Defence Sub-Committee
Oral evidence: Cultural Defence Diplomacy, HC 792
Monday 20 February 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 February 2023.
Members present: Gavin Robinson (Chair); Sarah Atherton; Robert Courts; Dave Doogan; Mr Mark Francois.
Questions 1-49
Witnesses
I: Major General Buster Howes, CEO, Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
II: Professor Greg Kennedy, Professor of Strategic Foreign Policy, King's College London, and Professor Jeremy Black, former Professor of History, University of Exeter.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo [CDD006]
Witness: Major General Buster Howes.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this first panel session of the Defence Sub-Committee on cultural defence diplomacy. We are delighted that in our first session, we will hear from Major General Buster Howes, the chief executive officer of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo; in our second, we look forward to hearing from Professor Greg Kennedy and Professor Jeremy Black. Major General Buster Howes, you are most welcome. Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. Do you have anything to say at the outset, or are you happy that we go straight into questions?
Major General Howes: I can briefly give some context. I was a trustee of the tattoo for five years before I joined the executive. My background is in hard, rather than soft, power. I was a Royal Marine for 34 years—well, I am a Royal Marine; like the Jesuits, there’s no past tense. Then I worked in conservation in Africa for a bit and with the NHS, and now this. That is my background.
Chair: Thank you very much. I will pass over to Sarah Atherton for the first question.
Q2 Sarah Atherton: It’s good to see you again, Buster. I think we are going to go into the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in a few questions, but the floor is yours. How should Defence and the Armed Forces fit into the UK’s soft power?
Major General Howes: At the risk of being doctrinal, to understand the tenets of it I went back to Joseph Nye, who explained the phrase “soft power” at Harvard in 2012. Soft power, whether it is defence diplomacy or more broadly, relies on the whole notion of a society’s values, because what you are trying to do is seduce and co-opt rather than coerce. Therefore the underpinning of it is very much values based, the trinity being democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.
There is a paradox, because the closer a cultural, artistic or sporting artefact becomes associated with Government, the less credibility it has. It is about the sense of it being independent or authentically creative in some way. The soft power of the Ministry of Defence or any Department of state is a complex thing. We will come on to the whole business of ceremonial and military music more broadly, but I think it is about light touch, as for all governmental things that work well.
Because this is the Defence Committee the focus will be on the MoD, but part of the lost opportunity is that it is not much more cross-departmental. The tattoo parochially has really strong links with the MoD for all sorts of reasons that you will be well versed in, but other Government Departments could make much more of the convening power of this institution.
It is a slightly complicated argument, because we want to be close but not too close. We are a charity and an independent company; our lineage goes back to 1952, when we were very firmly part of and organised by the British Army. That sense of being independent is important, but the challenge of soft power, as Nye said, is that it takes time to have effect, so it requires patience. The Government do not have many levers. We tend to look at the BBC and the British Council, and reading the Integrated Review, the same institutions come up. If you accept my premise of it being governmental but not governmental, and biddable but not biddable, there aren’t many things like the tattoo in the military sphere now. That is why the services value it so highly.
Q3 Sarah Atherton: The MoD is increasing its defence attaché network by a third so that is accelerating at pace, but you touched on working cross-departmentally. There is the foreign aid and the humanitarian side of things, and I think we will touch on music a bit later. Is there a piece of advice you could give the Government about how to work across Departments to actually enhance soft power?
Major General Howes: It is quite difficult to—for want of an elegant phrase—find the belly button you can push, which as much as anything says, “What is it you want from us?” The conundrum we quite often have is how do we show value. What is the measure of effectiveness, recognising that it can take time? What is the value of convening people?
Commander Field Army Ralph Wooddisse came last year as an Army lead for the tattoo. It was right at the point where Ukraine was absolutely focusing every mind. He brought 12 members of NATO’s field armies together—leads, so his equivalent—and they had a conference in Edinburgh castle. It is partly the setting of a UNESCO world heritage city, so there is a whole combination of things. You could argue that, because we were forward-leaning on Ukraine right from the outset, he would have convened that meeting anyway, but it was a huge success.
I spent some time in Washington when I was the defence attaché. I remember what Hillary Clinton inherited when she was the Secretary of State. Funding mechanisms in America are sometimes rather counterintuitive. The State Department buildings were built in the 1950s and they were wholly austere and functional. You can’t get public money for that sort of thing in America. As well as travelling 1 million miles during her tenure in that job, she twisted arms to elaborate that space. By the time she ceased in the post, you had Jefferson’s desk, where the constitution was signed.
My point is that the environment really matters when you are trying to have sensitive and difficult conversations. That is the reason why you have such beautiful art here. The diversion of the tattoo is sometimes a kind of magician’s misdirect.
There is also an interesting comment about keeping friends close, enemies closer. You always end up talking, and quite often you have a back channel, but where is the balance between us beguiling and somebody else manipulating? How do we balance that? We have the Chinese—some of whom I am meeting this evening—or the Iranians, the North Koreans or the Russians. Because we have “military” in our title, it is complicated, but, for example, the Edinburgh International Festival, one of the 11 in Edinburgh, is like the Oscars of the classical world. It is phenomenal and now rejoices in having Nicola Benedetti as the chair. They will engage all faces in the night. They will have Russian participants, state or otherwise, this summer, and that is quite a complicated question as well. If you are not engaging them softly, how are you engaging them? Where does the rheostat sit with talking to all people, and could we do that?
Q4 Robert Courts: Can I pick up on some of the points you’ve made, such as that it should be light-touch but cross-departmental? I am interested in the point you are making there.
We are looking at how Defence and the Armed Forces fit into this overall umbrella of UK soft power, and I am wondering whether there ought to be more of an overarching strategy and where Defence fits into this; it would bring in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, clearly the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Department for Business and Trade. There are probably two pieces here. There is a wider foreign policy objective of where Defence fits into this, and there is your own perspective.
I am conscious of the other great tattoo—the Royal International Air Tattoo, which takes place down in my part of the world and which deals with things in slightly different ways. It is differently organised. I would like to tease some things out from your points about cross-departmental work. The reason I am interested in this is because it is slightly counterintuitive when you talk about it being light-touch.
Major General Howes: We have taken the tattoo overseas five times, and we are looking at the moment to go to the States. There are quite a few actors in the Middle East who are interested in us doing something there. The last time we went overseas was in 2019, to Sydney, and we played in the ANZAC stadium to 83,500 people over four nights.
Engaging the Foreign Office, for instance, requires you to go through the prism of the GREAT campaign, and sometimes that is quite difficult to navigate—how you get on to the GREAT campaign and whereabouts it sits for America. I would strongly welcome a joined-up approach—that funny old thing—and the idea of a generally understood set of metrics that tell you what it is you are trying to achieve. Whether or not you are measured against them to show value for money for the British taxpayer, you could understand what the objectives were.
Q5 Robert Courts: In the same way as the French have set objectives for their foreign policy and their aid, we could have an analogous situation here?
Major General Howes: Yes, rigour would help us both. It is not vague, but it is quite a nuanced thing, as I have indicated. Twain, I think, said that when you have a big hammer, everything looks like a nail. I ran the Predator strikes in Afghanistan—this is probably not the smartest thing to say on the public record—and at that stage in 2008 everything looked like a nail. We are migrating it back. It is force on mind. It is interesting that hard power and the manoeuvrist approach to operations, which you will all be familiar with, is about force on mind. It is not about attrition warfare; it is about the psychological effect on the enemy, and so is soft power. They are not that distinct, are they?
Q6 Robert Courts: I was asking about a formal strategy.
Major General Howes: Yes, I would applaud that. I think it would be really helpful to have a cross-governmental strategy, and a champion for it so you could understand to whom you go to understand when decisions are made either in support or not in support. Having said that, the Cabinet Office can be very nimble. We went to Mumbai to support at small scale a trade delegation on the back of the Queen Elizabeth rolling in, with Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary. That was conjured up in three weeks and was a model of best practice in a way.
Q7 Robert Courts: Thank you. There was another thing I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned that you are looking to seduce or co-opt rather than coerce, which is a nice way of putting it. Of course, nothing is better soft power than music, so I would like to explore the importance of music with you. You have soldiers with many bands, the Royal Marines have a famous band and there is the Central Band of the Royal Air Force. Where do they fit in? What can they offer us as soft power?
Major General Howes: When all is said and done, some of the key ingredients are authenticity, credibility, history, noble purpose and trust. It depends where you go, but if you go the States and you brand yourself as a military tattoo, you cannot have a simulacrum; you need proper warriors. One of the most compelling acts in the tattoo, which has been coming back for years, is the Top Secret Drum Corps from Switzerland. They are lawyers and teachers; they are absolutely staggering percussionists, but they are not military at all, and yet they out-precise the military every year. However, the fact is, we need warriors for it to be authentic and credible.
As you are aware, Nicola Benedetti is one of the greatest living violinists, and I asked her what struck her most when she came to the show last summer. She said, “The rhythmic power of it.” The spine of our show is the state bands. We bolt everything to them. We have little time to rehearse, but we have their musicality, flexibility and ability to march, so they are the chockstone for the tattoo.
Q8 Robert Courts: There are the regimental bands as well. We had the Gurkhas here recently, this incredible cultural phenomenon, and they had bagpipes as well. Although bagpipes are traditionally Scotch and Irish, they were played on that occasion by the Gurkhas. It has an incredible impact, seeing that for the first time.
Major General Howes: Bagpipes generate 140 decibels. When there are 250 of them, you feel your internal organs vibrate; it is a visceral experience. It is a joke, but it is also more, because it is a powerful platform. At the age of almost 60, I am still ridiculously idealistic, and last summer I was very keen for us to pay homage to the courage of the people of Ukraine, so our finale was unambiguously that. We had images of refugees and Volodymyr Zelensky. You will recall it. It was blue and white. What we do with that is an interesting discussion. We gave money; it was not directly in our charitable articles, but it was something that felt like the right thing to do. So there is how we use the platform, mindful of the fact that we are closely associated with Government, and whether we have to be coherent with Government policy. That is something that needs to be thought about carefully. We are back to tolerable independence.
Q9 Mr Francois: General, nice to see you again. Her Majesty the late Queen’s funeral was a very sad event for the nation, but it was also an amazing example of military precision and co-ordination. What do you think was the impact of that funeral in terms of the standing of our Armed Forces both domestically and internationally?
Major General Howes: You look at that sort of thing and think, “How on earth do they do that?” There is a sort of notion of its uniqueness. I don’t think anyone does ceremonial like the military, even though in capacity it shrinks and shrinks. When I was in charge of the Royal Marines, I wrung my hands over the band service during the SDSR.
I think there is an element of other nations looking on in admiration. I looked at the BBC website, and for 19 September, there was an estimate of 4.1 billion people having watched the service, which is clearly preposterous, but a lot did. In this country, 22.4 million people were supposed to have watched it—
Mr Francois: About a third of the total population—roughly.
Major General Howes: Yes. It engenders enormous pride. I guess the only caution I would apply is that, “times is ’ard,” and there was a lot of bling. She was the most remarkable of people, so on one level, even if people were non-royalist, they recognised that it was right that she had her moment. There is a balance to be struck there with how much is enough, but yes, the eyes of the world were upon us, and I guess that is unusual. Did it do us harm? Absolutely not. The other caution I would apply, however, is the notion of the historical theme park. That is a difficult one to square. How much do we live on past glories?
Q10 Mr Francois: I spoke to some friends, so this is purely anecdotal, but a number of them used the same phrase, funnily enough—they all said it is something we are still “world-class” at. Would you agree with that?
Major General Howes: Yes.
Mr Francois: Thank you. I would tend to agree, too.
Chair: Thank you, Mark. Closer to Edinburgh now—Dave Doogan.
Q11 Dave Doogan: But not too close. Nice to see you again, Buster. The Edinburgh tattoo is a phenomenal event, an incredible production, and its utility is hard to put a number on—it is impossible to put a number on actually—
Major General Howes: I am hoping you will help us with that.
Dave Doogan: In terms of what it projects about Defence in the United Kingdom, how much utility does that allow United Kingdom Defence when engaging abroad? When allies—and sometimes, as you point out, maybe not allies—are in discussion about defence matters, how helpful is it for UK Defence to have the Edinburgh military tattoo there as a thing on which to reflect its capabilities, values, ambition, precision or whatever? How helpful is it as an enabler or—perhaps this is the word—a catalyst?
Major General Howes: Martin Luther King said that a vision is “a target that beckons”, and I think the tattoo beckons. The First Sea Lord brought the Chief of Naval Operations, a charismatic, delightful man, and we had the US Army field band—I’d said, “You can come as long as you don’t march in straight lines, and as long as you do bring a rapper.” They brought two, you will recall, and they blew the roof off—or they would have if we had a roof. The First Sea Lord said, “I have a line of a dozen people who would like to come on the night that I host,” so he values that hugely.
Memories fade. We have been around for a very long time—since 1952—but through the pandemic, like a lot of people, we became supplicants, trying to stay alive as a charity and to garner the influence that we needed. Since the summer show, which was fortunately a success, we have had lots and lots of people again banging on the door. That is valuable in that it opens conversations and it is something that people want—“We want to be part of the show.” We now have a waiting list to 2025. Some of it is about quality, but some of it is about trying to understand—for our purposes and yours—who to give the slots to. We are in quite a happy position at the moment. It is the convening power. It is, at the highest levels of Defence and Government, that opportunity for people to want to come.
One of the things that I am trying to do with the Edinburgh International Festival is with something called the Edinburgh International Culture Summit—I think the British Council is about to do a deep dive to work out whether it might be run a bit more nimbly. We bilaterally put together programmes. Edinburgh is a bit of a distance, at least from London, so people come up for one night or two. You could put on a programme that has us and the London Philharmonic or some phenomenal British or Scottish violinist, and then you have really quite a compelling thing. Then you have Edinburgh, which is a world heritage city. In a subtle way it has enormous traction overseas.
Q12 Chair: Could we explore a bit further how well Government—not to usurp what you do so well—could use the tattoo and similar events successfully for defence diplomacy and soft power more generally? When I was there 11 years ago, it was explained to me that there is a rotation: the Army will look after the guest lists for one evening and then will rotate with the RAF and the Navy and so on. Do you have any role in that? Is that something that is totally among the services?
Major General Howes: We have an argument every year—that is my role—about understanding equities. It is something they are very engaged with. The one thing they really care about is how many nights they have to host. The salute taker has a group of 24 people. Increasingly, they use that very strategically.
Q13 Chair: That is what I would like to hear more about. How has that progressed from being casual and ad hoc to being strategic?
Major General Howes: I suppose from just inviting your mates for a knees-up—
Chair: Yes, so you are no longer seeing the same 24 faces every year.
Major General Howes: The risk sometimes is that when the Chiefs come, they go, “Oh, bloody hell, okay, this is how we’re going to use it,” and then if, for whatever reason, one has not been or came ages ago, they lose sight of its opportunity, and then it can slide a bit. But as long as they can see it—because the best advert for the tattoo is the tattoo, and you are all cordially invited. It is about how the guests are woven together.
We had 4,400 VIP guests last summer—everybody from the Speaker of the House of Commons, who was absolutely hilarious, to Keir Starmer, who turned up under the radar. He came along and had a great evening. The security services come, and the national security adviser—although I don’t think he actually made it in the end—and then you have a lot of very senior military people. August is not the easiest time. That is self-evident. The First Minister turned up every year. It is unusual to see senior members of the Cabinet, although we invite them every year.
Q14 Chair: If you say there is more strategy being deployed in how the services use their ability to invite guests, when the First Minister of Scotland is there, for example, is she there as a guest, or does she have the same ability to invite on behalf of the Scottish—
Major General Howes: She does. We have four, including the Lord Provost. This year we are very much hoping that the first night will be the salute taker, as it is called, but that the principal guests will be the US ambassador to the Court of St James and the British ambassador in Washington, both four-star ladies who know each other well. We think that would be interesting. We are hoping to invite J. K. Rowling on the same night. You can see where I am going with this. It is not just people like me clanking with medals; we are trying to broaden the traction of it.
Q15 Chair: So you are highlighting the failure of Whitehall, or central Government, to harness to same potential that the Scottish Government and the services, in their own respects, have been deploying, and saying that it could be brought together much more coherently.
Major General Howes: The gentleman behind me has coached me very carefully not to be critical about anybody, but I agree with you, Chair. I think there is an opportunity here that we are not fully exploiting.
Chair: Grand. Thank you, sir. You talked about the magician’s misdirect earlier, and there was a bit of conjuring going on in your response there, but I will pass over to Robert.
Q16 Robert Courts: The impact of cultural defence diplomacy and the value that you have spoken about is probably something that all of us here have some sympathy with. But here’s the thing: how do you measure it? How does Government measure it?
Major General Howes: There are five measures. I did a bit of research and there are five endorsed measures. The Integrated Review quotes Britain as the second most powerful soft power—set against what metrics? There is the Brand Finance global soft power index 2022, there is ISSF’s world soft power index 2022, there is Monocle’s soft power survey, and there is Portland’s “Soft Power 30” report. They rate Britain somewhere between second and eighth.
At that level, it is a bit like the trust index. There is a really clever thing, which has been going for about 50 years, that measures trust in society—both the glue and lubricant of life. If these people at a think-tank level have done this—I couldn’t actually find out how they did it—the metrics exist. We did some work directly with the MoD to try to get better at this, because it is very much in our interest to. We were trying to do it bilaterally, and they were very inclusive in the process.
The defence industrial base comes with quite a lot of our senior military people; they use it to engage with the likes of Boeing, Northrop Grumman and others. But ultimately, if one side ends up with an outcome for refitting submarines or whatever, how do you point to the tattoo and say, “It was them wot done it”? It is never as straightforward as that. We look for empiricism, and I think the best you will get is anecdote. Stories are compelling but, when it comes to the Treasury, not that compelling.
Q17 Robert Courts: No, indeed. It is perhaps not a Treasury empirical measure, but what you can look for, I imagine, is links—connections between people that otherwise would not exist. Is that the sort of thing we are looking for?
Major General Howes: Yes—brokering conversation. This is entirely speculative, but would Ralph Wooddisse have hosted that important meeting—I hope it was not classified, because that would be unfortunate—if he had not had the tattoo as his bait? Would that have happened somewhere else, in a NATO country, because he was not primus inter pares, and would that matter? Did that help UK plc’s position? Well, I guess so. I don’t think you can measure that, but you can report it. You can find a form of words that says, “What is the grammar and logic of this activity? What are the activities that underpin it? How many of those can be ascribed to certain things that happen each year?”
I assume this is one of the reasons I am here giving evidence. There is the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which has elements of the military, and the Mountbatten Festival of Music, but that tends to be quite domestic and—not parochial; I wouldn’t say that as the erstwhile Commandant General. But there are not many things like the thing we do that you can point to.
Robert Courts: Very true.
Q18 Mr Francois: Can I ask one very parochial question on that? Years ago, when I was much younger, I used to go to the Royal Tournament every year at Earl’s Court or Olympia. I went to the last night. It was a very emotional evening, actually, for all the audience. There was—
Major General Howes: Raymond Brooks-Ward.
Mr Francois: Absolutely right. You are loyal to the Edinburgh tattoo, for obvious reasons, and your pride in it, if I may say so, sir, comes across, but do you regret the passing of the Royal Tournament? Is there any way that we could realistically revive it, or would the manpower requirement just be prohibitive?
Major General Howes: I think you are probably right in the latter caution. This is a personal view, but in the last 10 or 15 years we have learned the hard lessons that our grandfathers knew. The permafrost of the cold war was followed by things in the sand that were gritty and pretty horrific. There is a slight unease in my generation, the generation of Blair’s wars, of playing soldiers for public edification—the pastiche of abseiling off the front of Edinburgh Castle with a Fairbairn–Sykes commando knife between your teeth and rescuing a damsel. However realistic and thrilling doing inverted Vs and double death slides off the roof of Earl’s Court was, we are back to authenticity, so we have to think quite carefully about how we do it.
I regret the Navy’s field gun race going away, because there was something authentic, risky and exciting about it. They no longer do that, and you think, “Well, that seems a shame.” That tradition, which has been lost, goes all the way back to Nelsonic times.
Q19 Robert Courts: Aren’t you perhaps missing the point about recruitment and inspiring people, rather than the diplomacy? I appreciate that the question was asked in the context of diplomacy.
Major General Howes: That is probably fair. It is interesting. I would counter that by saying that the average age of the people coming to the tattoo—they are younger than me, so I must be careful what I say here—is 54. This is a conundrum that we grapple with a lot. We are not recruiting 54-year-olds. They are the gate guardians to 20-something-year-olds.
When young people come to the tattoo, sort of sucking their teeth, they go out doing flick flacks. It is like taking them to Cirque du Soleil; they are completely amazed by it, and then want to work for us. We are back to the perception of what it is. If I might say so—this may be a contentious remark—it is the same reason that Adele and Ed Sheeran have just declined to be part of the King’s coronation. It is because part of the attractiveness is being too cool for school, and kids who are going to be recruited don’t necessarily come to Earl’s Court unless they are six and come with their granny. Its recruiting power is a complicated thing. You have to get over the prejudice, first of all, before you engage, and that is sometimes complicated.
Q20 Chair: I have two further questions for you. As you highlighted earlier, you have studiously avoided negativity or criticism. We want to harness positivity. What more do you think the Government can do to benefit from the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, as one example?
Major General Howes: Specific to Scotland, I think it about the attendance of senior folk. I can say with confidence—I hope you agree—that you were looked after well when you came.
Dave Doogan: Extremely well.
Major General Howes: We are investing significantly to make a special experience more special. It is about the proximity of the 2,000-year-old castle, and the ability to go up it. We are trying to work out really compelling ways to elaborate, not just commercially. Going up to the Big Blaw, a bagpipe goes out of tune in about four and a half seconds, so they tune up right at the top, looking across the Firth of Forth. It really is a fantastic experience. It is a dizzyingly unique experience.
It is about getting senior politicians across the line. Sometimes, candidly, the secession debate can make it complicated, inevitably, for Ministers from Westminster who are trying to find a toehold, a reason or a legitimacy—not that they need one, necessarily, as part of Great Britain. I think it is that, more than anything, because once you come, you’ve got it. It doesn’t need me sitting here waffling for hours; just come and see the thing, and then you will go, “Ah, okay.”
Q21 Chair: What about the utilisation of the tattoo externally?
Major General Howes: As a business model, taking 1,000 people around the world is not the smartest thing. U2 take four—well, they take a few roadies as well. So we try to be repeatable, scalable and more nimble. Mumbai was a really good example of that. We did a Bollywood mash-up in Mumbai, at short notice, with 12 dancers and pipers. We will elaborate the tattoo 20% a year and take it off in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. I want to get the Scottish Ballet in kilts dancing with our dancers in tutus. I want to get Stormzy rapping with the pipes. I want to challenge some of the things, while recognising that the beating heart of it is the pipes, drums and dancers. Now I have lost my thread.
Chair: Don’t worry; I still have the final question.
Q22 Dave Doogan: I have listened very carefully to some of the observations about what I hopefully will not inaccurately describe as a space into which greater support could come from more senior people. Would that be fair?
Major General Howes: I think that is fair.
Q23 Dave Doogan: Right. To that end, does a Secretary of State—not particularly this Secretary of State—or a Ministry of Defence Minister attend the tattoo on a routine basis?
Major General Howes: No. Well, I have to be careful how I answer that. I can’t—
Dave Doogan: Yes, and I am not trying to trip anybody up.
Major General Howes: No, no. I am just trying to be accurate. I could not confidently say when the last Secretary of State came. That does not mean to say that one did not come in 2018, perhaps, or before then.
Q24 Dave Doogan: Fair enough. Let me ask an unrelated supplementary. Like all big productions of this nature that are based on a charity model, you have to sing for your supper.
Major General Howes: We do.
Q25 Dave Doogan: It is cash in. You will also, therefore, know where your fee-paying, ticket-buying subscribers come from. In a UK context, what is your spread?
Major General Howes: That is a really good question. We have Some 3.5 million people come to Edinburgh during the summer festival, and we were concerned by the expectation that that would be significantly diminished post pandemic, so we focused our marketing very carefully on a domestic audience. We were successful, in that—this is not a precise figure—about 25% came from Scotland. It is like living next to the British Museum: you never go to the British Museum. More often than not, people in Edinburgh in particular, but also in the central belt, perhaps do not come, but they did.
Typically, 44% are international. It is watched by 100 million people on television each year as well. We play to 230,000. Over our history, we have played live to 12.2 million people. About 44% come from overseas—a lot of Americans and a lot of Germans. Post Brexit, we are looking at Europe as well, to help to refortify some of those links. There are 12 tattoos around the world, of which we are the tattoo—people recognise that we are sort of primus inter pares. We engage with the Basel tattoo and the Dusseldorf tattoo every year. There is a sort of urban myth that you can never get tickets for the tattoo—most years we sell out, and this year we sold 93.5% of our tickets—but to your point, we are a charity, and you have to sell 86% before you start making a profit. As with all live events, the break-even point is very high.
Q26 Dave Doogan: We are very lucky in Scotland in terms of events. Between sport and culture, we have some extremely high-profile events. The tattoo is clearly in the premier league of attracting visitors—from the figures you’ve just said there, 44% of the audience is international visitors.
Q27 Dave Doogan: I’m guessing you must have a very productive relationship with Visit Scotland, then.
Major General Howes: Yes, we do. I would just elaborate on one of the things we are trying to do, because one criticism is that it is too Edinburgh-focused. It is clearly right in the middle of the old town. As with cities like Prague and Venice, there are too many people, too much mess—less is more. It is the second largest city festival in the world—second to the Olympics. It is the same size as the FIFA world cup and it happens in the same city every year. When something like the Commonwealth or Olympic games happens, there is a massive heave. Government gets involved; everybody gets involved. The Edinburgh festival happens every year like it’s running on rails. Everybody but us is direct grant funded to more or less of a degree. It is interesting that people think it will just happen. There is risk involved in that. As you will be aware, the film festival went bust last year.
Q28 Dave Doogan: Don’t take Edinburgh for granted, then.
Major General Howes: Yes.
Q29 Chair: Final question, Sir, which you are entitled to say no to answering, if you prefer—
Major General Howes: When did I last see my father?
Chair: You were previously a defence attaché in Washington.
Major General Howes: I was.
Mr Francois: And a very good one.
Chair: Part of this inquiry is going to look at the effectiveness of defence attachés in the defence diplomacy realm. Have you any observations to make as to whether the role of defence attaché is utilised as effectively as it could be, and whether the positions themselves have as much importance placed on them, or whether they are, for some, an exit strategy where you do a nice posting and then leave the Army?
Major General Howes: You make a very good point. At the risk of speaking about something I was involved with some years ago, I think we should send our brightest and best at a younger age. In bureaucratic cultures, rank counts. You don’t get access and you can’t get to see people if you don’t have enough weight on your shoulder. I’m not quite sure how you square that circle. As you say, it is too often a sort of sinecure. People get on to that circuit because they are not really employed in the centre—I am not going to make any friends by saying this. I think the ability to really gain traction from one strategically placed individual is enormous if they are really smart, energetic and upwardly mobile.
I remember going on a counter-terrorism based thing to Dhaka in 2006, I think, in Bangladesh. We had withdrawn our defence attaché two years before, and they were still furious. It is a bit like downgrading the World Service. These things are symbolic; they are more than symbolic. Putting people with real agility into those roles is an enormously good use, and I think it’s immensely good for the officers involved, as well. You learn all sorts of things at an early age. I think the current Chief of Defence Staff has completely changed the way officers are promoted to higher ranks, hasn’t he? You can jump ranks. It is less Buggins’ turn; it is more meritocracy. As part of the FCDO’s effort, if you put some really smart people into that role, it would be terrific.
Q30 Robert Courts: Can I pick that up? You quite rightly put your finger on that, and I entirely understand the points that you made. You do need the rank to open doors, but clearly you send the brightest and best at a younger age. I can totally see how that benefits the system and benefits the individuals. I am thinking aloud here, but when we are looking at some different employment models across the Armed Forces, like people may being able to leave and then come back, greater use of reservists, or perhaps people entering at a higher rank if you want their particular skills—all those things that are being thought of creatively—what are you considering? Would you recommend something like a temporary promotion to a higher rank and then you have to go back down again, or reservists?
Major General Howes: That is used a lot in Defence—acting rank or local rank.
Q31 Robert Courts: Acting rank—but much higher than you would otherwise have.
Major General Howes: I remember that Gwyn Jenkins, who is now the Vice Chief, went from two-start to four-star—bless him. He happens to be a Royal Marine, and he was DSF before this. He commanded the Special Boat Service, and he was a deputy national security adviser. I think he was MA to a Prime Minister, and then he did such a good job in the MoD that they said, “How about becoming the national security adviser?” He was a colonel at the time, and everybody started coughing in the Ministry of Defence because he was still 12 years old. It was sort of, “He can’t do that. He can’t possibly do that; he needs to be a three-star general to even think about doing that.” Now, lo and behold, he is Vice Chief at something. I think he’s 14 now. Admiral Radakin—the MoD is moving that way, and I think that is good.
The other point I would make is that if you bring people in, having been reservists, they have to be credible. When I went to the states, General Richards was CDS. I was not expecting to go there in that role, and I think the person who was lined up to go there had not been in Afghanistan and Iraq. His judgment was that you needed somebody who had done the hard yards in the sand, if he was talking to his American counterparts. You just have to be careful about experience and make sure they are a singleton who is working on behalf of HMG. That is why they need to be good: they need to be current. You do a defence attachés thing quite often in order to get a crypto fill on the language. If you brought people from outside back into that environment, you would need to make sure they had a very good upbrief to make sure they got it.
Chair: Okay. Thank you very much, Major General Howes. We greatly appreciate your taking the time to come down to London today and all that you do with the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in furtherance of our aims and objectives on defence diplomacy and soft power. Thank you very much indeed.
Major General Howes: You didn’t make me cry, which my mother will be pleased about. Please come, and then you will not have to hear me waffling on ever again.
Chair: Thank you. That concludes our first panel. You are more than welcome to stay within the Committee Room and hear the second session, should you so wish.
Major General Howes: Yes, I might actually, if that is okay Thank you.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Greg Kennedy and Professor Jeremy Black.
Q32 Chair: For our second session, can I sincerely thank both Professor Greg Kennedy, professor of strategic foreign policy at King’s College London, and Professor Jeremy Black, former professor of history at the University of Exeter? Gentlemen, you are both very welcome here this afternoon. We greatly appreciate your willingness to engage in this session as part of our sub-committee’s inquiry into cultural defence diplomacy. We are delighted that you are with us this afternoon. Would you like to say a few words about yourselves and your roles, and your views on this inquiry, before we go into questions?
Professor Black: I am well aware that the current Secretary of State is keen to develop this network and I think he is right to do so, for a number of reasons. There are the more conventional reasons of direct relationships with the militaries of foreign powers, not least to help ensure the sale of British equipment and advice, both of which are very important in lessening the costs of development in our own country, but I also think there are more serious issues in terms of what one might call defence diplomacy, which I would argue is a very important form of soft power if you think about it. I would differentiate between the hard power of stuff, kit, lethality, kinetics, all of which are crucial, and a soft power. I listened to the general and I respect him, but a soft power is, fundamentally, persuading other people to do what you think appropriate and trying to actually provide a shared constituency of interest.
There are great problems posed for Britain, in doing that, by the fact that many other states have Governments in which the military are very potent and which are not particularly interested in or do not necessarily respect highly the Foreign Office as a representative of views. We are not just talking about places that have, shall we say, dictatorial military Governments, Governments of that kind, of which there are very many; we are also talking about states that ostensibly are democracies but in which the military fundamentally direct strategy and often, as a result, foreign policy. To those states, it is very pertinent that we have successful, able defence attachés—able to represent what Britain stands for. And I think there one has to differentiate between states that are our allies, however defined—there is no one state of being an ally—and those states with which our relations are less close; again, that covers a wide multitude of facts. As far as the first is concerned, the fundamental job of a defence attaché is to explain the problems posed by the things that you can’t talk about in public, which is strategic prioritisation, and that is where you really have soft power playing a role. It is trying to align our strategy with that of our allies, trying to persuade our allies to understand our strategic parameters and assumptions, and trying to make sure that this goes as well as possible. That, I think, is the most crucial form of soft power provided by a defence attaché.
There is also the need to feed back into the British decision-making programme—not in order to roll over and say, “Yes, we’ll do what you want,” but to feed back the strategic prioritisation of other militaries and their influence on their states. Again, one needs to be grown-up about this. The militaries are not really, on the whole, interested in talking about the environment; they’re not really interested in talking about a lot of what is the agenda of modern foreign policy. What they are concerned about is power, and they are concerned to know what one is going to fight over, how far one is willing to direct resources, and what prioritisation one offers.
The last point—and then I’ll shut up. The last point that is germane here and that I can tell you, having spoken to many figures in other countries, military and diplomatic elites, over the last decade, is that particularly since 2015—in fact, I would say, since 2014, and the time of the Scottish referendum was when I noticed it most clearly—there has been a sense of volatility in Britain and British, as it were, possible geopolitical, strategic and military concerns. The basic question if you went to Japan in 2014 was: what is going to happen if Scotland votes for independence? They were concerned about Faslane; they didn’t give a damn about the other aspects of it. I think here it is necessary to use defence attachés to signal to foreign militaries that there is continuity in British policy making, irrespective of who may be running the country. That is a very important element, because foreign militaries appreciate that point. Nobody wants to put their cards on allying with a Britain that is regarded as unreliable.
Chair: Thank you, sir. Professor Kennedy?
Professor Kennedy: Thank you, Chairman and Committee, for inviting me today. I have had the privilege of spending the past 30 years educating military officers in Canada and here in the UK at the Defence Academy. As part of my studies, this kind of integration between political power and the military power elements is key to how I have assessed strategic foreign policy.
You need to be cognisant of a couple of things in your particular inquiry: first, you yourself and why you are doing this. Is this Ben Wallace’s initiative to make Defence better, or is it now an outcome because of what you are, because military power is intimately linked to the political? Imagine how I talk to an EU country’s defence attaché—do I talk to the EU through that attaché, or am I talking to an individual state with a political power dynamic? You are now a separate entity from the EU, so your defence attachés have a different place. That is a very important part of the European military landscape now. If you had talked to other defence attachés five years ago, they would all have told you the same thing: when we talk to defence attachés, are we even talking to European politicians? We don’t even know whom we are talking to. I am not in a place to judge. All I know is that, in terms of your strategic foreign policy making, that puts you in a very different place from all the apparatus that you have put in place for the past 40 years, so of course things have to change.
Secondly, soft power is not a vessel that is transmitted well through the military, because of what the military does. None the less, it is contextually significant to the military. In other words, imagine what you thought about the Russian May Day parade three years ago. How do you think that this year’s May Day parade will resonate around the world, as battalions march around and around the Kremlin, and different pieces of Soviet or Russian technology are paraded around? With the same kind of “ahh” and “ooh” as it was before? So, timing is important.
Right now, you are in a state of flux with your military, particularly your Army, which has been driven down this road to a large extent, trying to find ways that it can help with the Indo-Pacific pivot in places where it does not have a role yet, but also in terms of, “This is not something new; this is actually a renewal.” In the same way, as you abandoned many of the positions within NATO over the years—what Jeremy said, and what General Howes related about the downsizing of your critical situational awareness globally—you are having to reconstitute and restore what you had ripped down. You are not making something new; you are just trying to return to where you were, which is great—but you are also in a position of weakness.
You are not a strong military power at this particular point in time; you have issues. Therefore, your opponents might see this as a sign of weakness. This comes to the whole thing about soft power and signalling—context is important. Are you turning to soft power because you cannot do anything else? Discuss. And, if you are going to discuss that soft power, its context and when you do it, then this is where the IR comes in. If it is not co-ordinated and not connected across Departments, the overall effect of just having soft power put into the MoD and the defence attaché realm in a way that it had not been significant before, would be that it is irrelevant.
That is the same thing as having the Secretary of State for commerce or George Osborne or whoever else doing things at the same time as when you announced CSG21 was now going to go to the Far East—but you cannot get a trade agreement with the Chinese when you are telling them, “I’m sending an aircraft carrier, as its first tour, to piss you off.” That is not defence diplomacy, defence engagement or the way that you get joined-up, across-Government integration.
My last point would be to ask—the question was asked earlier, and alluded to in this thing about culture, when and where, and how you impose the idea of culture and militarism—how comfortable are you about being a militaristic, imperial power anymore? If you want a tattoo, an air show or someone to be impressed, is that what you are? Are you still happy with your heritage? Is this the kind of messaging that you want and have legitimacy in being able to sell? These other countries—India and those in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America—have a relationship in terms of how they view their military and their political that is very different from us. How we insert our messaging into their cultures, particularly if it is going to be through a military stove pipe, has to be done exceptionally cleverly, otherwise you run the risk of disassociating what it is you think you are doing from what you actually want to do.
This comes back to my last point, which is that what you are doing in this thing about impact or measurement is catastrophically difficult to do if you don’t establish the rules before you start to do it. As soon as this thing takes off, everybody is going to claim that they are doing something. Everybody is going to be chasing the money, because it is about the money, the posts and how we sustain different kinds of capabilities within this particular orbit. If you don’t establish what those benchmarks and matrices are right off the bat, then you aren’t ever going to be able to catch up.
I would really ask you to make sure that, as part of this Integrated Review, all the Departments of State really, truly understand what military power means to their Department and how that links to their type of power. This is also someplace where something like the Secretary of State’s Office for Net Assessment and Challenge comes in. That is the place where you are going to get that kind of red team ability to put a matrix in place that can actually start to measure impact, but I would not say they do it alone, because, of course, that is one Department. The FCDO is critical for this, but the Treasury, not so much; they have a very simplistic view of things—it is about money. Money is power, and that is what they understand, but that is not what you are talking about.
So the FCDO, Trade—as opposed to the Treasury, because that is about influence and making people think about things—and the military are the triumvirate that will give you the best benefit for setting up that complex system of assessment that you will demand gives you the measurements you will be asked for, in terms of what you are doing to evaluate the investment.
Q33 Chair: Thank you so much, Professor Kennedy, and thank you, Professor Black, as well, for your introductory remarks, some of which were wide-ranging, probably spanning outwith the remit of this Sub-Committee inquiry, which I think you know well. I hope our Clerks have listened to what you have said, because your comments could well see you back before us, in relation to other avenues and other inquiries.
For clarity, this Sub-Committee inquiry has been an aspiration of mine and of members of the Committee for quite some time, long before the incumbent Defence Secretary was in post. To put it in context, this inquiry is not a response to anything from MoD. In fact, to believe it was would be to misunderstand the role of this Committee, which is to scrutinise the activity of Government and, in this case, the activity of the Ministry of Defence. That contextualises where we are at: we are not pushing; we are inquiring. We want to see exactly what Government are doing, what Government could do and what Government should do. That is our role.
With that, may I ask Mr Francois to ask the first question?
Q34 Mr Francois: Gentleman, I apologise—particularly as King’s is my alma mater—because I may have to leave in about 10 minutes. I intend no disrespect at all. You have both given us some fairly forthright views on soft power. However well or badly we do it, how could we do it better? Perhaps I could start with you, Professor Kennedy?
Professor Kennedy: You need to integrate it into the system. Are you talking about the MoD or about Government across the board?
Mr Francois: I think the MoD, in the first instance.
Professor Kennedy: Okay. If you are doing it across the board, you need to make it much more of an ascending skillset, so that, in the same way that anything else gets you promoted and gets you ahead within the organisation, having that skillset is seen as being—You asked earlier whether this was something where you went on gardening leave, you did your last five years, networked your way into a nice job and then left. If that is what you are going to end up with in terms of the people populating that role, then you will end up with what you pay for.
You want the young and the brightest to do everything, so how do you make sure the youngest and brightest do this? Language skills, the emotional intelligence quotient, cultural affinities—all those kinds of things. There is stuff that will make you a very good officer and valuable to the organisation and the Government in general that is not going to put you on the path to HCSC and being CDS.
RCDS has a programme, and the pathways to RCDS probably match much more carefully along some of those plots. But I think that, in terms of the importance of language skills and the kinds of skillsets that you want to see, and being able to enable that kind of activity, you need to recognise them.
Mr Francois: En passant, it is interesting that you mention RCDS, because some members of the Committee, including some who are here, have been on that course, and I think—at the risk of speaking for others—that we would all speak very highly of it.
Professor Black: I don’t disagree with anything Greg said. I think you’re asking a really pertinent question here, not least in terms of the Chairman’s sensible injunction that we should remember the constitutional and governmental role of the Committee.
I would say that there is an understandable tendency, given the pressures—the enormous pressures—within which the Ministry of Defence operates, to not focus enough on the issues of defence diplomacy. I think Mr Courts made reference to the Treasury, and the actual increase in cost of having a few more defence attachés is very modest.
Mr Francois: It is certainly a lot less than an aircraft carrier.
Professor Black: Also, if you think about it—this is not intended as criticism—kit deteriorates every year, gets lost in exercise or whatever, so the cost is less than what you write down for a year, to give you a concept of what we’re talking about.
On the points made so far, I would agree with but I would add a qualification: rather than saying that one is thinking in terms of a completely different person/age group to be a defence attaché, I would say that a lot of it requires people who are fitted to the role that they are going to. Some societies are much more deferential to age than other societies. In other words, sending somebody who might show enormous aptitude but who is very much under 35 to a society where gravitas is seen differently would not be appropriate—just as we would not ordinarily send a naval man to Zimbabwe, which is not noted for its coastline.
What one needs is a very careful choice of people but, within that context, bright and able people spending two or three years on their way up doing the role is marvellous. It is important to our defence diplomacy towards other militaries and other Governments, it is important towards reading back to Britain and it is not necessarily incompatible.
The last country I went to where I spoke to the defence attaché was the last visit I made abroad, when I was the guest speaker at the annual conference at the Baltic Defence College in Tartu. That is Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I had a one-to-one with the British ambassador in Estonia first to make sure I said the right things, but then the defence attaché joined us, so there were the three of us. Then the ambassador moved on, and I just spoke to the defence attaché about the specific things he was interested in vis-à-vis good relations with the militaries of the Baltic countries. I thought that worked seamlessly. The two men clearly respected each other greatly; they clearly saw themselves as both operating in pursuit of British national interests within a NATO context. I thought that this was an exemplary way of proceeding.
Now, that kind of personality link is more important than whether the individual in question is 49 or 39, as it were. It is about getting the right kind of fit for the job.
Q35 Mr Francois: Very quickly, what I take from both of you—hopefully just to prove we have been listening—is that it is very important you invest in your human capital and that, having done that, you place the right type of human capital in the right place at the right time. Would it be fair to say that we have heard what you said?
Professor Black: Yes, I think that is absolutely right. Crucially, what we are trying to do is to elicit consent and co-operation, particularly with our allies, but also, to an extent, to maintain links and channels with those powers that we are not so fond of and that are not so fond of us. You really need the high skillset that we have in our military, but you need to focus it accordingly.
Mr Francois: Thank you very much.
Q36 Robert Courts: I will start with Professor Black, but Professor Kennedy can answer in due course. What would you see Defence’s role as being in this wider UK soft power offer?
Professor Black: I think Defence has an enormously important one. First of all, I agree with what the general was saying earlier, with what Greg is saying and with what I think the whole point of these meetings is: soft power and hard power are not incompatible—they are part of the same programme. In a sense, one way I am looking at it is that soft power is the intelligence side—I do not mean in terms of espionage—of strategy making. Strategy making helpfully includes us explaining what we want, us explaining what we can do and us explaining how our pieces fit together, and then trying to elicit co-operation with our allies and trying to pass back to London the views on the other side. It is a continuous process. To my mind, that, in a sense, is soft power, because we are not overflying aircraft at that point. I have written a lot on strategy and how we make strategy, and I think that is a key way in which you make strategy: you fit in the intelligence, the thought process and the analysis of the situation that comes through the military, as well as the very proper processes that derive from the political overseers. In a way, what you want is informed decision making, and soft power is a key element of informed decision making.
Q37 Robert Courts: So the soft power will enable you to have the links, the links will enable you to gather the intelligence, and the intelligence can pass back. You can make sensible strategy based on good intelligence, which itself comes from soft power. But, presumably, you also have to have the hard power in order to gain the soft power.
Professor Black: Oh yes, very much.
Q38 Robert Courts: I think that was what Professor Kennedy was saying, and he may say it again, although I do not wish to put words into his mouth. It cannot just be that you are doing that because you cannot do anything else; you have to have the ability to overfly the aircraft in order to get the soft power.
Professor Black: Yes. For example, good, bright people from abroad are going to Shrivenham or Sandhurst or are being trained within the British context. There are a multitude of forms of soft power, some of which the Defence Department does very well, and on some of which there are challenges to doing so well. That is not a criticism, because the tasks themselves are very hard, in part because strategy and strategy making has been very plastic and very unformed. You will know the argument—it has been voiced in the House of Commons, and I think the Commons debates were very well informed and very helpful on this—that strategic conception in Britain over the last decade has not been as wise, proficient or whatever you wish to say as in a previous age. One of the arguments there would be the interaction between the advice and the explanations coming from the military, but also from the political side—the two sides have to work together—
Robert Courts: And understand each other.
Professor Black: Yes, and soft power is part of the way in which the military explains things to its domestic constituency and its foreign constituency, and in which, through the military, Government and the politicians explain to the foreign military what we are trying to do.
Q39 Robert Courts: Yes, so that is its role within the wider soft power offer. But the reason why people come to Shrivenham, Sandhurst or RCDS is because we have something to offer; we are seen as a quality mark. If we are not seen as a quality mark, then you lose the ability, presumably, to influence strategy in that way.
Professor Black: Yes, I think that is very true. I have lectured at RCDS; in fact, I think I have spoken at Shrivenham. One interesting thing is that one of the things for which the British “product” is very strongly praised is the extent to which it is perceived abroad—this is an aspect of our soft power as a military—that our military is not politicised. Let me give you a contrasting example. People always used to say that the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein was very poor, because you were promoted because of your—I always used to try to explain to people that, actually, that was the proficiency he was looking for, in a way. We are not looking for that proficiency. That is one of the reasons why our military is very well respected.
It is an interesting aspect that we need to often think of ourselves as foreign militaries look at us. Obviously, it is important to have good kit and high standards of professionalisation. The British military has a very strong reputation for unit cohesion, for high morale and for doing it. But there is also the fact that you know, if you are talking to a British colonel, that he is not about to fall if the result of the next general election does not please. That is very important to our reputation.
Q40 Robert Courts: And certainly for wider military strategy, even if the policy might change under a different Government.
Professor Black: Yes.
Q41 Robert Courts: Thank you very much indeed. Professor Kennedy, what are your thoughts on where Defence and the Armed Forces fit into this?
Professor Kennedy: I suppose your starting point is how you are going to define Defence—how big you think that pot is. Do you include, say, your relationship with contractors and your technology people? If you are including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Thales and all those, obviously that technology element is a very attractive thing. That goes all the way back to the other side, with the Royal Navy, FOST and the way you can do things such as HADR and train people in terms of humanitarian relief operations.
What I am saying is that you have to think about Defence as a totality of all the things that go into it. The education element is one. People will come here to be doctors in the military or to learn about medicine. They will come here to learn about intelligence. They will come here to learn about organisational logistical processes—not just about the kinetics. Those people will go back to their countries and help a greater societal need, because they will then take those into their systems and help to spread that knowledge. It is about the things that you can do well within the totality of your organisation.
That is where the soft power element really comes in—when you think about all the enablers that it takes to make military power, about how you package that up and about how you can co-ordinate that. It is not co-ordinatable because of a relationship between Government, private industry, academia, other industries or even the media. That is why I say that, with the culture of something such as the Integrated Review, getting those cultural aspects right at the beginning is really important in this modern age. If every Department, when it thinks about national security, asks itself what it contributes, you will start to get that mindset of asking the questions very early on. That is when you can start to see that integration process take place. That is why I ask how big you think Defence really is.
Q42 Robert Courts: That, of course, will become increasingly important, because in so many areas we rely less on uniform and more on contractors that are embedded in the military. If I ask the question about the Armed Forces, do I mean the Armed Forces or do I mean wider Defence?
Professor Kennedy: Exactly, and this fits into something such as cyberspace. How do we fit those in now? I have just finished doing a paper for the United States’ space agency on merchant marine shipping, and how you used to subsidise that to make it part of your resilience. That is the buzzword now, isn’t it? It is all about resilience, the ability and capacity to withstand these kinds of supply chain changes—all that kind of stuff. That is about economic warfare. How do you make your economics, industry, trade and finance resilient against these kinds of competition?
That basically comes down to really simplistic things about understanding whether you are at peace or at war in that condition. If you think it is one, you take a different path than you would if it was the other. That is the associated part of the context: how big is Defence? Who is now included in modern Defence? We call it “security.” How in that regard do you differentiate peace, war, constant competition, peer-to-peer competition, great power competition and economic statecraft?
We make up words left, right and centre all the time to muddy the waters around what it is we are trying to talk about. When you want to be very clear, that is where I would say your point about how to go about doing it comes in. You need to establish an agreed lexicon: when I say this, this is what I mean, and this is what it means to the totality of the organisation. It is not that this is the FCDO definition of strategy, this the MoD’s definition of strategy, and this the Treasury’s definition of strategy; no, this is what we are talking about when we talk about the UK data or defence engagement. That is critical, because if you talk about different things, you talk past one another.
Q43 Robert Courts: Yes, there will be some sympathy with that from a number of lawyers on the Committee, who always find it is vital to define the term before we start discussing the content.
Professor Kennedy: People think it is a waste of time that you sit here, have meetings and committees and waste time sitting around trying to do this, but it is critical to be able to establish the way in which things proceed with any hope of finding an outcome.
On your other point, that question about Defence’s authority, you can never get away from the fact that your authority rests on the fact that you have been bloody good at killing other people. End of. That is what it is about: you have built the kit; you have trained people well; you have made them capable; and you have shown national will to put them into that harm’s way to do it—that is where the baseline runs from. If you try to hide that in any way, you will immediately run into problems with authenticity, hypocrisy, blah, blah and all the rest—and, to be brutally honest, as a former colonial world power, you don’t need any more added baggage. The only other thing that is more powerful globally than anti-Americanism is anti-imperialism, which runs high and hard in lots of places where you would like to do defence engagement. How do you do defence engagement through that particular lens at the same time as trying to overcome imperial history?
Q44 Robert Courts: I imagine there are two parts to that. You made the point—you were absolutely right about defining what we mean by Defence or the Armed Forces. Are we talking about people or are we talking about kit? The two are fundamentally different—one is much more visible than the other, for example.
Professor Black: Strategy is a key thing. I am sorry to emphasise this, but I call it tasking; strategy is involved in the tasking of the military, and tasking involves prioritisation. That is not fixed in amber. At present, the big problem for foreign countries looking at British Defence diplomacy is whether it is the case that the British are going to continue committed to an Asia-Pacific pivot and if so, how far, or is it the case that Ukraine will lead to a change? That is what foreign militaries are interested in. We can have our defence attachés talking about the latest bit of kit, and that’s important—it’s not that that doesn’t matter; it matters as well—but fundamentally what foreign powers want to know is—
Q45 Robert Courts: “What is it you’re trying to do?”
Professor Black: “What are you trying to do?” In other words, we need defence attachés—whatever their age; that doesn’t matter—who are capable and competent people who take part in that discussion.
The other thing foreign countries are interested in is if there is going to be a change of Government next year, which is widely assumed. I’m not discussing the rights or wrongs of that, but what will that mean? I mentioned this earlier, but the Leader of Opposition went to Tallinn, for example—the British Government knew he was going there—and made a good impression. That was picked up by the Defence side there as signalling that Britain’s intentions would not change. That is the kind of thing that people ask.
Chair: I will interject here. I invite Mr Doogan to raise a number of topics. You can see that numbers around the table are depleted so, should we lose critical mass, we are unable to perform our kinetic activity. I mention that in the context of length of answers. All of what you are saying is very useful to the inquiry thus far and I do not wish to miss what you have to say, but if we lost another Member, we will be unable to continue in formal session. I say that courteously.
Q46 Dave Doogan: We will get back to the resilience of the Committee in terms of numbers. Professor Kennedy, you touched earlier on the Indo-Pacific tilt. What does that mean? What role is the United Kingdom trying to achieve? Isn’t it an important tenet of cultural diplomacy to understand how the words you are saying to an audience land with them?
The example I want to use on the Indo-Pacific tilt is this. It was demonstrably the case that while talking about an Indo-Pacific tilt from a UK perspective, some of the phraseology and language used and the historical context and future dynamic that the UK was talking about were not landing well with some of the countries in the south-east Asian neighbourhood. In fact, close allies in the area, such as Australia, had to have private conversations with the United Kingdom to say, “When you say this, this is how it sounds to our neighbours. You would actually be better saying that.” How alarmed should we be that an august, very mature organisation like the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Defence could get the basics like that wrong?
Professor Kennedy: I think you should be and I think it’s the reason why you need an IR. I think that the FCDO, now that there’s a D in it, has gotten even farther away from that kind of ability to create synergy between the different types of power. It was not just the Aussies who were exceptionally unimpressed with the language; it was just the whole thing, and they should have been able to see that.
The Americans started their Asia-Pacific pivot with the same militaristic language. It was about trade. It’s the same way in which the Quad discussions go. It’s about trade. Everybody knows the Quad is about trade, but the Quad comes up very often like that: “Is this some kind of beginning of a NATO/Asia-Pacific? No!” When you go there and talk to the Koreans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Filipinos, they’re not interested in that.
When talking about this, I use the pandemic example. We talked about the pandemic as a war against this and a war against that and a battle against this. We do that like the Americans. If you look at the Europeans, they talked about things like competition; they used sports metaphors—they used different types of metaphors.
And yes, this is the other problem, particularly when all you are doing is trying to talk about the tilt and you want it to be about trade, but you get pictures of F-35s and the Queen Elizabeth and so on. Not only the words are wrong but the pictures are wrong, so the whole image is wrong and the symbology is wrong. Defence engagement first and foremost is about symbolising and making in people’s minds the strategic pictures you want them to have and then carry with them.
Q47 Dave Doogan: Thank you. Professor Black, we touched previously on Sandhurst, the RCDS and so on. I want to look at the specific case of the Royal Navy. Would you agree that if you are building a complex warship and your customer is the Royal Navy, that is a good shop window for your product, in so far as countries think, “If this product is good enough for the Royal Navy, it's probably good enough for us”? Is that a fair assessment?
Professor Black: Yes, it is. Obviously, our competence is regarded as stronger in some branches of naval shipbuilding than others. For example, Barrow has a world reputation. It’s not the only producer of excellent submarines—there are other ones—but it has a world reputation. For some forms of warship, though, we are not regarded as necessarily as good—let’s just say that.
Q48 Dave Doogan: Okay. Over and above that but sticking with the Navy, if we think about organisations such as FOST or Dartmouth Naval College, there is lots of international interest in sending officers there to be trained. How important an element of military diplomacy do you think that is? Obviously, the benefits are that they pay and it creates relationships that will endure throughout careers. These are all positive dynamics. But in terms of the brand cachet, if you like, how important is that?
Professor Black: It is very important. I think the discussion about closing Dartmouth, as you know, is misinformed. I would end by referring to a comment made to me by the superintendent at West Point, a Lieutenant General. I was a visiting professor there, and we had dinner, just the two of us. I asked him whether he minded that only a certain percentage of the graduates of West Point went into the military and he said, ”No. Everybody who has been here is an advertisement for West Point. Everybody is an advertisement for the United States. Everybody who is an American who goes into business and government is pro-military.” He said that is the view of the Pentagon, and that is one of the reasons for running the programme. I think we should have the boldness to understand that that is also true of Britain. It is about a past that is also modern. That is the key thing. We have a legacy from the past, but rather than just seeing that as something anachronistic that is slowly being chipped away by change, we should see the past as something that offers us the resources to engage with the modern, alongside the new ideas we need to generate.
Q49 Robert Courts: Very quickly, I would like to ask you both about what the military can do to further soft power and influence using assets. The Red Arrows are a classic example of that; there are also Royal Navy warships. Can I have a quick word from both of you on that?
Professor Kennedy: No. Enough assets—you’ve got enough royal this and enough that.
Professor Black: I think the showing the flag thing is tremendously important. I think the Navy plays an enormously beneficial role in areas where the British presence is otherwise very modest. South America is a classic example. The dispatching of a warship and all the opportunities that offers to get people on to the ship to talk to them—those sort of things are tremendously important and relatively inexpensive, since you have the ship there.
In January I was in the Caribbean doing some lectures—it wasn’t all fun. There was a British warship there, sitting in Antigua, that was doing underwater surveying for the local Governments, as part of our Commonwealth engagement. That was a tremendously valuable portrayal of what Britain can do with its military.
Professor Kennedy: You do it well. Keep on doing what you’re doing.
Chair: Gentlemen, we had anticipated asking you some questions about defence attachés in particular. In fairness to you both, I think you reflected upon that role and function in the opening statements and in further answers that you have given. If there are any issues that you wish to raise with us subsequent to this hearing, please feel free to write to the Committee. We would be keen to hear any further points you have to make. I do apologise that we have come to the end of our sitting, but I greatly appreciate your attendance this afternoon and your willingness to engage with us.
If I take anything from what Professor Kennedy has said, it is that there is a lot more to this than perhaps we thought when we embarked on the journey—and, to go by the opening statement, perhaps more suspicion out there as well. I very much appreciate, as we all do, the time that you and our earlier witness, Major General Howes, have given. Thank you so much for coming.