As news of Hutton’s new role as Defence Secretary travels across Politics Home, Twitter and email a few quick thoughts:
Next week John Hutton will face his first test as Defence Secretary when he walks down Whitehall to Parliament for a debate on Defence in the World. Given his new brief, politicians from across the floor may be gentle in their questions and speeches. Some people may even advise him that he should stay away and let Bob Ainsworth do the job. But this would be bad idea.
The MoD is not in a great place right now, morale is low, there is no strategic direction and people are exhausted. Unlike Browne, Hutton has to show commitment right from the start. On Sunday, having spoken to senior officials he should board a plane and visit Iraq and Afghanistan. There he should listen to senior commanders, FCO and DFID personnel, get up to speed with what’s happening on the ground and give a short pep talk to the troops before coming home. When the debate comes around next week he should enter the chamber and let it be known there are three things he cares about in his new brief – people, people, people.
Back in Main Building things won’t be so easy. There are three key things he will need to focus on. First: Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As has been reported in the French press – not all is well in Helmand – and while the people on the ground are the one’s who will stabilise the situation, getting a grip on Whitehall is as just as important.
Second: Strategy – Main Building is rudderless, that said there is hope in the shape of a new Director of Strategy, and a new head of policy & planning is also on the way. Coupled to this political consensus on a strategic review is close to reaching a tipping point – all parties publicly and privately now agree that a a review must happen, but when? With limited time until a General Election it may not be in the best interests politically and organisationally to kick a big review off now, instead it would be better to prepare the ground work. Laying the foundations is crucial and should never be underestimated. It may be a thankless task but Hutton will get kudos for doing it.
Third: Strategic Communications. Forget we are staring into an economic abyss for a moment and the other important issue the British Government is dealing with today are the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the fragile peace in Iraq and general instability in East Africa and elsewhere. And yet no one is entirely sure what we are doing and why these places are important. For reasons best known to the MoD senior commanders and officials don’t seem to be able to get their message out – this may be down to personal, bureaucratic and organisational interests but this needs to be corrected in days not weeks – the British public need to know what their armed forces are doing abroad and how it connects to issues like terrorism at home. Newspaper features on our men and women [insert country/ operation here] isn’t a sustainable policy. If Hutton is feeling bold he should copy No.10 and the FCO and overhaul the entire of MoD’s communications – website and all.
And what about procurement? This may prove, in time, to be Hutton’s Achilles heel. His constituency is home to a major defence contractor (BAE Systems) so it may be advisable to steer clear of procurement issues to begin with. He will have enough on his plate with savings that still need to be found, projects and platforms given the chop – a bit more transparency around the MoD budget wouldn’t go a miss either (but perhaps save this for another day). He should learn from US SecDef Bob Gates who has been weaving a completely new approach in the Pentagon and set the context and narrative first before doing anything major on procurement. After all – the question that has been buzzing around Main Building for the last couple of years is relatively straight forward: what is defence for?
Menzies Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats is the latest member of the establishment to call for a review of British defence policy. Following in the footsteps of the Conservative’s Forsyth Commission the Campbell Review says very little we don’t know already, offering up the same concerns over the military convenant, describing the armed forces as “overstretched” and the defence budget as being in crisis. The review still made the news – criticism of the military fills column inches, and it didn’t matter that pretty much everything Sir Menzies said on the Today programme had been said before either by the Conserviatve Party or by Anthony Forster and Tim Edmunds last year. But will this latest review have any effect? There are reasons to be both optmistic and pessimistic.
First, political consensus is now firmly in favour of a review at some point in the future. Campbell was wrong to suggest that the Strategic Defence Review did not predict the costs of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that wasn’t the point of the review – the aim of the review was to codify what had already happened in the 1990s – hence why we are in the mess we are in now.
Second, there is a worrying lack of capacity in Westminster and Whitehall to think innovately about defence policy. The Government have been pretty poor in thinking strategically about the future of defence, while the MoD (considering it is supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been woeful – and much of the responsibility for this lies with Ministers and senior officials.
Third, we must challenge the assumption that the MoD has the capacity to think creatively and strategically about the future. It doesn’t. The best work is being done in the FCO, HSC and PMSU. The new post of Director of Strategy at the MoD is timely and very welcome – capacity will need to be built up internally.
Fourth, we need to challenge the false choice made by political parties that ‘the armed forces should either do less and differently, or increase in the defence budget.’ If you start the process by thinking about institutiuons or budgets you will not achieve transformation but are most likely to make short term decisons which have negative consequences down the line (anyone got a spare pound for the carriers?).
Fifth, communications, or the almost complete lack of it. There are a handful of individuals in Main Building, and the military who get this, they are the exception. MoD communications, as we have made reference to before, are weak, utterly reactive, and often fail to get the message across clearly and coherently. There is a limit to how many times you can appear on Top Gear!
Above all Menzies Campbell’s review calls for a public debate on the future of defence. It’s unlikely to happen unless political parties admit they don’t have the answers and start listening and the MoD opens up and starts communicating to Whitehall and the rest of the UK about what defence is for in the 21st century.
LARRY KING: The question about the money spent on Iraq was a fair question, Chuck. Isn’t that a lot of money?
CHUCK NORRIS: … we can debate the question of whether we should be in Iraq or not, but we are there and we gotta take care of the situation there. I’ve been there twice, Arianna. I’ve done two tours over there. I know what’s going on over there. You haven’t been there.
This latest revelation must surely secure a place in the most popular facts about Chuck Norris. The current list (in case you’re wondering):
1. If you have five dollars and Chuck Norris has five dollars, Chuck Norris has more money than
2. There is no ‘ctrl’ button on Chuck Norris’s computer. Chuck Norris is always in control.
3. Apple pays Chuck Norris 99 cents every time he listens to a song.
4. Chuck Norris can sneeze with his eyes open.
5. Chuck Norris can eat just one Lay’s potato chip.
6. Chuck Norris is suing Myspace for taking the name of what he calls everything around you.
7. Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because he only recognizes the element of surprise.
8. Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird.
British defense officials must be squirming. While it is common knowledge that parts of the US establishment government are unhappy about Britain’s role in Basra and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is almost contemptuous about British forces, now analysis about developments in the southern city do not even feature Britain.
Writing for the New York Times, three well-known American security analysts talk about their recent fact-finding visit to Basra and how they “glimpsed a model of post-American Iraq.” The words “British” and “Britain” are not mentioned once while the analysts note that “recent Iraqi operations in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul would not have succeeded without American military support.”
So much for Britain’s remaining soldiers and development workers.
Since the Russian invasion of Georgia there has been a lot of discussion about the media war and who won it. The Guardian’s Peter Wilby, like many others, think “the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully.”
But another aspect seems to have received a little less attention – namely the nature of the media’s coverage and how it differed from other wars. Or, as a future PhD thesis might be titled: “The Media Coverage of the Georgian War: A Comparative Perspective.”
Let’s start with the Iraq War, which, like the Bosnian War before it, was a milestone in journalistic history. The tactics of the early Iraqi insurgency – indiscriminate killings, road-side bombs, kidnappings etc. – as well as the occasional Coalition aerial attack made the war the deadliest for the media. The war and its deadly aftermath have cost more reporters’ lives than any other conflict.
But reporting, too, seemed to undergo a transformation from its earlier Balkan incarnation. The Iraq War initially took the embed concept to the extreme. Viewers were up, close and personal – yet at the same time removed, as reporters were placed under different forms of censorship. We, the viewers, knew what the soldiers felt, could hear the whizzing bullets and could see their ghostly green silhouettes during night-time raids, but were left in the dark about the larger picture.
As post-combat stability gave way to violence, insurgency and chaos, it became too difficult to report outside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Suddenly we were looking down the other end of the media telescope: it became easier to understand the big picture – the missing WMD, the faltering reconstruction, the developing insurgency – but much of the detail was became, or at least fragmented. Relationships and personal stories – a stable of Balkan reporting – seemed rarer. Footage was usually after the event; a bomb would go off, but by the time the crew would to shoot the scene the bodies had been removed.
But in Georgia, the business of war-reporting seemed to take a step back to its Balkan version. Reporting was on the spot and live again. Really live. Pictures were not only after the event, but during the happening. We saw the footage as it happened, to the people, to the journalists. Even to the soldiers. “Embedded journalism” was live, but controlled. This was live and uncontrolled. David Chkhikvishvili’s video images of Georgian rockets being launched towards South Ossetia were live – and the first most people heard of the conflict.
But the war also seemed a little grittier, a post-Iraq kind of Balkans War – more indiscriminate, and more dangerous for reporters. Before the Russian suspension of hostilities, a Reuters reporter’s vehicle narrowly escaped bomb blasts near Gori. Jon Williams, an editor for BBC News, went so far as to call the safety situation during the conflict “catastrophic”.
As the prospect of state-to-state conflict seemed outdated before the Georgian War, so journalism seemed to be in a permanent post-Iraq state. Things have changed and it will be interesting to hear the progression reflect on these changes in the weeks to come.
