Building
a National Consensus
60. On the question of whether the SDR has, or will,
achieve a consensus about our defence posture in the nation as
a whole, the evidence is necessarily more equivocal and unreliable.
The Secretary of State was prepared confidently to assert—
... people in this country
do not want to play the role that Italy does [on half our defence
budget] ... why do we want to do so much? The answer is ... because
the British people want us to do that.[171]
The Secretary of State for International Development
put a slightly different spin on the same positive message, saying
that—
If we look at recent history
and likely future history, service under UN mandates is going
to be a bigger and bigger component of military service ... All
the traditional training and skills have to be there but that
... is a new analysis of the military role. I think it is going
to be an increasing role and it is almost going—I said this
when I met the Secretary of State for Defence—to change
who our supporters of military action are. The people who have
traditionally supported the UN in humanitarian assistance are
going to become bigger fans of the military over time and defend
their budgets."[172]
61. However, the Secretary of State also sounded
a note of caution about that 'consensus', reminding us that—
We have got very small Armed
Forces compared to what we once had. We have got an unpredictable,
unstable world to deal with where the nation by and large during
peacetime is not terribly interested in what the defence forces
are doing and how they are doing it, but in times of trouble when
they are called upon, hold us all very firmly to account.[173]
Lord Vincent made a similar point—
... the Secretary of State for Defence... says that
he wishes as part of this SDR process to achieve a wide public
consensus ... If he meant ... that we need to find a means of
enhancing public awareness of the significance of defence and
what it has achieved and why we still need to devote the necessary
effort and resources to it, then that I think is a very important
task because we are becoming victims of our own success. If alternatively
he means that no, I have to reach out there, we are a democratic
society and the public at large are somehow going to by some means
tell me what sort of defence they are prepared to pay for, then
I think we pay our Secretaries of State for Defence to give a
lead on those issues and not just to be on the receiving end.
We had a marvellous consensus on defence in this country from
1929 to 1939 and never were we so ill prepared for what followed.
It must have been the nearest we came to losing all our vital
interests.[174]
Professor Michael Clarke, giving evidence to the
Committee, thought that there was a consensus on strong defence
but suspected that it was—
... likely to become more
volatile in the future and ... if our forces are not seen to address
security problems in and around Europe then they may lose a certain
amount of domestic support. Equally, if they engage in operations
which appear peripheral to our direct security interest it may
be difficult to maintain consensus for them. So in general I suspect
that the MoD and the Government as a whole will have to work harder
to maintain a consensus which 20 years ago was really very solid
because of the generational factor, that most people were linked
with the forces through National Service or the Reserves or the
TA.[175]
62. Sir Patrick Hine commented in an aside to the
Committee that—
... if you had had pictures
on your televisions at home of the Battle of the Somme, for instance,
in 1916 like we would have today, both the Germans and the allies
would have brought that war to a halt in a month or less.[176]
This illustrates a broad point made by many contributors
to the debate around the SDR that there is a diminishing sense
that anything is worth fighting a war for: the money spent on
defence does not seem to be money spent on an urgent and vital
necessity. It is seen as discretionary. As the generation that
fought in the last war of mass mobilisation rapidly shrinks, and
as the generation that saw National Service is very nearly retired,
the experience of war and military service is no longer common
to the population as a whole. As Lord Vincent said to us—
... nobody in this country
... with very few exceptions ... has ever had to do what my parents
must surely have done twice in the first half of this century,
and that is wonder if there was ever going to be a tomorrow.[177]
While Lord Vincent is right that, since 1945, the
bulk of the civilian population has not had to experience present
personal danger on a daily basis, the generations that lived through
the Cold War had to contemplate the ever-present threat, however
distant, of nuclear annihilation.[178]
Despite this, Sir Michael Alexander, when asked whether the SDR
strategy was sustainable over 15 to 20 years, commented that he
saw—
... a very profound problem
that arises from this Review and indeed from previous reviews.
That is the lack of a natural constituency in this country for
defence. There is no real debate in this country about why we
have a defence policy, what it should be, and why we have a defence
capability.[179]
Although Sir Michael noted that there was 'a certain
amount of debate in this building' (the Houses of Parliament),
according to Professor Hew Strachan—
In the 1997 election, only
1.9 per cent of all Conservative candidates claimed a military
background, and no parliamentary candidates from the Labour Party
claimed a military background. Now that is not to say that one
or two of them didn't have a military background—as we know
Tam Dalyell was a distinguished trooper in the Royal Scots Greys,
and Tony Benn was of course in the RAF during his national service.
But the point is that none of them saw fit to claim that link.
And furthermore, nobody in the present Cabinet has direct service
experience. It is almost certainly, and I'd be interested to be
challenged, the first British government of which that has been
true.[180]
Using a colourful comparison, Sir Michael Alexander
expressed the view that—
It is going to be extremely
difficult to sustain public support for defence expenditure in
a world where the Red Army has gone home ... There is a real risk
that we will end up with ... the defence establishment being like
the Royal Opera House, enormously effective with a worldwide reputation,
tremendously professional but [with] no public support ...[181]
63. The causes of this potential lack of support
for the Armed Forces should not be seen to lie exclusively on
one side of the equation. Retired, and indeed serving officers
(and other service men and women) tend to talk a good deal of
the distinctive 'ethos' of the military life. Lord Vincent put
this general view fairly pithily—
... we have got a society
that thinks constantly about its rights, we are getting a growing
gap between armed forces who take on a quite different commitment.
Their priority is to go where they are told, when they are told
and do the business that has to be done when they get there, without
choice, and they accept that and those are the sorts of people
that we have got. If we get an increasing gap between public perceptions
which become increasingly less immediately informed because we
have gone through a period when there has not been a perception
of any immediate threat to the vital security interests of this
country and the way we treat our armed forces in terms of the
demands we make of them in this same environment, I think there
could be a serious loss of confidence.[182]
But perhaps the key element of the 'military ethos',
and the characteristic which really sets service men (and some
women) apart from the rest of society, is that members of our
Armed Forces are licensed by society to kill, if necessary, on
its behalf, and to risk being killed or maimed on its behalf themselves.[183]
64. The sense of a gap between the military and civil
society is probably not new, but it carries dangers, and whether
the gap is perceived or real it may be growing. The difficulties
faced by all the Services in recruiting and retaining personnel,
even in times of relatively high unemployment, highlight the problems
confronted. The search for a national consensus on defence policy
is certainly an important objective of the SDR process. The evidence
of those of the 400 plus submissions to the MoD on the SDR from
unofficial sources suggests that our witnesses may be right in
their perception that this is an increasingly challenging target.
It is not altogether surprising that, among submissions from 'the
general public', there appeared to be something of a preponderance
of dissenting views—that is in the nature of such self selecting
consultations. However, the lack of a large and visible constituency
of ready champions of the armed services outside the circle of
those with a direct interest in the matter should give some pause
for thought. The question of whether the SDR process has significantly
raised the profile of the defence debate inside and outside Parliament
is one criterion by which its success will be measured over the
coming months and years. We believe that the battle for hearts
and minds is one that the MoD will have to fight in the years
to come. However, to have won even a qualified welcome from the
Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers)[184]
indicates that the SDR may have gone some way to building a broader
consensus on defence, at least around the proposition that 'the
criterion by which our Armed Forces should be judged is not their
competence at waging war but their ability to defuse and prevent
it';[185] a conclusion
from which perhaps this Committee and the Secretary of State would
not greatly dissent. The SDR is, after all, predicated on the
assumption that 'All of Britain's military capabilities have a
role to play in preventing war'.[186]
65. Practical measures for enlivening the national
debate on defence are hard to come by. We have some comments to
make on the role of the Reserves and Cadets in a later section
in this connection. Sir Michael Alexander, for one, felt that
a more permanent forum along the lines of the Advisory Panel "might
conceivably have a role to play in meeting and sustaining such
a debate".[187]
As the Secretary of State remarked—
The defence of this country
is much too important to be kept in the hands of a handful of
people at the top of the Ministry of Defence.[188]
He expressed a cautious open-mindedness about the
possibility of some more permanent successor body to the Advisory
Panel, though with reservations about its 'accountability', and
invited this Committee to comment.[189]
We do so below at paragraph 71.
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