Memorandum from Dr Robert Dover
1. This memorandum takes a capabilities
approach to the question of NATO and European Defence and argues
that capabilities—in British and European contexts—pose
some serious challenges to the concept of European defence today.
2. The reason for a capabilities approach
to the question of European defence is straightforward—without
a root and branch review of defence capabilities and assets in
the EU, and in our localised case, the UK then all the follow-on
questions of what the UK, EU and NATO can do with these capabilities
become redundant. Without simultaneous reviews of the capabilities
enjoyed by the Armed Forces, and the commitments endured by them
there is a strong chance that the UK will suffer a strategic defeat
in the medium to long term. This memorandum tries, through a discussion
about capabilities, to suggest ways in which a new strategic culture
can be adopted by the military and defence elites, to avoid being
strategically defeated in the main military activities of the
day—counterinsurgency.
A DOWNWARD ECONOMIC
SPIRAL
3. Philip Pugh and Norman Augustine are
the fathers of the concept of Defence Cost Inflation (DCI). [39]In
both their studies they concluded that all military equipment
is subject to year on year compound inflation in the region of
8%. The impact of their statistical analysis (which was done in
relation to the British Navy) meant that (on the assumption of
compound UK defence budget increases of 2-3% per year) the navy
would shrink by a compound interest figure of 2-3% a year. If
one projects these figures out over 50 years, the navy becomes
so diminished that it ceases to have any meaningful utility. The
real-life inflationary costs of notable defence procurement projects—like
the proposed aircraft carriers, and Eurofighter Typhoon—have
come in at higher figures than presented by Pugh and Augustine.
If we couple the inflation of these headline projects to the replacement
of the nuclear deterrent and to other core costs such as the recruitment
and retention of services personnel, fuel, ammunition and the
like, then the pressure on the defence budget begins to look daunting.
The same is the case across the whole of the European Union; for
the disappointing reason that the majority of EU member governments
used the Cold War to offset their defence costs against the American
security guarantee. The off balance-sheet cost of this upward
economic cycle and downward capabilities cycle is to limit the
range and scope of activities that EU can prosecute in its own
name and its member states can do in support of NATO. The political
effects of these trends are therefore large.
4. The question of how to break out of inexorable
cycle of capability decline is a difficult one. Pugh concluded
that the only way to break the cycle was to fundamentally re-conceptualise
the tasks to be undertaken by the armed forces and the capabilities
they have to do them with. This memorandum modifies this view
slightly—it is essential to think beyond high-technology
solutions for every military problem. The majority of tasks that
are performed by European armed forces, including our own, do
not lend themselves to high-technology solutions, indeed the opposite
is true.
THE PROBLEM
OF SMALL
WARS AND
INSURGENCIES
5. The companies who supply the British
Armed Forces, the politicians who make the decisions about procurement
projects, and the Armed Forces themselves are fixated on high-technology
projects and finding operational justifications for them.
6. For the companies this makes sense; in
a post-industrial society the best way to improve profit yields
is to build few, very expensive pieces of equipment with high
research and development costs. Politicians seem easily seduced
by "high-ticket-price" items like Eurofighter Typhoon
and FRES, whilst simple and cheap equipment options (like infantry
body armour) get lost in a myriad of committees; whilst the armed
forces are instrumentally keen on any piece of equipment that
can demonstrate an improvement to their ability to conduct operations.
7. My argument is very simple. If the premise
that the British military will be fighting in a series of small
wars and counterinsurgency campaigns (like Iraq and Afghanistan)
is accepted, then the requirement for the most technologically
advanced equipment is negated by the operational realities on
ground. What the armed forces need is "second best, now",
not an Apache helicopter parked in a warehouse. Counterinsurgency
doctrine also puts a very high premium on the political content
of any campaign. [40]These
campaigns demand sympathetic contact between the armed forces
and the non-combatant communities they operate within. Necessary
moves into highly armoured vehicles are counterproductive for
these campaigns, and so planners should think asymmetrically about
how to combat the improvised explosive devices and get the infantry
out of armoured vehicles and back onto foot and into "snatch
landrovers"; which are far more effective at reaching out
to indigenous communities. What is required above all, at the
moment, is a technology that can bridge the divide between high-altitude
airspace and the commander on the ground; to help reconnect all
the elements of the battlespace.
8. The European way of war-fighting has
become wedged at the end of the higher intensity operation and
this is where we have pitched our capabilities and procurement
requirements. Equipment used for high-intensity war fighting is
often poorly suited to the requirements of so called small wars
and insurgencies which require a larger focus on "influence
operations". British political and military culture has become
averse to risk. The average counterinsurgency campaign lasts 15
years—the British and American led coalitions in Iraq and
Afghanistan are trying to neutralise the adversaries and the win
the peace in these theatres in two years, and to do so using high-end
war-fighting techniques. This demonstrates a failure to understand
asymmetry in all of its guises and makes it likely that we will
face strategic defeats in both the main theatres of operation
in Afghanistan and Iraq. Addressing these failures is not only
about a cultural turn in understanding the adversary, it is also
about a strategic culture of flexibility within the military and
the Ministry of Defence. [41]The
dynamism seen in the German military prior to World War II was
due to the strategic defeat they had suffered in World War I and
the rapid promotion of the middle ranks open to new suggestions,
including those of Liddell-Hart on tank warfare. It should be
our ambition to try and affect a strategic cultural change without
suffering a strategic defeat first. One of the ways of doing this
is to improve the immediacy of the lessons learned by individuals
returning from Afghanistan and Iraq and also to seek their input
into the equipment and innovations they need in the field. This
should include modifications to existing equipment—which
used to be the sort of task that was performed by DERA. Current
procurement programmes rely heavily on computerised scenario planning,
rather than the experiences of those rotating out of theatre.
A return to the innovation and flexibility that used to be a key
element and success of the British military would reduce the lead-in
time to innovative solutions in the field and also be one way
to echo Pugh's desire to adapt existing equipment rather than
procuring bespoke solutions.
A EUROPEAN CHALLENGE
TO EUROPEAN
DEFENCE
9. The European dimension of arms procurement
is particularly interesting. The European Commission and arms
manufacturers are at the forefront of an increasingly Europeanized
arms trade. The EU's national governments remain concerned with
the protection of national economic interests that are now anything
but national because of the internationalization of defence industries
through mergers, acquisitions and joint projects. Furthermore,
the Commission and manufacturers have used the `homeland security'
agenda to force a Europeanization agenda, which has arguably distorted
the preferences of national governments away from the stated security
goals of the ESDP. The juxtaposition of the deeply insular national
trade against an emerging and vibrant pan-European trade is an
interesting one to observe.
10. On the European stage the European Defence
Agency (EDA) provides the EU with an ability to influence the
development of technology (through research and development funds)
and, by inference, the procurement and sale of these materials.
By extension, defence industries should now be considered as a
tool of diplomacy at the disposal of the EU. However, the EU's
new diplomatic tool has the potential to cause tensions between
national arms programmes and national commitments to the NATO
alliance. The European Commission can be seen as trying to construct
a counter-weight to the global dominance of the American arms
manufacturers—this will clearly have an impact on how Britain
shapes its defence industries and armed forces in the future.
The EDA's and Commission's desire to increase arms sales might
also be part of a post-Cold War version of an arms race, the dash
for market share, as firms from America, Russia and Europe vie
for contracts around the world. The competition for market share
is partly a raw economic equation of boosting balances of trade,
but it also serves a foreign policy purpose of buying, or more
precisely selling, influence into those client countries—particularly
as the contracts often contain maintenance clauses that extend
the commercial relationship into the medium term. This sort of
direct competition with America may well put strains on the NATO
alliance. Furthermore, if the EU becomes a "soft-security"
actor, and one engaged more fully in homeland security then it
will start to put pressure on the MoD and Home Office budgets
to invest in expensive technology led solutions to counter-terrorism;
potentially dragging funding away from traditional military lines
and the sorts of roles NATO expects Britain and its European partners
to play.
11. However, at the moment, the EDA's primary
desire is for technological parity with the US. This is partly
driven by economics, but also driven by the consideration of power
politics, both nationally and supranationally. The EDA's Programme
of Action for 2005-6 demonstrated this point neatly: the priorities
were stated as strategic lift, air-to-air refuelling and C4ISTAR.
These are all projects that the United States military has been
at the forefront of developing. For example, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs) are technologies that the American and Israeli military
forces have used in preparing reconnaissance for tactical bombing
or infantry movements—a recent example being the 2006 Israeli
action against the Lebanon. The EDA's stated desire is that European
built versions of this technology should remain `interoperable'
with American built technology, reinforcing the thesis that the
European Commission's vision of defence technology is one that
supports US-led military actions—a direct echo of the British
government's position. But if one accepts the premise from the
Saint Malo Accords in 1998 that the French Government seeks a
way of eventually decoupling the EU from NATO, then the move to
build up similar types of capabilities to the United States, but
on a smaller scale, begins to look rather different.
DEPOLITICISING CAPABILITIES
12. One often hears about "political
interference" in procurement. From the stories about Westland
Helicopters, through to how the Joint Strike Fighter came to have
VSTOL installed on it, onto the more recent episodes about the
Serious Fraud Office, BAE and Saudi Arabia, political involvement
in defence procurement and capabilities seems to carry a large
quantity of negative baggage. Whether one wants to explore the
old military industrial complex explanations or not, it seems
quite clear that the UK government has failed to procure the right
sorts of military equipment for its personnel on a notable number
of occasions. And the elision of government and industry interests
appears to be playing a part in this.
13. Where this sort of dynamic may begin
to affect European capabilities, rather than just our own, is
with the development of the EDA. The EDA's role of advancing collaboration
between companies and countries on the development of defence
equipment appears to have expanded into generating manufacturing
contracts. This is not necessarily surprising as defence companies
had a large role in the working groups that designed the EDA:
high ranking European Commission officials sat with representatives
of BAE systems and EADS as well as the President of the European
Defence Industries Group to advise on how the new institution
should operate, providing a key voice opportunity to manufacturers
and providing greater evidence of a fundamental elision of public
and private interests.
14. The attempt to balance a quasi think-tank
role of identifying and plugging gaps in European military capabilities,
whilst also acting as an institutional guarantor of EU defence
manufacturing interests, has pushed the EU into a potentially
contradictory position. Evidence of this tension was seen within
days of the agency being established with the largest European
defence equipment manufacturers taking out a full page advert
in some British newspapers to emphasize their vision for the EDA.
The danger for the EDA is that it will lose its strategic overview
of how to plug the capabilities gaps that exist within the European
military portfolio—based on the sort of operations the EU
and its member governments' wish to conduct—as a result
of becoming a conduit for the lobbying attentions of the major
arms manufacturers. Moreover, its strong links with a European
Commission which is determined to promote a high-technology, research-led
industrial base, an enhanced internal market and an increasingly
neo-liberal industrial policy pushes the EDA down certain avenues
of activity, none of which look likely to suggest the sort of
defence equipment developments that are necessary for the British
military's primary spheres of activities.
SUMMARY
15. This memorandum has explored, briefly,
a capabilities led challenge to the concept of European defence.
It has argued that the equipment choices being made by the UK,
and now at a European level, are ill-suited to the sorts of conflict
the UK and European states are involved with. The reasons given
for this range from policy makers ignoring the experiences and
recommendations of those coming out of conflict theatres, a fixation
amongst the political classes for high-technology solutions, a
similar profit driven motivation amongst manufacturers and the
European Defence Agency trying to tie its activities to the Lisbon
Agenda. The memorandum also explored the possibility that the
British government is facing a strategic defeat that would severely
undermine the general concept of European defence and the NATO
alliance. Lastly, it plotted the development of the European Defence
Agency and the potential this institution has to destabilise the
trans-Atlantic alliance. The core argument of this piece is, therefore,
that whilst procurement is seen as an esoteric part of European
defence analysis, it has the potential to fundamentally challenge
existing security structures, both through the failure to deal
with equipment that is becoming obsolescent and the reduction
in equipment stores and the development of expensive and ill-suited
bespoke technology.
Lecturer in Defence Studies,
King's College London
11 May 2007
39 Philip Pugh, The Cost of Seapower, Conway
Maritime Press, 1986, p 274-280; Norman R Augustine, Augustine's
Laws, Sixth Edition, Viking Edition, 1986. Back
40
David Gallula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,
1964; DJ Kilcullen, Countering global insurgency, Journal
of Strategic Studies, 28(4) 2005, 597-617. Back
41
Mark Laffey and Tarak Barkawi, The Postcolonial Moment in
Security Studies, Review of International Studies, 2006, 32,
329-352. Back
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