Power projection: the inquiry by Sir John Chilcot into the lessons of UK involvement in the Iraq war has yet to be published. Flickr / UK Ministry of Defence. Some rights reserved.
On 17 March the Commons Defence
Committee released Rethinking
Defence to meet New Threats, the third
in a series of reports to inform the next UK government’s National Security
Strategy and Defence and Security Review, following the May general election. (The
first, Towards the
next Defence and Security Review: Part One, was published in December 2013 and the
second, Towards the
Next Defence and Security Review: Part Two–NATO, in July 2014.)
The Defence Committee generally
produces high-quality, balanced reports which challenge government practices
and narratives but the latest falls short of the usual standard. The report
rests on unsupported assertions and reflects a narrow, militaristic view of
security. It demonstrates little or no consideration of the efficacy of force
in pursuit of UK security objectives in an era of complex globalisation—in
particular the effects of employing military firepower in the Middle East over
the past decade and a half. It presents a wish-list of military capabilities to
match an endless agenda of immediate ‘threats’ purportedly demanding a military
response.
Nebulous and unpredictable
The report begins with the mantra
that the world is a more menacing place than ever, with direct threats multiplying
and danger at every turn. This is not right.
Security risks, which may or may
not become threats, have certainly evolved since the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, becoming more nebulous and unpredictable. The UK has become ever
more embedded in globalised networks of opportunity and vulnerability. With vulnerability comes uncertainty and risk,
and with risk comes insecurity. This presents challenges to established ways of
thinking and acting, not least in terms of understandings of ‘security’, power
and the role of military capabilities. Defence planners are however generally
conservative and this report represents a marked shift to military conservatism
by the committee.
The last formal reviews of
national security in 2010 (the National
Security Strategy and the Ministry
of Defence’s Global
Strategic Trends—Out to 2040) painted a
frightening picture justifying continuous use of military force in the name of
‘national security’. But a more balanced assessment, absent from
the committee’s deliberations, must also take into account these long-term
trends:
more secure from direct military threats from other states than ever: it enjoys
a prosperous, secure and stable regional neighbourhood and no longer faces the
threat of societal destruction from a major, sustained external attack as
during the cold war, recent Russian actions notwithstanding.
terrorist attacks are rare and do not constitute an existential threat to the
state or our ‘way of life’.
inter-state and intra-state war continues to
decline and there has been a pronounced
downward trend in the number of battle deaths.
conflicts are concentrated in only a small number of countries and are
increasingly short-lived.
of democracies continues to rise and the number of autocracies continues to decline.
average Human Development Index rose by 18% between 1990 and 2010 (41% from
1970), reflecting large improvements in life expectancy, school enrolment,
literacy and income. Almost all countries have benefited.
people living on less than $1.25 a day having declined from 1.9 billion in 1981
to 1.4 billion in 2005. The proportion living in extreme poverty halved, from
52.0% to 25.7%, during this period.
transnational advocacy networks, mobile-phone and internet access—continues to
intensify, favouring interconnectivity, a social democracy and political
accountability.
of treaties and norms have cumulatively stigmatised, outlawed and eliminated
many forms of violence (nuclear violence being perhaps the most important omission).
This is not a plea for wishful thinking,
hoping the worst never happens. We cannot escape uncertainty and government must
routinely think through long- as well as short-term risks and threats. But balance
is required to allocate effectively scarce resources to long-term security
needs—and to distinguish between necessary and optional military operations and
capabilities.
Unrealistic and misguided
The committee’s report implies
the UK must be able to act everywhere against everything. This is profoundly
unrealistic and misguided. In 2010 the Ministry of Defence outlined a range of military operations of choice, which included ‘peace
enforcement’, ‘military assistance to stabilisation and development’, ‘power
projection’, ‘focused intervention’, and ‘deliberate intervention’. These go
far beyond the standing military tasks generally considered necessary,
legitimate and uncontroversial in support of the UK state and citizenry:
assistance in civil emergencies, evacuating UK citizens from overseas, residual
protection from direct attack, protecting UK airspace and waters, and a
maritime contribution to global protection of sea lanes upon which the UK
economy is highly dependent.
The committee’s report implies
that the tasks in the first list are not
operations of choice and that the UK has to engage in all of them—and to have a
much broader suite of military capabilities to do so. But such decisions are
deeply political, not obvious or objective as the committee suggests, and its
report does a disservice by straitjacketing ‘security’ within a state-centric,
militarised frame.
The report rests on unsupported assertions and reflects a narrow, militaristic view of security.
The committee is silent on the
efficacy of the use of UK military force as part of the ‘global war on terror’.
Yet participation in the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has
proved deeply problematic. It has facilitated the rise of Islamic State,
echoing al-Qaeda’s nihilistic medievalism, and a wider sectarian civil war
across the region fuelled by some erstwhile ‘allies’. The western state-building
programmes in Afghanistan and Iraq have had very uncertain outcomes after more
than a decade of massive investment and horrendous violence, at enormous human
cost. More, this response to the ‘9/11’ attacks has brought heightened risk of
further terrorist attacks in the UK, as noted by the former MI5 director general
Eliza Mannigham-Buller, the curtailment of civil liberties and the securitisation
of daily life in the name of essential ‘counter-terrorism’.
In response the committee proposes
more of the same, fulfilling Paul Rogers’ warning in 2002 of a remilitarisation of international politics
and the emergence of endless war, as military-led risk mitigation generated new
and potentially more dangerous risks deemed susceptible to further military
solutions. And it presents a false dichotomy of hyper-interventionism versus isolationism, as if there were
not a spectrum of political responses to the risks and threats outlined. As
prime minister, Tony Blair did the same after ‘9/11’, when he presented a
binary choice between a ‘titanic struggle’ and ‘benign inactivity’.
Not new
Russia’s illegal annexation of
Crimea and its strategic destabilisation of southern and eastern Ukraine,
fuelling civil war, is indeed dangerous and exacerbated by a plethora of threats
to the UK’s European partners. But the context is not new and the committee
should not pretend it is.
Relations among Russia, NATO and
the US reached new highs after ‘9/11’, with unprecedented co-operation,
intelligence sharing, and military-to-military exchanges. They began to
deteriorate after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the triumphalist, unilateralist,
neo-conservative vision of the George W. Bush US presidency. A low was reached in
two hostile speeches by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, in Vilnius, in May 2006 and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007.
Cheney eulogised the US ‘freedom
agenda’ and lambasted authoritarian Putinism, while Putin railed against what
he saw as US imperialism, Washington’s supposed hidden hand behind by the
‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia (‘rose’, 2003), Ukraine (‘orange’, 2004) and
Tajikistan (‘tulip’, 2005) and a feared US plot to orchestrate a similar
‘revolution’ in Moscow. The new Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, stoked
the fires of Russian chauvinism, in the mistaken hope that the US would come to
his aid when violence ensued over disputed Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008. These are familiar themes today and the roots
of the turbulent relationship between Russia and the west stretch back decades,
extending equally to the nuclear realm.
Nuclear-capable bomber overflights are also
not new: Russia resumed active bomber patrols in 2007. Similarly, Russia has been
recapitalising its aging, nuclear-armed, intercontinental ballistic missiles with
‘new generation’ missiles since 2010—in part to overcome US missile defences,
following withdrawal from the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by the
Bush administration in 2002, as part of its rejection of multilateralism and
treaty-based arms control—and its ballistic-missile submarines and submarine-launched
ballistic missiles since the 1990s. The US, the UK and France have, and are,
engaged in comparable programmes, at enormous expense.
This is part and parcel of living
in a nuclear-armed world, in which the protagonists believe in the indefinite value
and legitimacy of nuclear weapons. The UK is a central player in this and
directly contributes to the ongoing risk of massive nuclear violence. This is a
collective problem which ultimately requires the collective solution of a world
free of nuclear weapons—admittedly very difficult for the committee to envisage
when it includes Julian Lewis, Parliament’s foremost nuclear hawk, and John
Woodcock, the MP for Barrow (where UK ballistic-missile submarines are built)
and Labour’s most strident nuclear champion. The committee’s response, that the
UK should instead invest in its own ballistic-missile defences, is perverse—given
the size of the Russian missile fleet, the enormous cost of missile defences
and major doubts over their technical efficacy.
A UK military presence and even
active intervention may well be the most promising means of realising essential
security requirements in a very limited set of circumstances. But its long-term
security cannot be realised through never-ending participation in a US-led ‘global guardian’
doctrine. This approach is far from neutral and rooted in military activism,
destabilisation and intervention as a taken-for-granted practice to combat
seemingly implacable threats from the world’s illiberal spaces.
When the new defence committee is
convened after the general election it should take a holistic, long-term view
on three core issues. It should examine how the UK can organise its economic,
political and security capabilities—including but beyond the military—over the
next few decades to:
- respond to
the consequences of a 2C+ rise in global temperature, as climate change
interacts with other environmental and social stressors; - contribute
to a sustainable security environment in the Middle East, not least through
climate-resilient socio-economic development and bearing in mind the evidenced
limits and often counter-productive effects of external military intervention;
and - contribute
to a sustainable security relationship between
Russia and Europe, accepting
that Russia may remain semi-authoritarian over that period—Russia is integral
to a stable European security environment and it is counter-productive to
dismiss its security concerns as wholly illegitimate or to slide back wilfully into
a familiar, cold-war relationship which could cement hostility for a
generation.
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