4
Examination of witnesses
Vice Admiral (Retd) Duncan Potts and Rear Admiral (Retd) Bruce Williams.
Q74 The Chair: Welcome back to the European Affairs Committee in the Lords, where we have two new witnesses. We have Vice Admiral Duncan Potts and Rear Admiral Bruce Williams. I am sorry to say that we are very likely to be interrupted by votes quite quickly. While we have the time and we have you here, would you each like to make a quick opening comment on the issues that we have been discussing with the previous witnesses? What would you like to see come out of the reset? What do you think the real opportunities are in the reset that the Government ought to be focusing on?
Rear Admiral (Retd) Bruce Williams: I will start off by saying that we are facing a really ‘wicked’ problem, not in an evil sense but in a systems engineering sense; where it is impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements. It is obvious, therefore, that in anything we do now we need to be very careful that we do not compromise the future. Structures we might put in place temporarily cannot then be allowed to dominate the future. We need to be careful of that. We are also need to recognise the UK is starting from a very low position post Brexit, after which we categorically excluded any structural co-operation with the EU. Right now, we are down to only having a Security of Information Arrangement set in 2020.
We come from a position—as I know you discussed with your previous guests—in terms of NATO and the EU, with NATO’s purpose being to provide assured collective defence and the EU focusing largely on the norms of human existence. Therefore, you have two levels, one focused on security and defence, and the other on defence and security interests. My belief is today that you cannot have one or other—mostly because on one side with NATO there are doubts as to whether the US wants to engage, and on the other because the EU has limits of ambition (which is up to the Petersberg tasks) that curtail options to a certain extent. We heard Lord Peach talking about the need for robust command and control. Maybe we have to explore the ideas that we adopted in the past, such as Berlin Plus, in terms of providing forces and capabilities from NATO but with a European oversight.
The Chair: That is a very good start, and you have had experience actually commanding an EU operation in the field, so bringing that professional experience will be very interesting.
Vice Admiral (Retd) Duncan Potts: Thank you very much. Mindful of the time, I will start with four points. I bring this with the experience of an operational commander for about 20 months for the EU as well. Some of them are contrary to the common view that we have in this country.
The first thing I would say is that what struck me when I was exercising command—and this was the counterpiracy operation off Somalia—was the lightness and the speed that the command and control apparatus could bring to an operation such as that, especially an operation that was not really a military operation; it was a constabulary operation, but it was also a multi-agency operation. I used to equate it at the time—because my army opposite numbers were in Afghanistan—that if you were a two-star over there, you reported to a three-star, who reported to another four-star in theatre, back to NATO to another four-star and another four-star, before you got to the political level. Ours was a smaller constabulary operation.
As the operational commander, I was able to be accountable directly to the political and security committee. I was regularly over there, certainly every month and at certain times almost every week, especially pushing through changes to the mission and the operations, which resulted in offensive action being taken for the first time. There was a NATO operation going on out there, and American Fifth Fleet was out there, and both of them regularly said to me, “You will set the pace because we have other missions to attend to and you do not”.
The second point I will make is about the ability to integrate. The military is a very small part of the EU, but we had the wider External Action Service and other organisations there, and we had a high representative for the Horn of Africa appointed as well. The ability to attend to all those non-military lines, working with the broader maritime community, but also ashore with aid and development as well, was integral to turning the tide of the piracy out there. I think that the ability to integrate was good.
Thirdly, that leads me to conclude, following on from some of the comments on the other one, that there needs to be the ability for the EU to be a vehicle for operations that are going on in the grey zone—the hybrid zone that Lord Peach was talking about. At the moment I am still interested in shadow fleets and maritime security; in particular, for critical offshore infrastructure and other critical national infrastructure. A convening power that can bring all that together fairly quickly is something that there may be a role for.
Fourthly, the other one for the UK—and I will not get into the politics because we are in a bit of a spin dryer at the moment, with everything changing—is that being the UK in Europe, you do not bring the Five Eyes in there but you bring a lot more different communities into Europe than perhaps other countries do. In particular, for me, it was that critical relationship with the United States at the time. Those are my points.
The Chair: Thank you very much. That is a very good start. While we are still going, I will ask the Duke of Wellington to take the next one.
Q75 The Duke of Wellington: From your experiences, to what extent is the EU prepared to involve non-member states in some of the security and defence arrangements? That may be ad hoc, I realise. Nevertheless, do you think that there is any inability on the part of the EU as an institution to involve a non-member state in some of those arrangements?
Vice Admiral (Retd) Duncan Potts: Of course, the EU is a collection of countries and while it has a central staff, the central Council is the deciding voice and it all comes down to the will. Some of the frustration with the UK in the past has been because it does not have a will, but we are in the middle of a grand, strategic, tectonic plate movement and, if interests align, there are always bureaucratic reasons why a third nation cannot be involved. It was interesting for me to read that the Poles were saying it was unimaginable that the UK would not play a central role in these things, so I think that we are in a moment of change.
Rear Admiral (Retd) Bruce Williams: It comes down to the ‘wicked’ problem I started off with. You can step off from where you were in terms of Third-state activity, and I will come to that in a second, or you can design something new for the moment. But designing something new for the moment will have an impact downstream. The trouble with EU Third-nation status is that not being a Member State leaves that country outside of the planning. It leaves it outside of the development. It puts hurdles, bureaucratic maybe, in the way. But that is the nature of the CSDP. That is the nature of the EU and its membership, which we have disestablished ourselves from. The question comes now as to whether or not you can actually rebuild something that is novel and new but will not fundamentally undermine the EU (because that will just get people’s backs up) and that deals with the emergency we now have. I do look at it today in the sense that I used to think of life being ‘interesting’ —that old Chinese curse. No longer ‘interetsing’, now I say it is ‘dangerous’.
The Chair: Absolutely. Let us pursue our quickfire questions with Baroness Ludford.
Q76 Baroness Ludford: This somewhat overlaps with the previous question, but Vice Admiral Potts talked about grand strategic tectonic plates. Will that unlock some thinking about the UK-EU security and defence relationship within the constraints of the existing EU frameworks for third countries? If the two sides are able to think about more ambitious and innovative arrangements, what might that look like? We know all the problems and barriers that there might be, but do you have any thoughts on how that could work and what it might look like?
Vice Admiral (Retd) Duncan Potts: Where we are at the moment, from my perspective, we should not do anything that would destabilise NATO at this critical time. NATO may be destabilised anyway. The EU may be destabilised. We need to be very clear about the organisational strengths. Of course, the EU has worked with NATO very successfully in the past, with some of the mission commanders being run by the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in the past.
There are some things as well that go on that can be complementary, that can be run in tandem, which may be better done by an organisation that is naturally well placed to integrate with all those other levers of European power, not just the politics but the law enforcement. We used, and I think that Lord Peach did as well, the maritime side, with which I am very familiar, the shadow fleet, the disruption to our critical national infrastructure. There are organisations where we need to pull all the levers available. It may well be that the EU needs to evolve and we do as well.
The Chair: There we go: the Division Bells. We will just have a quick word from the rear admiral, and then we will need to end the session because we are likely to have 45 minutes or so of voting.
Rear Admiral (Retd) Bruce Williams: I come back to the necessity of compromise here. In a ‘wicked’ situation, you need to find compromises. We know that NATO as a whole would be reluctant to do something because of what America has said. The idea of maybe adapting what we have done in Bosnia, where we had the Berlin Plus arrangements, where command and control draws off (as Lord Peach put it) the highly developed capabilities of NATO together with other capabilities within NATO working for a European collective. Might this be the way to practically put something together in the short term. If we do not, we will lag behind what is needed.
The Chair: We have to end it there. I invite you to send us letters if you have points that we have not been able to cover on the basis of the previous session. You know the areas of interest. We would be very happy to hear from you if you have more to tell us. With that, I am afraid I have to end the session. Thank you very much, both of you. I am sorry that it was so short.
