Yesterday morning I took a break from writing the Afghanistan chapter of my thesis to watch the Secretary of State for Defence give a speech on the ongoing Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) and the future of the Ministry of Defence (MoD). BBC News televised the entire speech and the Q&A live (BBC, Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian). Toward the end of the Q&A I thought Dr Fox gave an important soundbite: ‘This needs to be the defence review that puts the Cold War to bed’.
Interestingly, the term ‘Cold War’ was nowhere in the speech itself, but the comment suggests the frame of reference the Government is taking its approach to reforming the MoD. The Conservative Party left office in 1997 – not so long after the Cold War ended. It was clear (and unsurprising) from the attack on the previous Labour Government at the beginning of the speech that Government policies during the Conservatives’ 13 years out of power are viewed harshly by the current Government. Yet it is as if the Conservatives’ clock stopped in 1997 and is resuming now that they are back in office, with the Cold War only a few years deceased in the minds of ministers after their 13-year absence. It is worth remembering, after all, that the Berlin Wall came down before many of the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan were born.
At the same time, I do not dispute aspects of what Dr Fox was getting at. Many of the structures and processes within MoD (and within my own military’s five-sided building) do suffer from a Cold War hangover, especially procurement. The operational military (particularly ground forces) has gone through a bloody transformation in the last decade while the bureaucracy churns virtually uninterrupted. I certainly hope the SDSR and the ‘root and branch reforms’ address such issues.
As a personal example of the time lag outside the operational force, in 2004 I wasted devoted countless hours memorizing the structure of notional Soviet Tank Divisions in my officer training while we were actually fighting two nascent insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years, at the top across the Atlantic, Secretary Gates has waged his own campaign against the Pentagon (with the latest salvo earlier this week against too many Generals and Joint Forces Command, those who brought us ‘effects-based operations’), and General Petraeus did something similar to the US Army on his way up the General Officer ranks. (As an aside, a relevant article on the demands of high command by Thom Shanker, Win Wars? Today’s Generals Must Also Politick and Do P.R., is worth reading from Thursday’s New York Times. It’s probably worthy of its own post, but I’m not sure I’ll get that far this weekend.)
The question is, Is Dr Fox Britain’s Gates? If so, does that make General Richards (the outgoing Chief of the General Staff and incoming Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) who commanded ISAF in Afghanistan from May 2006 to February 2007) the British Petraeus? The latter analogy has been made more than a few times already, such as in his Sunday Times profile 11 July (requires registration):
Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times foreign correspondent, who has observed Richards in various theatres of war, sees him as Britain’s answer to General David Petraeus, who recently replaced General Stanley McChrystal as overall commander in Afghanistan. “He’s the type of officer we’ve seen only in the past decade, taking a broader world view than ‘Who can I kill?’. Even physically he’s like Petraeus — medium height and very wiry.”
It remains to be seen whether Fox can do for Britain what Gates is attempting to do for the United States Defense Department. I am firmly in the camp that believes Gates is the best SecDef in the modern era – maybe ever. Firing Generals is great for the morale of Captains, especially after enduring the period when it seemed that Secretary Rumsfeld rewarded loyalty over competence and seldom held senior officers accountable for failures with those below suffering the consequences. The manner in which current CDS Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup’s relief was announced suggests Dr Fox might be of the Gates mold. Whether he can successfully wrestle the MoD bureaucracy into submission, however, is a question that will require much more time on the job to answer.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Just curious, why were you memorizing numbers of Soviet tank divisions in 2004 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991? Mores seriously, those of us meanwhile who remember the 1997 UK SDR remember that that was the one that was meant to replace the Cold War model. And in fact it did-by giving us a completely abstract and vacuous ‘globalization’ model of expeditionary warfare which the UK cannot afford, but which we are still stuck with, reading between the lines of Fox’s comments. There is a lot of cheap politicking going on at the moment, not least about the UK fiscal deficit (witness Fox’s craven comment yesterday that ‘these are Labour’s cuts’), most of which is long term, a lot of which is driven by bailing out the private sector with public money (so much for the ‘self-correcting’ deregulated free market), and almost all of which could in fact be paid down over the medium to long term through normal economic growth. My own impression is that there is even less to Fox meanwhile than there might appear to be, and that we can sooner expect an acceleration of the disastrous ‘cost saving’ measures of New Labour via more PFIs, privatized contracting etc. than any serious strategic rethink-in short, an SDSR driven by the Treasury, and one which is even less intellectually serious than the 1997 review was. Not a good omen.
The short answer to your question about our training in 2004 was that it was rationalized as a building block for understanding the structure of many countries’ militaries that were based on Soviet hardware and doctrine (particularly North Korea). I agreed with that, but only to a degree. Yes, I needed to know what a T-72 looked like, but it seemed a bit much to go all the way to tank divisions and army groups, etc.
I agree that there is lots to worry about in the possibility (eventuality?) of a Treasury driven SDSR, but on the flip side, there is truth to the fact that resource limitations can sharpen the strategic mind. One of the problems in the US for many years has been that the comparative surplus of defence funding has meant little incentive to make hard choices about what is actually necessary. Why cut anything when you can have it all (or at least a bit of everything)?
I concur that budgetary constraint can sharpen strategic thought, but this has not been the case in the UK. Whereas the US since 2001 has enjoyed a bountiful surplus in it’s defence budget, the truth is that the UK since 1991 has been hampered by a strategic model that it can’t actually afford, in part because deindustrialization in the 1980s (a Tory policy) left us excessively dependent on an inherently unstable financial sector (a policy Labour exacerbated, so plenty of blame to share all around here) . Thus we are left talking about the need for a strategic rethink on a scale completely different from that in the US. Perhaps the most obvious comparison is that, whilst Gates is talking about scrapping a few big ticket items, the UK is facing the serious prospect of having to scrap or significantly downgrade its nuclear deterrent, simply in order to keep the lunatic expeditionary model that the 1997 SDR gave us going. That suggests the need for a genuine strategic rethink about our role in the world, but going by Fox’s pronouncements, that’s the very last thing that we’re in fact going to get.
Agree Pericles, the language of the pre review buildup has been exactly the same for decades, and so has the result
Cuts disguised as strategic thinking
With apologies if this has already been seen and discarded but this was an interesting insight as well from Gen. Richards:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/tag/david-richards/
No, that was a new link for me, so thank you very much!
“. . . (and within my own military’s five-sided building) do suffer from a Cold War hangover, especially procurement. . . .”
Let’s not forget that procurement rules, regulations are laws passed by congress andDoD procurement policy are a result those laws.
While Gates may champion acquisition reform and effect many procurement policy actions, the core problems inherent within the FARs ensure a muddled mess.
Much can be made better in DoD procurement, for sure, but until congress changes their me-first-for-my-district-and-US-national security-be-darned attitude, not much can change.
FYI:
“Dr. Ash Carter, DoD Assistant Secretary AT&L, advised industry of a new program with the goal of increasing warfighting capabilities by three percent without proportionately higher budgets. To assist DoD in this effort, Dr Carter has asked industry for their suggestions and recommendations to achieve this goal. NDIA clearly recognizes the budget constraints that drive this new DoD initiative and welcome the opportunity to engage in real and meaningful efforts to reduce industry cost and to exploit best practices to improve efficiency. As part of that effort, I have requested members of various NDIA Division to provide their recommendations for onward submission to DoD.
This link is a listing of the 57 recommendations that we have received thus far: http://www.ndia.org/Advocacy/Resources/Documents/LegislativeAlerts/EfficiencyInitiativeResponse.pdf . They have all been submitted to DoD. I am providing these recommendations and suggestions to you for your information. Although the deadline for industry submissions is on August 18th, this will be an on-going project for DoD as they continue to formulate the final recommendations to the Secretary of Defense. The attached list includes a brief description of each recommendation with a number alongside. To review in detail the recommendation, click on the number which will take you directly to a full discussion of the issue.”
Fair enough on the legal constraints in the United States that are less of a problem for the ‘elected dictatorship’ that is the British parliamentary system, though the current coalition government might complicate that a bit.
It would appear that Fred Kaplan shares some of your views about Secretary Gates:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/the_transformer
I’m also a big fan of Gates. I agree that firing Generals is great for Captain’s morale. Especially when those Generals aren’t very good.
I’m reminded about Yingling comments about there being more consequences for a Private who loses are rifle than a General who loses a war. Tom Rick’s top ten list of the Worst War Memoirs of Iraq and Afghanistan show that being a bad General can improve your odds of getting a book deal.
Anybody who saw George Osborne on Ch4 news last night knows where this is going. Watching Liam Fox squirm and squeak is peripherally amusing, but nobody should be in any doubt who’s got the whip hand in this ‘strategic’ debate.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/george+osborne+aposmod+pays+for+tridentapos/3746577
The ruckus between fox and osborne is my biggest concern, particularly as throwing the £20b trident replacement costs into the defence budget has wrecked the costing baseline that fox’s hastily assembled SDSR assumed it could work to.