Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-51)
PETER HENNESSY,
JULIAN LINDLEY-FRENCH
AND HEW
STRACHAN
9 SEPTEMBER 2010
Q1 Chair: Thank you very much to our
witnesses for joining us this morning. I understand that Julian
you've flown in from Rotterdam this morning for this session?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Yes.
Chair: I'm extremely grateful for that.
For the record, could each of you just say briefly who you are?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I'm Julian Lindley-French, Professor of Defence Strategy at the
Netherlands Defence Academy and head of the Commanders Initiative
Group of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Peter
Hennessey, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History, Queen
Mary, University of London.
Professor Hew Strachan: Hew Strachan.
I'm Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University
of Oxford. I run a programme there on the changing character of
war and a propos our earlier conversation I'm on the Chief
of the Defence Staff's strategic advisory panel.
Q2 Chair: Thank you very much indeed
for joining us. We had an exceptionally informative seminar on
Tuesday. This is our first public evidence session of this inquiry
and I wondered if I could kick off. Professor Strachan, in your
paper "The Lost Meaning of Strategy", you describe what
seems to be an existential crisis around the term "strategy"
and say that it's become too loosely defined to mean anything.
Could you explain what you mean by that?
Professor Hew Strachan: Yes, I
could. I think there is a tendencyI'm in danger of being
otiose and repetitious on this pointto confuse strategy
and policy. There is clearly a relationship and the boundaries
between the two are fuzzy. We need to understand that policy may
provide direction, but strategy is more concerned with the means
by which policy is effected. There is also an implication in strategy
that you are dealing with somebody who is trying to do something
opposite to what you wish to do.. Therefore it is a more reactive
business and an inherently more complex business. The remit of
this Committee is to look at Grand Strategy. I think that part
of the confusion arises from that, because the implications of
Grand Strategy embrace both strategy and policy Particularly when
it was coinedthat is in the context of World War IIit
was about how Allies co-ordinated their efforts. It was about
how they brought together not just military capability but also
economic and social capability. It involved the co-ordination
of different theatres of war, so it had an application that was
much broader than a traditional definition of strategy would have
had. The latter was more clearly focused on the conduct of war
and more clearly a matter for soldiers, and arguably sailors.
Part of our confusion is that we've been dealing with wars that
haven't quite hadto use the word you used in a different
context just nowthose existential dimensions. So we've
got ourselves in the situation where strategy itself has become
confused, because we've thought of it in terms of Grand Strategy.
We're not terribly sure whether Grand Strategy is something that
is appropriate, especially when we are, these days, involved not
only in wars, which I think somewhat mistakenly and unfortunately
have been described as discretionary, but also in wars where we
have been the junior partner. So, if there is Grand Strategy to
be made, it's not been our responsibility and I think that raises
a fundamental question for the United Kingdom.
Q3 Chair: Can we just stick to terms
at the moment?
Professor Hew Strachan: Yes.
Chair: Language seems to be part of the
barrier to understanding. What comes first, policy or strategy?
Is it policy to have a strategy or does policy flow from strategy?
Professor Hew Strachan: Well,
I think the relationship is an interactive one. In theoretical
terms, in the much over-quoted, and selectively quoted, phrase
from Clausewitz, the implication is that strategy flows from policy
and in an ideal world that would be the case. But, in reality,
there's not much chance of implementing your policy if it's strategically
unsound and impossible to fulfil, so there is likely to be a much
more dynamic relationship between the two. That actually goes
to the heart of the problem, which is that much strategy is written
as theory but then there is the issue of strategy in practice,
which is a different undertaking. So, theory may inform your judgments
in practice, but when you have to deal with the messy business
of doing it, then, clearly, you have to be much more pragmatic.
That relationship between policy and strategy is likely to be
an iterative and a dynamic one.
Q4 Chair: Professor Hennessy and
Professor Lindley-French.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I think
policy without strategy is, to a high degree, flying blind, actually.
I'm very grateful to this committee because I've never had to
write down before and I thought I better had, what I thought national
strategybecause I know you want to go much wider than the
SDSRmight be for a country like ours with our past and
the condition in which we find ourselves. So, I had a little stab,
Chairman, if I can inflict it upon the Committee. I think the
national strategy for us is about the reconciliation of intentions
with possibilities. It needs, if it's to have a chance of working,
to be realistic in every respect. For example, I think the word
"vision" is now such a piece of linguistic litter that
it should be abandoned. The contagion of the language of the management
consultant into the business of government, I'm sure, appals you
all as much as it appals me. I think if the word "vision"
comes up, we should have the equivalent of a red buzzer to squeeze
it out in our discussions today and with other witnesses. But
that is a prejudice, as you might have noticed. The ingredients
of a national strategy need to encompass a considerable range
of moving parts: economy, society, condition of political and
public life, systems of government, military kit, diplomacy, intelligence
capacity, and intellectual capital, by which I mean the mix of
universities and technological R&D. Only then can Britain's
international relationships and place in the world be assessed
properly, if you've done a very realistic assessment of all those
moving parts. And the trick, if there is one, is to create both
possibilities and achievements that are greater than the sum of
those parts; that is the bonus of strategy, if we can do it. It's
hugely difficult and stretching and it's not aided by the tendency
among political leaders to collapse into a combination of Blue
Peter-like wishful thinking. Your generation I hope is immune
from it, but New Labour always sounded like, to me, Blue Peter
on stilts, complete bollocks actually. "We do world poverty
this week and we solve AIDS the next". There is usually a
combination amongst politicians in government anyway of Blue Peter
and Tommy Cooper naivety, believing that "just like that"
these things can be done. It's kind of the Triumph of the Will:
British Version. Also, the great delusion of those in government,
particularly if they're new; they think because it's them, the
great intractables are going to become malleable because, at last,
we're here. So, I think it's terribly timely that you're doing
this for a lot of reasons, one of which is an antidote to the
bollocks and the fairy stories that, no doubt, new ministers still
flush with the joys of being there are telling each other in the
Cabinet committee rooms.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I would take a slightly different angle and say that in fact Grand
Strategy, as we are discussing it here today, is a new term; and
it's a mistakeno disrespect to Hewto put it in historical
terms. We are talking about the organisation of very large British
means to large British ends. This is probably the first time since
Suez, if not before, that we've had to do this. For the last 50
or 60 years, our penchant for balancing others has tended to lead
us to seek common ground between the American worldview and the
French-European view, to put it bluntly, but those pillars are
changing. Those assumptions that we've had for 50 or 60 years
about where our best national effort should be made to achieve
the most likely security for our citizens are themselves in question.
Right now, I would put the question as being, how does the United
Kingdom cope with the relative American decline? We handed over
from British power dominating the system to American power dominating
the system. Now, the Americans do not dominate the system as they
did. George Bush came to power thinking he was 1840s Britain;
America today is 1880s Britain. All of this means that we can't
simply assume that we can find a common ground. Therefore, where
strategy at that level comes in requires first and foremost political
leadership to establish national aims and objectives. Then strategy
operationalises at that level aims and objectives. Thereafter,
you make policy, which leads to change in government. But it's
about where Britain needs to be in terms of influence over change.
Now, if you had said to me 10 years ago, that we'd have the world
that Britain resides in today, then I would have said that's very
hard to judge and that's been part of the problem. We have many,
many risks, but no real existential threats. However, there is
enough friction in the system todayand very clear friction
with systemic, regional, weak states, technology proliferationthat
a country like Britain will need to be at the forefront of influencing
positive change. Now, how we do that will require all national
means to be organised effectively to a stabilising end. In the
absence of such a concept of government and governance, this would
be, I would argue, the first time that Britain has conceived of
a Grand Strategy that is truly British and not a reaction to somebody
else's.
Q5 Chair: The Cabinet Office says
of course that Grand Strategy is a term that is falling into disuse
and is no longer appropriate.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Well, I would argue that they would say that, wouldn't they? Because
they would argue that it's a way of ensuring bureaucratic control
over what is essentially a political process.
Q6 Chair: Professor Strachan?
Professor Hew Strachan: I was
just going to say that if you read British Defence Doctrine, Grand
Strategy was at one stage written out on the grounds that it sounded
too imperial; it's now been written back in essentially because
it was concluded that you did need the sort of intellectual framework
that that provides. So I think that there is a recognition that
there is a problem here and which is itself part of the challenge.
The Grand Strategy is a problem and represents a problem; part
of the difficulty, as I'm sure you're well aware, and I dare say
we'll come on to this discussion, is to find, not only an intellectual
focus, which is largely where we've been so far, but also an institutional
focus.
Q7 Chair: And would you agree that
what became known asit was driven by the militarythe
comprehensive approach, was actually a failed attempt to substitute
something for Grand Strategy?
Professor Hew Strachan: I absolutely
agree it has elements of that and the problem of course was that
it came with MoD stamped all over it; so it was very hard to use
that as a basis for a common set of assumptions across government
departments. In a way, the comprehensive approach was the military
also speaking to itself, the recognition of a need for a such
a thing and, at the same time, a somewhat unwilling recognition
that they would have to do 90% of the delivery because they were
going to have to do things they wouldn't otherwise define as military.
Q8 Chair: National Security Strategydoes
that say enough? Is that a broad enough term?
Professor Peter Hennessy: There
is also the new National Security Council (NSC) on which I'm very
keenProfessor Strachan is the expert on the Committee of
Imperial Defence, which is a 1902-1904 idea with better IT. That's
what the NSC is: it's the Committee of Imperial Defence under
another name. It would be tactless to call it that again, but
that's what it is. I do think its hour has come again, but it
won't work, however, it won't rise to the level of events, unless
it broadens this notion of strategy. Whether they call it "Grand"
or not doesn't matter. When you look at the ingredients that feed
into the NSC, as they were meant to into the National Security,
International Relations and Development Cabinet Committee (NSID)
that Gordon Brown set up, it's much, much wider than anything
we've ever had, ever probably, certainly since World War II, when
the whole war effort had toit's like MRD Foot used to say,
"total war is like the sea, it's one", you can't separate
home and overseas, you can't separate the theatres. The NSC, if
its remit is to be believed, and I do believe that that is what
it wants to do, has to rise to the level of the events, not just
in institutional terms, but in appreciating the widths of the
inputs and the blending of the inputs, and how it's handled, and
how it's integrated. It's going to be very hard work for both
the ministers and officials to make it work. But so far the signs
are quite promising in terms of the attention level: as you know,
it meets every Tuesday after Cabinet and the Prime Minister, if
he's here, chairs it, all of which is crucial. The papers are
good, I'm told, and all the rest of it. It's got to be a step
change if it's to fulfil its promise, which I really hope it will
do because the level of events does need rising to. Perhaps we
will come on to this, but we really do need for them to think
in strategic terms, but if the Cabinet Office has said "Grand
Strategy, we don't conceive of it in those terms anymore",
well, it should.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I would question whether the NSC is sufficiently powerful in relation
to the four power ministries: Foreign, Defence, Department for
International Development (DFID), and the Home Office. That is
critical because ultimately, it is a national effort across government
and that will require fundamental changes. I really wonder, looking
at the National Security Strategy, whether it actually leads to
any planning traction across government and that will be the true
test.
Q9 Chair: But doesn't that depend
upon this problem of definition that the language that people
use in various different departments, has got to be homogenised
and created as a single idiom of thought? Otherwise people keep
talking at cross purposes.
Professor Hew Strachan: One of
the key difficulties, I think, here, just signalling the point
of language, is that even within the Ministry of Defencethis
is not an attack on the main building specifically but applies;
let me reiterate, this across the pieceas far as the armed
services are concerned, strategy is too often seen simply as the
planning process. Planning is obviously what staff colleges train
you to do, quite rightly, but strategy itself is, not only wider
than the purely military, at least in the terms in which we're
talking about it, but also crucially as its first stage the identification
of questions and problems. The tendency in the planning process
is to think through to the solution, but there's an earlier stage.
That is why it is inherently difficult for government to do it.
It's not that it shouldn't do it, but it's why it's difficult
because the tendency and, I think probably Peter Hennessy will
be able to speak about this much more directly, the tendency is
to go to the solution as quickly as you possibly can, because,
of course, you want results and you want something that looks
immediately attractive and promises a quick outcome. There is
the other side. Mention has already been made of the Committee
of Imperial Defence. One of the problems about the Committee of
Imperial Defence was that, although it had many of the attributes
of the National Security Council, it was an advisory committee
only, an advisory committee to the Cabinet, and crucially its
agenda remained remarkably focused and narrow, compared with the
sort of security agenda we now have. It seems to me if the NSC
today is to have a role, then it needs to think, "What are
the bits that lock into it?". At the moment it exists in
isolation. Where is the thinking part of the NSC? Where is the
point where you actually think about strategy? You could identify
possible agencies. You could ask for example; what is the relationship
between the NSC and the Royal College of Defence Studies? Could
a relationship be forged between these two? Should the NSC have
its own staff of people who actually think more coherently and
more consistently about strategy. And without that thinking, what
do you actually do with the constituent ministries that might
also contribute to national security, it's very hard to see how
to proceed. And it's indicative in that context that we're here
in this committee when we could equally well be talking about
exactly the same issues to the Defence Committee or the Foreign
Affairs Committee.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I think there is a very important point here, mainly with respect
to my work with senior officers, but also the Civil Service; I'm
always surprised that at above two-star level, be it civilian
or military, it's assumed that strategy is understood; there is
no education for strategy. The Committee of Imperial Defence took
place at a time when Britain was an imperial power: strategy by
definition was on the table every day. Much of our effort for
the last 50 or 60 years has been European focused, very regional
and suddenly we're being asked to step up to a global role at
a time of great financial stress. I suspect that it is not a problem
of government that we can't think strategically; it's a problem
of education. I do strongly believe that one could use existing
institutions like RCDS, Defence Academy, National School of Government,
to start preparing people from politicians through to senior civil
servants, who are very management, rather than strategy focused,
on the essentials of strategy in a contemporary world. We cannot
assume that there is a grasp of this at the higher levels of government
or institutions in this country any more.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I can
help here. I thought for a long time since the NSID cabinet committee
was created by Gordon Brown when he became Prime Minister in June
2007 that we needed one of those capability reviews, as they're
now called, to look at the relationship between NSID's width,
and now the NSC's width, and the providing departments and agencies
right across the piece, from the first line of defence, which
is "C"'s agents in the field to the last line of defence
which is HMS Victorious on patrol this morning somewhere in the
North Atlantic, with politico-military, trade and aid, diplomacy,
soft power, BBC Overseas Service, British Council, and the money,
BIS and Treasury, the whole lot in between. You need a review
of the relationship of all these providers to the proper flow
of material to the NSC, but also with the strategic question being
asked at the time. There is only one bit that's had a capability
review, since NSID was formed, and that was Ciaran Martin's review
of the relationship between the Cabinet Office and the intelligence
agencies. But the rest of it is unexamined. It's as if, by re-badging
at the top, they would somehow adapt themselves, and I don't think
that's enough. If we're going to have a chance at this strategic
mentalite, it's not just language, it's a state of mind,
really, that we're talking about. If we're going to nurture that
state of mind, you need everything that Julian has said, and Hew
has said, about the staff colleges and all the rest of it, but
also you need a review of the special linkages, otherwise it won't
fly. The great virtue of NSC so far compared to NSID is that at
least it meets; the full NSID very, very rarely met. It went down
into its sub-groups, which is just the same as the old model,
but NSC actually does meet, so the prospects for what you're doing
are increased by the fact that at least it is at work. So a reason
to be cheerful.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Critical in this whole process of course
Chair: We must move on as there are a
lot more questions. Charlie Elphicke.
Q10 Charlie Elphicke: I also saw
the military owned security side of the Government machine as,
if you like, a tool of the implementation of wider national policy,
wider national purpose, which goes far behind the whole issue
of security and military mattersthe implementation tools.
I read with interest the article recently of General Newton in
the RUSI journal. He starts this article, he and others, saying
"We don't have a national strategy", which I take again
as slightly wider to mean, that we don't have a general national
purpose, national aim and national direction. Would you agree
with that and what would you say that sense of purpose or wider
strategy should be?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
First of all, I would agree with that. Second, the consequences
of agreeing with that are what you see in the British armed forces
today: basically a country that has tried to follow American Grand
Strategy, an activist one, and rightly so, but on British resources;
a government that is by and large on a peace time footing while
the armed forces are at war; and a classic attempt to muddle through
without properly considering the generation and organisation of
the means required to be successful in any given venture. That
will have to change. That in a sense is what we mean by Grand
Strategy, which is the organisation of far greater national means
across government. The sadness of all this for me is that right
now this country looks far weaker in the wider world. I live on
the continent. I had one very senior Dutch politician tell me
that the British have gone soft. If the Dutch are saying that,
then there must be a problem. The tragedy for all of us is that
Britain looks far weaker than it is, as does the West, and that
encourages our adversariestake Iran, I'm not going to mention
China, but these kinds of countriesto miscalculate. Grand
Strategy at this point isn't just about organisation; it's about
sending out a narrative, an intent, to allies, partners, and adversaries
as well as publicsto say "because of difficulties
we are engaging, not disengaging". My great fear for the
whole SDSR debate, which is military-focused, is that it gives
the impression of a cliff edge. It gives the impression that there
is this age of austerity and there is nothing beyond that. In
fact, looking at the figures of debt, Britain's national debt
at the moment is relatively small compared with the national debt
between 1920 and 1955, 30% to 40% of GDP compared with 130%. The
narrative that we've created by not having a stated Grand Strategy
is one of weakness, exaggerating our weaknesses and communicating
that weakness to others. If for no other reason, such a statement
would put that right.
Professor Hew Strachan: Just to
go back to the issue of the National Security Strategy and the
National Security Council, which is where I thought your question
was leading, there is a mismatch between rhetoric and means here.
The language of globalisation used in the National Security Strategy
of 2008 essentially confronts us with a range of problems, such
as climate change, migration, the ills of the world in general
and the threats that might face the world in future, as though
those are specifically the national interests of the United Kingdom.
What strategy should be doing is to identify more closely what
are genuinely national interests, and to express themin
national terms. They could relate to many of those wider phenomena.
At the same time strategy has to match that bigger picture with
where we put our resources. At the moment, we're in a situation
where we talk in global termsand we have not properly debated
whether that's appropriate or not. On the other hand, we're really
only willing to put in the resources of a medium rank European
power and this is the nub of the debate in terms of where Grand
Strategy should be going and the nub of the debate for the NSC.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I think
Julian's reply to Mr Elphicke's question has really put his finger
on it. The way possibly to audit this from the outside is to ask
yourself where all the nervous energy is going at the moment?
The nervous energy is going into getting by, not even muddling
through. One of the reasons for attempting to go to a Grand Strategy
is that it can be a bit of an antidote to excessive mood swings.
I'm not Pollyanna about anything reallyI'm too old for
that; once you get beyond 60, just getting by is the normbut
it really can help in this area.
Chairman, there is one question that
is lurking that nobody has asked yet, though maybe one of you
is going to, so forgive me if I'm being presumptuous. It's that
we're all assuming that Britain cannot contemplate just being
a mediocre, second-rate, former great power tucked up inside a
huge regional organisation.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
A super-Belgium.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Yes,
Belgium with a nuke. We're not considering that any of us perhaps,
but maybe it will come up in a minute. The assumption is that
it's no longer wider still and wider for our beloved county, but
we we ain't out of the business yet; and if we have cunning plans
of Baldrickian proportions, even though we have no money and bugger
all kit, we can somehow still move Johnny Foreigner in ways that
Johnny Foreigner doesn't entirely want to be moved. Now, that's
the assumption of everything that we've talked about so far; I
don't know if that's your assumption. Actually, I don't mind it.
I'm not a wider still and wider chap, although Cambridge historical
tripos, when I took it, trained you to be a District Commissioner
or a spy and nothing else. I'm not a wider still and wider person,
but I am very keen that we should maintain as much influence as
we can in the world, because, by and large, I think with some
terrible aberrations, which we all know about in 2003, we do bring
decency and, above all, a sense of due process, to international
affairs. On the rare occasions where we do the reverse of bringing
due process to international affairs, the world is the poorer
for it. So I'm very keen on this assumption, but it is an assumption
that has suffused everything we've said so farincluding
your questions.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
It's a very strange debate for me, if I may just have a quick
word on this, because, living abroad, I'm always surprised how
the British seem to think they're far weaker than they are these
days. We're the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, the
second biggest cash spender on defence stillobviously that
will probably change fairly shortly. We're simply too big to hide
from friction in the world. What I see from much of Europefrom
my talk to the French and the Germans last week, for exampleis
that there is really an opportunity through a grand strategic
statement for Britain to lead, and yet we seem to have lost the
plot there. We seem to have said that we're broke and that's it,
we now give up. For me that is why, as Peter rightly says, a Grand
Strategy is an antidote to self-defeatism which I find all over
the place in this town every time I visit. So, it's not just a
structural issue.
Q11 Charlie Elphicke: I absolutely
agree that underpinning my thinking is a sense that I get from
my constituents that, frankly, they're sick and tired of the mediocrity,
and there is too much mediocrity in this nation, not enough sense
of purpose, not enough sense of direction, not enough sense of
national heave and where we should go. I guess the question is,
in terms ofand it's not military, it's trade: who are our
trading partners; we've got trading with Europe going on, and
a lot of us want to trade with China and India, then we have a
military strategy that is tied up with America, and then we have
this whole global thing like climate change issues going, so there
is a sort of dissipation of purpose and clarity about where we
should go. Should we capture that clarity as a country and how
should we conduct that kind of process?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Well, like it or not, Britain has global trading interests. That
is what ultimately drives the shape of your security policy, military
and civil. We will have to be clever in how we secure those. At
the centre of that will be influence through institutions and
through reinvestment in a diplomatic service that is currently
depressed into the tool it should be to shape events and structures
though institutions. By the way, Britain has a particular genius
for leveraging the interests of others in pursuit of our own objectives.
Above all, that takes political leadership. You can organise government
all you like, but strategy is an essentially political process
that comes from the top and unless that injection of ambition
is there, rather than the current narrative of doom and gloom,
then I fear that Britain will lose that influence critical to
its interests.
Q12 Chair: We're going to have to
get through our questions much faster and the answers are going
to have to be shorter. Professor Strachan.
Professor Hew Strachan: This is
a short answer. I think we're confusing policy and strategy; I
think we're in danger of going down exactly the same rabbit hole
that we've just been criticising. We need to be clear conceptually
of the distinction between the two.
Q13 Chair: Well, if you can make
sure that we get a paragraph in our report which distinguishes
between the two I will be eternally grateful to you. Charlie,
are you finished?
Charlie Elphicke: Yes, thank you.
Chair: Paul Flynn.
Paul Flynn: Professor Hennessy, I am
eternally grateful to you for giving a possible title to our report;
it would be an arresting one if we call it, "An Antidote
to the Bollocks" and I will press for that.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I look
forward to it.
Paul Flynn: You quote the definition
by Sir Michael Quinlan about this subject: "A theorem in
matters of military contingency: The expected, precisely because
it is expected is not to be expected. Rationale: What we expect
we plan and provide for. What we plan and provide for, we therefore
deter. What we deter doesn't happen. What does happen is what
we did not deter because we did not plan and provide for it because
we did not expect it." Now, I think that could be summed
up as saying running around in ever decreasing circles and finally
disappearing into a dark orifice and it does strike one with the
futility of a Grand Strategy. Is a practical, useful Grand Strategy
as elusive and unattainable as discovering the meaning of life?
Professor Peter Hennessy: That
was, I think, pretty well the last thing the great Sir Michael
Quinlan wrote and I call it Quinlan's Law. There is a lot in it
but it's not a reason for just saying, "To hell with it!
The world is impossible to predict. Even the best intelligence
analysis produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment
staff can't get it" and so on and just reacting. If you do
want the UK, in the overused phrase of Douglas Hurd, to punch
heavier than its weight in the world, there are certain preconditions
for that. One is us being greater than the sum of our parts in
the ministerial and the departmental input and all the rest of
it, as well as the wider political nation that are interested
in these things. But if you do assume you want to cut a dash in
the world, that is, to some degree, out of proportion to your
wealth, kit, size of population and all the rest of it, then you
have to be guileful. You have to have as a good a system for horizon
scanning as you possibly can, with all the necessary caveats.
For example, we haven't talked about it yet, but the one that
I find the most helpful was an institutionalisation of something
that was done in the last defence review, the DCDC people at Shrivenham,
the "Shrivenham Scans" as I call them, I find them absolutely
fascinating. As far as I can see, they produce
Q14 Chair: DCDC?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre.
Professor Peter Hennessy: That's
right, exactly. And they produced a very good one, the bulk of
which was made public in time for this review and, as far as I
can see, it's having no salience at all in the way the SDSR is
being cutyet another example of an own goal and being less
than the sum of our parts. But I'm not defeatist in the way that
you mightI suspect you're teasing me on this because you're
not an opt out of the world man either, are you? It's not for
me to ask you questions.
Q15 Paul Flynn: I don't share the
view that you expressed about Britain. Like almost any nation
on earth, Britain believes it has some virtues that it has to
spread wider and wider when instead it would probably be more
rational to accept our position in the world and become narrower
and narrower. Every nation from North Korea to North America would
say that they had unique virtues that they had to spread worldwide.
If you take the practicality of having a Grand Strategy, then
the one we were linked up to in recent years was the project for
the new American century, which had this visionwe shouldn't
use that wordthe view of a whole century that was going
to be blessed by the benign influence of one superpower that would
be led by the wisdom of Bush, Cheney and Halliburton. We signed
up to that and got ourselves involved with two wars.
Professor Peter Hennessy: A Prime
Minster did, and a few members of his immensely supine Cabinet,
but you didn't sign up for it for one minute.
Q16 Paul Flynn: I know I didn't.
The country, the Prime Minister, went into two wars because we
were following America blind. We didn't have an independent foreign
policy. I mean we have an independent nuclear deterrent, but we
don't have an independent foreign policy in that way. That's the
story of the last decade. If we had a Grand Strategy written down
somewhere, the decisions would be takennot on a rational
basis, not on a basis of evidenceit would be based on the
need of the Prime Minster to get a drip feed of adulation every
day from the tabloid press. Thatcher wouldn't be bound by a Grand
Strategy. Is this really seeking for a Holy Grail that we'll never
find? If we do find it, it will turn to ashes.
Professor Peter Hennessy: The
Holy Grail is a very useful concept for your entire inquiry because
we've been looking for something like this since the Committee
of Imperial Defence first met, before it was made permanent, in
1902, so we've got 108 years of looking for this Holy Grail in
institutional terms, but always, throughout my lifetime, we've
been making the best of an increasingly difficult fist. This is
the eighth defence review, if not the ninth in my own lifetime.
The first one didn't leak: we realised it had taken place after
31 years when the papers were declassified, but this is the ninth
defence review. They're all in tough circumstances. They all pretend
to be taking a strategic look and very few of them do, so there
are a lot of Holy Grails here. But I think it is slightly unfairI
can't believe I'm saying thisto say that the Blair Cabinet
signed up to the project for an American century. You're using
the kind of languageI hope I don't sound disrespectfulthat
Mr Blair was rather prone to use.
Paul Flynn: Oh dear Lord.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Millenarian,
you know.
Q17 Chair: Professor Hennessy, I
don't want to get diverted too much on to personalities, but I
think there are two very important questions in what Mr Flynn
raises.
Paul Flynn: I'm quaking with indignation
at being compared to that contemptible charlatan that you mentioned,
which is now more apparent from his confessions in his book. Embarking
on the Iraq war was influenced by the belief that the world was
in a fine place when America and Britain were working together.
If we look at the way that policy is made in this country, and
I think I take a more cynical view than you do on this, you see
that most policies, like policy on drugs, for instance, is completely
evidence-free. It is rich in prejudice but there is no question
of ever looking into results and we have had some 40 years of
error, disaster, tragedies, deaths as a result of such policies
by all countries. We don't compare it with what's happening in
other countries like Portugal or Holland, but we carry on with
that. What is going to change it? What is going to persuade any
government to escape from their addiction to daily adulation in
order to keep their popularity up?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I think it is going to be forced upon you and I think it is going
to be forced upon the UK by the Americans. Harold Wilson in 1968
said no to Vietnam and he was prepared to pay a political price
for that. The Americans feelI'm off to Washington again
shortlythat we're no longer the ally of first resort that
we once were because of performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
that because of our position financially, we may have to say no
for other reasons. Now, saying no to the Americans will have consequences.
But I go back to the point I made earlier which was, looking from
abroad, I do think that the British mustn't undersell themselves
because we are seen by many as being a particular nation in the
stable future of the international system. We have no evangelical
role, as such, but we do have a particular reputation that is
worth preserving and ultimately this comes down, not to trying
to exaggerate British power, but to getting the balance between
effectiveness and efficiency right. I would argue that the way
that British Government is structured makes Grand Strategy virtually
impossible and therefore makes effectiveness virtually impossible
because it's a series of fiefdoms that are not particularly focused
on any set of national aims and objectives.
Q18 Chair: In what Mr Flynn is asking
you there are two nubs, one is Grand Strategy: is it hubris to
pretend that we can control things we can't control? Secondly,
are we too small a country now to have a Grand Strategy?
Paul Flynn: The hubris has led to more
than 500 deaths, 1,500 serious injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan
because Tony Blair wanted to see us walk tall in the world. And
it is ostensibly
Chair: Professor Strachan, Grand Strategy.
Professor Hew Strachan: Can I just come in
on this very point? The debate about 2003 highlights what I think
we're trying to get at, which is that because we didn't have a
coherent idea of our own strategy, we were unable to engage sensibly
with the United States in terms of what our priorities were, as
opposed to what the United States' priorities were. It may be
that our priorities were and are identical with the United States';
that's fine, but we didn't actually seem to think that process
through. So the first point I would make is that. The second point
I would make is that the purpose of strategy is, in some sense,
to be prudential, to try and be long term in its focus, to try
to think through how the future might look. The reality is, as
2003 suggested, or, going back, as 9/11 suggested, that contingency
tends to get in the way and therefore political pressures quite
naturally put pressure on strategy to change and go in different
directions. That leads us on to the Quinlan problem and the point
about what Michael Quinlan was saying is that you hope that strategy,
and deterrence as an offshoot of strategy, will have some effect
in shaping and minimising the role the unexpected can play, and
therefore the opportunity for short-term contingency to put you
totally off course. But don't imagine that contingency isn't going
to be a vital part of strategy-making because the political will
always present strategy with the unexpected. That is the nub of
the relationship and why we need to distinguish between policy
and strategy.
Q19 Paul Flynn: What he's saying
is we can deter what we expect, but we cannot deter the unexpected.
So, what we're looking for in a Grand Strategy is utopian compared
to the experience of the last
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
It's simply the ability to adjust, adapt and augment. It's really
about the centre of gravity of your effort. If you don't understand
Q20 Paul Flynn: And how do you get
the unexpected into the Grand Strategy?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Because history would establish basically four sets of different
scenarios that are likely to happen at any one time given circumstances.
Now you make a judgment over your main effort, about where it
should beat the moment it is counterterrorismbased
on your strategic judgment at that time. What you must not to
do is sacrifice the ability to change and adapt in light of change.
My concern about the way the Government is currently structured
is that loss of flexibility; that is perhaps most damning.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Can
I just say one thing in support of Mr Flynn, actually because
I do respect what he says and get us away from 2003. The difficulty
of the unexpected is illustratedMichael Quinlan was involved
in thisby 1966, when the big carrier to replace the existing
ones was cancelled, scrapped. It's the sort of debate we're having
now. If somebody had said in those discussions in 1966, which
led to two resignationsthe First Sea Lord and the Minister
for the Navy"Come forward to 1982. We're going to
need a carrier-based task force to go 8,000 miles into the south
Atlantic to reclaim the Falklands", the person who said that,
at the very least, would have been offered counselling. It's part
of the problem of the life, but I do respect what you say and
I know what's motivating you in saying it, but we must be careful
of letting 2003, for all the lividness of that scar, overshadow
us too much. In some ways it can't overshadow us too much, but
for the purposes of this debate, if we're too 2003-centred, we
could be in a bit of trouble .
Q21 Chair: Nick de Bois.
Nick de Bois: Thank you, I'm going to
move it on a little bit and talk about the skills and capacity
for making strategy. Given that there seems to be a view that
we haven't had Grand Strategy for a while, the Cabinet Office,
in its submission to us, said that one of the key requirements
in the Civil Service is the ability for strategic thinking. Would
you agree with the Cabinet Office in that statement that it is
actually a valued skill? If it is a valued skill, I suspect that
you might say that that doesn't sit comfortably with the fact
that we've lacked a Grand Strategy.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I suspect
that their use of "strategic thinking" is not the kind
of notions that you're working on. Again, it's the management
consultant nonsense: everybody has vision, everybody has a strategy.
Both words have been almost entirely debauched and because of
the overflow of managerialism, over a very long time now in Whitehall,
the way they use the word strategy is not as in the Michael Howard
study of World War II Grand Strategy, that Hew has written wonderfully
about, for a large part of the last century. It's something much
more narrow and meagre and management consultant contaminated.
So when they come and give you evidence, I think you should probe
them, with your customary courtesy, on that because I have a feeling
that that is nonsense on stilts too.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I would like to reinforce that; I think they probably mean "management",
when they talk "strategy". There are very good reasons
for that. The British Civil Service traditionally dislikes French
Enarque grand dessein, which is implied in Grand Strategy,
but to have Grand Strategy, a bureaucratic elite needs to be challenged
in its thinking internally and externally. Strategic management
from the Civil Service point of view has been really about the
control of information. I would argue that in fact we are now
involved in a knowledge war, where intelligence and government
information are all very well, but without understanding the context
of that knowledge it's very hard to make informed strategic decisions.
So broadening out their community, if you like, to inform their
leadership is a critical aspect of Grand Strategy.
Q22 Nick de Bois: In many ways, if
we accept your suggestion that strategy in the Civil Service is
really talking about management and that is inherent throughout
every department, are we effectively in a position where any drive
for strategy and ultimately a Grand Strategy within the Civil
Service is going to be totally bottom-led as opposed to top-down?
The preference is that it should come more from government ministers
and leadership to set the strategy. Are we are effectively seeing
bottom-led strategy within the departments?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I think in the absence of an American style think-tank culture
inside the Beltwaywhat you see in Washington is this constant
interaction between political leadership, think-tanks and bureaucracy
to constantly test ideas and to establish frameworks for policy
and management; we don't have that herethe tendency is
to always control information and pull it towards the bureaucracy
which prevents that, if you like, market-led reality test. That's
a fundamental if we are to move it above management to the genuine
consideration of strategy.
Professor Peter Hennessy: You
tend only to get what you are seeking and what we're seeking,
I think, if there's a real constraint that is self-evident, like
the need to prevail in a total war or when Ernest Bevin, Mr Attlee
and A V Alexander and others, and Whitehall generally between
1945 and 1948-49 when NATO was created, had to react to events
in Eastern Europe and some really menacing, although not entirely
readable, intentions on the part of Stalin in the Kremlin. That
produced a reaction which became a Cold War secret state and a
certain set of strategic assumptions and prisms through which
a great many questions were addressed. In the absence of that,
it needs a Prime Minster to do it, particularly if it's a multiplicity
of anxieties. The last time I think it was done, in terms of the
archive I've worked in, was when Harold Macmillan in June 1959,
in immense secrecy, called Sir Patrick Dean, Chairman of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, to Chequers and said we need a study,
no holds barred, of where Britain will be by 1970 on current policies.
It's the whole lot: society, economy, place in the world, future
of the remaining empire, Britain and Europe, the relationship
with the United States, can we afford nuclear weapons, all of
it. They did a remarkable piece of work and it was so realistic
and so therefore pessimistic in those circumstances, because of
our over-extension, that the Cabinet paper was pulled from full
Cabinet discussion at the last minute in February 1960. It's declassified
now. The "Future Policy Study", you might want to send
for it to the National Archives because it's an extraordinarily
good piece of work and it went into a little Cabinet committee.
Mr Macmillan consoled himself because it was all so difficult
by saying, "Very often, the best periods in our history have
been not when we've been in charge of the world. It's our language,
our culture, our literature." You always collapse into the
sleeping bag of soft power when you haven't got the faintest idea
of what to do. But it was the last serious attempt to do it on
the scale that I think is required and it took a Prime Minster
who had that state of mind. Macmillan had that state of mind and
it's pure chance if you get one. And you know the Prime Minister
far better than I do, Chairman, and you will know whether he is
that sort of a chap or not, but if he isn't, it is going to remain
extremely difficult for this to happen to any degree. Professor
Julian Lindley-French: Just a quick point on that Chairman.
Every single instrument of this country's influence is in crisis:
the EU, NATO, the United States. The bureaucracy is primarily
focused on the Comprehensive Spending Review, for understandable
reasons, but the mismatch between the change out there, the decline
in our influence tools; and our own internal focus on cuts at
a critical moment makes it incumbent that we move beyond a management
culture.
Q23 Nick de Bois: Is that a lack
of confidence in ourselves now, particularly since some argue,
as I think all three of you were arguing earlier, that because
we've tied ourselves so closely to the US in the military and
to the EU economically, we've effectively lost the confidence,
if you like, to add up all the individual strengths we've got
and to pack a punch above our weight? Is there a lack of confidence
and is it that we may have tied ourselves too closely to the others
that may have led to that?
Professor Hew Strachan: Putting
the historian's hat on, as Peter and I might most naturally do,
I think part of the issue is: what is it that actually generates
the capacity and appetite to think strategically. In Britain's
case, the empire certainly did, which was why the Committee for
Imperial Defence existed: there was a real problem of imperial
defence, so there was a real issue to tackle. The appetite for
strategic thought is often associated with national crisis. I
have to say that last year I was quite optimistic that Britain
had reached such a point. Perhaps that optimism is reflected in
the fact that this committee is addressing this issue. The combination
of financial crisis and the recognition of the points you have
just made, prompt the moment when you sit down and try to think
through what strategy is and what you should be trying to do with
it. That thinking tends not to happen in times of relative stability,
relative peace and relative superiority. The United States is
also having similar sorts of debates because however much you
may think it is better on the other side of the Atlantic, they're
less convinced than we are that it is. I think there are opportunities;
the issue is whether, when those opportunities arise, the institutions
to give effect to the thinking can come in to being. Our difficulty
is that at the moment, institutionally, we've disaggregated the
capacity to do this. We mentioned the DCDC. What happened there
was that the function of strategy within the Ministry of Defence,
which is one of the core ownersnot the only owner of the
process, but the core ownerwas put out of the main building
to Shrivenham, and physically divorced from the centre. That institution
now finds itself doing at least two or three competing tasks.
One is writing doctrine, which is entirely different from what
we're talking about, but which has become conflated with it. The
second issue was whether it is dealing with immediate and short
term issueshow the armed forces are employed today, and
what they're doingor long-term strategic trends, some of
which are extremely important for the security of the United Kingdom.
Some of them fall into what I think Professor Hennessy would call
a Pollyannaish momentonly in this case probably in reverse,
because strategic trends tend to emphasise the bad news rather
than the good news. Strategic trends stress those things that
are likely to happen to the world, but not much of what they do
really focuses on what the United Kingdom is trying to do. It's
extraordinary that DCDC is at Shrivenham, at that distance, (quite
apart from the other things that have happened to it), rather
than in London and central to the processes that we're talking
about. Professor Hennessy mentioned just now the publication last
year of a document called "The Future Character of Conflict",
which was designed to address precisely what its title says, but
its arguments are nowhere evident in current thinking in relation
to strategy, let alone in relation to the Strategic Defence and
Security Review.
Q24 Chair: We will come back to capacity
later on. Are you finished Nick? Greg Mulholland.
Greg Mulholland: I want to turn the focus
specifically on the changes that the new coalition Government
has made that are clearly relevant here. I think we found it interesting
in the written evidence supplied by the Cabinet Office that Grand
Strategy was no longer a term in widespread usage. They then went
onto to say that the NSC is therefore developing a National Security
Strategy that starts with a definition of national interest based
on an analysis of the UK's place in the world and covering all
aspects of security and defence, a slightly narrower definition.
Do you think this actually presents an opportunity or a problem
for having a genuine Grand Strategy?
Professor Hew Strachan: It's an
opportunity.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Yes,
it is.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
But it depends: if it's another exercise in recognising only as
much threat as we think we can afford, which is always the danger
of these exercises, then it will fail. If it's really willing
to push the envelope with external advice across the range of
potential risks and threats, then it has a chance of establishing
policy within a correct framework, but it still seems a very narrow
intellectual exercise.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I don't
think it goes wide enough because it is driven byIt's a
good development, though I must admit I think it would be very
hard for any of us, even though we're very close to all this,
to quote a single paragraph from the two National Security Strategies
we've had already. Hardly any of it has stuck to the Velcro of
memory and we're meant to be animated by these things. It's hardly
been noticed in the press or anywhere else. It was necessary.
It is funny that I remember at the time thinking that we'd acquired
and disposed of an empire, fought in two total wars and were on
the winning side in the Cold War over 40 years but never felt
the need to write down anything on these lines. A lot of it suffered
from the linguistic contamination, a kind of Pollyannaism writ
large. Then it would stagger to hard pol-mil, real stuff and then
come back to wishful DFID thinking. David Miliband's foreign policy
refresh was very much along those same lines. That's not to say
that it wasn't a good initiative of Gordon Brown's, and we've
only had the two, but I hope this one goes wider. One of the things
we need to think about is that I think the intention of the coalition
is to have only two in the space of a Parliament, rather an annual
one. If it is only going to be two in the space of a Parliament,
then I think it needs to go much wider. It needs to have that
width that Macmillan's inquiry had in 1959-60, otherwise it excludes
a great many of the real weather makers about our country, its
place in the world, and its prospects.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
It still smacks at times of a desperate military trying to persuade
the rest of Whitehall to get its act together that somehow this
stuff really has not gained much traction in other ministries
who are more concerned about the funding allocations. It's almost
as if we've yet to cross the threshold where we've perceived sufficient
friction to warrant more cohesion and I wonder if this exercise
will do it. I would prefer, unlike the 1930s, or, indeed, the
first decade of the last century, there to be some element of
planning in our response to uncertainty, that is strategic judgment:
to have some sense of the parameters of our future effort. I fear
that once again there will be a strategic shock before we do make
that real effort to break down the bureaucratic boundaries between
ministries.
Q25 Greg Mulholland: Do you think
that the new framework that has been set up and trumpeted is broadly
the right one? I know, Professor Hennessy, you've raised concerns
about the regularity of meetings, for example, but is the new
National Security Secretariat the right framework for delivering
that, and, if not, what would be a better one?
Professor Peter Hennessy: That's
a very interesting question because the secretariats needed tidying
up. There was a whole load of overlapping ones, which as the diagram
that Oliver Letwin sent the Chairman shows, come together, which
was the first step. But in terms of this inquiry, where is the
thinking capacity? There are some very clever people in those
secretariats, the best and the brightest that Whitehall can provide
in this generation, across several generations, but are the best
and brightest of them doing more than fire-fighting in these circumstances,
particularly with the Comprehensive Spending Review? What proportion
of their working week, let alone their working day, can they put
into the intellectual R&D that is necessary to give us a chance
of getting to where I think this committee wants this country
to go? The best and the brightest in Whitehall are inevitably
in the fire-fighting positions because that is what happens. The
danger is if you put them into a bespoke kind of think-tank, they
don't feel that they're in the swim of things because they're
not part of the secretariat at the Cabinet committees, and all
the rest of it, not writing the brief for ministers for particular
casework of the NSC. But it would take a particularly self-confident
and determined Prime Minister to say, "Out of all this, I
want a core thinking capacity and a reasonably high proportion
of the best people in the generations now in Whitehall, and in
the military, and in the armed forces and in the intelligence
agencies, I want deployed on this fusion approach to knowledge
and possibility rather than the fission approach."
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I think part of the problem is that there is no equivalent of
the Senate Armed Forces Committee or Senate Foreign Relations
Committee driving the process forward from the purely parliamentary
level as it were. There needs to be much more direct parliamentary
involvement in ensuring that that momentum towards convergence
at the top of bureaucracies, prime ministerial leadership and
a genuine willingness to consider our basic assumptions for future
strategic planning with insiders and outsiders. That is exactly
what happens in Washington, that interaction between staffers,
the committees, the bureaucracy, and the political process, which
frankly this town lacks.
Professor Hew Strachan: That comes
back to the point I made earlier about institutions, that logically
we should be talking to a House of Commons National Security Committee
because that would then mirror the creation of the NSC and you
would be relating exactly to what the NSC would be doing. Logically,
we should also be thinking about how exactly you put the thinking
part into the NSC. The NSC secretariat is not that thinking part.
I think it's incredibly hard for anybody actively in the Cabinet
Office or indeed any other Department of State currently to approach
a topic in the terms in which we're imagining it would have to
be approached, because government departments have a different
mode of operating on a day-to-day basis. If you operate on the
basis of the e-mail in front of you, then your capacity to sit
back and reflect and get a sense of distance over time is affectedI
mean distance both in terms of a context as to where you have
come from and a sense of where you might be going toand
a sensitivity to what is really changing, as opposed to what seems
to be changing because of the hype in today's papers or the current
debate in Parliament. These are all the attributes that you need
to be able to put into this process for it to have any sense.
And to that extent it has to be both removed and also linked in.
I'm not just deliberately speaking in paradoxes, although paradoxes
capture the point. We're told that General Petraeus is particularly
good at putting thinking time into his day; he tells his staff
that he must actually clear time where he stops. I hope each of
us manages at some point in the day to do the metaphorical equivalent,
whether it's sitting on a train, walking the dog, or having a
bath. But there needs to be a moment when actually you get some
sense of perspective, rather than being driven by immediacy. The
problem within the Cabinet Office, and also I suspect within the
NSC secretariat, is that the immediate drives out the considered.
It is getting that consideration into the process, something which
is not just hampered by the current culture within government,
but also by its mechanisms of working. Professor Peter
Hennessy: There is one quote that might help your report
Chairman on this as a stimulus. With the money running out, you
might have thought that this would help create a climate for this.
I can never trace this quote, but if I remember this correctly
it's Sir Lawrence Bragg, director of the Cavendish Laboratory
in Cambridge. He called them all in, and they were nearly all
men in those days and he said, "Gentlemen, we've run out
money. Now is the time to think". That is a very useful maxim
for all this.
Q26 Chair: Before I come to Kevin
Brennan, may I concentrate on this question of capacity and oversight?
Are you saying that there is a lack of some central organisation
that has the capacity for strategic thinking, not just generating
a single document but sustaining and adapting that strategic thinking
in the light of the e-mails that are coming in? Is there a lack
of a central secretariat?
Professor Peter Hennessy: I can't
see where it is. I can't detect it.
Professor Hew Strachan: Absolutely.
The Cabinet Office is logically where it should be situated but
of course the Cabinet Office is relatively light and mean, compared
with other government departments. It doesn't necessarily see
itself in this role. Crucially, the consequence at the moment
of having the Cabinet Office do the job, is not necessarily to
create a central form of thinkingif it has that capacitybut
more often to create another government department to generate
increased friction with the remaining ministries.
Q27 Chair: So does what is in the
Cabinet Office therefore need to be an outpost of something more
independent, more collegiate, more intellectual?
Professor Hew Strachan: Well,
you're talking to academics, so of course we'll say yes to that.
Professor Peter Hennessy: You
need some rough trade in there as well, some very awkward people,
not just smoothies like us.
Q28 Chair: But if it was all located
at Whitehall, it would all be caught up in the day-to-day pressures.
Shouldn't we have the royal strategic establishment or something
like that?
Professor Hew Strachan: This is
where something I've already mentioned, the Royal College of Defence
Studies comes in. It doesn't have to be the RCDS.
Q29 Chair: But defence is too military
for what we're talking about.
Professor Hew Strachan: Absolutely
of course it is, but that is why the creation of the NSC is an
opportunity. Precisely because it's chaired by the Prime Minister,
it is absolutely the right forum, in terms of giving the message
of its national importance, its central significance. It should
then think about how it generates the thinking capacity. If the
NSC says, "We need a bit of work on this, or we need to understand
that", how is that now done?
Chair: It goes to the head of the department.
Professor Hew Strachan: Exactly, and it then
becomes balkanised.
Q30 Chair: Isn't there a danger that
government departments are going to resist this because they're
going to lose control over things they think they control at the
moment?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Again, I would go back to the Washington model. If you take the
think-tanks, CSIS and Brookings and these types of institutions.
They either have people in them who are temporarily out of government
or real experts. Why? Because in those forums you can take intellectual
risk to challenge policy. There is nothing like that in London
where you can really take intellectual risk and have sufficient
stature in taking it that it will influence policy; policy inside
the bureaucracy tends to be, by definition, risk-averse. We are
looking at a very, very complex environment, That kind of intellectual
and conceptual risk is essential before sound policy is established.
Q31 Chair: Didn't Whitehall used
to fund university chairs, university departments?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
A little bit, but not much.
Professor Peter Hennessy: A little
bit, but not much, never much.
Professor Hew Strachan: The big
initiative was Denis Healey's in the late 1960s, when he established
defence lectureships across the United Kingdom, funding them for
five to 10 years and then the universities took them on. Broadly
speaking, I think there are probably one or two still in post
in the United Kingdom as a result of those appointments, but they
are reaching the end of their careers. So Healey recognised that
that was an issue. Today, if I could just elaborate on that point,
there is a real pressure on strategic thinking outside Whitehall.
It is created by the current mechanisms both of university funding
and of research assessment, because, within a politics department,
engagement in public policy doesn't figure within the UK as something
that will get brownie points in the research assessment exercise
of the past and the REF exercise of the future. Very few academics
are therefore put in a position where it is seen to be productive
in terms of research assessment and research income to engage
with the Government. That is somewhat offset, by the latest proposals
in the REF for public impact to be part of the process.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Which
is immeasurable of course.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
We either have ivory towers or policy bunkers; we don't have much
in between.
Professor Hew Strachan: The consequence,
it seems to me, is that you will be struggling in 10 or 20 years
time to have some of these irritants outside the system, just
because at the moment the system isn't well-geared to producing
them.
Q32 Chair: And, in terms of oversight
of this process, it is proposed that it should be a joint committee
of both Houses on national security. Is that enough?
Professor Peter Hennessy: That
would help, and also if Parliament could find the money to create
its own thinking capacity; a very small one, but very high quality.
The National Audit Office is the closest thing you've got, but
you've got a wonderful library and very good support services
in many ways. If select committees of both houses could pool a
little bit of money and there was a joint committee on Grand Strategy
that wasn't just defence and foreign policy-focused with its own
small think-tank, it might help you have an influence out of all
proportion to your size, as it were, in terms of budget.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Look at the Library of Congress Research Service; that is exactly
what they do, very high quality indeed.
Q33 Kevin Brennan: Aren't you all
massively over-claiming what a Grand Strategy could achieve in
practice?
Professor Peter Hennessy: Probably.
We're trying to cheer you up. We're trying to give you a sense
of possibility. We're an antidote to the politics of pessimism.
We're Ian Dury, reasons to be cheerful, that's what we three are.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
What it achieves is by and large up to you gentlemen. You are
close to policy making, you are the political oversight. It ultimately
comes down to the quality, the level of ambition and the quality
of policy that comes out of the analysis.
Q34 Kevin Brennan: But at one point
you said that we shouldn't exaggerate our power in the world and
at another point you said we should punch above our weight.
Professor Peter Hennessy: They're
both compatible. If you have exaggerated notions of what you can
do in the world, it's hopeless really; it leads to delusion and
disappointment. But not if you have a realistic notion that if
you shove it a bit this way and if you try it that way. And if
you keep your investment in high-class diplomacyterribly,
terribly important. I never thought that in my life time I would
ever have to worry about the condition of the British Foreign
Office. It was like Canada, it was just there, it was all right,
but I really do worry about the condition of the Foreign Office;
it's been appallingly run down.
Q35 Kevin Brennan: Don't we have
to, in thinking about Grand Strategy, there is a strong sense
and a weak sense; it is not necessarily to do with optimism and
pessimism. There is the strong sense imperial view of a Grand
Strategy, which is utterly impractical in the current world and
in the current reality of politics, which hasn't been sufficiently
discussed or not just the current reality but the reality. Then
there is a weaker sense, which isn't necessarily a pessimistic
sense which is, if we could agree what is possible across political
divides about the things that Professor Hennessy set out at the
beginning about what a Grand Strategy ought to consist of and
then garner our institutions and resources around attempting to
meet those needs, then you could get the longer term impact of
Grand Strategy. However, if it isnot overly ambitious,
but overly grand, if you forgive the phraseisn't doomed
to fail?
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I think the dangerI feel very moved about thisis
that the title "Grand Strategy" is that it implies that
it's about power itself. No, it's not. I guess I'd rather change
it to "Big Question Strategy". It's a willingness of
government to address the very biggest questions that affect a
nation's security across the whole board in partnership with other
experts, other stakeholders, to use that over-worn phrase, that
ensures that there is balance in our response to the environment,
but also ambition in our ability to shape events. It isn't simply
about trying to punch above our weight. It is simply making sure
that we have sufficient imagination to deal with what's out there
and, frankly, I would say that right now we do not.
Professor Peter Hennessy: On one
timing level, isn't a good idea to maximise our influence in the
United Nations by being a permanent member of the Security Council;
not by being the awkward one or flaunting ourselves, but by being
the decent due process, thoughtful one? Sir Percy Cradock was
the former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. I did
a radio documentary in 1991, called "Out of the Midday Sun?"
about whether we should give up on all this. Percy, I think I'm
quoting him pretty accurately, said, "History has dealt us
a certain hand because of being an imperial power". There
was an assessment made by Harold Wilson when he became Prime Minister
in 1964, or for the Foreign Secretary, by the Foreign Office planning
staff. Because of our history we were, and we still are I think,
represented on more international organisations than any other
country in the world and I think that's a huge asset; plus the
cliched asset, and it doesn't mean to say that it's wrong, of
our language being the language of international diplomacy and
trade. So that is there even if you look at it in the terms of
the hand that history has dealt us. In the same programme, Sir
Anthony Parsons, who was our man in the UN at the time of the
Falklands saidactually this is Julian's point"The
rest of the world isn't ready for us to withdraw. They expect
us to be there". Partly because they think, a lot of them,
that we caused a great many of their problems; I think we could
make a lot of money by being the permanent scapegoat for every
failing nation because it's our fault, you see.
Q36 Kevin Brennan: They do think
that and they don't think the Chinese did and that's a problem
for us I think in Africa. Can I just ask this question, which
is a bit off-piste, but if you were contributing to a UK Grand
StrategyI'm just asking you to think off of the top of
your headwhere would Trident feature?
Professor Peter Hennessy: I have
to come clean. I think we should keep it. People say it's a political
instrument. The Indians always say that we have to have our bomb
because that's how you increase your chances of a UN Security
Council seat. It's very difficult for historians to be anything
other than humblethough that doesn't come naturally to
meabout what the world is going to be like in 50 years'
time and once you give up a capacity it's gone.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Britain should have a nuclear deterrent. Whether or not the technology
should be a Trident derivative, it seems to me that the question
is whether there is a cheaper alternative that does the same job.
It's a balance/investment question.
Professor Hew Strachan: It's the
cart before the horse.
Kevin Brennan: I thought you might say
that.
Professor Hew Strachan: You've
got to have strategy before you decide where Trident sits. One
of the difficulties at the moment is that we don't think coherently
about strategy and we therefore find it hard to think where Trident
sits.
Q37 Kevin Brennan: So, our witnesses
are putting policy before strategy yet again.
Professor Hew Strachan: Absolutely,
and what we should be thinking about is where does deterrence
fit in our thinking and therefore where does nuclear deterrence
fit within our thinking and then why we would need Trident. I
endorse the others in thinking we probably do need it. I would
also say that, going back to your earlier question, I am confused
here about whether we are talking about whether Grand Strategy
is something that is genuinely useful for us to be able to do,
or whether we're talking about British decline or British resurgence.
There are two totally different questions there that we're conflating.
It may be, and this was how I understood the burden of your question
when you first put it, that Grand Strategy is overwritten as a
concept; that actually a lot of it is a lot more pragmatic, sensible
and doesn't need a big title. All we need is somehow to be able
to draw it together. That I think is a perfectly defensible line
of argumentit's foreign policy, it's economic policy, it's
all these other constituent parts and we do it without thinking
about Grand Strategy. Many of the great grand strategists never
used the phrase when they did it; they just went ahead and did
it, like the wartime Prime Ministers. Churchill didn't need to
say, "I'm doing Grand Strategy"; he did it.
Q38 Kevin Brennan: So in other circumstances
a Grand Strategy would have meant resisting Indian independence
for example?
Professor Hew Strachan: Well,
it might have done, but that comes again to the fact that strategy
is essentially a pragmatic business and it needs to accommodate
contingency. If India is not to be held, if the realistic conclusion,
against Churchill's own instincts, is to say that India must be
given independence, that is exactly what we're talking about.
Q39 Chair: That was Attlee's Grand
Strategy, to relinquish India.
Professor Hew Strachan: That's
why debate is central to where strategy is.
Q40 Chair: But isn't the implication
of what Mr Brennan is asking, and your answer to him, is that
whether we like it or not we have a Grand Strategy, the problem
with it at the moment is that it's disparate and scattered around
Whitehall, not written down in one place, not supervised and not
held to account by politicians.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Ergo, it is not grand.
Q41 Chair: We live with the outcome
of this rather disparate arrangement.
Professor Peter Hennessy: So,
you're going to recommend muddling through, are you?
Chair: I'm not in charge of the conclusions
of this committee.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Harold
Macmillan only ever gave me one interview, long ago and far away
when I was a youth on The Times and when The Times
was a quality newspaper. He said to me, "You can't have a
foreign policy if you're in the debtors' court." That is
a very obvious thing to say but we do need to remember that in
the circumstances. It's the Paul Kennedy theory that great powers
are on the slide unless they really do attend to their economic
wherewithal and in the end the sinews of influence are economic
and industrial. I mean you can argue about thatthere are
all sorts of arguments about that in the scholarly worldbut
it's a first order question isn't it?.
Q42 Paul Flynn: You've taken a very
fiercely nationalistic view that we have to have a nuclear weapon
because we don't know what's going to happen in 50 years' time.
That's an invitation for every country in the world to have its
own nuclear weapon because they don't know what's going to happen
in 50 years' time.
Professor Peter Hennessy: I'm
not wildly keen on that. You can see that I'm not wildly keen
on encouraging anybody else.
Q43 Paul Flynn: Proliferation is
a far greater threat in the world, I would suggest to you. Can
you give me a practical example of any plausible situation when
Britain would use its nuclear weapon independently?
Chair: But this is a question of policy
rather than of strategy.
Paul Flynn: Yes, sure.
Professor Peter Hennessy: It was
always the most remote contingency that it would be used alone
and if you look at all these Cold War transition-to-war exercises
that I've been reading now that they've been declassified, it
was an integrated NATO plan with the Nassau "supreme national
interest" clause in case the United States was not prepared
to sacrifice Chicago if Manchester was threatened. It was a very,
very remote contingency. I remember Frank Cooper, a great figure
in defence affairs for many years, said to me that as long as
the memory of 1940 remains fresh in this country, when a small
amount of very highly sophisticated equipment and a very small
number of highly trained young men was all that stood between
us existing as a sovereign nation and not as it did in 1940-41,
that will always affect the prime minister of the day. If you
read Tony Blair's memoirswhich is quite tough to do, I've
been having to force myselfhe considered getting out of
the business, and said, "But could I come down to the House
of Commons and say we're scrapping it?" Frank's argument
was that no Prime Minster could live with himself or herself if
they were the one who gave the capacity away that in future, in
some immensely remote contingency, might have had high nation-preserving
utility, if they said, "Look, don't even contemplate it."
That is why in the Cold War a system was developed which we still
have of each new Prime Minister writing down longhand on a sheet
of paper and sealing it the instructions from beyond the grave
that are in the safe of every Trident boat as they were in the
safe of every Polaris boat. It's not a rational thing, it's not
evidence-based policy making. As the great Michael Quinlan said,
each generation clothes a gut instinct in a different set of rationales.
That doesn't answer your question does it?
Q44 Paul Flynn: No, it does not.
You haven't mentioned proliferation, which is the greater threat.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Looking from a British point of view, I would not give up the
deterrent and I would like to stop others getting it, period.
Q45 Chair: This is a subsidiary debate.
Mr Brennan, have you got anything further questions?
Kevin Brennan: No, I think that will
do.
Chair: Can I just ask you, Professor
Lindley-French in particular, do we need money to fund this extra
strategic capacity and where would the money come from?
Professor Peter Hennessy: Not
much.
Chair: I'm asking Professor Lindley-French.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Peter is quite right. I have looked at the growth in ministerial
investment in the last 10 years, for example ODA, DFID, 215%,
intelligence services 112%, Defence 11% and yet defence has been
bearing the brunt. I really wonder, given the very fast increase
in investment in certain ministries, how that could have possibly
been efficient. I would suggest to you that the establishment
of a national security structure could be done from within existing
expenditures and I would say that it would have to be done from
within existing expenditures. Now, obviously that will require
choices, and tough choices, but I cannot for a minute, given NAO
reports and the GAO reports equivalent in the US, believe there
are not monies to be found from a power ministry investment to
be put into a national security structure.
Q46 Chair: Is the CSR and the SDSR,
Professor Hennessy, the right opportunity to get this outcome
from these two processes.
Professor Peter Hennessy: It should
be, but you're going to have to get on with it because it's nearly
all done and dusted and they're all exhausted. Morale is at rock
bottom. Having come here to cheer you up, I'm not being pessimistic,
I'm being realistic. You might, if you think it matters, Chairman,
do a very quick interim report on this one because the clock is
ticking. I'm serious. You must get on with it, if you really think
it matters; we do, and I suspect you do as well. Whatever model
of the UK and the world you go for, an interim report might be
very timely and it might actually help.
Q47 Chair: We're aiming for the second
week of October.
Professor Peter Hennessy: Too
late.
Q48 Chair: Well we will reflect on
that.
Professor Peter Hennessy: On this
one point.
Chair: As a peripheral point, people
have talked about a single security budget, is this an irrelevant
point to this debate?
Professor Hew Strachan: It's not
an irrelevant point if you actually wish to achieve co-ordination
on the grounds that the thinking may go where the money goes.
It seems to be a sensible way, but are you also thinking therefore
that there will be a National Security Ministry and a National
Security Minister? Because presumably all those things hang together.
If that were the case, then presumably you're also implicitly
arguing that the National Security Minister can't be the Prime
Minister so the Prime Minister would no longer chair it. So, it
would be very important, it seems to me, that whoever held that
office had clout that was, perhaps not comparable, but nearly
comparable with that of the Prime Minister. The budget itself
is part of a wider set of problems.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
I would support that suggestion but it may be better to have a
national security audit because then one can properly judge the
relationship between civilian and military aspects of security.
Defence budgets have historically tended to grow on the basis
of a little bit more of what we've had before. If we are going
to have to change of posture, the only way to do that is to establish
security policy that is properly based across the national effort
and an audit could help that process.
Q49 Chair: Or, if we give ourselves
a less urgent timeframe, is this the time that we need a new Northcote-Trevelyan
inquiry into what the Civil Service actually is?
Professor Peter Hennessy: You
need more of a Haldane one. Northcote-Trevelyan was to stop us
being run by the 18th-century equivalent of special adviserspeople
appointed because they believed things or knew someone, rather
than because they knew anything. That cleaned it up. It took four
decades to clean it up; it was an extremely difficult thing to
do, but Haldane in 1918 commissioned by Lloyd George was much
more what you're about; it's how your organise departments both
individually and in clusters to bring thought and analysis ahead
of policy decision. It bears re-reading. So, I think your model,
if there is one, is Haldane 1918 and not Northcote-Trevelyan 1853.
Professor Hew Strachan: The issue
here is balance between thinking and capability. The CSR has been
predominantly about capability. As I see it, what the MOD is doing
is almost exclusively about capability; it's not about the thinking
part at all. Yet, if you don't think, you can't actually make
sensible decisions about what capability you want to have. Putting
the weight back on to thinking seems to me the key point. If you
need an inquiry to achieve that, then fair enough, but it's going
to be hard to achieve that obviously within your own timeframe,
given the fact that although these decisions are due in October
there will be, I suppose, a subsequent fallout because decisions
have been taken so quickly and in such an unco-ordinated way.
At the moment at least, because each department is doing the same
thing, it's going to be hard to see how each set of approaches
will actually work out before they all come together in October.
And therefore there will be a long period, I assume, after October,
when the implications are actually being digested, and during
which there will be follow-up work and implementation. Maybe,
slightly contradicting what has been said before, there will be
more of an opportunity after October to influence how this plays
out, than we're currently anticipating.
Q50 Chair: In terms of the institutional
structure that is created to underpin?
Professor Hew Strachan: Yes, it's
a question; I haven't got the answer. Will the CSR be, could it
be, a launching pad rather than a terminus? That's all I'm going
to say.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
Having spoken to the Defence Secretary, it's come down to carrier
or not to carrier; the carriers are becoming a metaphor for whether
Britain is a military power or not and part of it reflects the
input nature of the culture, rather than the output requirement
that we have now. There has been no case nor counter-case properly
made for those carriers within the framework of future strategy.
It's all about affordability. It's a mark of putting capability
before strategy that the debate has been brought down to this
level.
Professor Hew Strachan: The same
point could be made about the Trident question: we have not discussed
whether there is a value in extended the deterrence? Does extended
deterrence support international security? Is there particular
value in Britain having a deterrent in relation to its contribution
to extended security? That's where the question, in my mind, should
be; it's not where the debate is, but it's where the strategic
question as opposed to the political question is.
Q51 Chair: Gentlemen, it's been a
very intensive hour and a half. To my astonishment we seem to
be about to finish on time unless there are any further questions
from my colleagues or anything further that our witnesses wish
to add?
Professor Peter Hennessy: Can
I just add one last thought? Whatever you recommend, it would
be an idea to come back to this question very briefly, admittedly,
once a year because there is always a problem of things being
lost sight of. I know the Government will reply to you because
they have to and all the rest of it, but you will be so preoccupied
by other things, with respect, this time next year, that this
might all seem very distant. It might not, depending on circumstances.
But if you did an annual audit of this strategic question, a short
one, it would concentrate minds over the road here and it would
be extremely helpful for those of us on the outside to get a cartography
of what was actually happening or not. It wouldn't take you long
because you're doing all the R&D now for this one, aren't
you? That's just a respectful suggestion.
Professor Julian Lindley-French:
My final comment would be, this is not just any other moment;
the decision made under the SDSR will send a signal to allies
and partners alike about the commitment of the United Kingdom
as a major leading player or not over the next decadeit's
a hugely important moment.
Chair: Professor Strachan?
Professor Hew Strachan: I think
I've said my piece.
Chair: Thank you, gentlemen. It's been
a rich and rewarding session for us and I hope you've enjoyed
it too. Order, order.
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