Integrated Review 2020: Britain cannot afford to put off plans to bring defence and security strategy into the digital age
The chancellor Rishi Sunak has put off the three-year Comprehensive Spending Review – CSR – in favour of announcing his fourth package of support measures to mitigate Britain’s Covid-19 epidemic. It is certain that this will not to be the last Covid bail out, yet the announcement that the CSR was to be postponed caught cabinet colleagues on the hop – not least the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. He has now lost the defence review that was to be the core of the Integrated Review 2020 – IR20. This was supposed to be the most far reaching review of strategy, security, defence and foreign policy since the end of the Cold War – and possibly since the cuts and realignments following the Suez crisis of 1956.
The purpose of the IR20 was to initiate a fundamental reorientation of defence and security strategy. It would also set spending resources and targets for most of the 2020s. The whole reshaping plan had been signed off in Number Ten by Dominic Cummings, and had the support of the five principal service chiefs. It was to move the forces and the security and intelligence agencies into the digital age. Among the proposals are a new cyber force, for offensive and defensive cyber operations, based on similar units in the US command hierarchy and the Israeli military and security apparatus.
Instead, we are to get a one-year spending plan for defence – though how much that can address fundamental issues such as the £13 billion black hole in the equipment budget, and the need to invest in personnel, and the replacement of old platforms with new systems, is anyone’s guess.
No wonder that Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary could barely conceal his frustration when he addressed the Future Atlantic Forum on HMS Queen Elizabeth yesterday. “The world does not stop for our (defence) review,” he told his audience of British and American top brass, cyber warriors, and diplomats, “and our adversaries will not halt in the absence of our strategy. The UK’s defence cannot be paused in the absence of financial uncertainties.”
There is much to be done – even by a watered-down Integrated Review. It needs to begin the fixing of defence, from reforming the ministry of defence and its antique practices, to making some sense of the looming equipment budget crisis. We are spending too much on too much equipment based on outdated concepts. We need more “sunrise” concepts and systems and replace “sunset” programmes and practices, as the General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defence staff puts it.
A prime example is flagged up by Francis Tusa of Defence Analysis, one of the most articulate and thought-provoking independent voices in the defence world today. “We have just seen some £5.5 billion spent over the past decade on upgrading and introducing new fighting vehicles for the Army. As of today, not one of those programmes and vehicles is operational.”
Another far from small consideration is the development of drone warfare now being played out in the fight between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Drones such as those new models supplied by Israel, Russia, Turkey and Iran are being used to devastating effect – immobilising armoured and infantry force on the ground in a trice.
“It shows how deadly the close, direct-fire, battle has become,” a senior British commander and SAS veteran, observed to me this week. Professor Mike Clarke, doyen of UK strategists, believes the British Army would find it hard in Nagorno-Karabakh. “The proper use of drones is devastating,” he says, meaning the mixture of quantity and quality, mass swarm attacks by cheap drones bolstered by Israeli and Turkish armed drones with precision rockets and missiles. “A British strike brigade might not last an afternoon. The whole issue of drones is crucial.”
Tom Tugendhat MP, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, writes for Reaction today that the government needs a comprehensive strategic and security plan for home and abroad. Resilience and contingency for social disruption is part of the home defence spectrum, as unfortunately too few British service chiefs are prepared to consider. Abroad, the UK must build and renew networks of alliances and arrangements with non-state agencies, the appropriate NGOs and IGOs, to ensure some rules-based order in global affairs.
The IR20 is to mark a fundamental shift of British foreign relations from what was termed “the continental commitment,” shaped by Sir Maurice Hankey during and after the end of the First World War. Hankey was the first of the modern era cabinet secretaries and national security advisers, a post he assumed at the age of 39 in 1916 under Lloyd George. As described by the late great historian Sir Michael Howard, in his Ford lectures of the same name, the Continental Commitment meant matching commitment to the security of Western Europe to the legacy and obligations of first the Empire and then the Commonwealth.
Today the new orientation to the dubious, and at times vapid, slogan of “Global Britain” is often unconvincing in this context. Slogans are one thing, and the practicalities of defence another. This semantic shift should not mean that we ditch our valuable security allies in Europe. British forces are compatible in aims and outlook to those of allies like France, Germany and the so-called Nordic Group – the Scandinavians and the Netherlands. We have similar ethos, doctrine, training and budgets. We want to do similar things across the world, especially in Africa.
Architects of the Integrated Review, such as the former ambassador Alex Ellis, want the strategic blueprint he has drafted so assiduously to be published at the end of next month. A document will be published, we understand, but it should not just be what a senior colleague at the Financial Times describes as “something warm and fluffy, fine words and high aspirations, but short on hard substance.” A costed strategic plan is essential, so too are military and defence ministry reform.
As Tugendhat says, we need a plan. This goes beyond service chiefs, the defence secretary and the authors of the diluted Integrated Review. At the moment it all looks too much like a plot by Luigi Pirandello: Six Ministers (including a PM) in Search of a Strategy.