20
Examination of witnesses
Professor Jamie Shea and Professor Mark Webber.
Q100 The Chair: Good morning. I welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee Professor Jamie Shea, NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary-General for Emerging Security Challenges for the eight-year period of 2010-18, and Professor Mark Webber, University of Birmingham.
Thank you very much indeed for joining us today to contribute to our inquiry “Defence concepts and capabilities: from aspiration to reality”. During our one-hour session today, we will be not only broadcast but transcribed; it is on the record. I always remind both witnesses and members that when we ask questions, if we have a relevant interest to declare we should do so at that point. As ever, I will start with a rather general question before turning to my colleagues, who will ask more focused questions. I anticipate that my colleagues will wish to ask supplementaries related to their questions.
This is the first question. What is your assessment of the overall position of the UK in NATO? Last week, we watched closely the activity there. What is the scale of our influence, in your judgment? How effective is the UK in promoting its own agenda in NATO itself?
Professor Jamie Shea: The UK has always been a big player in NATO. It was, of course, one of the founding fathers, in the shape of Ernest Bevin. It has supplied more Secretary-Generals than any other NATO member state.
It has also traditionally kept a number of senior positions. Until recently, it held the position of chairman of the Military Committee with Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach. It has always held the position of Deputy SACEUR, the deputy to the Supreme Allied Commander, who has also had a role in generating forces for EU operations in the past. It has always had an Assistant Secretary-General, notably connected with defence planning and policy. In terms of representation, the UK has always punched above its weight and above many other companies.
Secondly, the UK is a firm supporter of NATO. Particularly in the wake of Brexit, it sees that it will be present in Europe and exert influence and weight through the NATO alliance. Fortunately for the UK, Brexit coincides with NATO becoming more significant in any case because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. We can talk more about that later.
Of course, NATO is an alliance where influence is directly proportionate to contribution. In this respect, the UK has always made a number of significant contributions to NATO. It hosts NATO's Allied Maritime Command—MARCOM—at Northwood. It plays a big role in the lines of communication across the Atlantic with its maritime capabilities. It also has expeditionary capabilities. It has commanded the NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force in recent years. It leads in Estonia, as I am sure this committee knows very well. It has increased its contribution there and put 1,000 extra troops in Poland. It has taken on an air policing role in Romania. The UK knows very well that, going forward, a demonstration of military commitment also translates into more political influence.
My final point as a quick general answer at the beginning is that the UK has also always been committed to the other side of NATO, which I dealt with in my final job there when I was in charge of emerging security challenges. The UK saw that there was a role for NATO in what we call resilience and in dealing with hybrid threats. We would not have got as far as we did in cyber defence at NATO without the UK. The UK was in fact the first country to volunteer its national cyber capabilities on behalf of the alliance. GCHQ gave us an enormous amount of help with intelligence. It pushed forward a NATO cyber-defence pledge to persuade allies to take on commitments on resilience as well as to classical military forces.
The UK is active in the alliance. It uses all the instruments that it sees there for collective defence and for hybrid warfare/resilience issues. It is a big participant in exercises, and it was the first country to offer Finland and Sweden temporary security guarantees pending their accession to NATO, a process that started in Brussels yesterday morning.
Professor Mark Webber: First, I concur with everything Jamie has said. Let me add a few points of extra heft to that. You can summarise this in a ready formula. NATO is vital to the UK, and the UK is vital to NATO. The United Kingdom contribution to NATO, which we have just heard sketched out, is probably the most important European contribution in terms of command structure, contribution to the leadership of the Alliance, defence expenditure and contribution to operations.
We may come to this later, but the UK contribution over time to the two missions in Afghanistan, the mission in Bosnia and the mission in Kosovo was only bettered by the United States in relation to troop numbers, casualties, fatalities and so on. That is clearly recognised amongst the other allies and, importantly, by Washington. In that sense, the relationship is reciprocally beneficial to both sides.
It is also worth adding this. The bedrock UK position on NATO has been without controversy since the founding of the alliance back in 1949. The UK has been firmly committed to the alliance without equivocation, which is very different from France, Spain or even, periodically, the United States. It has contributed very materially to the political cohesion and leadership of the alliance. That is very important, particularly at times when the alliance has seemed to be divided or looking outwardly to be competing with its strategic competitors on values as well as on interests. The United Kingdom is very forthright in arguing in favour of the values and the political cohesion of the alliance.
I have two quick further points on the political cohesion issue. We may have time to follow this up later. The domestic political consensus on membership of the alliance is rock solid. There are some caveats to that. The Green Party, Plaid Cymru and periodically the Scottish National Party have not fully conformed to that position, but the SNP is now very much in favour of NATO membership. If we were to have indyref2, some of those issues may be flushed up once more. Public opinion in the UK is very strongly in favour of NATO. The UK’s Atlanticist opinion is amongst the strongest in the whole of the alliance.
My final point is about the influence the United Kingdom can bring to bear. In some ways this is an extension of its material contribution. It would be natural that the United Kingdom would exercise leadership through its occupancy of the three Secretary-Generals and possibly the next one. Who knows? There is a lot of speculation that folk in this very building may be lining up for that job. The fact that that is in the water reflects the high esteem in which the United Kingdom is held, but there are very particular and important episodes in NATO's history where the UK has been fundamental.
At the end of the Cold War, the Thatcher Administration was very much in favour of a continuation of the transatlantic alliance rather than the beefing up of a nascent European pillar for defence. Tony Blair was very important to the interventions in the Balkans in the late 1990s. The United Kingdom—maybe this has been under the bonnet or less obvious—has been very significant in the transformation of NATO doctrine on counterinsurgency and so on, because of its role in Afghanistan and its bilateral role in other global conflicts and the domestic one in Northern Ireland.
To summarise all that, it is absolutely clear that the United Kingdom is a very important, if not the most important, European player in the alliance. That is likely to continue for some considerable time.
Professor Jamie Shea: Chair, if you would allow me just to add something that is absolutely fundamental, which we have not mentioned, the UK is the only European member of NATO that provides a standing nuclear guarantee to the alliance through the Nuclear Planning Group. In the current circumstances, that is arguably now even more important than it was in the past.
The Chair: Thank you very much for giving us the view of NATO, the context in which the UK is operating now, and the context in which you have operated in the past. That has given us a very good way forward for our questions analysing the now.
Q101 Lord Stirrup: Gentlemen, good morning. One of the central features of last year's Defence Command Paper was the identification of Russia as the most acute threat facing the UK and of China as a key strategic challenge. This gives rise to questions of prioritisation and the balance of defence effort in particular between NATO tasks and what in old money we might have referred to as out of area.
In thinking about that, it would be helpful to have your views on the nature and scale of the defence challenges NATO faces today and over the next decade. How would you rank these? How would you set them, in priority terms, against any other threats the UK might face elsewhere? Could you also say a word about the value the UK military in particular adds in defence terms to NATO? Are there any areas in particular where we could take more of a back seat and let others make the running?
Professor Jamie Shea: Thank you for an excellent question. This will not be a surprise to the committee, but clearly, after 24 February, collective defence is NATO's core business and will be for some years to come. You saw the results of the Madrid summit. There has been a significant reinforcement of NATO forces on the eastern flank, a significant raising of the level of readiness, from 40,000 to 300,000, in the bulk of NATO forces and the construction of more command infrastructure. There is speculation that the UK will also build more command infrastructure in Estonia, as the United States has agreed to build a corps headquarters, the V Corps headquarters, in Poland. There are more intensive exercises and more pre-positioning of heavy equipment and so on.
NATO has taken on quite an ambitious agenda there. It has made a good start with the temporary deployments since 24 February to provide reassurance, but the key thing now is to translate that into a more permanent presence on the eastern flank, backed up by quickly mobilisable and adequate reserves, and to sustain it financially over the long run, as it could continue for some time to come.
Inevitably, if that is the priority—I am sure the committee is looking at this—this will raise questions particularly for the UK. The UK is heavily embedded in that. It was already before 24 February through its lead in Estonia, its major participation in the NATO Response Force and NATO exercises and its taking on of air policing and air defence tasks, particularly in Romania.
The question is about what is left for other contingencies in the Indo-Pacific. I saw in the margin of Madrid that Ben Wallace, the UK Defence Secretary, said that one of the two new aircraft carriers would be on station for NATO at any time. This then begs the question of what the UK's level of ambition would be on presence and projecting power. Remember the carrier task force that went to the South China Sea last year. What would the possibilities be there? What would the ambition be there? What would the capabilities be?
I live in Brussels, as you know. The perception there is that the UK is clearly going to get sucked back into Europe. Even before 24 February, the Government took the decisions to rebuild a military facility at Sennelager in Germany and the like. The challenge for the UK, therefore, is to see how it proportions itself across the various tasks.
To my mind, there are three things here. First, the UK Army, which is 81,000 today—you know this so much better than I do—is going down to 73,000 or something according to the Integrated Review. The Government set out a plan, which was that it would have a small army that was super well equipped, with cyber, artificial intelligence and the 16th Brigade dealing with disinformation and so on. It would fill vital niche capabilities, because of its specialised role in the NATO command structure, against what were considered at the time to be hybrid-type threats, little green men and cyberattacks coming from Russia.
What we have seen in Ukraine is a much more classical conventional war, with large armies, tanks, artillery and the rest. NATO is trying to go back to brigades and heavy armour. This is the big issue. What kind of debate will NATO have about dealing with the Russian way of warfare? The Russian way of warfare is to use artillery, to shell, to bombard, to attack civilian targets, to cause environmental hazards and to cause humanitarian crises. Does NATO deal with that by mimicking the Russian order of battle—“They have tanks; we need tanks. They have artillery; we need artillery”—or does it look at another approach?
The UK will need to look at the decision from NATO. The idea of having 300,000 troops at high readiness is an indication of that. Germany, for example, announced in Madrid that it was also going to form an armoured division of 15,000, with tanks, and come back to a more traditional posture. Does the UK follow that trend and say, “Hey, we need to increase the size of the Army, because we need to play a role in what will be a land warfare operation”? Does the UK say, “No, we’ll leave that to the Germans”? The UK could let Germany go back to its Cold War role of providing the bulk of NATO’s heavy divisions.
Do we say, “We’ll leave that to the Poles”? The Finns do this already. They have five well-equipped armoured brigades and 200,000 well-equipped reservists. Do we say, “We’ll leave that to the Romanians”? The eastern Europeans would then provide the bulk of this more traditional classical war-fighting machine, and we would stick to the course we set out in the Integrated Review. We would provide though the Army, which will still go down to 73,000, the essential niche capabilities, particularly in command and control, in the information space, in logistics and in the cyber space, which these other countries may not have the specialised technological capabilities to provide.
There will be a choice here. Will the UK stick to its course or reorient itself after 24 February? I suspect—this is just my personal view—that the UK will probably want to continue to play quite a large maritime role, given its geographical location and its historical role around the lines of communication. It will probably also want to be present in the reserves. Clearly, you do not quite know where the attack is coming from, so you will have some kind of reserve force as well. Despite the augmentation we are seeing in Estonia at the moment, it will probably keep its permanent army presence at a relatively small scale.
The other issue is that Africa has not gone away. Towards the end of Britain's time in the EU, the UK warmed up to the common security and defence missions of the EU, in which hitherto it had not participated. It commanded, as you know, Operation Atalanta, the counter-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden out of Norwood. It went well. The EU certainly appreciated the UK taking on that role. It joined Macron's European Intervention Initiative, which is focusing on security in the south, notably the Sahel. The UK also sent troops as part of the peacekeeping force in Mali.
Apart from the question of the land defence of Europe, there is a subsidiary question for the UK. Okay, we are out of the EU, but we now work in different structures. We have the Northern Group, which the UK is part of. We have the Visegrad Group. We have the intervention initiative. The UK can do things with Europe outside the EU that the Europeans will look favourably upon. Will the UK continue to also have this focus on Africa? That is a major focus in Paris and in the southern part of Europe.
Those are, very succinctly, some of the big strategic issues that will come up at least from my point of view.
Professor Mark Webber: If you do not mind, I will go back a few years and look at it in the following way. As an alliance, as opposed to an aggregation of individual allies, NATO made a clear choice as to its strategic direction not in February of this year but in 2014 following the intervention by Russia in Crimea and the annexation.
There was a lot of talk at the Madrid summit last week that the adoption of the Strategic Concept was the most consequential reorientation in the post-Cold War period. I do not think that is true. The reorientation began in full effect in 2014. With the Readiness Action Plan and Enhanced Forward Presence, which came shortly afterwards, SACEUR had already started to articulate plans for the defence of Poland and the Baltic states shortly afterwards.
That decision had already been taken. In parallel, NATO, as an alliance, took the decision that, to use a phrase, out-of-area operations were out, hence the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That remains the case. As a question of strategic choice, NATO is no longer an alliance where you could imagine a coalition intervention in Afghanistan, Libya or indeed Syria. Syria is a different case, for obvious reasons. That strategic choice had been made several years ago.
It has been reaffirmed by the intervention in Ukraine, hence the beefing up of the various military measures we heard about in Madrid. Those were in train for some time. If you go back to 2019, NATO adopted a new military strategy in 2019—unfortunately it is classified—in which it had already stated unambiguously that Russia was the most pressing issue for the alliance. None of this, in a sense, is probably a surprise to many of you, but it is very important in the next steps hereon. In a sense, there is a path dependency now. There is a sense of commitment politically, militarily, organisationally, strategically and doctrinally in where NATO is now going.
That raises a number of interesting issues. One is the UK position, which in a sense you were alluding to. The UK position geographically is very important in the north. There is the Joint Expeditionary Force, the Northern Group, the UK contribution to Enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia, Poland and so on, and its maritime capability in the North Sea, the Arctic et cetera. The UK role will in fact increase.
The second part of your question, sir, was about how that affects other allies and how others can fill some of the gaps. Jamie alluded to Africa. In the Strategic Concept—this was perhaps not picked up enough in the reporting on it—the second priority was terrorism. Most people would have said it was China, but in fact it was not. Russia clearly was the priority, and collective defence consequently fell out of that. If you run through the Strategic Concept, international terrorism and indeed the Madrid declaration came next.
The politics of that reflects the position of Turkey, the southern states such as Italy and to some degree France. NATO does not do a great deal on terrorism, unless you count counterinsurgency operations, but those have now ended, in effect. That is a work in progress. Politically, that talks to an unsatisfied agenda in NATO for some states in the south such as Spain, Italy and Turkey. We can probably see that political tension coming up.
If I had any advice, it would be that this ought not to be a priority of the UK in NATO. The UK already performs and could perform a very important role in the northern dimension. A southern dimension is for other allies to take priority over. There are clearly allies that are willing to do that. That is an important political distinction.
We have not really talked about China in all this, but, notwithstanding what I have just said, that clearly was a very important development in the Strategic Concept. We may wish to follow that up, but at the moment NATO as NATO, as opposed to individual allies, has very little capability or in fact political consensus to do a great deal vis‑à‑vis China militarily, although politically partners in South Korea, Japan and so on are important.
Lord Stirrup: I just want to pick up Professor Shea's point about nuclear capability. NATO has always been a nuclear alliance. Nuclear burden sharing has always been an important issue in the alliance. That really did seem to decline in recent years. There was the controversy over Germany and whether it will retain dual-capable aircraft. That seems to have been resolved by Chancellor Scholz with the announcement of the F35, but is nuclear burden sharing still an important issue for consideration in the alliance?
Professor Jamie Shea: To my mind it certainly is, because it is a way of sharing the responsibility with the United States and the United Kingdom and not leaving them alone in a national decision-making structure in a nuclear crisis. It is important.
Secondly, nuclear burden sharing means that allies have to confront it. They have to have nuclear consultations; they have to have exercises. Frankly, sir, after many years in which this had very low salience, knowledge inside NATO, such as the way in which NATO ambassadors would comprehend nuclear signalling in a crisis or how they should handle all this, had withered on the vine. In a way, the fact we have the five basing countries that have the sub-strategic nuclear weapons and the dual arrangements does help to spread this knowhow in the alliance.
I have to say one thing. It is interesting that France, although it is not part of the Nuclear Planning Group and does not pre-commit its nuclear forces to NATO, also feels very strongly about this and regularly invites the NATO council to visit Île Longue, where the French keep their nuclear submarines, for nuclear prep talks, if you like. My sense is that it is important, because this is also a way in which one demonstrates that there is a potential ladder of escalation. As I said, it spreads the culture. It is very important, particularly now, more for political than perhaps immediate military reasons, that it be maintained. That is why it is so important that the Germans finally decided to buy the F35 and therefore give an indication that they would have a nuclear-capable aircraft, because if one country pulls out, the temptation is for it to unravel elsewhere.
Professor Mark Webber: Could I just speak for 30 seconds on the nuclear question? The language in the Strategic Concept is almost identical to the previous Strategic Concept. The NATO language on the nuclear deterrent has probably been boilerplate for the last 20 or 25 years. It rarely becomes a matter of public discussion.
In that sense, although underreported in the coverage of last week's events, there is a very clear view that the importance of the nuclear deterrent in NATO is fundamental. Remember, of course, that it has been Russia in the Ukraine crisis that has been talking up the importance of nuclear weapons. On the NATO side, the language has been quite restrained. None the less, that should not lead us to the view that it has become less important.
Professor Jamie Shea: Would you permit me to add on this an important point that I forgot? NATO has so far ruled out the deployment of new ground-based intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe since the recruitment of Cruise and Pershing in 1987 in response to the violation of the INF treaty by Russia and the deployment of the Russian ground-based intermediate-range nuclear weapons.
If NATO rules out that US ground-based option, it is all the more important that it keeps the sub-strategic systems that it has at the moment. Otherwise there will be a much more difficult political debate in the alliance, as we saw with Cruise and Pershing in the 1980s. Excuse me for that.
Q102 Baroness Blackstone: A NATO summit has just taken place, of course. What do you think the key outcomes of that summit were? Were there any issues or topics that should have been discussed but were not.
Professor Mark Webber: The key reported outcome was the Strategic Concept, but its contents were well anticipated. None the less, as a political signal that is very important.
Materially, the strengthening of deterrence and defence posture in eastern Europe down to the Black Sea and so on was equally important. There was the invitation to Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, to which Jamie alluded right at the outset, the accession protocols being signed and the agreement with Turkey on the margins of the summit. That is one to watch, because the formal process by which accession occurs requires constitutional procedures in all the existing member countries. That will not be a problem here, because of the way treaties are dealt with in Parliament, but it could be a problem in Turkey. We can probably expect another argument over that when the accession protocols hit the Turkish Parliament and Erdoğan is facing an election.
Underneath those headlines, there were some important things worth noting. The day before the formal summit, the Secretary-General issued a document on NATO's contribution to ameliorating climate change. NATO, as an organisation, has a formal commitment to reducing carbon emissions in its organisational facilities. There is a separate process being discussed amongst the allies as to how their national militaries can contribute to reductions in carbon. That had been in the offing for quite a while, but it was formally signed off.
There was also a decision to revisit the Wales defence spending pledge next year. At the next summit, wherever and whenever that is held, there will be a discussion on taking forward the 2% GDP defence spending pledge. Currently, only nine allies out of 30 meet that. In the year before an American presidential election, you could imagine that being a hot topic. There were a series of measures outlined to support Ukraine and enhanced support for Georgia, Moldova and Bosnia, although the detail of that was not clear. Georgia is an important case there, because it has been a previous target of Russian aggression.
What was not mentioned? Briefly, there was no great detail on co-operation between NATO and the European Union. I believe there is likely to be a NATO-EU statement coming out sometime late this year or early next. That is very important. Some of this can get very technical, but there are some issues with NATO's reorientation to the east to do with military mobility and the integration of armed forces. Oddly, at this point in time, the EU, rather than NATO, seems to be striding ahead on that.
The EU has military mobility projects and, through Permanent Structured Cooperation, it has a significant number of projects aiming at more efficient and more coherent use of military expenditure. It is difficult to get an insight into NATO's equivalent of that, the NATO defence planning process, from open access sources, but those discussions are taking place.
There was also some anticipation prior to the summit of an announcement on NATO common funding. This is a favoured project of Secretary-General Stoltenberg. NATO has three common budgets, which are quite distinct from the NATO principle of “costs lie where they fall” in operations, deployments and so on. There was some sort of agreement to boost that, but it is not clear by how much and what for. We may come to this in a moment when we talk about technology, but it is possible that some of it has been earmarked for technological co-operation.
There is one other, which remains a mystery to me. The talk around eastern Europe and so on, NATO projecting stability and its southern strategy leaves aside the fact that NATO should have a proper Arctic strategy. For some reason this never seems to get proper ventilation. It is not mentioned in either the Strategic Concept or the Madrid declaration. Given the importance of Russia, I would have thought that was pretty clear. The Arctic Council, with Sweden and Finland joining NATO, is basically a NATO bastion.
My hunch—Jamie may know more than me—is that this is a Canadian issue more than anything else and that Canada is not entirely happy with NATO having a clear strategy on the Arctic. It does strike me as a little unusual that it is still underarticulated. The same could be said about the fact that NATO does not really have a proper maritime strategy either. The current one was adopted in 2011. It has a space strategy and a cyber strategy et cetera, but it has not updated its maritime strategy for over a decade. That would be my assessment.
Professor Jamie Shea: Mark gave a very full and very comprehensive answer, so I will just try to fill in the margins and talk about the things you might have looked for. On Russia, there was clearly a sense of, “How do we handle Russia over the long run?” Are we going back to containment? How different will it be this time versus last time? What kind of role could NATO play in the long run in reducing the ability of Russia to cause it harm?
For instance, one thing I have written about in various articles is the idea of a NATO COCOM, if you remember that structure from the Cold War. The COCOM was a co-ordinating committee. It would be an organisation that blocked the transfer of sensitive military technologies to Russia to make it harder for Russia to modernise its armed forces. The EU has been very active on this around oil and gas and other ways of reducing dependencies on Russia. Beyond the idea that Russia is a threat, how do we try to reduce its capacity to cause us harm? Some sketching of that would have been useful.
Burden sharing was pointed out very well by Mark. If we do switch back to a Republican President, if Donald Trump were to be re-elected in two years' time, having only nine out of now 32 allies meeting the 2% target would not look good. Therefore, NATO action now to pull the rug from under the feet of critical Republicans in the United States would be wise. The Secretary-General was quite upbeat that he thinks that by 2024, which as Mark rightly said is the target date for the current defence pledge, 19 more allies would be added to that number. With the current issues with inflation, oil and gas and the cost of living, it may not be so easy for countries to deliver on those targets. NATO still has a couple of years to go. It should use those years wisely.
The real issue when it comes to Georgia and Moldova—Mark referred to this—is the fact that we are not good at deterrence in the grey zone. We are good at deterrence when it comes to our own members. Finland and Sweden clearly drew that conclusion and therefore quickly applied to join NATO. We are not so good at deterring Russia from bullying our partners if we are not willing to give them NATO membership and security guarantees.
In the run-up to 24 February, we tried the mother of all economic sanctions; we tried very focused intelligence operations; we tried very intensive diplomacy; we made it clear that we would support the Ukrainians in resisting. We brought out the entire playbook of what we consider to be effective deterrence measures: “Do not do it. You’ll pay too high a price”. It did not work.
As we look beyond Ukraine, first we will have a problem with Ukraine, whatever shape or form it ends up in. We will have to deter Putin from going further, wherever the line ends up after this attack. Georgia still has this commitment from NATO that it will be a member one day. We need to do some harder thinking about deterrence in the grey zone and about our options there.
For Ukraine there was the very good message that NATO will stay the course. That came not just from Biden and Stoltenberg but from many other leaders. Zelensky addressed the meeting, and that was good, although NATO clearly will not be in the lead. However, you cannot have a situation where the US and the UK are providing most of the money and most of the capabilities. That is unsustainable, particularly in the long run. Congress will not be able to vote $40 billion every month, particularly if you look at the current spending rate. It is $400 million one week, $1 billion one week and $400 million the next week.
The Ukrainians in Lugano this week are saying that they will need $750 billion to rebuild their economy and $80 billion to finance their deficit. One of the things will be about how to put this on a much more sustainable Atlantic-wide level. I fear what will happen if the burden continues to fall so heavily on the shoulders of the United States. There are already 12 Republicans who are voting against these credits. It will be 20; it will be 30. This consensus, which has held so well, will break. Maybe that was also missing. We need a sense of the long-term sustainability arrangements.
Now that NATO has taken on China, it will be very interesting. What does it do about China? China was described in very sophisticated language as a systemic competitor. With China, NATO still hopes to have the relationship it once hoped to have with Russia. There will be a lot of competition and there may occasionally even be some confrontation, at least in diplomatic terms, but there will be dialogue, there will be meetings. There was no suggestion made of a NATO-China council. One wonders, particularly in the very fractious international circumstances at the moment, what NATO will do.
The four Indo-Pacific leaders that are NATO partners—Japan, New Zealand, Australia and South Korea—were invited to the summit. Australia pledged some weapons for Ukraine, which was a good signal to some of the Europeans, but there was no real clarity on how NATO intends in the future not only to deal with China but to link Indo-Pacific security to Atlantic security. There is a sense that the agendas are increasingly overlapping, such as proliferation, the rule of law and so on. How does NATO persuade its Indo-Pacific partners to contribute to Atlantic security and how is NATO going to contribute in return to Indo-Pacific security? This needs to be operationalised, and that was not particularly clear.
If you would allow me two final comments, first, it was disappointing on new technologies. The UK has been pushing very hard in NATO to have more on innovation and experimentation, looking at new civil R&D and new technologies. NATO simply repeated that it was going to find $1 billion for the DIANA project to set up an innovation hub. There was nothing particularly new. There was not much new on cyber or those kinds of things, even though they will be crucial to spending our defence investments wisely.
On NATO-EU, I am less pessimistic than Mark. This is interesting for the UK. If I may respectfully say this, it is something you could look at. There was a NATO proposal to the EU to deepen the dialogue on resilience, on China—yes, NATO and the EU should discuss China together—on hybrid and on military mobility. If this actually happens, there is an issue. UK diplomats have often said to me, “Jamie, NATO covers twice the population of the EU, because a great number of allies are not in the EU. Therefore we need to duplicate in NATO what the EU does to cover the 50% of the population of NATO not in the EU”.
On the other hand, NATO in Madrid was saying, “No, we’ll go to the EU for these things. We’ll go to the EU for resilience, for money, for military mobility, for space assets, to deal with the south and so on”. If the EU increasingly becomes the service provider of these resilience-type things to NATO, this may give the UK a voice in the EU via NATO, but it also may have consequences, because NATO will stay a military organisation, with the EU increasingly looking at civil society, cyber, resilience and supply chain-type issues. Whether the UK will play that as a risk or as an opportunity is one of the key questions that came out of Madrid.
Baroness Blackstone: Thank you very much. You gave an enormously long shopping list of issues that NATO currently faces. It is a little difficult to identify in that enormous global list of issues what the core of NATO’s work should be and indeed what the UK should be doing.
I come back to Lord Stirrup’s question. Are there some areas where we should take a back seat? You made another really interesting statement. Of course, NATO is an alliance, not just a group of countries in different bilateral relationships. Does the notion of it being an alliance not mean that there should be some kind of collaborative work to identify who does what? Everybody cannot do everything. It would be shambolic and very expensive to do it that way. How do you identify what the UK’s particular role should be, and what we should be doing, rather than having this vast list of things that NATO—and indeed, therefore, the UK—has to take into account?
Professor Jamie Shea: That is an excellent question. It is a core question here. When I was at NATO, in my modest way, with all my colleagues, I looked at it as having a two-tier structure. There is the inner core that only NATO can do, only allies can do, which is the day-to-day collective defence through posture, exercises, readiness and so on to parry an attack.
Then there is the second tier of NATO, which deals with things that are important to allies, because they would also be prevalent in any kind of aggression. These are cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, sabotage operations or the battle for influence in the wider world. Whose narrative do Africans believe in all this?
If you look at the Russian way of warfare, they go full out. They attack civilian targets; they create environmental hazards; they create a humanitarian disaster; they destroy civilian infrastructure. If that happens in a NATO member state, you cannot expect NATO troops to deal with all those things. NATO would need to have in place a set of pre-existing partnerships so it can bring people in.
If you would just allow me just a quick anecdote, the hardest problem I had to deal with when I was at NATO in Afghanistan—Lord Stirrup will remember this very well—was the problem of improvised explosive devices. For many years we went for a classical military solution: to build vehicles—you will remember the MRAPs, transporting troops by helicopter—to build military deminers and all that. It did not do any good. The IEDs kept proliferating like mushrooms.
Eventually, we recognised that we had to go left of the bang and right of the bang. We worked with scientists on biometrics; we worked with the justice system; we worked with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on tracing the money and on network analysis. We worked with the civilian sector, with the private sector, on the supply of potassium chloride and ammonium nitrate. By going through a networked approach, we eventually managed to decrease the supply of IEDs.
There are certain issues that NATO cannot deal with by itself. I dealt with cyber defence. In the early days, the only way we could stop a cyberattack against NATO was to call up Deutsche Telekom and get them to give us extra bandwidth and deal with denial-of-service attacks. I learned the lesson very well. By the time I left we had 15 NATO cyber partnerships with the private sector.
My way of dealing with this is to say that we need two NATOs. We need a military core, for NATO's core business of military attack, but, given that modern military operations have all these other nasty things going on, which NATO troops probably do not have the time or expertise to deal with, you need to lock in a set of good civilian military partnerships for disaster preparedness, civil emergency management, critical infrastructure protection and resilience. It could be the EU; it could be the private sector. You need to have good exercises to train on the procedures so that everybody knows what is happening.
We need two NATOs. We need a small one and then a broader and more diffuse one, which provides those kinds of partnerships tailored to needs. That was my view, and it still is.
Professor Mark Webber: I am aware that you may have other questions to ask. I will make quite a meta point here. There is a distinction between NATO under the treaty and NATO as an organisation. For NATO under the treaty, it is pretty clear that its priority is collective defence. You can read all sorts of nuance into the 14 articles of the treaty, but its core business is collective defence. In a sense, that is what it has returned to. On many other issues, NATO is quite thin. Jamie, as an insider, has referred to a series of improvisations that NATO has had to undertake. It is thin on counterterrorism. When it goes out of area it is not necessarily very successful, as was the case in Afghanistan.
If the implication of your question is one of prioritisation, the prioritisation is collective defence. That is absolutely clear in the Strategic Concept. That is what NATO is good at. It is its muscle memory; it is its history. It is where there is very clear political consensus. That is where it is going.
My broader point—it is even broader than that—is a critique of the Strategic Concept. It is not really that strategic, to be honest. If you read it, it reads like a summit declaration. The Madrid declaration was very short. The Strategic Concept was longer. It almost substitutes for a proper summit declaration. It is not strategic in the sense that your questions imply—ie what is NATO to prioritise, and how is it to do it in a world in which its main strategic competitors are Russia, China and maybe to some degree Iran, North Korea or whatever?
I did not get any sense in the Strategic Concept that this strategic triangle has been carefully thought through. It would have been thought through in the Pentagon, and it may have been thought through in the MoD and to some degree in France and Germany, but for commercial as much as strategic and military reasons. That is NATO's big challenge in the years ahead.
NATO cannot really do China. The United States can. A point may arise in the coming years when China returns to the priority point it has enjoyed in the last few years in the United States. Then NATO is left facing Russia sans the US. How is it to deal with that? That was absent in the Strategic Concept, and that really ought to be a priority. There should be a more Europeanised NATO looking after its core business while the United States prioritises China and the Indo-Pacific.
Q103 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Gentlemen, much has happened in the relatively short period between the publication of the Integrated Review, the Defence Command Paper and now the Madrid summit. Does this lead to any reassessment? Do the results of the Madrid summit lead to a reassessment of the Integrated Review? I think particularly about the effects of Ukraine, about the revelation of the nature of the Russian threat and about Finland and Sweden.
I will put my supplementary question to save time. Does this mean, for example, that the old out-of-area concept has gone? As you have mentioned, the four Indo-Pacific nations were invited to the Madrid summit.
Professor Mark Webber: The Integrated Review and the Defence Command Paper were written before the Madrid summit. The Integrated Review had a political subtext, which was how the UK positioned itself after leaving the European Union. That suffuses a lot of the ambition.
There is a clear point that needs to be made, and it is implicit in what you are saying. Some of the assumptions of those two documents have on the one hand been reinforced by the war in Ukraine and in some senses supplanted by it. Let me give you one example. The Integrated Review had a bad press initially, because it was misread. The thing that was given considerable prominence was the so-called tilt to the Indo-Pacific. You actually have to read a fair way into it before you come to that interpretation. It is very clear that the main threats to the UK reside in Europe and that NATO is the cornerstone of British defence policy and UK security. In that sense, there are no surprises there.
One could say the same about the Integrated Operating Concept. Much of the detail—it is a bit nerdier than the Integrated Review, which was mainly written for public consumption—is there when it comes to the need to modernise the fusion doctrine of the British military and so on. To some degree, the war in Ukraine has confirmed that.
I would say that in some ways it has held up well, but you will be aware there was a debate in this House on 9 June in which a number of speakers pointed out there was a degree of redundancy in those documents. The Integrated Review may well simply need a refresh. This does not mean a complete rewriting, but you could imagine an annexe or some additional document that would look to the world not just post Brexit but post Ukraine.
It is also important to bear in mind—we have not discussed this, and in some ways I am glad we have not—that the Integrated Review was written in the middle of a pandemic. You may remember all the headlines at that time about how global health was going to be the big security challenge for national Governments and indeed NATO. All of that has disappeared. It is not mentioned in the Strategic Concept or the Madrid declaration.
In some ways, the Integrated Review was of a time and place. Some of that has survived rather well and some less so. It may well need some sort of reinterpretation or refreshing.
Professor Jamie Shea: I will reiterate what I said in reply to Lord Stirrup. My sense is that the UK will probably stick the course despite the changes. It would have to increase the size of the Army quite considerably to play the major forward land role in Europe. As I said, the UK will look for the more traditional continental land powers to do that.
There is one question, however, given that the UK now has to have a brigade in Estonia, has to be in NATO’s reserve forces, has a commitment to Poland and is becoming more involved in northern security, where it has these close relations. Mark mentioned the JEF, the Joint Expeditionary Force. Will a modest size of the Army be necessary?
Ukraine has also shown the problem, which is endemic throughout NATO now, with the lack of stocks of weapons, ammunition and so on. The Ukrainians are using 6,000 shells a day. If that rate of use is still modern warfare, to what degree will the money be found to properly stock those weapons? That is true of all NATO countries, including the United States. Will the UK Army need more heavy armour and more heavy capacity given the new circumstances?
My sense is that NATO will look to the UK to play the role that was already prefigured in the Integrated Review, the maritime capability. The Navy was one of the big beneficiaries. The Navy occupies the position of the CDS at the moment. We have not seen the Russian navy so far in Ukraine apart from some blockades of the Black Sea. That would be a new factor that would occur in any kind of conflict with NATO. As I mentioned, the UK will also have the niche capabilities, the high-tech capabilities. The question for the UK is, “How does it integrate those high-tech capabilities optimally in the new order of battle?” It really brings those things to bear.
“Never say never” is my reply to out of area. Its demise has always been announced, and yet a crisis comes along somewhere—such as piracy in the Gulf of Aden or illegal migration in the Mediterranean—and off we go again. It is useful for the UK to participate in things like Macron's European Intervention Initiative, which does not commit the UK to deploying forces in Africa but is a good way for the UK to stay abreast of countries like France that are doing operations in terms of lessons learned, best practices and all that.
The UK was in the Mediterranean until recently supporting the EU Operation Sophia off the coast of Libya. There are interests that we share on terrorism. The key question for out of area is what is called defence capacity building. It is not doing enough Afghanistan. There is clearly no appetite for that in NATO at the moment.
The key task in many of these countries—do not forget, my Lords, that NATO is still doing a training mission in Iraq, which is continuing—is, “How can we do a better job of training the local forces?” The record is mixed. The UK has spent a lot of time and effort and has a big track record on defence capacity building. How can it bring that to bear in NATO?
My final comment is on the Indo-Pacific. Let us not forget the EU. Forgive me, but I do live in Brussels. France is an Indo-Pacific power. It has 7,000 troops permanently stationed in the Indo-Pacific. Last year Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, not just the UK, all sent maritime assets to the Indo-Pacific. With the European commitment, we need a dialogue with the EU on an Indo-Pacific strategy. The EU has a China strategy; it has a bilateral dialogue with the US on China; it now has a US-EU defence dialogue. This is perhaps not something for today but maybe for the future, when the winds blow in a more favourable direction. We need more co-ordination with the EU to leverage the influence that we can have in the Indo-Pacific.
Q104 Lord Alton of Liverpool: Thank you, gentlemen. Can I press you further on the nuts and bolts, the granular detail, about our capabilities? How do the UK's military capabilities and, inter alia, the moving goal posts of our own UK defence budget allocations, compare with the assessments and plans made by other NATO countries, in particular Germany and France? Do we share the same assessments and plans?
For instance, do we and Germany see Turkey's response to Swedish and Finnish applications for membership in the same way? Do we have areas of greater or lesser strength? Are we including the United States? Are we fully interoperational? If not, what are the gaps?
Having been in the US last week talking to different Republicans, some of them have a traditional Atlanticist view of the 70 years of peace that NATO has given, but others take a Trumpian view and say that the EU has a combined budget of over €14 trillion and needs to pay its own way. “It’s China, stupid”. They are aware of the dangers of an invasion of Taiwan. Where does that leave NATO planning?
Professor Jamie Shea: There are lots of big questions there. As you know, UK forces have been more or less permanently engaged somewhere over the last 20 years or so. That means wear and tear. It has shown the issues of equipment, sustainability, not having the right equipment and the like. All of NATO has had the problem of cannibalisation, as you know. You have to strip some units in order to equip certain units. When you were going, you knew which units were going so you could prepare for that. You could hide the weaknesses, to some degree.
The question for the UK will be about the quality of the equipment, particularly the heavy armour. We are exercising now with heavy armour, because the expeditionary days of NATO are over. This is also about mobility, the ability to get things quickly across Europe. The UK has been working very hard on that, because it is distant from Europe. Reinforcement is a particular challenge from the UK, because we are half as distant again as Germany is from the Baltic States. That involves an element of pre-positioning and so on. My sense is that the professionalism and training of the people is undoubted. The question is whether the stocks and the equipment will be up to that. Will the UK invest?
In NATO, there is a defence planning process—you will be familiar with that—which means there is a two-year rolling cycle where every country takes on force commitments. These are transparent, because there is an annual review where every country is assessed by all the other allies and has to explain, for example, why it was not able to fulfil a commitment.
Finland and Sweden definitely help, because they also have advanced cyber capabilities and advanced defence industries. It is not for nothing that the NATO centre of excellence on hybrid warfare is located in Helsinki. The UK's effort to make NATO resilient on the home front will be boosted by the fact that these two countries are joining the alliance.
The problem for the UK is that it wants to play in every area. It is not a specialised country. It wants to play in the cyber domain, the maritime domain, the air domain, the special forces—they have been a key feature of the UK in recent years and were very important for the Libyan operation in 2011—and the land force. As always, going forward in a financially constrained environment, does the UK still see itself up with the United States or France with at least the aspiration of playing in every league or does the UK see itself as a more medium-sized power and decide that it has to specialise in one particular area, maybe maritime, and therefore reduce its role in certain other areas?
What would be the consequences of that? Would others pick up the slack if the UK were not willing to do that? That will be the question going forward. Can you continue to put the full team on the pitch every week? Do you have to start cutting corners? Are you not going to allow attrition by a million cuts and take the strategic decision that you will give up this and instead do that?
Q105 Baroness Rawlings: I need to declare an interest, as I worked for NATO for about five years in the 1980s through a small campaigning body called Peace Through NATO. I mention that, because you mentioned the nuclear capability, and it was all concerned with that.
You have touched on it, but I wanted to ask about fostering science and technology co-operation for defence between the member states. What are the gaps? I wanted to stress further that we have now left several important EU bodies that tangentially touched on defence, whether it is space or the others that are important. Has that made a big difference to us? Is there space for the UK to be a leader, particularly considering that Dr Bryan Wells, NATO’s chief scientist, is a British national?
Professor Mark Webber: This is in the nooks and crannies of what NATO does. Luckily, I did a little bit of homework yesterday on this one. It requires a bit of deep diving to get to some of the detail, but your question is well put.
NATO does not undertake scientific research such that there is an end product—ie co-operation on armament production and that sort of thing. To some degree, it undertakes research, the dissemination of knowledge and so on. The UK does very well out of the Science and Technology Organization in NATO, the STO, which is headed up by the individual you referred to. I have a list of the various projects here. There were something like 300 in 2021, and the UK was the second or third in terms of accessing resources for that.
These are scientific projects, and their outcomes are published, disseminated and so on. It is usually done in open source, which is a bit of an issue now given the alacrity with which China looks at open-source material on defence and technology. There will be a classified element to that, but Jamie will know better than me. As far as I understand, that ends up in some way or other in the NATO defence planning process, at which point it is advisory.
There is a separate arm—maybe in order to make up some of the deficiencies of what I just said—that has been recently announced. The Innovation Fund was announced at the Madrid summit. The defence accelerator, which goes under the acronym DIANA, is in partnership with Estonia and will be based out of Imperial College London. Not much detail on that is available. As far as I understand, its aim is to fund start-up companies that would then engage in defence production, but whether that remains within nations or in some sense is exploited across the alliance is not clear to me at least.
It also appears that the £1 billion allocated to that fund comes through national contributions. It is not part of NATO core funding. Interestingly, the United States is not part of it, which might tell you something about the way in which the United States regards protecting its defence industries.
NATO has an important role. That knowledge will be pooled in things like mine clearing, dealing with radiation attacks and so on
Baroness Rawlings: With the private sector, as Professor Shea was talking about earlier.
Professor Mark Webber: The private sector would come in through bidding in the various projects that might be facilitated through the innovation accelerator, and, indeed, currently through the STO. A non-private element to this runs out of Allied Command Transformation as well and is entirely in-house. The innovation accelerator is a little obscure, but at least it is an important step forward. The money is not yet flowing. The budget becomes lives next year.
The Chair: Thank you. Professor Shea, although we have run out of time now because we have our next session, if there is any further information you feel that it would be appropriate for us to have, would you mind submitting that in writing so that the committee could consider it as evidence? It is something you would be prepared to do. I am most grateful to you. As I always say, time is the enemy when we have such excellent presentation of evidence. Thank you very much indeed.
