I was planning to write a more comprehensive analysis of RUSI’s journal article yesterday. I didn’t, which was fortunate, because Michael White has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian on why the military feels misunderstood while The Times leads with why Britain’s security must be a narrowly defined priority (which I will post separately about). All three pieces echo a set of assumptions that are out of date and unless interrogated risk sending UK HMG back to the early 1990s.
In order to understand the view of the traditionalists in the ‘defence community’ you have to go back to the beginning of the week and listen to the Radio 4 interview with Gwyn Prins. At one point Prins suggests the UK is at war with a peace time mentality.
I first heard this phrase at Wilton Park a year or so ago, more recently at Defence Academy and last week at the Rag. It is, I think, becoming the mantra of the traditional school within the defence community and is borne out of their view of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how the community sees the world through the lens of global terrorism, instability in the Middle East and other latent threats (Russia being the prime example).
In this context the reason for why the military feels misunderstood is not as simple as Brown spending more on security than defence as White suggests but a reflection of how isolated the defence community have become in the current debate about national security and resilience.
It is Browne who lacks the necessary overarching narrative that would act as a strategic anchor for MoD during this period of uncertainty. Devoid of such a narrative (let alone a strategy) the three services have resorted to damaging campaigns (invariably about procurement) with each other, played out in the harsh light of the media, as illustrated by Michael White:
Hence this Thursday’s ministerial search to cut the Astute nuclear subs and Type 45 destroyer programmes, to sell some Eurofighters (ordered but irrelevant) to the Saudis. The army’s new multi-purpose vehicle is probably safe from a Navy-RAF pincer movement. So are those two carriers: Rosyth dockyard is in the PM’s constituency. But defence contractors may be told to “sort it out yourselves”.
There are a number of different strands to the current debate on national security and defence but 3 are important in the context of the RUSI/ White/Times articles.
The first strand has to do with the role of UK defence in the current security environment. Here the debate rarely moves beyond the dual dichotomies of latent threats and poles of power (i.e. uncertainty of Russia) and the perennial debate over defence spending. The point here is that these debates are usually separate discussions and lack a necessary strategic anchor to bring them together. The result is that debates over defence end up being dominated by equipment rather than UK priorities.
The second emerging strand is about the focus and level of risk. Past debate has focused solely on the threat from terrorism. Since last December however there has been a concerted effort by departments and think tanks in the UK and across the Atlantic to place terrorism in context within a spectrum of risks (see Alex’s post on McConnell for instance). In doing so what is clear is that while most agree terrorism remains a threat to the UK it has become increasingly apparent that it is not the only risk.
This is disconcerting for the defence community which traditionally thinks in terms of one big threat. It is why, for the last couple of years, the question whispered along the corridors of Main Building been what is our role today?
This latter point is why many commentators felt what RUSI served up at the beginning of the week was well past its sell by date. By arguing that the UK is now in a time of remission between the frontal attack of 9/11, and its eventual successor the RUSI article was creating the image of a threat that they claimed would deliver an even greater psychological blow . It didn’t help that they were unable to support this with substantial evidence and to make matters even more confusing the authors conceded later on that we know much less about what threatens us.
The final strand concerns the present debate over counter-terrorism legislation which, at its most simplistic, pitches the security camp against the liberty camp. The new Counter-Terrorism Bill is the current focus of dispute with the former camp claiming (wrongly as it turns out) that only they understand there is a threat from terrorism and if everyone else knew what they did the legislation would be accepted without complaint. The liberty group meanwhile has chosen to use the ‘42 days’ as a stick to prod the apathetic public and NGO community into standing up against such draconian laws citing the last three pieces of CT legislation as examples of how disproportionate the government has been in the face of the terrorist threat.
Given that both Tony Blair and Tony McNulty have admitted that the ‘rules haven’t changed’ when it comes to fighting terrorism and that they got some things wrong it was therefore a mite confusing to read that RUSI thought the UK was a ‘soft touch’.
It is these three strands of debate that explain why the RUSI piece makes sense to the traditionalists in the defence community but to everyone else looks like a reckless piece of polemic based on spurious and an unconvincing analysis.
