ABCA: The alliance you never heard of

Over the last two weeks I haven’t just been on holiday. For the last three days I was participating in exercise Agile Alliance ’08 of the ABCA–the alliance of 5 armies (no, not these 5 armies) that you very likely know nothing about but should. In fact, strictly speaking it’s not an alliance, like NATO, because its not based on a treaty but something called a Basic Standardization Agreement between the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and (more recently) New Zealand. There’s a good short history of the Alliance and a description of its current state in Joint Forces Quarterly ABCA: A Petri Dish for Multinational Capability. An excerpt:

The origins of ABCA were grand. Its founders, General Dwight Eisenhower, USA, and British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, wished the program to improve the levels of standardization and cooperation the military achieved during World War II, which were characterized as mostly workarounds and temporary fixes, leaving nothing enduring. Montgomery, visiting North America in 1946, recommended that the United States, Britain, and Canada should “cooperate closely in all defense matters; discussions should deal not only with standardization, but should cover the whole field of cooperation and combined action in the event of war.” Later that year, according to the British press, the three countries were considering whether to standardize all weapons, tactics, and training.

The original ABCA program was established with the 1947 signing of the Plan to Effect Standardization among the American, British, and Canadian armies. One of the first standardization agreements coming out of the 1947 program was a standard thread pattern for nuts and bolts, the so-called unified American-British-Canadian screw thread. The 1947 plan was replaced by several versions of the Tripartite Armies’ Standardization Agreement until 1964. The current agreement, “The Basic Standardization Agreement among the Armies of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, 1964,” became effective on October 1, almost a year after Australia joined the program. New Zealand gained associate membership through Australian sponsorship in 1965.

New Zealand has been a full member since 2006 (see Our Rightful Place). The thing is ABCA is kind of a submarine. There’s a lot moving beneath the surface but above it there’s not much to see but a radio mast and a periscope. With the exception of the JFQ piece above, a wikipedia page, and an article in Armed Forces and Society from 1991 Whither US Alliance Strategy? The ABCA Clue, and a handful of webpages there is hardly anything written about it. Have a look at the abstract of the AF&S piece linked above:

This article describes and analyzes the little-known, but extensive, defense cooperative relationship that exists among the armed forces of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. While perhaps arguably a relatively esoteric subject prior to 1989, given the recent changes that have taken place in the Soviet Union, U.S. alliance strategy is now on the threshold of a new era—an era in which the Soviet threat is seen by many allies as diminishing. As U.S. officials ponder the implications of a decreased Soviet threat on its many alliances, of which almost all have been threat-based, it will be important to recall the one series of collective security arrangements with allies that has been founded on similarities, vice solely threats. This intimate Anglo-Saxon connection appears to have the needed bases for enduring well into the post-cold-war era.

There lies, I suspect, one of the main reasons you don’t hear so much about it. It’s basically an exclusive club based (it was said to me) on three pillars: common military culture, common language, and common history. More crudely put in the bar: ‘it’s an alliance of those actually doing the fighting and dying.’ Now I am an unabashed Atlanticist and rather a fan of the idea of the Anglosphere as a meaningful force for good but I’m not sure that the Dutch or the Danes (whose troops quite possibly speak English better than your average British squaddie) who are also putting their troops in harm’s way don’t have good grounds to be aggrieved by this exclusivity.

Nonetheless, it is the case that the ABCA is seen by its members as ‘the alliance that works’ (you can guess to what it is being compared) because between its members there is a very high degree of interoperability. Actually, I think ‘interoperability’ is rather a jargony word for what is basically a relationship founded on the ability to communicate, trust and rely upon each other’s judgment. For example, between Australia, Canada and New Zealand it is quite possible to swap units and leaders at even low levels with confidence that they will fit in and perform to expectations. (The US is an outlier in this respect. Paradoxically, the US is completely transparent with its doctrine but is not even sure yet if it should let its allies see what kind of kit they’ve got in their trucks let alone swap platoon commanders. I’ve no doubt this is an aspect of the fixation with technology that was written about eloquently by John Gentry in Doomed to Fail: America’s Blind Faith in Technology. ‘You can read my doctrine but no way can you look at my widget!’). ABCA members are very reluctant to do anything that might screw up a good thing.

It follows, then, if talking loudly about it might aggravate some allies who are not in the Superfriends that not talking about it loudly is a good idea. Right? Wrong, in my opinion anyway, because ABCA’s aims are more limited and short-term than they really ought to be. I say this for two main reasons. First, there is the reality about the direction in which doctrine and concepts are starting to flow. When Australia was brought into ABCA in 1964 it was so that NATO doctrine and standards could be transferred through the original ABC to a non-NATO ally; now the flow is reversed, from the ABCA into NATO. You can see why this would really bug certain allies. But that’s just the way it is, like it or lump it: ABCA matters more now than it has before.

The second reason is more important. It’s about the nature of future warfare . Call it what you will, hybrid warfare, complex insurgency, war amongst the people, the major challenge of figuring out how to prevail in these sorts of conflicts is very largely a problem for land forces. You only fight wars amongst the people where the people actually are, after all. ABCA is specifically an Army (and Marine) club–which is I think another of the reasons that it ‘works’. I think the guy who wrote that Armed Forces and Society article about ABCA in 1991 should have put it in a drawer for another ten years or so. In the dreamy days of the Post-Cold War the imperative to have an alliance which actually ‘worked’ was not so much which was why NATO survived by turning itself into an avowedly more political alliance. The Post-911 era, by contrast, looks a lot more like those times which necessitated ABCA in the first place. The 5 armies cooperated from 1939-45 because they had to–the cost of not doing so was defeat. Perhaps the situation is not quite so stark now; yet even the United States recognizes that going it alone is neither practical or desirable and that means having real interoperability with its actual fighting partners.

Which brings me back to the United States which is clearly primus inter pares in ABCA. How could it be otherwise when the US spends $500 billion a year on its armed forces while the next largest ally, Britain, spends about $56 billion a year? New Zealand’s armed forces total about 10,000; the USMC on its own is about the same size as the the British armed forces in total. So, you can think of ABCA as something like a solar system with the US in the central position. In theory, the sun and the planets exert gravitic effect upon each other. Little Mercury does actually move the sun…a little. It seems to me, therefore, that one useful thing about ABCA is that it gives the allies a chance to have a detailed look in on what the US is thinking about its own land forces structure, equipment, doctrine and training and so on, and to adjust their orbits as required.

Another useful thing about ABCA, at least as far as my impessions of this conference go (it merits further investigation), is that there is an appreciation of the value of diversity of national approaches which would be lost in a truly homogenous organization. The point is to be able to fight with the Americans, not as the Americans. I do not doubt for a second that there are some American officers who would say the solution to interoperability is simple: everybody take our doctrine and buy our kit. What I observed, however, was a willingness on the part of the Americans present to acknowledge and learn from the expertise and capability of others. This was especially evident in the syndicate on influence operations.

Perhaps they were being polite. Perhaps back in the Pentagon ABCA isn’t taken that seriously. That would be a mistake. And I’m not trying to say ‘I, for one, welcome our American overlords.’ It is just that the resemblance between ABCA and the solar system can be a bit misleading because relative to the disparity in size the willingness to listen on the part of the hegemon actually seems pretty large.