1
Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy
Oral evidence: National Security Capability Review: A Changing Security Environment
Monday 26 February 2018
4.25 pm
Members present: Margaret Beckett (The Chair); Lord Brennan; James Gray; Mr Dominic Grieve; Lord Harris of Haringey; Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill; Baroness Henig; Lord King of Bridgwater; Baroness Lane-Fox; Angus Brendan MacNeil; Rachel Reeves; Lord Trimble; Tom Tugendhat; Theresa Villiers.
Evidence Session No. 2 Heard in Public Questions 21 – 40
Witnesses
I: General Sir Richard Barrons, Former Commander Joint Forces Command; Ms Elisabeth Braw, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council; Dr Andrew Rathmell, Visiting Professor, University of Exeter Strategy & Security Institute, and Managing Director, Aktis Strategy Ltd.
II: Mr James De Waal, Senior Fellow, International Security, Chatham House; Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College London.
General Sir Richard Barrons, Ms Elisabeth Braw and Dr Andrew Rathmell.
Q21 The Chair: May I welcome you all to the Committee? Thank you very much for coming. I apologise for the fact that we kept you hanging around for a few minutes while we sorted out some Committee business.
I will kick off by asking Dr Rathmell, who has spoken to us before, to start on the issue of stabilisation in the Middle East, north Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. How have circumstances and conditions there changed since the Arab spring? Has that made a difference to our approach to stabilisation in those areas?
Dr Andrew Rathmell: Thank you very much for inviting me back. Let me answer the question by focusing in a couple of ways. First, we need to be very clear about what we see, and what the UK sees, as stabilisation. I will then suggest what has changed.
By stabilisation, the UK and its allies mean not just hot stabilisation, as in Helmand or Basra, but structural stability, conflict prevention and conflict management. That was laid out very clearly in the UK policy paper on building stability overseas in 2011. The conceptual and policy framework, articulated in 2011, that the UK has had is a reasonably good one. It was picked up in the NSS in 2015. In 2016, DfID put together a paper, which the Committee has heard about before, that updated that framework and has given an even better definition of stability and how to build it in states overseas. At the moment, that is only a DfID paper, not a cross-government paper, but there is a basis, at least, for cross-government policy.
There have been a couple of changes since the Arab spring, particularly in the last four or five years. The first concerns our understanding of how to build stability in these sorts of states. What the DfID work, and other UN and World Bank work, shows is that simply addressing the formal parts of a state—building the police force and the governance systems—is not enough; you also have to work on the politics, the economics and a range of other aspects. The research on what causes stability, instability and civil wars has moved on since 2011. Therefore, our conceptual understanding of how to address those issues has moved on and needs to be adapted.
Secondly, the tools with which to approach this have moved on. In the last decade, the UK and its allies have invested a lot in tools to deal with this issue. The Committee has looked at some of those, such as cross-government funds, stabilisation units and military capabilities. The UK and its allies have developed a range of new tools and approaches to deal with stability. We can talk about what has and has not worked in the last few years.
The other key point, of course, is the wider environment. This is not so much about what has happened since the Arab spring; it is a broader question. I would pick out three key points the UK might need to look at in this refresh. Arguably, the trajectory of instability across the Middle East and north Africa has got worse in the last few years. We have seen that in non-state competition, involving sub-state groups. I refer not just to Islamic State but to Hezbollah and other groups. The great power competition in the Middle East has got worse, so the trajectory of instability is more difficult.
The isolationism, to a degree, in the US and in Europe has made it worse. In Europe, for a range of reasons, we have seen policy disarray and a lack of attention to what is happening in the region. Europe has a lot of instruments to deal with instability in the region, developmental and political, but it has been distracted and focused on short-termism. Similarly, the US has backed out a little.
The key issue is that the environment has worsened. While we have a greater understanding of what to do, there is the question of whether our tools are adequate to deal with stability in these countries.
The Chair: You refer to the trajectory and to the presence of other major powers. Russia is now much more formally involved, I would almost say, in Syria. China is much more involved in sub-Saharan Africa. That has made a difference to the situation. Has it changed the UK’s approach to stabilisation in those areas?
Dr Andrew Rathmell: At the moment, it has not changed it significantly. I suggest that it should. How has it changed the situation on the ground, and what are the potentials for how the UK can work with this? Fairly obviously, what the Russians have been trying to achieve not just in Syria but in relation to Iran and General Haftar in Libya—in other words, in supporting certain groups we are not very keen on—has made it harder, purely in geopolitical terms, to achieve our objectives on state stability. What the Russians see as stability is not what we see as stability. The Russians are working for stability as they see it in Syria, but that is a very different form of stability from what we want. In that sense, it has made a difference.
China is a much more interesting example, with a lot more potential. If you look at Africa and Afghanistan, China’s interests are very similar, in many ways, to what we would define as stability. It wants the rule of law, to a degree, for economic investment. It wants security and stability for its investment and its construction companies. It has been willing to invest a lot more in peacekeeping and what we would call stabilisation-type work at a very light level, through peacekeeping. Even though the Chinese definition of stability is different from ours, as it does not really involve human rights, there is a lot more potential for us to think about how we can work alongside or align ourselves with Chinese approaches to encourage China to bring stability in some of these countries in a way we would like, given that we are not going to do it all ourselves. China is an interesting opportunity, and it is worth thinking through how the UK can engage with it. Russia is a different matter.
The Chair: That is helpful. You have talked about the way in which things are changing and the tools that are changing. Do you feel that, on the whole, what we are doing has been fairly successful in, for example, joining up our efforts to stabilise Iraq and Syria?
Dr Andrew Rathmell: I do not want to sit on the fence too much. If you take the period since the last national security strategy in 2015, I would probably say that the glass is half full rather than half empty.
To go into Whitehall engineering, I think that some of the capabilities that the UK has tried to develop to deliver this sort of stability have improved. We have better National Security Council plans. Within the military, we have some change, with specialist and regionally aligned units. We have cross-government funds and secretariats. The Home Office is getting much more involved in joining up work on policing, migration and stability.
On the Whitehall engineering side of it—the wiring diagram—there have been improvements. The efficiency of delivery, whether by civil servants, by the military, by contractors or by NGOs, has improved. There has been a lot of work on that by DfID and so on.
So the delivery capability has improved. I would point to areas where the UK has done a reasonable job in the last few years, such as Iraq. The UK took its eye off the ball in Iraq for a few years, for reasons that are very well known to the Committee. My sense is that over the last three years, since the NSS, the UK has joined up its military and civilian activities reasonably well, where there has been a policy decision by London to do so.
In Afghanistan and Somalia, we have protracted crises. Nobody really knows the solution to them, and the UK cannot solve them by itself, but what the UK has been doing has been fairly good, at least compared with the UN, the US and other players. We cannot solve Afghanistan or Somalia, but we can play reasonably well.
In other areas, such as Libya, where there has been no policy decision by the UK to do a great deal, the UK has not done much, but we have the potential to do it if we want to.
So I would say that the glass is half full. I think that the capabilities have improved. My question in this review would be: to what extent is this still a UK government priority? In 2015[1], the Building Stability Overseas Strategy laid out government policy clearly and said that this would be a priority for the Government. The national security strategy said that it would be a priority, and various capabilities were built. Frankly, with everything else that is going on, I do not know at this stage whether this is a policy priority for the Government. There has been no clear policy framework since the 2011 paper. The question would be: do the Government want to make this a priority and, therefore, to invest in the policy and the capabilities? It is a simple decision on whether or not to do that.
Once that decision has been made, it is a question of where the expertise lies. There is good expertise within the Government and the supply chain, but a lot of it is not really working on these issues. For example, DfID will spend 50% in what it calls fragile states. This is really a question for the International Development Committee, but I would suggest to you that a lot of that is spent in fragile states, not necessarily on the causes of conflict. Simply spending money on healthcare or education does not necessarily address conflict, unless you target it on conflict. It is a question of how we use our capabilities. If you wish, we can talk about the EU and the US as well, as a separate issue.
The Chair: Sir Richard, do you want to add anything to that? Do you share that reaction?
General Sir Richard Barrons: I think we are reluctant to confront the fact that, as the United Kingdom is addressing its place in the world, we need to consider how the world is changing substantially. Our preference is to look at the world that we enjoyed in the immediate post-Cold War generation, which generally went our way and in which we felt we held the initiative and we did good and noble things around the world. Now, in the Asian century, with the advent of much greater multipolarity, we need to address a world in which the seeds of potential conflict are much greater and risks of instability are appearing that genuinely jeopardise our security and prosperity.
Our response to that is still quite small scale. One of the lessons of the period from 2010 to now is that you cannot fix big problems that really matter with small tokens, and that we may just have to address these problems better. It is so much better to deal with them at arm’s length, through effective stabilisation, than to deal with them when they manifest themselves as a strategic peril.
Q22 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Given what you have said, how do you expect the Government’s focus on addressing migration and security threats such as extremism and terrorism at source to be reflected in the outcomes of the capability review? Surely there is urgency to look again at how we are approaching those issues.
General Sir Richard Barrons: It is absolutely clear that the threats you describe—migration and terrorism—manifest at scale from abroad and really matter to the security and prosperity of our country. They need very sophisticated treatment, both at home and abroad. In a national security strategy, I would expect there to be a very clear-sighted view of what we need to do to contain and diminish those problems abroad, through all the levers of power available to the Government.
An element of that is about intelligence, an element is about stabilisation and an element is about rather forceful, assertive military counterterrorism. That is generally quite well understood, but it is challenged by some of the very difficult places where these problems are occurring, which are difficult to get to.
We are also sometimes reluctant to accept that things like migration will be with us as a strategic challenge at scale for the foreseeable future. If millions of people cannot or will not stay in their country of origin, but we are not going to let them come here and are reluctant to see them all just bob around endlessly in the Mediterranean, we need a more sophisticated response. I do not think we have grasped that. It is an indication of where something in our world that is really serious is happening, but we have not yet committed the resources and the co-ordination, both nationally and with allies, to produce a systemic fix.
Dr Andrew Rathmell: I echo Richard’s points. If this review is going to go beyond the tactical—looking at some small realignments in budgets, resources, et cetera—ideally it needs to take that longer-term view, although there may not be political oxygen to do that at the moment. We know from all the work that has been done on futures, including by the MoD, that migration, instability and the Asian century will be the key issues to look at, along with urbanisation and technology.
When it comes to addressing stability overseas in this way, I do not think that at the moment there is much link between the fairly small capabilities that the UK has been building and our fundamental ability to address these issues. A lot of these issues will be addressed multilaterally, with key partners in Europe, with the US or through the UN, possibly with some of the Asian powers. My sense is that we are only dipping our toe into the water of how, in 20 years’ time, we are going to be able to address state stability and migration with some of those powers. The question for this review is: is it just a tactical tweaking, or do we want a more fundamental reassessment of some of these things?
Q23 Lord Trimble: Dr Rathmell, the Prime Minister said in Munich that the United Kingdom will decide how to spend “the entirety” of our foreign aid in future. Do the Government have the capacity to use effectively the aid funding that they currently spend via the EU?
Dr Andrew Rathmell: That is a good question. I will make one caveat first. As the Committee well knows, when we talk about aid, sometimes we are talking just about ODA—overseas development assistance, the rules of which are being tweaked at the moment—and sometimes we mean ODA plus a range of other assistance, such as some of the security assistance that the UK and other countries provide. While the ODA is much larger for the UK, it is important to think about both and to ask the question in that context.
In your question, you made a comment about EU development assistance. The EU is a complex beast, as we all know, with a range of different development tools and instruments. On this particular agenda of stabilisation and conflict prevention, the EU, with UK help, has made a lot of progress in the last few years. You can look at some of the policy initiatives on stabilisation that the EU has taken, some of the ways in which it has now allowed itself to start spending money on support for foreign militaries, for example, and some of the work that it has done on intelligence. There is a whole range of ways in which the EU is now doing quite innovative work on stabilisation, which is exactly what the UK would like it to do.
The UK has been pushing that agenda. I really hope that, if the UK redirects its aid through another channel, that will not slow EU progress in those areas, because the EU will be a much larger player in development than the UK. If the UK can find some way of using development assistance or diplomatic work to keep encouraging that progress in the EU, so that the EU is doing this across the board, it will help our security a great deal. That is quite an important point that I would like to make.
The question then is how the UK uses those funds, assuming that they are the same funds. As you know, at the moment the UK puts the bulk of its non-EU money into other multilaterals: UN agencies and so on. It also spends some money within government, while some goes to NGOs and private sector contractors.
As we have seen, DfID and the Foreign Office, as the main agencies, have struggled to spend current budgets really efficiently and effectively. Committees are well aware of some of the issues that have arisen. At the same time, the DfID reviews of various UN agencies have raised questions about efficiency and effectiveness. If we simply pour more money into the top of the UN or into NGOs or contractors, or if we simply give the money to the MoD or the Foreign Office to spend, we have to be very careful to ensure that it is spent effectively.
If we are going to significantly move money out of the EU and to put it into one of those other pots, the first thing that I would like to see is the Government being very clear that there is a transition plan to do that and that the money will be well managed. There are lots of ways in which that could be done, but simply adding it to existing budget lines, without any preparation, is not a recipe for success.
The Chair: We move on to the role and capabilities of the Armed Forces.
James Gray: Before we move on, I have a very quick supplementary to your last answer. Given that it is the law of the land that the nation must spend 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid, surely it is not possible to transfer those funds to other pots, as you describe it. If we did, we would not be achieving 0.7%.
Dr Andrew Rathmell: By other pots, I mean other channels to spend the aid. For example, you could simply put it into the DfID budget. If you put it into the DfID budget, DfID might give it to a UN development agency, to an NGO or to some other part of the Government.
James Gray: Let me put it in another way. Do you not agree that there is an artificiality about making that a law? It is perfectly reasonable to make it a ministerial ambition to spend the UN 0.7%, but is there not a fake PR artificiality in making it a law?
Dr Andrew Rathmell: I know that that is a very live debate, on which we will all have views.
The Chair: I think it is an intrusion into private grief.
Q24 James Gray: It is my point of private grief, is it not?
I will move on to my proper question, which is about defence. I take it that the whole panel is content with the decision to separate out the defence section from the capability review. Is that a sensible thing to do? Is it a correct judgment?
General Sir Richard Barrons: It depends on why it has been done. If defence has been separated out from the rest of the review because it reflects a developing acknowledgment of the broken condition of UK defence and a desire to take more time to look at it and then to come to some sensible conclusions about how to restore our defence, that is a good thing. If it has been separated out to get over some difficult decisions, in the hope that over the next four or five months it can just be modified or swept under the carpet, that will be a bad outcome.
James Gray: I take your point entirely. Given that Sir Mark Sedwill made plain before this Committee that it was a fiscally neutral review, had the defence part been within the review that will be announced, we hear, before Easter, it would by definition have been necessary for the defence part of it to be cut. As the defence budget has now been separated out, presumably it is possible for it not to be fiscally neutral.
General Sir Richard Barrons: The Defence Secretary has said publicly that he does not regard the current exercise as fiscally neutral. I take that as a very encouraging sign that the Government accept that they have run down defence beyond the point of its being sensible and that they now need to do something, which will cost them some more money.
Q25 James Gray: In evidence from others, we have heard the concern that if UK and NATO defences continue without a significant increase in spending, it will increasingly limit what we can do. We will become particularly Russia focused and will not focus on other areas of threat. Is that a correct judgment, in your view?
General Sir Richard Barrons: The strategic issue of our time is that we can all explain very cogently the paths travelled by western defence since the end of the Cold War. For very well understood reasons, we now all have defence forces that are as small, as narrow and as hollowed out as they are because, in the absence of any great existential peril, we have not needed them to be any different.
We now sense—I feel that the Committee senses this very keenly—that we are beginning to live in a very different world, where risks to our homeland and our vital interests abroad are likely to be manifest. The outmoded post-Cold War defence solution is not the answer to those risks.
The debate is still stuck on whether there has to be a choice—say, between Russia and the wider world—when the UK clearly exists as part of a worldwide community. It is also stuck on the sense that the conventional military solutions of today are the right ones or will be the right ones for the future; clearly, they are not and will not be. In my view, the debate needs to acknowledge that the UK has things to protect at home—Russia would be my focus there—and interests abroad that it must be able to secure, with allies. It is not one or the other; it is the ability to flex as necessary.
Above all, we have to grasp a much more transformative debate about how, for example, digital-age technology will underpin the profound transformation of our military capability. If we do that early and well, we will restore our competitive edge in defence terms at an affordable price, and to the great benefit of British industry. If we do not do it, we will be done over by people who do.
James Gray: In other words, you accept the thesis that we do not necessarily need what used to be called full-spectrum capability. We do not have to be able to do anything in the world, but there are certain things that we ought to be able to assess that we will have to do. You mentioned Russia and high tech, which are two of them. By that means, we could direct our limited resources at particular areas of danger, but it would mean sacrificing certain capabilities that we used to have.
General Sir Richard Barrons: We need to redefine what we mean by full-spectrum capability. On the one hand, I argue that some of the things that are quite prominent in the current inventory of many western armed forces are slowly but surely becoming obsolescent as technology eclipses them. We have been very slow to acknowledge that that is happening. This is normal in military history.
James Gray: What sorts of things?
General Sir Richard Barrons: For example, I argue that we now live in an era where conventional military conflict is dominated by increasingly long-range precision fire—ballistic and cruise missiles of various shapes and sizes. The core inference of that development is that our traditional reliance on big bits of infrastructure—big platforms, land, sea and air—and things like large headquarters that sit above ground is outmoded. We should not be surprised by that, because military technology moves on all the time, but we have not done anything about it. Right now, we are continuing to invest in things that have probably had their day.
James Gray: Aircraft carriers, for example.
General Sir Richard Barrons: That would be an example. In the future, you would use it differently. Which of us in this room is going to put anyone’s aircraft carrier within the range of a Chinese carrier-killing ballistic missile—which, by the way, is at least 1,600 kilometres—unless we are sure that all the people on that aircraft carrier, of which you have only one or two, will survive that experience? We are not sure.
James Gray: The trouble is that surely there are only three possible outcomes, unless we see a substantial increase in defence spending to, say, 3%—which, realistically, we admit is unlikely, even though we might like it. The first is that we will have to reduce our ambitions in the world and decide that we are no longer able to do anything like we would like, anywhere we like. The second is to consider which of these threats we will actually address, and to leave others to the Americans or other people. The third is to throw in the towel completely and say, “Our days as a great nation are now over. We are now going to defend the beaches at Dover, but not much more than that”.
General Sir Richard Barrons: I would advocate a different approach. First, it is vital for the Committee to accept the current parlous state of UK defence, as a result of the journey that we can all articulate. On that basis, the first thing that you will have to do is stabilise the resourcing of defence, so that it does not fall over any more. That will cost you the full price of SDSR 15, which is an extra £1.5 billion a year minimum. Then you will have to spend some more money to fix some of the things that are really threadbare. That is common to all outcomes. It is disappointing news, but it is affordable in a public sector of £770 billion a year. You are just going to make some hard choices.
The much more interesting debate is: if we have to deal with the problems that we see in our world—an assertive Russia, the rise of China and its military resurgence regionally and globally, the potential threat from powers such as Iran in the Gulf, or things in Africa that affect migration or terrorism—we must recognise that those problems have to be met on the terms and at the scale that they set, with allies. But the answer is not to invest in just more of the same; it is to have a very thoughtful look at how combinations of digital-age technology would give us genuinely different, new and affordable solutions. If we can take advantage of the logarithmic reductions in information-based capability, we may find that we can develop things that keep us safe, at home and abroad, at a much more affordable price than if we continue to jog on with conventional solutions. If only we could have that debate as a result of Committees such as this, we would be in a profoundly better place.
Q26 Lord King of Bridgwater: I very much agree with your assessment. The idea that, globally, one of our carriers has a vital role to play in the South China Sea is an illustration of things that are never going to happen. One of the areas in which one can look for some support is the strength of NATO and the extent to which there can be genuine reliance on allied resources—for instance, the minesweeping capabilities that we had, which were a specialist facility. In a very real way, the United States left it to us to do that in the first Gulf War, because we were good at it.
With other NATO countries not spending too much money, or not as much as we would like them to spend, do you see the possibility of closer co-operation in NATO by sharing resources in that way, to enable that global role to be played?
General Sir Richard Barrons: It is essential. We have to accept how, for understandable reasons, NATO has gradually but incrementally demobilised itself since the end of the Cold War. We all understand why. Now, in the face of new threats on the borders of Europe from Russia, arguably, and potentially, as an act of collective security, further afield, NATO needs to rediscover its mojo and to be remobilised. When it does that, it absolutely cannot be allowed simply to reinvent the model it had at the end of the Cold War. There will be examples where we will survive and thrive only if we engender great co-operation between allies. Things like ballistic missile defence, cyber defence and air defence against conventional cruise missiles can be done only on an alliance basis. With the notable exception of the United States and, perhaps, Sweden, which is not an alliance member but is investing in suitable capability, very few NATO members are investing in capability to deal with the military risks they are now confronted by, as the world has moved on.
James Gray: Madam Chair, I apologise, but I am going to be elsewhere. I am going to welcome the Ice Maidens, who have just walked across Antarctica.
Q27 Mr Dominic Grieve: May I just touch on priorities? I have the advantage of being Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Of course, the interesting feature is that the money currently spent on the intelligence budget now forms part of the magical 2% in its assessment. That may be very nice—and, of course, overall the intelligence agencies have received, over time, substantial investment; they are one of the very few areas that have done so.
To pick up your point about cybersecurity, that is clearly relevant, and the same applies to defence intelligence. But in the light of the questions that you were being asked earlier, are we in danger of taking our eye off the ball? I am not sure about full-spectrum defence, but if it is masking the fact that there is no adequate ability to defend one’s own territorial seas and one’s air space, are we in danger of misleading ourselves as to how we are using our 2% investment?
General Sir Richard Barrons: We are emerging from a period when we became quite obsessive about terrorism. Because it was clear, present, urgent and necessary, we diverted an awful lot of resources, both financial and in people, to the business of terrorism. I would not argue that that was the wrong thing to do, but in so doing we allowed our ability to look at other military risks in our world to wither, and in some cases disappear. I would include the challenge from an assertive Russia in the way it actually presents itself, which is very different from how it presented itself in the Cold War.
We have to understand that this century will be dominated by China; as a strategic military force it is gaining in ambition, capability and reach, which we need to follow, because it will bump into us and our interests. We need to understand the dramas that are unfolding in the Middle East, in the shape of the developing clash of wills between Saudi and Iran, because of our reliance on capital flows and energy from that region, and we need to understand what is going on in Africa because of the risks of migration and terrorism and a humanitarian drama of the first order.
We need to build intelligence machinery that covers the risks across the board that can affect our security and prosperity. When we do that, we need to take advantage of the new means of doing it, so rather than building intelligence that used to be about individual analysts being experts, it is now really about how we harness the power of open-source big data propelled by machine learning, connected to our allies. When we do that, we will find that we do it better and arguably much more affordably.
Q28 Angus Brendan MacNeil: General Barrons, you have argued that things can be done only on an alliance basis. That comes down to a fundamental question about states and the role of states in the future—the jigsaw that we have to put together against existential threats. Do you think that there is a point where the smaller parts of the jigsaw will have to get together to decide what they want to spend their individual two per cents on? If we are talking existential threats, we are talking about states that have 20% of the human population—puny figures.
General Sir Richard Barrons: I think that states, by which we probably mean European states, have to accept that the challenges that they face in the world from other state actors are so huge that they can compete only by binding together. We have irrevocably bought into the collective security mechanism of NATO and other things in Europe.
We also have to recognise that we all face some threats that do not recognise any national boundaries—cyber would be a major example. So unless we bind together with our neighbours, we will never find an effective way in which to deflect those threats that do not recognise borders.
Angus Brendan MacNeil: What has to change from what is happening today to start happening tomorrow to take account of the point you are making?
General Sir Richard Barrons: We need to recognise that NATO as a conventional military instrument has demobilised and declined, so it needs to be reset. But it has to be reset so that it can deal with the military problems it actually has to face. I would argue very strongly that it starts with the ballistic and cruise missile challenge that dominates the landscape these days. It has to accommodate air defence, which cannot be done on a national basis, and underwater defence, which also cannot be done on a national basis.
In the arena of cyber, we have to recognise that it is an entirely borderless problem. If we try to deal with the cyber challenge on a national basis, even though we are pretty good at it, we are bound to be unhinged—or we will be unhinged because our neighbours fall over, which has massive consequences for us.
Q29 Baroness Lane-Fox: To continue on the theme of modern deterrence, I am interested, first, in whether we can even take account in the way we have built our strategy for all the different threats—everything from nuclear and conventional military strikes to terrorism and cyber subversion. As a supplementary to that, I shall come to some of the specifics.
General Sir Richard Barrons: I do not think this is rocket science. In the business of deterrence, we are perfectly capable of looking at the world and embracing the range of things that can do us harm. Then we will recognise that this is a lot more than the nuclear deterrent: deterrence and the deterrent are not synonymous. This is a lot more than the traditional, conventional military risk that we used to deter. Now, it embraces things such as what happens in the grey space—so-called hybrid conflict—and what happens in cyberspace.
We need a full-spectrum deterrence policy and strategy that embraces all those things and then does the things common to all deterrents—build a credible response, make clear those things that you wish to deter, make absolutely unclear what you are going to do precisely in the event of your lines being crossed but make it absolutely clear that you have the will to respond—and just do it across all those things. At the minute, we tend to fixate on little bits of that, which is never going to be good enough.
Ms Elisabeth Braw: Thank you for inviting me. Yes, we tend to fixate on the Armed Forces being the answer to every threat that faces our country, or any country, but I would argue that there is a huge resource, especially as the threats turn to the homeland, in the population itself.
On the grey-zone attacks, I looked at the report from Lloyd’s insurance on a potential hack of the US power grid in 15 north-eastern states, which would leave 93 million people without power. Lloyd’s says that mortality rates would rise, and there would be a decline in trade as ports shut down and there was a disruption in water supplies. It would bring chaos to transport networks, and it would take several weeks to restore power. There is no way in which we could or should place armed forces at every power plant. That is when we need to turn to the population, which is an incredible and underutilised—or, in fact, unutilised—resource in providing deterrence.
Denmark has an extension of the whole force or society approach, with what it calls “total defence”. It has a volunteer organisation attached to the armed forces; 48,000 people volunteer their time, trained as part-time troops. They do everything from guarding sports events to guarding critical infrastructure and military installations, and they exist in the local community. Imagine if we had something like that here in the UK; 48,000 in Denmark translates into about 500,000 people in the UK. That is at very little expense, because they volunteer their time, and we would have that resilience, which would free up resources for the sorts of threats that require enormous investment.
Baroness Lane-Fox: Sir Richard, you mentioned hybrid threats and the grey area between war and peace, with which I am a bit familiar in the digital world—what is an attack and what is war. Can you give some examples of the practical differences that that leads to, and how therefore you would have to reorganise yourselves?
General Sir Richard Barrons: I would start by saying that I do not think that trying to maintain a distinction between peace and war is terribly helpful conceptually, practically or legally, although there are some definitions to do with the law of armed conflict where the division between peace and war may apply.
We have to accept two things. The first is that we are challenged in the world every day by powers that have a different view of us. Take Russia as an example. We are in a competitive or assertive arrangement with Russia right now. Russia knows absolutely that it has nothing to gain by confronting the theoretical, conventional military superiority of a US-backed Europe, but it has also learned, or rediscovered, that it can very effectively keep us on our heels, destabilise our democracy or weaken or economy by playing in this grey space. It looks at all the levers of power that it has available to it, whether that is politics, diplomacy, media, cyber or social media, and does things that are unhelpful, even if they are a little chaotic.
We struggle to play in that space. We are doing a better job of identifying when it occurs, and the US example of Russia being found tinkering around in the Democratic National Committee is a leading example. So we are quite good at calling this out, but we seem not to have worked out what we are then going to do in applying sanctions, deterring it or rebutting it, or doing it back. I know that democracies struggle with this more than monolithic states do, but it is absolutely a feature of our time, and we should not expect that if we were to transition from confrontation into conflict that stuff would stop. It would just be another feature of conflict at scale.
Q30 Mr Dominic Grieve: May I just come back to the point that Ms Braw made a moment ago? I was rather struck by the suddenly raised question about volunteers in a Danish context providing an all-round capability to help civil power and be engaged. I was once a member of the Territorial Army, which, relatively speaking, I think one has to accept, was rather poorly trained for most of us compared with the regular Army, but was supposed in many ways to fulfil exactly that role. A past Government axed it and replaced it with a much smaller reserve, which was supposed to be immensely dedicated, to be provided with an enormous amount of time to take off work to go and serve, if necessary, overseas, and to supplement the regular Army. In fact, that devastated the previous structure, because it was apparently worthless.
I was very struck by this remark, because if you are right we have headed in the wrong direction and in doing so have deterred large numbers of people who would be prepared to give up some of their time to reach a reasonable level of training but who have no ability to submit to the level of training that is currently required for the reserve.
I wondered what the whole panel thought about that, because it suggests that we may have gone in the wrong direction. I plead guilty to the fact that I thought that we were going in the wrong direction when we originally did this.
Ms Elisabeth Braw: I think it is the wrong direction. Norway has a similar organisation, Heimevernet, which translates as “home guard”. The Norwegian Heimevernet is equally as attractive as the Danish equivalent; in fact, it is commanded by the former commander of the Special Forces Command, so you get the idea. It is not a sort of “Dad’s Army” arrangement. That is a crucial aspect of it, because if it has strong and distinguished leadership, of course people want to join; it is prestigious.
What is more, Danes will tell you that it is better to be an informed and empowered citizen than a passive one who will panic at the first sound of a terrorist attack on Oxford Street. It comes back to the idea that the population is not a fragile flower that needs to be protected from every conceivable danger but can be mobilised as a resource that empowers ordinary citizens—or, at least, a great many of them.
General Sir Richard Barrons: There are two reasons why the present state of the reserve is unacceptable. The first is that, in our history, we recognise that big wars are always won by civilians; we just have not had one for a while. But it is an inescapable fact that a powerful reserve makes the Armed Forces better every day, because it gives them access to talents that they would not otherwise have and makes them bigger when they need a bigger set of Armed Forces. We lost that through the Iraq-Afghan period, when the reserve was broken by being used in dribs and drabs and never exercised its chain of command. It has not entirely recovered from that by some distance.
The second reason—and this may be common to us all—is that our recent adult experiences of wars abroad is that they are away matches, where the homeland is at no time put at risk, there is no societal mobilisation and the reserve is not called out. But that is a historical exception. If we want to talk about credible deterrence, a resilient society is inextricably part of that. Having reserves and volunteers who can keep the country together, although it is targeted through strategic-level cyber targeting or ballistic or cruise missiles at some date in the future—it is clearly not imminent—is a vital part of deterrence. But we seem to have convinced ourselves that we live in a post-conflict Europe where the homeland is not on the pitch, which is just naive.
Baroness Lane-Fox: In addition to that interesting suggestion, are there other things that you would like to see as outcomes of the capability review, in relation particularly to this idea of the state, non-state or high-risk threats that we may not yet be able to address effectively?
General Sir Richard Barrons: This current review is an opportunity that will not come around again to easily draw a line at the end of the post-Cold War period. It should accept that we have run down our defence and security, less for counterterrorism, for reasons that we can articulate. That was fine, but now as the world is turning out it is not fine, so just doing more of the same is the wrong answer.
In trying to work out what to do next, I should like this review to conclude, first, that it must stabilise defence by paying for SDSR 15 and, secondly, that a proper call is needed to stop and think and have a genuinely rigorous review of the defence and security requirements in this century. As part of that stop and think, it could then conclude that there are new forms of harm that we have to deal with in the grey space and in cyberspace, which we are not brilliant at yet but which really matter.
Secondly, in the transformation of conventional military capability, the answer is to seize on the potential of the digital age and apply these combinations of things that have been developed in civil society genuinely to transform how we can deter, defend, protect and, if necessary, punish people, in a way that will be more effective and, I think, more affordable. In so doing, I would argue that it could be made part of the Brexit-era prosperity agenda. I do not see many of those things likely to come from this review.
Baroness Lane-Fox: Do you think we have the people who can think about it in the way you have described? When you say that you do not think it will come out of the review, is that partly because of—
General Sir Richard Barrons: I do not think it will come out of the review because of the way in which the parameters have been set and the way in which politics are conditioning it. With a lack of bandwidth in the Brexit era and those sorts of things, I do not think it is very likely. There is a tendency to see those reviews as marginal adjustment, and I am talking about a major, profound and strategic change to equip ourselves for this century. That is going to require rather bolder politics than we have seen so far.
Q31 Angus Brendan MacNeil: Ms Braw, you made an interesting point that relates to a previous role that I held in Parliament as Chair of the Energy Committee. You mentioned the 93 million people in north-eastern United States who would be knocked out if there was some event around a power plant. What importance has been given to distributed generation as a method of defence—from wind, solar, storage or whatever source—that would alleviate or mitigate such an event? Do defence circles think about that, or do they leave it to another space?
Ms Elisabeth Braw: I cannot comment on UK arrangements in particular, but I know that in Nordic countries, for example, hospitals are already planning for what to do in case of an attack like that. In the past, they planned for things like a tube collision. Now they are planning for outages or attacks on the infrastructure that by extension would lead to a mass casualty situation.
That is also an area in which the adversary blurs the line between state and non-state actor, by extension or in response we have to blur the line. What is the Armed Forces’ responsibility and what is the responsibility of civilians? It does not really matter, as Sir Richard says; it is a range, and empowered civilians will strengthen our deterrence.
Q32 Rachel Reeves: I have a question about how national resilience works within the capability review, perhaps for you in particular, Ms Braw. What policy options and capability should the Government consider as part of that?
Ms Elisabeth Braw: I would strongly suggest something along the lines of the Danish Hjemmevaernet, which is a very inexpensive arrangement. It has 600 full-time staff and 48,000 volunteers, as I mentioned. The Italian armed forces have a similar arrangement, the Servizio Civile, which is essentially the continuation of civilian conscription for those who refuse to carry weapons. It has six to eight months of training for young people who want to do the civilian part of the conscription. Last year, about 50,000 people did it, and the training is provided by NGOs, so it does not even involve a lot of government administration. That, too, empowers society against these sorts of threats, including the hack on the power grid, which would result in chaos in all areas of society. You would have this core of empowered citizens, so I would love to see something like that.
Rachel Reeves: How resilient do you think we are at the moment to these sorts of malicious threats? Is there any way of measuring that compared with other countries or over time?
Ms Elisabeth Braw: I am not privy to the inner workings of the Government, but I know that the highest-ranking officials have been reluctant to have crisis management exercises in the way it is done as a matter of course in Denmark, simply because it would be embarrassing for gaps to be discovered. Sir Richard can weigh in on that as well. Exercises are a way of detecting gaps and plugging them afterwards.
To come back to an example of a country that is very well managed in this context, Denmark has regular crisis management exercises involving all of government, business and civil society, which is a way of cheaply and effectively plugging the gaps. That would be necessary here as well.
General Sir Richard Barrons: I would say that the UK currently exists in a state of acute comparative vulnerability, for a number of reasons. First, England is the most densely populated country in Europe; our infrastructure runs at about 98% the whole time, and we all experience the joys of Transport for London on a bad day. So the first reason is that for our society to function we require an awful lot of complex things to keep working at maximum output.
The second reason is that very few people in this country feel existential peril. They do not get out of bed in the morning and worry about bad things happening, which is common in other parts of the world. As Elisabeth has described, our mechanisms for bolstering resilience have largely either been dismantled or do not exist.
The third reason is obvious to military planners around the world. The idea of territorial invasion at scale, which was popular in the 20th century, is now being eclipsed in many cases by the view that to bring a country such as the United Kingdom to heel you focus not on its Armed Forces but on its critical national infrastructure and bring daily life to a halt. If you have a population that is essentially a giant strategic snowflake, it is going to put pressure very quickly on the Government just to agree with the opponent, whatever it is saying, because we have dismantled all our resilience mechanisms.
Countries such as Russia and China will thoughtfully apply capability such as cyber, missiles, agents, proxies and money to bring the daily life of their opponent to a halt, which was very clear in Estonia in 2007. This is war in our time, and we are not prepared to deal with it either by preparing the population or by building the organisations and processes to be effective.
Q33 Rachel Reeves: Sir Richard, you mentioned the importance of infrastructure. Last October, the Government published the National Security and Infrastructure Investment Review. One thing they consulted on was the takeover rules for British companies with national security concerns, and potentially strengthening them. Do you think that is necessary, whether because of foreign takeovers or takeovers by other British companies that might want to sell off parts of those companies in future? Do you think we should look again at those rules?
General Sir Richard Barrons: That is a legitimate concern. If there is something to our daily life that is vital and it is in the hands of a foreign Government or company, we would need to be sure that when we fell out with that country it did not take advantage of it.
However, I do not think that that is the key question. The key question is how we do better at sustaining our daily life by having the laws, regulations, education, training and processes in place that allow the Government to direct a whole of society effort. For example, that includes the City of London in how we address confrontation and conflict. That debate has occurred for 30 years or so. Just relying on the public sector to do what it does on its own will be insufficient, and just relying on the good will of boards and shareholders altruistically to spend their money on preparations for something that they think is not their problem is not going to work either. This is about raising our national game for life in the 21st century.
The Chair: That seems an admirable point on which to thank all three of you very much indeed and move on to our second panel.
Examination of witnesses
Mr James De Waal and Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman.
Q34 The Chair: We thank both of you very much for coming and sitting through the previous session, which I suppose sets quite a good background for it. As you know, we are looking at the national security capability review. Was it a good idea to have the review? Has it been approached sensibly? Does anything in particular leap out at you that it is obvious the capability review should address but may not be?
Mr James De Waal: I think it seemed like a good idea at the time. Its origin was before the election. I have never been a particular fan of the idea that you have regular reviews, regardless of what else is going on in the world. What is important is: is there a question to answer? Is there a problem to solve? There needs to be an assessment of whether the benefits are worth the costs. Doing a review is always quite difficult and the costs are often quite high. They are in part political costs because the business of reallocating resources is always a politically sensitive issue, and if you are going into this as government you have to be braced for three to six months, perhaps even longer, of leaks and potentially negative stories coming out.
At a strategic level it is also not good news because it goes into the international world, in the sense that Britain is not getting its policy right.
In our system, so much depends on the power of the Prime Minister. You need to have a sense of whether it is the Prime Minister’s agenda. Is it something they can push through?
Before the election the answer to all those questions was probably yes. You had a new Prime Minister who seemed to have a different view of the world from David Cameron. Brexit was coming up, which seemed to raise a whole set of other issues, and a lot of the expectation in the election was that the Prime Minister would emerge in a stronger situation, so you could afford to have all these political difficulties.
The election went a particular way, but we also have recognition that perhaps the Ministry of Defence budget is a greater problem than expected. It is now quite questionable whether the Government really would be doing this if they were starting from this position.
I conclude with a footnote about something that has changed since 2015, has not been recognised and is quite important—the publication of the report on the Iraq inquiry. Whatever the Government do to look at how they do security policy, I would like to see them take proper account of the recommendations in that report.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: I can say only that it is interesting that there has been no government response to the inquiry yet, which after a time is a shame. Individual departments, including the Ministry of Defence, have responded quite well, but there has been no government response.
The Chair: Are you expecting one, or are you not sure?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: I think the issue has been put on the “we’ve got other things to deal with” pile, but there are a number of issues that the inquiry did raise, not particularly about the question you just posed to us but how you manage operations, and it has certain obvious implications for defence spending: the use of urgent operational requirements and so on.
I agree with a lot of what James has said. There is a problem with defence reviews. There was a period, largely following the Nott review of 1981, when Governments were scared to have them, because that review was followed by the Falklands and there was a sense that, every time you had a review, what you decided to cut was going to be needed the next year. Therefore, government became rather wary of reviews.
Now it seems that we cannot get enough of them. They have the cost that has been mentioned and encourage the view that everything is being looked at holistically. But you cannot look at everything holistically all the time. Nor can you expect every few years to have massive swings in one direction or another, partly because all the legacy programmes that drove the 2015 review still impact on the current review. It also suggests that you are doing more than you are actually able to do. What you need to do at the moment is manage the mismatch between defence commitments and the defence budget.
It is not a new problem; it has been a driver of past reviews. This review started with a view that the Ministry of Defence could not do this by itself, so a wider context was needed in which to place it to try to find a way of getting some grip on the defence budget. Then it became apparent that doing that would cause significant upset, particularly with the marines’ amphibious forces, general manpower issues and so on, so it has been handed back with that very specific problem still in hand.
There is no reason why, when you are dealing with that issue, you have to try to address every other issue on the defence agenda. Some of these need to be addressed with a degree of urgency, some can be addressed with more time, but we are where we are. The fact is that this review will have to answer some difficult questions. In the end, it is a government issue, because it is hard to see how a politically acceptable answer will be found without finding a bit more money.
Q35 The Chair: In a lot of the conversations that we have had, in various ways it has come up that the guiding principle of the Government’s approach to all this has been to maintain flexibility to respond to something that has happened unpredictably. However, we also keep hearing from other people that it is all very well to concentrate all your response to something you are not expecting, but there is a risk of that occluding the longer-term focus on projects and work that might prevent these things from happening in the first place. Do you have a view on those issues and the tension between them?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: As I have already mentioned, a defence programme is developed over many years. The carriers emerged out of the 1998 review, which was a long time ago. They were part of a particular strategic debate that was going on at the time and made sense in a particular form—not necessarily the form in which they have now arrived, but we are two decades on.
First, you have to recognise that it is a long time and the strategic context will shift around you while these programmes are under development. This is particularly true when talking about the big-ticket items such as Trident. We now have systems designed during the Cold War that came into being early in the post-Cold War period, and now we are moving into the post-post-Cold War period.
Essentially, you end up saying that there are certain generic capabilities that make an awful lot of sense if you want to be a serious player in the defence field, and the good thing to do is to give yourself flexibility with your capabilities. If you try to link it too much to specific scenarios, you will get caught out. You suddenly decide that something is never going to happen again, as we did in the 1960s in relation to out-of-area operations, and then there you are; you are scrambling with bits and pieces to try to put together a significant response. It makes perfectly reasonable sense to go for as generic a set of capabilities as possible that can be applied to a number of areas.
I think you can also argue, moving more towards the national security side of it, that there are a lot of things that you can do in the short term that may not require much by way of military effort but that do require a lot more diplomatic effort—possibly, as you were discussing before, with the development budget as well.
The timescales keep catching people out. We have to accept that it is very difficult, and the record of anticipating future conflict is really bad. If you tie yourself to a set of very particular scenarios and say, “We will never do that again”, or, “This is definitely the way of the future because we have seen an example of it over the past year”, you are likely to get caught out.
Lord King of Bridgwater: A favourite illustration of that is that we sold all our desert uniforms three years before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Mr James De Waal: I would make two points, one about the specifics of the review and a slightly more general point. It is important not to use words such as flexibility and adaptability as an alternative to setting clear priorities. One of the real measures of whether this exercise is a success will be if there is a clear set of priorities. It is important that you are clear why you have chosen those priorities so that if those things change you can say, “Maybe we need to change our priorities”, but I think that is the key thing.
The other, more general, point is that I am slightly concerned about the general tone of our approach to national security, which suggests that there is a range of threats out there in the world that are going to come and attack us when we are just bumbling along in our own way. This rather underrates our own agency in setting an agenda for what we hope to achieve in the world, rather than just responding to others. Also, the strategic situation in which we find ourselves is partly of our own making.
To give you an illustration of what I mean, when al‑Qaeda was such a threat it felt that it was responding to what it saw as western entry into the holy region, and in our confrontation with Russia to some degree this was a Russian response to what it felt was the West getting into its area.
Both those movements might have been understandable—indeed, praiseworthy and the right policy—but these were policy initiatives that we as part of the West took, and I think we underplay that.
We also underplay the fact that the problematic situation in which we now find ourselves is to some extent the result of a financial crisis that was, by and large, triggered and caused in the West, and the failure of security and economic policy in the West in some areas. It is not as if these problems with Russia and China have arisen from a vacuum and come to us as a threat; we contributed to this.
Q36 Baroness Henig: That raises a question about what our role should be in the world, particularly as we move into the 21st century, which is changing quite rapidly. Should the UK, as a mid‑ranking power, seek to play a truly global security role, or is it better suited to playing an international role based on its position as a strong regional security power?
Mr James De Waal: I am quite sceptical about discussions that start from, “This is Britain’s place in the world”, largely because these are questions of ideology or identity, and they are political questions. You cannot turn to a bureaucratic exercise as a way of reaching a decision on these questions. Personally, I think one’s starting point ought to be one of scepticism based purely on the evidence of our recent international experience, which to my mind suggests that Britain’s international influence has perhaps been overstated.
I would also suggest that what is often presented as an eternal aspect of the character of this nation is much more variable than that. I would say that the notion of Britain as a power outside Europe is quite recent and dates from perhaps the mid-1990s. Before that, Britain was a country focused largely on the security of north-western Europe and Northern Ireland, with a few peripheral interests outside that. The idea of an expeditionary posture has come rather later than that.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: With one important qualification that we did have an empire.
The Chair: Some people seem to think it is going to reappear like magic.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: An awful lot of our concepts, approaches and expectations were developed during the imperial period. Even Harold Wilson in the mid-1960s was still echoing those sorts of assumptions. In 1962, Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, as he then was, observed, to great irritation in this country, that we had lost an empire and failed to find a role. That led to everybody trying to find a role, including a bridge between Europe and the United States, or the Greeks to the American Romans, and it all tended to revolve around the special relationship in some way. To try to work out what our role is going to be is in some ways about how we connect with the United States, which obviously has its own particular issues and problems at the moment.
We also have to recognise post empire that we are in a very privileged part of the world. We are bemoaning the fact that we are not as engaged as Russia is in the great problems. Well, good, because Russia is engaged because it is petrified by all sorts of things going on around its borders in ways that we are not. We may make them so, but at the moment there is no particular reason for us to be so. We are an island, which has always been a great strategic advantage, at the end of what is now a reasonably benign continent, so we have choices that other countries do not have.
We may choose to play a role well away from the UK, but there is nothing pressing us in the way that presses other countries. We are obviously affected by what goes on in north Africa and the Middle East. I am not for a moment suggesting that we can ignore that, but it is an important shift in the historical context of the debate, because government has to make the case much more about why we are doing things, rather than it being axiomatic because of our geographical position or, as in the past, because we could not bear the thought of another great power dominating the European continent. Those are the sorts of issues that grow the policy.
Lord King of Bridgwater: What about the Commonwealth element that affects us?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: As you well know, we have obligations by agreement and so on, such as the Falklands. There are things that we can do there, but, going back again to the 1960s, if India was to get into a war with Pakistan, or Pakistan with India, Britain was right to the fore; it felt it had an important role in helping to manage these crises. As late as 2002 we were still playing quite an important role with the Americans when there was an India-Pakistan crisis. You can imagine that, but they do not look to us in the same way as in the past. It is supportive, but it cannot by itself, as we could have done in the past, make a strategic difference.
As was said before, most of the things we will have to do really depend on our picking our alliances, local ones as well as the United States and others, very carefully. The idea that we can be independent players in a lot of these issues, even with the Commonwealth and a particular state, is much harder to sustain.
Q37 Baroness Henig: Going back to the so-called special relationship, the Prime Minister has said that reinvigorating the transatlantic partnership is a fundamental part of the UK’s role as we leave the EU. What do you think our prospects for success are, and what are the challenges?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: I think everybody is having difficulties with the current Administration, in part because there are two of them. There is the formal Administration who say all the right things and are sensible, orthodox and pretty mainstream, and then there is the tweeting part of the Administration, which is much harder to reckon on and work out what notice you pay of it. It is a very unstable and unsettling period for that reason. Some of our allies, such as the Germans and maybe the Canadians, find it more unsettling than we do, but it is unsettling.
That said, there is an extraordinary depth to the relationship that tends to be underplayed, especially in the intelligence field and obviously the nuclear field. I do not think one should underplay the ease of interaction between the US and the UK, which I think can be sustained, but what is harder is to be in the position Prime Minister Blair tried to get into where you feel you can move the Administration in one direction rather than another, possibly against their own instincts. That is a very hard thing for us to do at the moment.
Q38 Tom Tugendhat: Is there not a slight error in Dean Acheson’s observation, in that the role of the British Government is the same as it has ever been—the happiness and furtherance of the interests of the British people? In that sense, Britain’s role has not changed for 1,000 years. Would it not be fair to say that our interests and role in some ways have become a little easier and in some ways a little harder?
On the ways in which it has got easier, Sir Lawrence is absolutely right: we live in a very fortunate part of the world. We are very fortunate to have 20 miles between us and even that fortunate part of the world, making us still more fortunate. But is it not also complicated because it means that we have to think really hard about the decisions that we are going to take about where we intervene and so on, because even the very smallest intervention can have effects at home? Therefore, is it not the role of the British Government to look very hard at the world and decide methodically and carefully where to intervene? Although I respect his Lordship’s call for our Commonwealth affiliations to be regarded as important, is it not incumbent on us to be cautious even when we intervene in Commonwealth areas?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: We are bound to be cautious. The case has to be made. Operations that would have been the small change of previous conflicts are now seen to be very big deals indeed that are thoroughly debated in both Houses, as they should be. Because of Iraq and Afghanistan, people will want persuading. We saw after the terrorist attacks in France that people can be persuaded, but the case has to be made.
James referred to threats. It is one thing to worry about Russia or China as big powers with big ambitions that may be trying to interfere with our allies or way of life, but once you start getting into the sorts of places that are falling apart in civil wars, which are by far the greatest source of conflict in the modern world, and the way other powers intervene by proxy, you are talking about very complicated situations, and explaining how you are going to intervene sensibly in those areas is quite difficult.
To take an example not from us but from Russia, Russia thought it had done really well in Syria and then all of a sudden things start happening that mean that: first, it cannot get out very easily; secondly, it cannot get everybody to agree even to turn up for a peace conference; and, thirdly, it is having to deal with the Turks, Kurds, Israelis, Iranians and the Syrian Government. It had a private army of its own beaten up by the Americans the other day.
I am sure that these sorts of things were not anticipated by President Putin, but this is what he has to do. It is very difficult once you do get involved to put limits on your liabilities and explain what you are going to do, which is why we tend to do these things largely through air power—the easiest way of going in and out.
Tom Tugendhat: Given all you have just said, is it not slightly odd that we have split the defence capability review from other areas? Does it not sound to you as if they are fundamentally the same thing?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: Personally, I believe there should be a continuing conversation on national security priorities. I do not think it is an every-five-years-type of thing. It should be a regular, continuing conversation, because they change.
Tom Tugendhat: On the spectrum.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: Yes, they change. At certain times you realise that certain things are necessary. You can argue correctly that in 2015 we saw that cyber was becoming more important. If you look back at that review, that is the most important legacy. It was the proper one to take. You did not need to be looking at everything else at that time to realise that cyber was becoming more important. If we had not decided it then, we would certainly have decided it the next year. Equally, the defence review, as already discussed, is about the mismatch between commitments and resources. At some point you have to deal with that. It does not have to be bound up with everything else when you do.
Tom Tugendhat: Is that not rather more an internal budgetary process for the MoD to sort out rather than a national capability review?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: I think that was how it started, but the idea was to give it a context in which others could help them sort it out.
Mr James De Waal: I am quite sanguine about splitting the reviews, partly because my own experience of overall integrated national security reviews is that defence often ends up dominating the discussion, which is rather broader based. I am quite struck that, although we say we have national security reviews, we are still quite a long way from doing them on an integrated basis. Certainly, in looking at where the resource is and being able to reallocate between the various different sectors, I would be more encouraged if there was a discussion that said, “We are spending about £760 million a year on counterterrorist policing. Let’s compare that with the figure of between £200 million and £300 million a year we are spending on the UK military operation in Iraq and possibly Syria, or the £3 billion to £4 billion we are spending in Afghanistan for notionally counterterrorist reasons, and reallocate some money between the defence and policing budgets to deal with this”. It seems to me that is not happening. Until it does, you cannot really talk about having a proper integrated national security review, so, to some degree, splitting it off for defence makes sense.
The other point is that there is a risk in particular of the defence versus national security capability review becoming some sort of mechanism for the articulation of political rivalries between the senior people involved.
Tom Tugendhat: That would never happen.
Mr James De Waal: You are the expert, but I think that is the greatest risk because, as I said at the start, these exercises are often incredibly politically sensitive.
The Chair: I have long thought that one of the greatest weaknesses in any Government is the inability to look on the one hand at what is being spent on programme A and what is being spent on programme B and to take account of the Government’s overall approach. It all tends to be done in silos. We all say that it should not be, but it continues to be done in silos.
Q39 Lord Brennan: Sir Lawrence, before I became a member of the Committee, I read your book on strategy. It is a great book intellectually, and definitely volumetrically, but when I skimmed through it recently I could not find anything in it that would justify the use of the word “strategy”. When the Government say in the Brexit negotiations, “We stay members of NATO. That is our military alliance, but we are ready in the future to enter into security—intelligence and so on—and defence commitments with the EU, or members of it”, is that feasible?
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: Yes. The role of NATO is big war, and at the moment it is Russia-focused. It was not so much at the start of this century, but it has become so. Essentially, it is the things that you may wish to do with the United States. The role of the EU has been in less demanding tasks. They have a defence component, but the United States would not expect to be involved. None the less, they are important. They may be things like patrolling, dealing with piracy, peacekeeping operations, trying to deal with refugees as they come over and so on. You can argue about whether defence is the right word. They certainly have a military component to them. We have not engaged in these an awful lot, but they have a role, and I would not be averse to seeing that continue.
A lot of problems have been caused by the tendency for some in Europe to keep talking about European armies and so on and imply that there is something they can take over from NATO in a serious way, and it is just not true. It is not going to happen for all sorts of reasons within the EU, and it would not be a good idea if it was going to happen. We can talk about these lesser areas as being perfectly sensible and quite helpful, but NATO is still the big security provider.
Q40 Lord King of Bridgwater: I think you have picked up the last question, which is one that I could not possibly agree with. One of the lessons highlighted by the Chilcot report was that ministerial leadership and co‑ordination is vital in setting and delivering security policy. It never occurred to me that that could be right. Anyway, there we are. There is a follow-up question: does the capability review process so far suggest strong political leadership? We want a non-political answer to that question.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: We have already had the answer to the last bit. Shall we say that the moment of political leadership is yet to come, because decisions will have to be made? It will be apparent either that the Armed Forces are making very unwelcome cuts or that they have been bailed out to a degree where, as General Barrons put it, they can be stabilised, and then you have to try to look beyond that at where you go.
May I make two points that have come up that have Chilcot relevance? The point about the lack of ministerial involvement was made by and large in the context of decisions that were made in particular during 2002, when no sub-committee of Cabinet met in the build-up to the Iraq war. Some very big decisions were not challenged or interrogated as much as you would have wished. I think that was the point that was made.
There is another issue that goes back to the previous conversation about co‑ordination between different departments. First, if you are not getting the departments working together, which is one of the things a national security review might achieve, or the National Security Council should achieve, there are varying degrees of commitment to the policy that emerges. One of the real problems in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq was that, because in the end this was seen very much as a prime ministerial decision, the other departments—notably, but not just, DfID—were not brought in.
The second point that is relevant is that, when you have an emergency and are trying to respond, the ease with which the military can get more money under urgent operational requirements is in striking contrast to the ease with which the Foreign Office can get more money, and they are really quite trivial sums in comparison. One of the curiosities of the situation we are in is that at a time when we need diplomacy—because we want to deal with conflicts before they reach a dangerous point and need good evidence and intelligence about what is going on in the rest of the world—we keep undermining the Foreign Office.
The sums are really quite small compared with those for defence. It is not just the overall sense of priorities—what you give to diplomacy and what you give to the military, which will always be vastly larger—but the ease with which the military could respond to a contingency, and did so quite efficiently, and the difficulty, because of the way the Treasury controlled the budget and did not have a contingency for the Foreign Office, or DfID for that matter, meant that it struggled to respond. I think those are issues worth addressing.
Lord King of Bridgwater: At the end of the Cold War we thought we were moving to a much safer world and that everything would be sweetness and light. In a very real sense, the world is now a much more dangerous place, with mass migration, the development of social media and the development of cyber. A whole lot of elements that did not exist some 20 to 25 years ago mean that you need much tighter and closer co‑ordination of different government departments—people working together—to face the threats. We talked earlier about critical national infrastructure. It is no good running a successful overseas campaign if our home affairs are shut down.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman: Yes. The critical national infrastructure is a very good example of an issue that emerges over time, gradually starts to be recognised and becomes tested in specific ways, because most of our infrastructure is tested by one sort of attack or another daily. Gradually, you start to work out what to do. I do not think we have done too badly on that issue. My point would be that these are issues that government needs to keep coming back to. They change over time. If you have a good National Security Council structure, which I think in part is a question of secretariat as much as actually meeting, you should have regular updates on where you are and what needs to be done.
Estonia was mentioned by General Barrons. The lesson of Estonia is that it now has the best cyber capability of anybody. It is a world leader, and the Russians do not get anything for the denial-of-service attack. There are interesting and important lessons you can learn, but I come back to the point that it is a continuing, not once every five years, exercise.
Mr James De Waal: May I make just one point?
The Chair: We are about to lose our quorum, so will you be brief? I apologise, because I would like to hear it.
Mr James De Waal: I will try to do it in 140 characters. If you are having more joint funding, more joint organisations and reorganisation of Whitehall structures to deal with hybrid threats, what does that mean for accountability and funding, which are still based on Ministers and departments and service level agreements with the Treasury?
The Chair: That is an extremely good point on which to finish. Thank you both very much indeed. We are very grateful to you. I am also very grateful to members of the Committee for their resilience.
[1] Witness correction: In 2011