Strategy Seems To Be The Hardest Word

As tensions mount ahead of the publication of the British Governments ‘Integrated Review’ (IR) on Tuesday, there is a variety of informed speculation in the media about what it may herald. The review is being trailed as the most significant shift in UK strategic thinking since the end of the Cold War.

This sounds impressive, but arguably so too have been most of the previous defence reviews since 1991. It is hard to think of a new Defence Review launched that was not simply saying ‘steady as we go’ and changing very little.

The publication of this review will arguably be the fifth major Defence Review since the 1990s Options for Change paper was released, heralding the end of the Cold War. Since then, we have had the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, the 2010 SDSR, the 2015 SDSR and now the 2021 IR. This is in addition to a variety of smaller papers such as the 2001 SDR ‘New Chapter’ and the 2004 paper.

In 30 years, the UK has attempted to define its defence and security strategy on no less than 6 different occasions. Each time a slightly different answer has been found that reflects the interests and issues of the time. Investment has been accelerated, reduced and cut on projects and issues that wax and wane in and out of favour as time passes.

Perhaps a question can be asked as to whether the word ‘strategy’ is a good description of the UK’s current security policy, or would a better word suffice to describe UK security policy more effectively?

The issue with the word strategy or strategic is that it implies a long-term coherent approach to activity, setting goals, monitoring them and allocating resources to achieve them as required. Over a long period of time these will yield results, and goals will either be met, change, or fail.

Some countries have the luxury of being able to take a genuinely strategic approach to their security and conduct it in this long-term approach. Arguably the USA can because it has sufficient resources, and such global interests that it is mandated to focus globally across a range of areas, and understand its interests, equities, and goals in these regions.

Smaller nations with extremely limited regional or continental interests also arguably have the luxury of developing long term strategies. Their local situation is relatively unchanged, they know their neighbours, threats, and risks, and have a very clearly understood set of concerns to monitor. To be a small country, with limited interests in the world beyond your region is helpful, as it permits the ability to do long term strategic planning with a clear goal in mind.

The UK though falls into that category of country which has the genuine luxury, and challenge, of being able to pick and choose its interests. As an island nation, in a secure and stable continent, the main threats to UK integrity are limited. An absolute bare bones approach to UK defence would probably call for limited air defence, some offshore patrol vessels for fishery protection and maritime surveillance, and a limited counter terrorism/insurgency ground force.

The UK has the relative luxury of being able to choose the extent of its engagement with the world, and the level of interests it wishes to have in different regions. It is not constrained, like some powers are, by having unstable regions on its doorstep, nor does it share contested land borders with hostile states. By its very nature, the UK can afford to be open minded in its thinking.

This perhaps is the challenge — when you have a globally focused mindset, and a desire to look globally for engagement, then defining a strategy is more difficult. Your engagement is voluntary, not mandatory, which means it is a discretionary activity that can change on the whim of an elected government with new interests. The challenge of creating long term strategy is that different governments have different views on where their interests lie, and how they wish to resolve them.

There is perhaps a challenge that there is a lot of the world where the UK has interests, but not necessarily the resources to adequately do everything it wants to do. For example, the UK could focus heavy effort on Africa, or the West Indies, or the Middle East, or Asia Pacific — all are regions containing a UK diaspora, overseas territories, opportunities for economic success and so on.

The challenge is that to ‘do’ a strategy properly takes a long time. To go into a region, lay the groundwork for good relations, build links, understand a country and its issues, then work out how to thicken relationships takes years. It needs sustained diplomatic, aid, economic and other investment to really start taking off, and does not happen overnight.

The risk is that a ‘stop start’ approach to strategy, where a region is flavour of the month, then all but abandoned, then cautiously looked at again leaves regional partners wary. The UK has spent decades undoing the damage caused by the decision in the 1960s to withdraw from the Middle East — a decision that made sense given the pressures of the time, but one which did huge damage to reputation and standing. Even now, well over 50 years later, there is suspicion that the UK return to the region is not permanent.

The other challenge in building a long-term strategy is that the system itself does not encourage or create a long term culture of career expertise. It is a safe bet to make that everyone involved in both the 2010 and 2015 SDSRs have long since moved onto other jobs, probably outside the armed forces and civil service, and that the IR has been done by an entirely new team.

There is no coherent system or career structure that permits people to become genuine country or region experts in the UK Government. This means that you can jump from posting to posting, one minute a desk officer on foreign policy, the next minute working on trade talks in an entirely different area.

The problem is that it is more down to luck than planning that we have specialists, those who have lived or breathed a regional expertise for their careers. Often those who know the most are the least promoted or rewarded, putting up with low salaries and no career prospects to stay close to the area they know best.

The risk is that this creates a system of near perpetual flux, with a constant churn of newly arrived ‘expert’ desk officer expected to offer advice to Ministers on a country or region, but who have practically no knowledge of it at all. While one of the great strengths of the British system is that it can and does work very effectively across institutional boundaries (arguably the British Civil Service is the most effective organised bureaucracy out there at working in a truly joint fashion), its expertise can be shallow.

What this has arguably built is a culture where the UK wants to engage, would like to engage, but lacks the deep cultural knowledge in the centre, and long-term secure career structures to be able to take a genuinely strategic approach. It is not possible to enter the civil service as a junior desk officer, and progress up through a series of targeted postings, linked to a specific region, and then aspire to one day lead the cross Whitehall policy for that area. This makes it much harder to build a genuinely strategic culture, for there is no long-term view in place — people take a short-term interest, then move on within 18 months to 2 years to a new, unrelated, challenge.

This inability to take a long-term focus on one or two core strategic goals, that are properly funded over many decades and which people build careers on, is perhaps a good reason to suggest that what the UK has is not a strategy, but a series of short-term operational priorities.

The UK is arguably very good (and comfortable) at working in the operational level — it likes clearly defined goals, solving problems, resolving them and then moving on (or at least extracting to the point when it is no longer heavily invested in the issue). A glance at post-Cold War UK engagements shows ground commitments across the Balkans, operations in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and so on.

On each occasion there has been targeted efforts to identify a resolution to a crisis, build an alliance, deploy troops, use multi-national institutions to seek order and reconstruction and then quickly draw back down again to low levels of engagement. The UK has essentially tried to operate at an operational level, focusing on a single crisis or issue, resolving it and then backing off, rather than trying to develop deeper thicker links as part of a longer-term strategy of regional engagement.

This operational mindset perhaps comfortably suits the UK’s position — a nation that can pick and choose issues and entanglements with the luxury of detachment from the crisis, in a way that others, more actively engaged with it, cannot.

It is much easier to define outcome and activity on a one — two-year planning timeline where you can see a crisis through in the duration of a posting, than it is to look at it from a decades long prism. For all the talk of strategy, perhaps a better description of the UK’s approach to global security is that it takes an operational approach — engaging on issues where it has the time, resources, interests, and bandwidth to cope for the short term, while avoiding being sucked into long term engagement.

This approach though makes it extremely hard to work through issues like defence procurement, where identifying what is the right equipment to buy at times can be difficult. Major projects now take decades to realise and bring into service — the Type 26 was first conceived of in around 1993, but will not enter service till about 2026, some 33 years after conception.

The British Army meanwhile has not introduced a new armoured vehicle from its core funding programme into service for 24 years, despite spending over £300m on concept designs, and running on older obsolete vehicles. The result is that it is reliant on vehicles designed in the 1960s (like the FV432 series) to continue working. Yet in the 24-year period the Army has deployed globally, and had to adapt from operating in the Balkans, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Africa to Ukraine, and constantly shift perspective on what is required.

This constant change in operational priorities and interests makes it much harder to work out what is needed. If the threat were still the Soviet Union and protecting Wolfgangs bratwurst van from the 3rd Shock Army, then there is no doubt we would probably have Challenger 4 under construction by now — a clearly defined threat, an understood challenge to react to, and a clear set of design parameters.

Instead, we’re asking the armed forces to constantly shift their requirements to cover everything from the preparation to fight against a heavy Russian armoured division, to being able to range across Mali combatting insurgents, while also being able to help nation state building in Afghanistan. The range of demands on a finite budget is huge, and the requirements are ever changing — how do you handle this?

So, as we approach the IR, it is perhaps worth asking whether the word ‘strategy’ is the right phrase for the UK. Are we genuinely a strategic thinking nation, able to take a long term (e.g. decades) perspective on the world, or does our focus shift to react as circumstances change?

The blessing (and arguably curse) of being a nation with global interests but not rigid commitments, and extremely capable and deployable military power is that you can pick and choose your engagements with a freedom of choice denied to many other nations. As a nation we seem to be on the verge of choosing to re-engage in the Indo-Pacific region 50 years after withdrawing from it.

A proper strategy in the 1970s would arguably have not seen this withdrawal occur at all, so instead we are now looking to begin again from where we left off, rebuilding lost influence in a region neglected for some time. The prospects for engagement are exciting, but is this truly the start of a new long-term decade’s long strategy of engagement, that will over time bear fruit as relationships evolve and the UK is seen as inextricably committed for the long term?

Or will a decision in 5–10 years’ time alter this and put the focus somewhere else instead the process will begin all over again? At its heart, the question has to be — is strategy the right word to use when describing British security policy goals?

(originally posted at https://thinpinstripedline.blogspot.com/2021/03/strategy-seems-to-be-hardest-word.html)