Over at Current Intelligence, I’ve had a few thoughts about what comes next for the British army.
Broadly, three choices are possible. Stick to the current structure, persevere in the view that the messy, internal conflicts of the last two decades are the way of the future, and design your forces to fight ‘amongst the people’. Or re-imagine the future of warfare as something different from Afghanistan, with its sustained, expeditionary nature and very low-intensity fighting. Something, perhaps, like the wars Israel has been fighting: episodic and more intense. The third option is unpalatable for the army: abandon the expeditionary model that has been with us since the 1990s, and concentrate more on the rapid projection of force, by air, sea and special forces.
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The second alternative seems more likely to me. If future enemies fight like Hezbollah, the army will need an innovative, adaptive response. More than that, it will need to focus anew on the higher end of the war fighting spectrum, with brigade size operations. In short, it will need to pay attention to the theory of Hybrid War. The key idea in that theory is that enemies exploit asymmetry by utilizing their comparative advantage. Moreover, they do so by employing a range of operational styles, simultaneously. In one place, the enemy may be fighting like an urban terrorist. Down the road, though, he will have erected an effective SAM screen and be laying ambushes for your armour. What’s new? Aren’t many historic wars hybrid, critics (including me) ask? Yes, assuredly, comes the response, but there is something new in the ability of networked adversaries to shift rapidly from one style to another; to exploit the erosion of the West’s technological edge and its aversion to casualties. A neat summary of this thinking comes in the UK Doctrine Centre’s paper on the Future Character of Conflict.
The theory served as a counterweight to the conventional, Revolution in Military Affairs-type thinking associated particularly with the US military, but also with its allies, including Israel. When the IDF was checked by Hezbollah in 2006, it was widely seen as the end for Effects Based Operations, and its deterministic and jargon-laden approach to warfare. Accordingly, Hybrid War has been routinely bracketed with other ‘irregular’ war theories, like Fourth Generation Warfare, Three Block War, and Rupert Smith’s ‘war amongst the people’. Its main achievement was in reminding conventional armies not to mirror-image their opponents.
Now, though, it might serve to push in the other direction: in emphasizing that not all adversaries are like the Taliban; not all potential wars are low-intensity counterinsurgencies. Other enemies can move across the higher end of the war fighting spectrum. This polemical role for Hybrid War, like the theory itself, comes with some problems. Who, for example, is the threat for Britain? After all, a war between the UK and Hezbollah is most unlikely. Advocates of Hybrid war are sometimes prone to focus on the operational level at the expense of the strategic: on the style of fighting, rather than on the types of societies doing it. For those of us worried that the operational level of war has come to dominate the strategic, this is troubling. Surely the what of policy goal should precede the how of operational art?
But for those seeking to re-imagine the British army after a decade of counterinsurgency, hybridity may be attractive for precisely this reason. It needs no strategic concept. Many states can be described as potential hybrid adversaries, capable of operating simultaneously with a variety of regular and irregular, high and low intensity tactics. Indeed there is no reason even to name the adversary – any sensible foe will have observed the lessons of 2006 and adapted accordingly. Preparing to meet that shadowy threat should give the army of the future something to think about on Salisbury plain, and in the ante-rooms of the Treasury.
What do you think? The newspapers today, meanwhile, focus on the potential for a cull of senior British officers, something I’ve mused on before.
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This whole Hybrid War Theory sounds like something cooked up by the Israelis and their American supporters to explain their poor performance in the 2006 Lebanon imbroglio.
i’d like to hear more on the difference between the second and the third options………
The difference is that the third option is common sense ;-)
We have an expeditionary model bolted on to a state transformation agenda, neither of which actually works very well, and neither of which we can actually afford. What is also not raised by this issue is the broader ‘identity’ debate, which this other recent article actually summarises very well:
http://www.rusi.org/analysis/commentary/ref:C4C6D0795721B3/
‘If the answer is that Britain is not a superpower but that it should ‘make a difference’,[24] then what kind of difference, why, to whom, and in which areas of national and international life is the country best placed to act to make its mark?’
cheers, i think i am with you, if the second is taken to mean the liberal-interventionist philosphy that goes alongside the military capability…………….?
Speaking as an army officer the third option to me seems the most sensible from a defence perspective and taking into account our traditional employment of armed forces. It is however unpalatable to the army…
If we view the current spate of high intensity counter-insurgency operations as the future (and many seem to conflate these conflicts with ‘Hybrid Conflicts’) then we need a larger army. Size matters and both Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly demonstrated that the UK army is too small. However the political will is not there to increase the size of the army in these times of austerity. So on a defence basis how best to get ‘bang for our buck’? To my mind this is in maintaining or increasing our ability to project force through the air and sea components.
Traditionally we have maintained trade and influence through use of the navy, although this can also now be done through use of the RAF. the army was used predominantly for small scale policing type actions at home and abroad. As we seem no longer to be able to afford to do the latter perhaps we should now concentrate on the former?
Mmmh…
I recall reading somewher that ‘the army is a projectile to be fired by the Royal Navy’.
Historically, when we were building our informal trading empire and not the territorial morass that became Victoria’s formal empire, we hit hard, hit fast and then left; even the Afghan and China campaigns of 1840-42 were not longwinded.
Why do we always insist on re-inventing the wheel? Go for option 3; a small, highly trained (contemptible even, maybe?) army, capable of theatre entry ops, supported by an adequately resourced RN and RAF (so long as the latter recognise that Maritime Patrol, heavy lift and helos are as important as fighter-bombing). We can always get our international, continental partners, to provide the high-end, warfighting capability.
The problem with the commitment to any military programme is that its lifespan outstrips economic cycles of boom and bust. If we look at the proposed Trident programme and we estimate a lifespan of 40 years, then it is conceivable that this programme will experience at least 4 times as many recessions as we had seen in the last decade – 2… so 8 recessions in total, though possibly more. A quick note on those 2 recessions of the past decade… the first one followed directly after 9/11 and was the culmination of that event, as well as the need to recover from the Y2K excesses and the Dot Com bubble burst. By 2004, the recovery was all but complete, but the root causes for the second recession (of which we saw signs as early as May 2006), were already in place. The point is (in an adaptation of the street saying): recessions happen.
How does this impact large military programmes? Simple… it is not possible to predict what will happen economically within the next 4 decades, yet we need to plan around it. It is understandable from a human perspective that we will allow those events of which we have the most recent memory to bear the most weight on our decision-making process. After all, the economy is little more than the quantification of confidence – in the markets, of the consumers, long term ventures such as housing, etc. If confidence is low (as it is now), it will affect us and lead us to conclude that these programmes cannot be undertaken.
But after each bust, there is a boom and the danger is that we could be shedding ability now in our gloom, yet be in the position to afford the same in years (or perhaps months) to come. It is all fair and well to say: “oh, let’s get rid of our heavy ability, because a) we don’t need it and b) we cannot afford it.” After all, how difficult can it be to throw a combined arms heavy division around in the battle space? Unfortunately… very. If we do not have it, we cannot train with it and we cannot use it when the need arises. If we get shot of it now, and want to retrieve that ability in a decade’s time… good luck to us. We’ll need it.
What we should be doing, is to smooth things out over a longer period. I’m left with the impression that our previous governments had felt a moral obligation to blow every penny of income at least three years before it was “earned” – and we can argue about that value proposition (e.g. how expensive our free health service really is). When the going is good, we rapidly increase our investment in social devices (to the extent that the burden becomes debilitating), because our politicians – being arch-optimists – fail to account for the harsh reality that the next recession is already in the making.
When the next recession does strike (with the inevitability of the seasons) – then we witness the most vulgar jockeying by ministers and department heads to hold onto whatever advantages they had amassed during the good years – in the same manner as the bulge companies and banks (like BoA) claimed that they were “too big to fail” – only here and now it is called “ring-fencing”. Education is too important – in fact, we should invest even more, so that the education managers needn’t apply themselves too much in their fitful attempts to meet their bloated objectives. Same with Health- and Social Services.
However, for all the lack of sense of the above, we know that governments may change, but they all still operate in the same manner. And our current position is one where the horse had bolted several decades ago (taking the stable door with him). So what to do now? I would propose that we attempt to factor in the possibility that boom will return – perhaps not in the next two quarters, but then soon thereafter. And that 3 years or so after that, the bust will return. And so on and so forth.
To facilitate the smoothing required to deal with this sine wave, we need to consider the role of the Civil Service (governments may come and go, but the Civil Service remains). And in principle, we need to provide these departments with the ability to save – that is, if a department is provided a budget of x, but if it only uses x – y, then the department should be entitled to retain that into the future, possibly even invest that delta in a prescribed and controlled manner. Perhaps then we’ll see the end of this desperate spending spree at the end of each financial year in an attempt to create the impression that the department had not received a sufficient budget last year… and by inference requires an even bigger one for the next year. In short, we’re not facing a problem of a lack of money, we’re facing a problem of system, of process and of procedure.
As an analogy, I’d like to draw attention to a recent event in English history: a couple of years ago (2005 if my memory serves me), the South of England experienced a hosepipe ban. Our green and pleasant land experienced a drought. Yes, it is true that it did not quite rain as much that year, but the fundamental issue was not as much the lack of rain, but the poor infrastructure around the management of it. Compared to all of the countries in the world that experienced a drought that same year – many of them in the 3rd World, England was infinitely worse off than any of them… for in those countries, all they needed was for the rain to return – but in England that would not solve the problem. We needed more than the heavens to open, we needed managers to start thinking.
And so it is now with our money. We do not need the boom to return (though it would be nice… please), we need to work smarter with our cash all around, through boom and bust. We need to get those managers that believe it their God-given right to receive our hard-earned cash and spend it not as much to our benefit, but towards the fulfilment of personal departmental ambitions – to wake up, realise that the cash is the most important national resource and treat it as such. For example, if he blows £13 billion on an IT programme that does not even work, there must be recourse (other than promoting him). By the same token, we should enable these managers to spend the money wisely and not be penalised for doing so.
In the mean while, we should hang onto as much of our military ability as we can – in cadre form if required. The boom will return. One day.
‘In the mean while, we should hang onto as much of our military ability as we can – in cadre form if required.’
Why?
There are two separate issues here-the military strategy of the state and it’s fiscal footprint. The two are out of whack at present, hence why we are in a worse position now that many other states.
To be brief-the issue wasn’t Brown’s spending, but the fiscal footprint of the state it was based on. Spending would have been rational if the economy wasn’t over-dependent on the financial sector as a legacy of Thatcherism (if it was, for example, based on manufacturing instead, as in Germany). So the pit we’re in is avoidable in future if we alter fiscal policy.
Military strategy is a separate issue. 70% of our key trade is with Europe. The utility of keeping full spectrum ability is at least worthy of being questioned.
My point is… it is never a good idea to knee-jerk on long term planning on the basis of the amount of money we have in our pockets right now – be it in a boom or bust.
Regarding your second issue: a far better approach to planning (and I get the sense that we agree on this point) is to ask: “what do we need to achieve and how will we manage that with our available and anticipated resources.” In fact, there are elements of Grand Strategy present within that approach. It is also subtly different to an approach of “what can we afford right now”, which in my opinion is pure logistics.
So when we do tailor our ability, it should be based on where we realistically see ourselves in the near- mid-, and long term in terms of that what we value.
Regarding your first issue – it just so happens that this current recession is based on credit operations of the financial markets (it had been a while since we’ve had one of those), in particular relating to banks lending money that they had to borrow themselves, to people and institutions that had no means of repaying – and then distributing the risk by means of attracting investment based on (what turned out to be) faulty ratings (securitisation of sub-prime mortgage portfolios being a case in point.) The next recession may emanate from the manufacturing sector for all that we know, and then it will be Germany’s turn (and that of other manufacture heavy countries) to weather the storm. Sometimes it just makes sense to “stay in your lane” – there is no silver bullet in national and international economics. Even if we hedge our bets by diversification, it’ll only serve to increase the chances of being severely impacted by booms and busts (as opposed to occasionally only experience the periphery of the storm).
‘…it just so happens that this current recession is based on credit operations of the financial markets (it had been a while since we’ve had one of those), in particular relating to banks lending money that they had to borrow themselves, to people and institutions that had no means of repaying – and then distributing the risk by means of attracting investment based on (what turned out to be) faulty ratings (securitisation of sub-prime mortgage portfolios being a case in point.) The next recession may emanate from the manufacturing sector for all that we know, and then it will be Germany’s turn.’
1982-90 developing countries debt crisis
1984 Continental Illinois Bank rescued by the Fed
1987 Stock market crisis
1990-92 Property-led Nordic and Japanese banking crises
1997-98 Asian Currency Crisis (partially property based)
1998 LTCM bail-out in USA
1998-2001 capital flight from Russia, Argentinean Debt Crisis
2001-2 Dot com bubble and stock market crashes
The source of the majority of modern financial crises is no mystery. It ain’t uppity unions. There is a direct link between growing financial deregulation and ‘innovation’ (making money where there isn’t any, in short) and the nature of the vast majority of modern financial crises.
To get back to the original starting point, generating a sustainable military strategy with an economy (the UK’s) increasingly hocked up to the neck in the financial markets latest hokum, with no other really substantial inputs, is, shall we say, at the very least an ‘interesting’ modern government conundrum.
I should point out that of your list of 8 financial crises, I only ever got the memo on 2… that is, there were two of this list that had an effect on the UK – being the stock market crash of 1987 (described as somewhat of a mystery), and the 2001 crash (brought about by the Dot com crash) and people flying large airliners into skyscrapers.
Of the latter, I agree that investors attempt to manufacture money out of thin air… but it really needed 9/11 to kick the actual recession off.
Point is – humans are greedy (and according to Dilbert also stupid and something else) – the combination of which will invariably lead to a cycle of boom and bust… if not in the Financial Sector, then somewhere else. There is no escaping it within our current paradigm. What matters more is what we do during booms and busts.
But we’ve wandered far enough from the original topic – so with that, I plead opinion and exit stage left.