Britain needs a realistic new foreign and defence policy

The foreign policy and defence review proclaimed by Boris Johnson in the election campaign and the Tory manifesto is to be one of the most sweeping since 1945. In defence terms alone, it will mark a turning point, as with the past reports and reforms of Cardwell, Haldane and Lord Esher, the latter after the near debacle of the Second Boer War that ended in 1902. 

It is designed to lead to a radical rethink and overhaul of national security strategy, defence funding and procurement, and the employment of hard and soft power in what the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, calls the era of “the 360-degree threat scenario.”

Regular defence reviews have been published every five years since 2010. The first of the current series was ordered by Tony Blair for 1998. The problem with that review, once regarded as a model of its kind, was that it wasn’t fully costed. Among its proposals was building two new fleet aircraft carriers for the Navy – provided the economy could bear it. This get-out clause was later ignored, because the project brought up to 10,000 jobs to Rosyth, which was adjacent to the constituency of Gordon Brown.

The aircraft carrier project, and the F-35 aircraft, which even the American defence budget is groaning to sustain, are likely to be prime targets in the initial probings of the review’s leaders, Boris Johnson’s capo consigliere, Dominic Cummings, and the historian, Professor John Bew, now serving as foreign affairs advisor to the Prime Minister. Their views on misspending and profligacy at the Ministry of Defence are already well known – as are those of the defence secretary Ben Wallace.

Cost overruns on the current equipment programmes have been put at around £7 billion by the Times and the Financial Times. Sticking such figures on a headline, however, tells less than half of the real story. It conceals the extent and nature of the task now confronting the architects of the review. It is going to be a tough challenge even for the indomitable Cummings, the self- confessed admirer of Otto Von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor who forged German unification 150 years ago.

Quite a number of critics and consiglieri have gone before, believing that they too could fix the UK’s defence finances. In 2010 Bernard Gray, formerly of the Financial Times and a defence advisor under New Labour, was brought in as head of defence materiel. Philip Hammond, known as “spread sheet Phil” during his tenure as defence secretary, claimed to have balanced the defence equipment budget. But the costs kept rising. 

Part of the problem is that specifications frequently change during the introduction of new equipment and systems – particularly during operations where the enemy has a deciding vote. The Navy is currently having to spend extra funds on completing the build of the class of Astute hunter-killer submarines – as the first three have been found to be less than cutting edge.

Changing times, and politics, have afflicted most recent defence reviews. Blair’s 1998 SDR, was overtaken by events within three years. The attacks of 9/11 brought new and long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and signing up to George W Bush’s “war against terror.” These incurred unanticipated expenditure of blood and treasure, and extra funds for short-term specialist equipment. 

Politics have played their part. Under David Cameron’s six-year spell as prime minister, the spec and configuration of the aircraft carrier programme was changed three times – costing hundreds of millions of pounds. In 2010, when the defence budget was actually cut marginally by the incoming coalition, the programme for a new Nimrod MR4 maritime patrol aircraft was cut altogether, with the clear suggestion that no such aircraft was needed. This serious gap in thinking, as well as practical defence, has now been reversed with the purchase of nine Boeing Poseidon 8 aircraft, whose cost is likely to send Dominic Cummings’ blood pressure through the roof. Cheaper alternative solutions were available. 

Moreover, some of the really big, and lengthy, programmes are not fully “derisked” – in other words, fully costed over the expected length of service. The aircraft carriers and the F-35, strike plane fall into this category. So, too, does the plan to replace the Trident ballistic missile system and its four launch submarines, for which £31 billion has been allocated for the boats alone. The first of the new Dreadnoughts is due in service about ten years from now, and due out of service by 2060. What it will all have cost by then is anyone’s guess.

Quite apart from the heavy metal items in the defence portfolio, the new review will have to consider the new technologies and techniques of conflict – from the militarization of space, to the whole panoply of new information warfare, nanotechnology, cyber, and the impact of quantum technology on encryption. 

According to Professor Michael Clarke, veteran adviser to the MoD, the UK’s defence and strategy policy will hit “a flexion point” in about 2024. Then it will have to invest more in new alternative technologies and less in the “heavy metal” systems of aircraft carriers, strike aircraft and tanks. Funds for research and development, currently just under £2 billion a year, will need to be doubled – just to keep up.

At the other end of the spectrum more will have to be spent on manpower. Currently just over 35% of the £42 billion annual budget goes on personnel. But all three services are now struggling to keep the numbers up. This is likely to rise to 40% of the budget. New terms of service, including part-time and open-ended contracts, will have to be introduced. “We have to lose too many skilled men and women when they are at their most valuable in the late forties, because the time of their 22 year contract is up,” a senior officer explained recently. He said there is also concern about some branches and services being able to generate sufficient senior leaders and officers of quality as their promotion system had become too narrow, especially in the case of the Navy. 

The state of Britain’s defence will be only a part of the new review. Its brief runs much wider, and will have to say where Britain will be in ten years’ time, and what needs to be done to protect and promote its interests. Previously such matters have been considered in the somewhat thin National Security Strategy papers published just before the Security Defence and Strategy Reviews (SDSR) of 2010 and 2015. 

The remit this time is to look at where the country will be in 2030. It will be out of EU Europe, still in Nato, and probably a smaller player in the global economy. By 2030 the leading global economies, by size, will be China, India and the USA, followed by the likes of Indonesia and Brazil.

Scoping this change, and factoring climate, environmental and demographic change, will be the most challenging aspect of the reviewers’ remit. This will involve assessing the remit of the Foreign Office, DFID, and flag carriers for UK soft power such as the BBC World Service and the British Council. It is more than an educated guess to suggest that the old foreign aid regime will also be reassessed.

It is likely that DFID and aid will now be brought directly under a super- Foreign Office, as will the British Council. In turn, all will be given policy direction by the Cabinet Office, which will be advised by a re-tooled National Security Council. The NSC in its present form was launched by the Cameron coalition government. For some it has never lived up to its billing: to analyse, articulate and coordinate UK security strategy and policy, home and abroad.

It has focused too much on policy and politics – too little on strategic analysis according to critics like Professor Mike Clarke. “Too often the NSC was used by politicians and officials to grandstand and show off,” is a rather blunter assessment by a Whitehall insider.

The biggest challenge for post-Brexit Britain is the exotic mix of security risks and challenges, ranging from terrorist activities of non-state actors and the disruptive stratagems of Putin’s Russia and even Xi’s China, to the pressures and tensions from climate and environmental change, migrations and demographic shifts. One of the most alarming developments of the past few weeks is the utter sense of discord at the latest UN Climate Conference in Madrid.

The question arises now as to who post-Brexit Britain does business with in terms of hard, soft, sharp and virtual power. The mainstays for the next decade will be the Nato alliance, not least because of its unrivalled capacity for operational planning and deployment. In terms of intelligence sharing this will be complemented by the UK’s membership of the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership of US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

While Britain self-evidently needs to maintain global interests, not least for energy and food security, we should not kid ourselves that “global Britain” means that we have a global capability. Given the size of budget and security capacity, Britain cannot afford to go it alone. Beyond Nato, it will have to forge a new treaty with Europe for a security area from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. 

Britain must assess its parameters and priorities in the world over the next ten years. This is the prime task for Dominic Cummings and John Bew, and it is much more important than sticking their red pencils into the defence procurement account books. 

They might be helped in the approach of two sets of documents. In 2009 Australia produced a new defence white paper with the title, “Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030.” Originally the brainchild of Kevin Rudd, it set out to describe the needs of Australia in its specific region and era. It came in the aftermath of Australia leading a major peacekeeping task force in East Timor in the late nineties, the aftermath of 9/11 and Australian involvement in the ragged conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is written with astonishing compression, clarity and vision. It is a brilliantly realistic assessment of Australia’s geopolitical position – the kind of realism and self-awareness Britain now desperately needs. 

“From the outset, we need to have a clear view of how much strategic risk Australia is prepared to bear,” it states in its brutally realistic executive summary, “and how much military power we should seek to develop. The more Australia aspires to have greater strategic influences beyond our immediate neighbourhood – that is to say the ability to exert policy influence that is underpinned by military power – the greater the level of spending on defence we need to be prepared to undertake.”

One curious omission from the 2009 white paper is the strategic implications of climate change. Ten years on, Australia faces the prospect of large parts of its region and home territory becoming uninhabitable. 

Another series of documents which should be on the review reading list is the series of “Global Trends” analyses published every five years by the US National Intelligence Council. Each new report assesses what it got right and wrong five years before – a healthy exercise of reflection that would repay Cummings and Bew in assessing what the UK’s nugatory National Security Strategy papers of 2010 and 2015 got right and wrong, or simply left out.

The NIC report of 2012, “Alternative Worlds”, like the Australian defence paper, was surprisingly light on assessing the implications of climate change. The report of 2017 is particularly poignant given the position Britain geopolitically is now in. “The Paradox of Progress” is a pretty bold document for a federal agency in the first year of the Trump era. One of its main contentions is that that advanced nations are becoming increasingly isolated and “island” entities. Internally their societies are fragmenting into “island” communities. This is an illuminating variant on the “bubble” theory of social media communication and isolation.

This is a health warning for the new review process. Each of the Security and Defence reviews since the 1998 SDR has been launched with the exhortation that it must be backed by “a wide public debate” about the nation’s needs and priorities. It has never really happened. Assorted think tanks like the Royal United Services Institute – RUSI – or the International Institute of Strategic Studies, hold seminars and debates, often behind closed doors. They are joined by specialist university departments like War Studies at King’s London and the Strategic Studies Institute at Exeter, and gurus from the media commentariat, quite often self-appointed. All of which hardly reflects a broad spectrum of informed public opinion.

This time the public consultation needs to go beyond gesture. Given the fragile nature of community cohesion and social resilience, it is a necessity more than an obligation to consult the public and the voters. This could be done through schools and universities and new formats of townhall meetings and citizens’ forums.

Time is short. “We have to define Britain’s post-Brexit global role and interests – we can’t just pull up the drawbridge,” Lord Peter Ricketts, architect of the 2010 SDSR report, and a former National Security Adviser, said recently. “We are not there at all at the moment.”