Written Evidence submitted by Dr David Blagden, Strategy & Security Institute, University of Exeter

Priorities and Expectations for the Modernising Defence Programme

1.                As part of their Inquiry into 2018’s ‘Modernising Defence Programme’ (MDP), the House of Commons Defence Committee solicited external evidence on the priorities that should guide this ongoing ‘mini-review’ of UK military capability. This submission addresses three of their core questions (highlighted in bold), drawing on my academic research in the fields of international politics and British national security strategy.

2.                The Committee asks whether state-based threats now pose the greatest threat to the United Kingdom. My research suggests that they do indeed. Even in the late 2000s, when attempting to stabilise Afghanistan in the name of countering terrorism had become the all-consuming focus of British defence policy, it was clear that UK national strategy was getting the expected-value equation between impact and likelihood wrong.[1] It is highly likely that we will continue to face intermittent terrorist attacks, but such attacks carry far less potential for national harm than military confrontation with a nuclear-armed major power.[2] To its credit, HM Government now thinks more rigorously about the balance between probability and cost in weighing various dangers than it did in the late 2000s. This trade-off is still flawed, however, for various reasons that I have recently analysed, leading to systematic under-weighting of direct military threats to the UK and over-weighting of ‘new’ non-state risks.[3]

3.                Today, with multipolarity – a situation of multiple competing major powers – returning to the international system, UK defence must confront the reality that non-state actors will continue to wish us harm, but that hostile states have an overwhelmingly greater ability to inflict it.[4] On top of that ability, moreover, there are also various reasons that states could face incentives to harm us, too. Such a combination – capability plus potential intent – should position state-based threats at the top of Britain’s hierarchy of security concerns. Russia, in particular, has obvious incentives to wish to weaken, roll-back, or entirely break NATO, and those incentives are now backed by (partially) restored capabilities.[5] Targeting the UK, meanwhile – as the European NATO state that has historically displayed the greatest combination of capability and resolve to balance Moscow – could prove integral to any such efforts to weaken or break the Alliance. And Eastern Europe is not the only potential flashpoint. Some combination of regional interests and/or entangling alliances could yet drag us into state-on-state conflict in East Asia, the Middle East, or the South Atlantic[6] – although Russia is clearly our most proximate and powerful threat.

4.                The authors of the MDP must therefore think hard about the state-based contingencies that they hedge against, and the UK force requirements that follow. Russia will never again rival Western levels of aggregate economic power or technological sophistication. Yet NATO’s global superiority owes in large part to US capabilities outside Europe, which are not ‘automatically’ at Britain’s disposal. Such global superiority also does not preclude decisive Russian concentrations of local superiority and/or Russian escalation to nuclear coercion if its sub-nuclear strategic options fail. And as Washington faces the greatest rising peer-competitor since its own emergence as a great power, i.e. China, it is likely to become less willing – and eventually less able – to shoulder its European allies’ defence burden at the same time.

5.                In the face of these international-structural conditions, we face pressing questions for UK strategic posture and the associated capability sets. What if, as part of some limited Alliance response to a Baltic or Norwegian contingency (say), Russia faces incentives to destroy NATO’s stand-off air power – including UK land-based RAF stations and RN carriers? How might UK efforts to preserve the US alliance commitment to NATO by supporting Washington’s global strategy – such as deploying British forces to the Gulf or East Asia – suck us into commitments that are costly on their own terms, jeopardise our core NATO balancing effort in Europe, and/or bring us into confrontation with China/Russia/etc? What if some Russian action in Estonia/Svalbard/etc sees NATO/Britain – with little help from a disinterested Washington, in a worst-case scenario – left choosing between acceptance of the fait accompli (i.e. the breaking of NATO), costly attempted recapture in the face of a formidable Russian anti-access/area-denial perimeter, or perilous escalation to nuclear coercion? And what would we do if – as part of an effort to weaken NATO by dissuading the Alliance’s only offshore European power, i.e. us, from contributing to continental defence – Russia undertook a concerted campaign of coercion against Britain itself? Patterns of Russian naval activity, bomber patrols, cyber/informational activity, and chemical/radiological weapons use in and around Britain imply that we are not far from that latter scenario already.

6.                The Committee asks what the MDP should mean for the size and shape of the UK armed forces. Following from the previous analysis, capabilities suitable for deterring – and if necessary, scaling-up to fight – potentially hostile major powers must once again be at the centre of UK force posture. Despite the ‘hangover’ of the Afghan/Iraqi COIN era and its distortionary effects on force posture (especially in the Army), the MDP must prioritise capabilities with major warfighting utility. That does not necessarily mean abandoning all ‘stabilisation’ capabilities; indeed, there could be ‘hybrid’ subversion contingencies in the NATO periphery where the ability to operate ‘among the people’ becomes highly relevant. Special Forces and high-end deployable infantry (notably the Royal Marines and Parachute Regiment) will remain particularly salient. Nonetheless, we must also recognise that even when Russian ‘hybrid’ operations are discussed as ‘new’ – itself a misnomer, since strategy has always involved (dis)information, subversion, communications disruption, etc – they are ultimately underpinned by the large-scale coercive deployment of conventional forces under the shadow of nuclear deterrence. Accordingly, while its existence is not directly under consideration in the MDP, the independent UK nuclear deterrent based on four-boat CASD will remain central to British national security, and must receive the necessary support to ensure that it remains effective.[7] Moreover, weight and quantity of conventional forces must also receive an emphasis that was unfashionable during the ‘War on Terror’ era.

7.                At the heart of restoring UK capabilities suitable for state-based deterrence and defence must lie weight, depth, and resilience, broadly conceived. As Libya exposed – and as an outgoing JFC recently argued – British stocks of munitions, spares, fuel, and technical expertise have been run down to unprecedentedly low levels,[8] premised on ‘just-in-time’ resupply from global markets, as if Defence was a ‘normal’ business. Such assumptions may have maximised efficiency when engaging in expeditionary wars against minor powers, but they are likely to be cruelly exposed against adversaries capable of (a) identifying such an obvious vulnerability and (b) targeting supply lines effectively. In a similar vein, large swathes of British military logistics and engineering support are now so reliant on private-sector contractors that civilian employees from multinational corporations are effectively UK combatants. Again, that may have seemed an efficiency-maximising solution during the era of unipolar US power in which there were no meaningfully capable state-based adversaries and the only purpose of UK defence was expeditionary operations under counter-terrorist or humanitarian banners, but it raises serious questions about combat resilience today. And in another similar vein, even while SDSR 2015 committed to valuable re-growth of UK combat air power via an expanded Typhoon fleet and a full 138-aircraft through-programme F-35 purchase, UK anti-missile defence of the runways, hangars, and command/control (C2) centres needed to conduct national air/maritime defence is reportedly non-existent.[9] The number of RAF/RN stations at which such aircraft are operated has also been consolidated ever-downwards, again in the name of financial efficiency, compounding such infrastructural vulnerabilities. These are all examples of areas where UK capability may be exposed as ‘thinner’ under stress than it appears on paper.

8.                These questions of weight, depth, and resilience emerge across UK force posture. The RN’s new aircraft carriers are often reflexively maligned as vulnerable ‘white elephants’, without critical interrogation of the alleged logics: in fact, there are good reasons to think that carriers are a more survivable platform for NATO air power than fixed runways, thanks to their mobility.[10] But even so, it is hard to argue that the Navy’s fleet balance is currently healthy. The 1998 SDR suggested that the RN should fall from 35 frigates/destroyers to 32 in exchange for the new carriers; in fact, it has fallen to 19, with media speculation over even some of the remaining vessels’ effective readiness. ‘Hunter-killer’ submarine (SSN) numbers have also fallen from twelve at the 1998 SDR, past the ten that that Review promised, to six as of March 2018 (the SDSR 2015 target is seven). All of this adds up to a fleet capable of assembling the necessary escort groups to screen two carriers – an important benchmark, if we are to operate carriers at all, since that ensures continuous availability. But whether that fleet could generate sea control – or even robust sea denial – against a hostile major power in our Northeast Atlantic home region is up for debate. And we may have even less capacity for key SLOCs elsewhere (the Mediterranean, say). Similar questions afflict an Army committed to a maximum ‘surge’ deployment of 50,000 troops by the 2015 SDSR, with anticipation of conducting combined-arms manoeuvre warfare at divisional scale in support of a major contingency, yet with <80,000 total personnel and a reported mere 156 tanks (compared to the 348 promised by SDR 1998).

9.                The Committee asks whether the MDP should seek further increases in Defence spending. The analysis presented here suggests that it should indeed. There are certainly things that could be done for little extra expenditure to mitigate certain concerns identified here. Quick reaction force-dispersal plans should exist, especially for defence-essential capabilities like combat air power – if they do not already – to maximise force survivability. The new Land Ceptor SAM could be deployed at key nodes throughout the UK, along with other modest infrastructural ‘hardening’ measures, impacting adversaries’ calculations of their ability to decisively weaken British forces through first-move advantages (e.g. runway/C2 strikes). The RN could adopt the US Navy’s concept of ‘Distributed Lethality’, ensuring greater firepower per hull, thereby complicating adversaries’ calculations about operating in Britain’s maritime region.[11] Tellingly, with the Batch 2 River-class patrol vessels now coming into service, Britain has managed to procure five >2,000-tonne warships – while initiating disposal of four more <15-year-old Batch 1 Rivers – armed with nothing but light guns and a flight deck. While this submission is not the place for specifics, nine comparably sized vessels in most nations’ service – with modest anti-ship, anti-submarine, and anti-air weapons fits – would constitute a valuable littoral defence capability. More generally, ensuring that there is a full suite of munitions purchased, integrated, and available for the major platforms of all three Services would maximise ‘bang for buck’. If our expensively procured P-8s, Typhoons, Type 45s/26s, F-35s, etc, end-up operating with gaps in munition-types (e.g. the pending absence of an RN/RAF anti-ship missile as Harpoon becomes obsolete), it will exemplify ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’.

10.            All of this notwithstanding, however, the need for greater resources in Defence to ensure Britain’s security in this emerging era of resurgent state-based threats is now pressing. ‘Future Force 2025’ provided a solid blueprint for balanced British defence, but it is clearly now in need of additional resources if it is to be fulfilled, given political and economic shocks since 2015. Of course, there are multiple competing demands on UK fiscal capacity, many of which are more electorally salient than Defence – until national security is called into question. It is therefore the duty of Government to take the costly decisions today to ensure a secure and prosperous tomorrow. ‘Strategic latency’ – preserving pockets of capability that can be scaled-up again in a more dangerous future – has worked well enough through the post-2008 era of fiscal consolidation.[12] But that more dangerous future has arrived, and the time for some (modest) scaling back up is therefore now. Bolstering holdings of munitions, fuel, and spares is costly. Ensuring that there is sufficient technical expertise within the Services and MOD, as opposed to wholesale reliance on private contractors, is initially costly (albeit often cheaper in the long run). Sustaining enough training, maintenance, and other infrastructural capacity to subsequently re-grow capability is costly. And ultimately, re-growing major elements of the force as SDSR 2015 promised – e.g. restoring a balanced RN escort fleet through an expanded Type 31 frigate order – while fulfilling the rest of ‘Future Force 2025’ will be costly.

11.            None of this case for expanded resources is intended to let strategy off the hook. Britain needs to prioritise its interests and commitments; simply asserting that we will be ‘Global’, with ill-thought-through suggestions of sending our scarce aircraft carriers into the South China Sea (for example), delivers little security and much risk. Moreover, preserving security in the face of an assertive Russia with substantial capabilities and high resolve will require careful UK/NATO management of deterrence’s ‘Goldilocks problem’: doing enough to deter, while avoiding escalation to levels of harm that no side would wish for.

12.            Still, a meaningful expansion of resources will also come with real benefits. Restored military morale, with payoffs for recruitment and retention. Enhanced political influence, by making a decisive contribution to NATO at a time when other elements of UK diplomatic position are in flux. And most crucially of all, increased UK capabilities to independently provide Britons’ national security in an increasingly dangerous multipolar system.

12 April 2018