is a statement of the obvious that the UK will need to continue to rely on alliances and partnerships. More seriously, though, the question is whether the UK can on its own still aspire to undertake operations other than in defence of itself and its dependent territories. And given the impact of globalisation and the emergence of new threats to security, such as climate change, to what extent does it make any sense for the UK to operate other than as part of a larger group.
• Partnership across Whitehall is another dimension. The Comprehensive Approach has become established as a concept and is alive and well in Afghanistan and Whitehall. The question for the future is how much further the approach can be taken. How do we ensure in future that we consistently take a whole of Government approach to overseas contingencies? How do we build on the progress made to date with the Stabilisation Unit and the deployable civilian component?
• What is the significance of the partnership idea to 'soft power'? If we live in a world where achieving our objectives depends on working through local actors, what does this imply for the priority to which the MOD accords such activity?

Space and Cyber Security

In the course of our work we have also considered what new dimensions of defence activity we need to take account of in the future Review.  The work we have done and the opinions of other experts all point in the same direction, one which was set out in the National Security Strategy:  Space and Cyber Security.

The extent to which the west in particular is reliant on Space for the operation of the most mundane but essential aspects of modern living has become a somewhat commonplace observation in informed circles.  The Rt Hon James Arbuthnot MP drew attention to it in an address he made to this institute last July.  Defence too is dependent on unimpeded access to space for a range of purposes.  We need to be clear-headed about the potential vulnerability that this creates and about the possible impact of increased demand for access to space-capabilities.

The Government produced its first cyber security strategy last year.  The MOD is playing a full part in the cross-Government cyber security effort.  This is consistent with our firm view that this issue is best tackled on a Government-wide basis.  In addition, however, we need to expect adversaries, whether state or non-state, to make increasing use of cyber to attack us whether here in the UK or on the battlefield.  We need in consultation with our close allies to understand the full implications of these developments for defence, including legal and political considerations.

Deterrence and Persuasion

None of this should be taken to imply that we give less weight to deterrence - to dissuade potential adversaries from acting in a manner which would threaten our security.  The Government's position on the nuclear deterrent was set out in the 2006 White Paper and subsequently repeated in the National Security Strategy.  We need to ensure too that we maintain and refresh our understanding of the broader persuasive effect which our armed forces in the round can have.

Peroration

This conference has been organised with the objective of 'red-teaming' or 'critiquing' the emerging Green Paper thinking.  I hope this speech has given you sufficient flavour of what is likely to emerge. 

There is in fact no scientific way to determine how much we should spend on defence and the posture we should adopt.  There are policy choices.  It is frequently asked why Britain and France spends approximately 1% more of GDP on defence than most other European countries and considerably less than the US.  In the end, as my former boss, Sir Michael Quinlan once commented, it is about the type of country we think we are.  It is important in the forthcoming Review that this question is thoroughly aired.