A strategic defence and security review that really matters

A review of national strategy will be undertaken this year and it really matters. It really matters because of Brexit, because of Global Britain, because of the challenges of a globalised and digitised world, but, above all, it really matters because we never got around to answering US Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s jibe in 1962 that we had “lost an empire but not yet found a role”.

Instead of taking the challenge head on, we chose to subsume national strategy within a collective European identity and dodge hard choices for another 50 or so years.

Acheson’s quip was more astute than perhaps even he intended. Empire began shaping Britain’s national strategy in the late 17th century and continued to do so until the 20th century, when first global conflict and then Europe became the defining issues. With neither Empire nor Europe defining our interests, Britain’s national strategy is no longer pre-determined by external factors.

We have a degree of strategic choice perhaps unavailable for the last 300 years. This is evident in a nervous debate that swings from the euphoria of those who see another Elizabethan Age of buccaneering enterprise, to the forebodings of those who foresee isolation on the world stage.

The Prime Minister has said he will personally supervise the review process. This matters, but not in the sense that the process would be poorer without the occasional Thucydidean allusion to the strategic legacy of the Peloponnesian War. A review of this sort can only be conducted properly by the head of the executive arm of government. Anything that resides in a single department with proprietorial interests — the MoD or FCO — would be limited by their factional concerns. The process must be conducted from the point that has access to and authority over all instruments of formal national power, so Boris gets the job.

He will be helped by his wingmen. Dominic Cummings should stop it becoming dull and Sir Mark Sedwill, the Cabinet Secretary, will bring the focus of a long-time security professional with experience at the sharp end of national strategy. Whether Sedwill, as the busiest man in government, should hold the post of National Security Adviser as well as the day job, is a moot point, but, in the specific case of the review, it will bring a welcome clarity of purpose. It’s too early to see an outcome but easy enough to spot some of the issues that will shape the debate.

First is the fact that we are already at war. Not war in the dictionary definition of armed conflict between state entities, initiated by a formal declaration, concluded by the occupation of the enemy’s capital and codified by instruments of surrender. Rather, we are in a state of perpetual conflict with both states and non-state actors who seek marginal advantage in limited, tactical and frequently non-military engagements which, taken in aggregate, can confer decisive strategic advantage.

For the Chinese, this is easy and plays to Sun Tzu’s legacy of strategic disguise, with its central theme of avoiding strength and exploiting weakness. Re-worked for the 21st century, this sees cyberwar, intellectual property theft, restrictive trade practices, economic entryism, disinformation dressed up as education, lawfare (bending the rules to China’s advantage) and information operations used in place of conventional warfare. In the same way, Russia has abandoned its traditional strategic reliance on military mass and mastered the subtle deceptions of Hybrid Warfare. This is where internet trolling replaces artillery fire as the means of shaping today’s battlefields, which occupy cognitive rather than physical space.

And that’s just the opposition. As everything from the Stuxnet cyber-attack on the Iranian nuclear programme to the Trump penchant for punitive tariffs shows, the west is equally adept at finding new instruments to achieve strategic advantage. The overall effect is to move away from the idea that conflict is primarily about military action that is attributable and episodic, to something non-military, potentially anonymous, pervasive. Conflict has become the background noise to everyday life.

Second, bombs and bullets are no longer a sufficient answer. The military may retain the state monopoly on lethal violence but it has no claim to be the invariable author of strategic outcomes. Future strategy will only be effective if it can reach beyond the formal instruments of national power — military force, diplomacy, aid and economic power — and incorporate informal elements like advertising, communications, big data and artificial intelligence.

In a world where the realm of human perception is now both a marketing environment and a conflict zone, the review will be incomplete unless it extends into those parts of civil society rarely touched by official process. This will be a real test of the convening power of No. 10 and the collective civil service imagination; indeed, Mr Cummings’ weirdos and misfits may have found their role.

It is unclear whether the implications of all this have yet registered with the armed forces. Military leadership has plenty on its plate, with the inability to recruit, the eternal black hole in long-term funding and the chastening experience of recent conflicts. It is being exhorted to embrace Fusion Doctrine, which recognises space, cyber and information as warfare environments, in addition to the traditional domains of land, sea and air. If it can pull that off, Britain will have military capabilities fit for the 21st century.

But the danger is that the scale of the challenge is simply overwhelming and that the individual services fall back on the crudest indices of institutional success — the number of ships, tanks and aircraft each manages to blag in the next spending round. If so, Britain will have military capabilities fit for the mid-20th century.

Third, the world is burning at both ends. What the Cambridge historian Eric Hobsbawm defined as the ‘short 20th century’, the period 1914-89, was characterised by great power politics and alliance wars. There were sub-plots, like the extended wars of de-colonisation fought by several European nations, but these were often sponsored or hijacked by the wider East/West confrontation.

9/11 changed all that and we embarked on small wars of liberal intervention. Where we had spent most of the 20th century defending liberal values in our own country, we spent the early years of the 21st century promoting them in other people’s. Briefly, conflict was no longer concerned with great power rivalry. During that hiatus, China worked its economic miracle and Russia redefined its strategic ambitions to emerge today as ambitious players on the world stage.

However, domestic and international terrorism has not gone away. Its effects domestically are more likely to be divisive than decisive, but it is a constant distraction from what now might be a bigger game. Internationally, jihadist terrorism will endure and while Isis has been temporarily defeated in physical terms it continues to flourish in a virtual dimension.

Add to that an incipient religious war in the Middle East between the Sunni and Shia strands of Islam, a situation where the governments of Mexico, Iraq, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are powerless spectators to conflicts in their own countries, the untold effects of climate change and potential nuclear proliferation and you have an all-court challenge to the imagination of even the most competent process of strategic analysis. Where, for most of the last 100 years, we faced threats that looked potentially mortal, they tended to come in single dimensions. Now, while we face no single, epochal challenge, we have to cover multiple strategic bases simultaneously, any one of which could pose an existential threat.

These are just three pointers to how the debate might unfold in the UK. There are plenty more — but that’s probably enough to be getting on with.