In the last 20 or 25 years, there has been a much greater understanding that a country’s ‘national security’ encompasses much more than the traditional duality of diplomacy and military power. Trade routes, public infrastructure, energy supplies and societal cohesion are all at play in terms of assessing threats and designing ways of defending against them.
One key issue to emerge has been the concept of resilience: how well-prepared is Britain? What risk mitigation have we undertaken? How would we respond to a sustained conflict? What is the public mood? At the beginning of the year, the House of Lords appointed a select committee on national resilience, chaired by former adviser on corporate responsibility and self-regulation Baroness Coussins, to report on the subject by November.
This week, the committee heard from three senior figures from the Ministry of Defence (MoD): Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Military Strategy and Operations); Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths, Commander, Standing Joint Command; and Damian Johnson, Director of Home Defence and Strategic Threats at the MoD.
It all adds up to wishful thinking
They had a detailed if sombre story of meticulous preparation to tell. The MoD has a four-part strategy called ‘Fortitude’ to deal with hostile action on and against UK home soil. One of the elements sets out how military and civilian personnel will be involved in reacting to any attack on Britain. The regular armed forces would be expanded, the volunteer reserves would be mobilised and civilians would be encouraged to contribute where necessary to the defence of the realm. Griffiths explained:
This is our mass mobilisation, and how we would go ahead with increasing the size of the military workforce and the civilian volunteers to support us in time of crisis and conflict. We use the joint military commands at the very bottom of the organisation to connect to society, generate the inclination to serve and then pull them in as required.
The other parts of Fortitude focus on cooperation between military and civil authorities; the protection of military installations and critical national infrastructure; and the role of the police and other civilian organisations in assisting the armed forces to deploy from and return to the UK.
These are plans to address very grave threats like long-range missile strikes, cyber attacks, damage to infrastructure and various forms of hybrid warfare, but they sound serious and carefully drafted. The problem lies in the fact that ‘Fortitude’ is a castle largely built on sand.
Many of these ideas were prefigured in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) which was published last June (later than expected, like everything which emerges from the MoD). It referred to the need to ‘build national resilience’ and ‘increase national warfighting readiness’, but precious little has actually been done in the 11 months since then.
The SDR also stressed the importance of ‘leading a national conversation to raise public awareness of the threats to the UK, how defence deters and protects against them, and why defence requires support to strengthen the nation’s resilience’. This has simply not happened, and the MoD is still talking about a ‘national conversation engagement campaign’ as a future event.
There are also critical pieces of strategy and legislation missing. The SDR recommended a Defence Readiness Bill to ‘provide the government with powers in reserve to mobilise reserves and industry should crisis escalate into conflict’. No such measure, however, was mentioned in the King’s Speech earlier this month and seems unlikely to appear before next year at the earliest.
Equally, the SDR’s high-level recommendations depend on concrete spending decisions which will be set out in the Defence Investment Plan. But this plan was initially promised for the third quarter of last year, has still not appeared and may not be published before the summer. It could easily end up being a year late.
This highlights a toxic intersection between two habits: that of Labour ministers to make bold announcements and think somehow that they equate to taking action; and the tendency of the MoD to assure any anxious interlocutors that, while there may be challenges or capability gaps or delays in procurement, everything will be all right and the armed forces are ready to defend the realm if necessary.
It all adds up to wishful thinking. The MoD is facing a financial shortfall of nearly £30 billion over the next four years. The Royal Navy’s battle fleet barely runs to a dozen active vessels available for operations. The Royal Air Force has no medium helicopter capability. The Royal Marines have no purpose-built amphibious assault ships. The Army’s Ajax armoured fighting vehicle programme is a decade behind schedule and the Royal Artillery has 14 proper guns.
The armed forces cannot currently meet the UK’s operational requirements, and there is no guarantee of adequate resources in the immediate future – indeed, some programmes may have to be cut. How on earth, then, are we to take seriously senior military and civilian personnel who describe elaborate plans to defend the United Kingdom through new systems, deployments and capabilities?
‘Fortitude’ currently has all the credibility of Billy Bunter’s postal order. It will arrive, we are assured, and it will address all our anxieties and vulnerabilities. When? That is a complicated matter. We must hope that our enemies – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – will have the decency to wait for us to be ready before attempting to do us harm. Anything else would be unsporting in the extreme. But what else have we left to rely on?
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