Has the Defence Review secured Britain's place in the world?

By Professor Michael Clarke, Director, RUSI

On Monday, the latest National Security Strategy was unveiled. Yesterday, the defence and security review to give effect to it was announced. A week ago, these were all part of the same review, but the Government decided to split them up as a matter of 'presentation'. First the story; then the numbers. But the story and the numbers don't fit together very well - and a 24-hour pause doesn't make them look any more suited to each other.

This is hardly surprising. Defence reviews are never easy and this one has been conducted under much more pressure - of time, finances, events, not to mention a war in Afghanistan - than any since 1945. Of course it is painful. Bases such as Kinloss will close, because the Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft is being cancelled; big ships including the Ark Royal are being scrapped; 25,000 civilians will lose their jobs, along with a 17,000 reduction in Armed Service numbers. It is inevitable that the spotlight will fall on the jobs lost, the famous names scrapped, the military hardware retired or cancelled. These cuts are not trivial.

But nor are they the essence of what strategic defence planning should be about. We should not judge the review on the basis of the views of one, or even all, of the three Services. The Service Chiefs are the first to admit that they are the servants of the state and will do whatever is legally required of them, as long as they genuinely understand what the state is asking. Strategy is political and the military are there to inform it, not to devise it.

For all the arguing and the leaks that have surrounded this exercise, there is some clear grand strategy behind it. The Government has decided that Britain will still strive to remain a global player. The Prime Minister yesterday even used the old phrase of a previous Conservative government, that Britain would still "punch above its weight". It will do this by recognising the general alignment of interests it feels with the United States and aiming to keep its Armed Forces above a threshold that the US takes seriously. It will put more "soft power" effort into heading off problems before they turn military, as did the last government, but the review as a whole is based on an implicit rejection of the Blair approach that Britain should aim principally to be a 'force for good' in the world.

In the Blair years, military activity was conceived as essentially discretionary - and in those years, it generally was. But now, the Government makes a straight national interest defence for the enlightened role Britain should play, recognising that the generally benign conditions of a decade ago may be wearing off quickly. Destabilising wars in places that matter to us; the loss of political influence in regions from which we buy energy; the prospect of renewed military competition, after a 30-year interregnum, between the great and emerging powers of the world, where Britain will have to decide on its loyalties - all of these affect the national interest and provide reasons for keeping forces geared to high tempo operations.

In Blair's 'discretionary operations', as he outlined in his Chicago speech of 1999, the forces go when a number of conditions are met and there are good prospects of success and a return home. In operations driven by real national interest, the forces just go. For the military, this is a different planning assumption.

For these reasons (and a few party political ones), David Cameron made a strategic choice at the weekend in appearing to have agreed, against strong Treasury pressure, to impose no more than an 8 per cent cut on defence across the board, putting more pressure on cuts in other ministries. He was less convincing yesterday when he tried to elaborate on the defence element of the overall security strategy. The National Security Strategy is a good attempt to pin down the elusive concept of 'security' for a modern, prosperous, small state living in a stable part of the world but with global interests to nurture. But that document does not have much to say about the hard choices that leaders have to make about real issues. It's a good checklist of threats, such as to cyber security, that leaders need to keep in mind.

And here is the mis-match. If we are to take the National Security Strategy really seriously, we might logically be looking at a much greater shift of resources from military 'hard power' towards diplomatic, economic or cultural 'soft power' - playing our role in the world in more subtle ways.

But the Government feels instinctively that this would be too much of a risk, so the strategy has been to interpret 'punching above our weight' essentially in conventional military terms; and terms that we think matter to the United States. Agree with it or not, that part at least is consistent with the Prime Minister's grand strategic view of what we should be doing in the world. This is why the two parts of the strategy do not match very well. The review has really struggled to get over the short-term pressures and has gone for the cuts that are possible, as opposed to those that might make a real difference to Britain's long-term strategy.

The decision on aircraft carriers, which provokes such derision - scrapping Ark Royal, building two and only using one, and that without any aircraft for some years - is quite logical. If we assume that carriers might be needed for heavy and distant operations, not now but some time later, the essence is to keep the relevant skills alive and have a force that will eventually be top of the range. On the other hand, the Navy is sacrificing a lot of 'flexibility', 'adaptability' and other desirable aspects described in the National Security Strategy in giving up useful frigates and destroyers to pay for the carriers.

The curious conclusion is that the MoD has been given a lot of pain in having to make these 8 per cent cuts, but has also been let off the hook in not having to make much greater ones. The Government has salami-sliced the Forces, making savings where it can, and runs the risk of creating an eccentric force structure to back up a pretty ambitious national strategy.

The force structure will be judged 'eccentric' if it maintains major weapons systems, such as the carriers, the Trident nuclear force, or relatively high numbers of fast jets (all good from a US perspective), but cannot sustain operations because of a lack of transport, support or protection, and cannot invest in the new technologies of smart command and control and electronic warfare. The statement yesterday did not give much hope that any of these military "enablers" would benefit from a step change in the MoD's approach to them.

We also have to recognise that the war in Afghanistan is a major limiting factor in how far this review can go. Operations in Afghanistan, one way or another, account for something like a third of the MoD's budget; it diverts existing expenditure and soaks up new money. Again, the Government has made a strategic choice that success has to be paramount and the whole thing ring-fenced until after 2015.

The broader downsides of failure in Afghanistan are judged to be far greater than the costs of success for the next few years. That, too, is a clear strategic posture. And that makes it impossible to address the pros and cons of the Tornado jet fleet, or a restructuring of the Army, or a better way of using the Reserve forces, as we might have in any previous review.

The good news is that the Government has committed itself to five-yearly reviews, so the work here will go forward to another review in 2015. Reviews should no longer be left until they are forced upon us, where we look for a once-in-a-generation settlement of our defence and security. On the other hand, this review has not taken as big a step down the road to real reform as many had hoped six months ago.

We might give one cheer for the fact that defence has come through this brutal process with more intact than it might have expected, and greater opportunities to reform itself in a less febrile atmosphere after this year. And we might give half a cheer that the Government is serious about developing a genuine strategy for national security - albeit somewhat aspirational so far. These days, that probably feels like a good reception.

This article first appeared in the Daily Telegraph, 20 October, 2010