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    Reconnecting the People with Defence

    13:00, 29 Mar 2010
    RUSI, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ET
    Link to map: multimap

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    About the event:

    The Rt Hon James Arbuthnot MPA lecture by the Rt. Hon. James Arbuthnot MP, Chairman, House of Commons Defence Committee.

    Since the end of the Cold War, the people of the United Kingdom, and of Europe generally, have become increasingly distant from the idea of defence. They have not felt threatened and have been comfortably sheltered by an American umbrella. The attacks in New York on 11 September 2001 did not change that general perception, and neither did the attacks in London or in Madrid. The power of modern weapons means that greater defence can be provided by fewer people, resulting in a diminishing relationship between the armed forces and the people they protect.
     
    James Arbuthnot discussed why events in Afghanistan, and more importantly in a nuclear-armed Pakistan, should lead us to question whether we can continue in our complacency. The threat of further instability in a region with such close ties to the United Kingdom is one which is not understood; people have tended to conflate the conflicts in Iraq, with which they felt unhappy, and in Afghanistan, which at first they supported. Explaining the purpose of the engagement in Afghanistan must therefore become the most important task of UK and European governments. The restoration of political will should become one of the key priorities for the Strategic Defence Review.

    Full Text of Speech

    Introduction

    So, why are you all here?  What do you want from me?  A solution?  I don't have it.  You want to know what the outcome of the SDR will be?  You want certainty?  You want to know the future shape of defence?  Sorry, can't help.  And neither can anybody else.

    Because we don't know:

              Who will win the election.  Who will be doing what in 6 weeks, let alone 6 months.

              How the financial crisis will feed into the aftermath of the election.

              What the process of the review will bring out

    So you want to know the result of the review before it is held.  Sorry.

    But if you can't have the solution, let's at least try to give you the problem.  There are many facets, and each facet needs to be addressed by different solutions.

    The major problem, and everything else I say will be comparatively unimportant, is that we in the West are losing both the will to defend ourselves and an understanding of what defence is about.  This is a British problem, but not just a British problem.  It permeates the Western world.

    The reasons for this relate to the natural consequences of history.

    Some little time ago the American colonists broke away from the nest and forged out on their own.  They fought a war against us, and eventually succeeded, as teenagers do.  The relationship stabilised, and the last century was characterised by wars in which the United States came to the rescue of Europe.  And we, like elderly parents, became increasingly and resentfully dependent on them.

    So since their first intervention in the First World War, the security of Europe has become closely linked to the foreign policy of the United States, which was focused on its European and Transatlantic aspirations and objectives. US intervention in the Second World War confirmed this.  The creation of NATO in 1949 institutionalised it.

    And NATO was a success.  It has kept the peace for 60 years.  With peace comes prosperity, and it was prosperity that won the cold war.  The vast Western capitalist economy was able to outspend and out-research the sclerotic and inefficient Soviet economy, and in the Cold War the most potent weapon was not the cruise missiles installed at Greenham Common but the economic efficiency created by democracy, which gave us the tax base that the Soviets could never match.

    But also with peace comes complacency.  NATO has become a victim of its own success.  While we had an inadequate understanding of quite how bad the Soviet economy was, that complacency was kept at bay.  But when the Soviet Union imploded, the interests of defence suffered a triple blow.

    • First we no longer had a visible enemy, so it was hard to take money from other areas for defence.
    • Second, and it is a slightly different point, prolonged peace creates flabbiness in the military machine.
    • And third, we had relied during the cold war on the cheap defence provided by nuclear deterrence - we had decided not to match the conventional armaments of the Soviets. When the cold war ended, the world became less rather than more stable. We moved towards a multi-polar world, in which it is less clear that nuclear deterrence works. Yet instead of increasing our conventional defence, we took the peace dividend.

    Now most European countries barely think about looking after their own national security.  NATO has sucked out of public political debate across Europe much of the urgency concerning defence matters which the current situation calls for.

    Fumbling attempts by elements of the European family to develop a greater defence consciousness and capability through the EU have failed.  They would be more convincing if the Europeans stopped combining their demands for a greater say on defence matters with steady reductions of their defence budgets.  US attempts to get its European allies within NATO to focus their minds more upon their own defence and their own contributions to regional and international defence and security have also failed.

    But perhaps we in Europe are weakened not just by being like aging parents that are relying more and more on our feisty child, the United States, but by the very foundations of our society, our religion, our freedom and our democracy.  An open society permits itself to be questioned: the flip-side of this openness is doubt, uncertainty, hesitancy and reluctance.  The manifestation of this may be more visible in other European counties where Governments have fallen on the basis of supporting or using military force - the Dutch Government has now fallen twice.  We in this country may say we are made of sterner stuff but, even if this were true, for how long can we continue to say it?

    Western society is afflicted by doubt and dissension as to its ideological foundations.  As the Harvard meta-historian Christopher Dawson reminded the post-War generations, culture is founded upon cult, the belief that a society has about itself, its origin and purpose.  In Europe we have lost that common cult or belief, and culture itself is fractured and dissonant: without the solid backing of people who believe in some common principles no army can fight its way to a difficult, costly and drawn-out victory.  The nature of the modern media, of the 24 hour news and of the Internet, raises the question, "Do we have the stoicism to see death on our TV screens?"

    This contrasts sharply with the Islamicists we are facing in Afghanistan, where we see that a modern developed alliance of 42 countries can be held at bay by a handful of committed men on motor bikes.  Europe has become "post-militarist" and "free thinking and uncommitted".  That leaves us vulnerable to the "undeveloped but highly committed".

    So that's the first part of the problem.

    The second part of the problem is that we think we can rely on the United States to defend us.  We're wrong.  We're morally wrong because it's degrading and pathetic to shelter behind someone else's coattails.  And we're wrong to believe that the United States will continue to protect Europe while the focus of economic wealth, and therefore of US Defence attention, is shifting to South East Asia.  The USA will defend Europe only for so long as it is in their interests to do so.  But Europe will not spend more on defence until the USA forces it to.

    The third part of the problem is the power of modern weapons.  It allows us to do so much with so few people in the armed forces.  This has the consequence, naturally, that in comparison with recent decades there ARE very few people in the armed forces.  But weapons cannot do the important job, unlike members of the armed forces, of connecting the people with defence and explaining what they do.  That lack of understanding exists despite the 24 hour news I referred to.

    People do not understand that the world is a more dangerous place than it ever has been.  We now have the technology to destroy it.  My own assessment of human nature is that when you have the technology to do something, sooner or later someone tries to see if it works.  As you can tell, I'm a naturally rather gloomy person.  My smile has been described as winter sunshine glinting on a coffin lid.

    And where does this technology exist?  Where else than in one of the least stable regions of the world, in Pakistan.  Europe is failing to lift its eyes to see the scale of the threat of nuclear proliferation in the unstable region around Afghanistan.  It looks likely that Iran will have a nuclear weapon soon.  Just for show?  I'd guess not.  President Ahmedinejad has suggested using such a weapon against Israel. 

    And it is not just nuclear weapons that should concern us.  There are interesting emerging technologies like Electro Magnetic Pulses.  I have a bee in my bonnet about the need to protect against them.  A small tactical EMP could nullify the military and security advantages that we in the developed West have over the relatively undeveloped countries and groups that now are a threat.  Our satellites could be knocked out, our communications severed, military and civil networks brought low.  The national grid could be permanently destroyed.  That would have unpleasant consequences.

    These very powerful weapons we buy are at the cutting edge of technology.  As Bernard Gray pointed out, sometimes we try to buy things that are "just within the laws of physics".  Yet despite that point, oddly enough we also tend to prepare for the last was rather than the next war.

    You would think we would know better.  You would think we would realise that we have got most of our previous predictions wrong.  There are a few people who have made accurate predictions and who are doing so now, but we do not know who they are.

    And as Bernard Gray also pointed out, we do not spend our money on this equipment as well as we could.  Perhaps we do it better than anybody else, but if in so doing we waste billions of pounds a year, that is not saying very much.

    And the fourth part of the problem is that if all those things weren't bad enough, we are faced with a bit of a financial problem.

    Professor Hew Strachan, when he gave evidence to the Defence Committee just over two years ago, on 25 March 2008, said that this country had reached the point where it was impossible to maintain an Armed Forces with balanced capabilities across the spectrum, from the ability to fight a major war to peace-keeping and counter-insurgency operations.  Opinions may differ on this point, and causes for this development may be sought in defence inflation, poor procurement practice or military over-specification of equipment, but there is a sense that even to stand still we must spend more.  And we hear there is no more money left.

    So those are the problems.  Now all we need to do is to find the solutions.

    Solution to lack of will

    The SDR must kick-start a process to re-engage people with defence, politicians and the public at large.  Do not despair.  The first task is to recognise the problem.  And I hope I have set that out with rather alarming candour.

    But the second is to devote our extraordinary resilience and resources towards identifying solutions.  The resources which give us such a problem - our democracy, our Internet, our open society, our 24 hour news, can also help to create the solution.

    George Robertson, former Secretary General of NATO, made an excellent speech earlier this month[1].  And that is where the solutions lie.  They lie in the word inspiration.  It is an idea that has fallen into disuse in modern Britain.  There is something phoney about inspiration.  Not to be trusted.  We must banish that thought as soon as we can, starting in the schools.

    I believe that one of the most inspiring things we could possibly do would be to revitalise the cadet forces of this country, bringing an example of discipline into a school system that seems to lack it.  And there is also something about military music that brings an inspiration that an accountant would find impossible to quantify.  So recreate as many military bands as possible, and send them to every village fete and school playground on a regular basis.  When did you last see a military band at a village fete?  And instead of spending less on the reservists and more on the regulars, reprioritise spending towards the reservists, so that every part of the country has a direct link to the armed forces on a daily basis.

    Show the armed forces we value them.  Does stopping generals from travelling first class send the right messages of how we value those who rise to the top of the calling that sacrifices so much?  Sending signals of economy is valuable, but sending signals of undervaluing is just wrong.  The armed forces are not an equal society - meritocratic, yes, equal, no, and thank God for it.

    But this is not just a battle to be fought in the UK.  We need to fight it in Europe as well.  So we must shift our rhetoric away from "you ghastly Europeans, NATO is our protector" towards "NATO has been our protector - but unless we reenergise defence, NATO will be irrelevant - and so will Europe".

    Solution to the United States

    There is no complete solution to this.  If we try to plead with the USA to continue to defend us because Europe, which is richer than the USA, cannot afford to do so, they will look on us with the contempt we deserve.  But I do believe that while our interests coincide, and I suspect they will continue to do so for many decades and I hope longer, we can show them how it is in their interests to be close to us - in the interests of common cultural, trade and military values.  In order to do that, we in Europe must be better partners for the USA.

    Solution to the power of modern weapons

    Buy them better - that means implementing Bernard Gray.  He may not have got everything right, but he got a hell of a lot more right than wrong, and I think the government needs to accept rather more of his report, with rather more enthusiasm, than it so far has.

    But if we can see an end to salami slicing, a restructuring of the incentives in DE&S to move away from the tribalism of purchasing that currently seems to be the way it's done - and was when I was Min DP - we would get a long way forward.

    What I am not saying is that we should reverse our investment in modern weapons.  R&D gives you battle winning capability decades down the line.  I think it is short sighted of this government to have cut it by 24% in the last three years.  What I am saying is that we should begin to expand the numbers of our personnel again.  There is crucial work to be done by people as opposed to the weapons they carry.

    Solution to the financial problem

    Ah, now that's tricky.

    Barnard Gray will help.  A revitalised public will towards defence will help.  A greater European commitment will help.  But in the end it is not enough.

    The last time we spent just over 2% of our GDP on defence was n the early 1930s, and we know what that led to.  It currently reinforces the view of our enemies that we are weak, divided, uncommitted and defeatable, which of course forces us to spend more.

    So.  All of this comes with an increasingly heavy price-tag.  Unless we change how people feel about defence then it all means nothing.

    As George Robertson suggested, we need to get out there and make the case for what we are doing, for what we believe in and why we do.  And this will be the greatest task of the Strategic Defence Review to come immediately after the election.

    I shall end by telling you that a couple of weeks ago I saw a wonderful film, Invictus.  I recommend it.  It is about Nelson Mandela and his conscious decision to inspire a largely white South African Springboks team to win the Rugby world cup - and in so doing to break down the racial barriers that bedevilled South Africa.  He relied on a poem by William Ernest Henley which ends with the words, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul".

    Let us take those words to heart.  Permanent decline can be our fate if we permit it; but if instead we re-energise ourselves, we can reclaim our former self-respect.

    Notes 

    [1] I ask you for a moment to recall the spring of 1940 in Europe. The Nazis had swept though the Low Countries and into France. The British Expeditionary Force had been defeated and had retreated from Dunkirk with most of Britain's fighting equipment left on the other side of the Channel. The US government was still refusing to intervene, the US Ambassador to London - JFK's father, resolutely oblivious to the Nazi menace. There were no other allies of consequence, and the British Cabinet was split with a significant appeasement faction led by Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax wanting to sue for peace.

    At that moment, chronicled in John Lukacs brilliant book 'Five days in London, May 1940', Hitler was winning and Britain was defeated. On paper, that is. The fact that we are free people today is due mainly to the fact that Winston Churchill inspired the British people to not accepting or even contemplating defeat. He made it clear that

    Britain would fight on and that the Nazis would be defeated. It was a triumphant psychological approach which simultaneously rallied the people of Britain and rattled Adolf Hitler and it transcended the facts on the ground which looked so bleak. We should take note today.

    The views expressed above are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of RUSI.

    Event manager: Sabrina Downey

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