November 4th, 2015
By Julian French.
”We think the strategic priorities that were identified in the QDR [were] rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region: two, maintaining a strong commitment to security and stability in Europe and the Middle East; three, sustaining a global counterterrorism campaign; four, strengthening key allies and partnerships; five, and prioritizing key modernization efforts”.
US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, 28 January, 2015
Austin, Texas. 4 November. For me one of the pleasures in life is to come to America’s heartland and to get a feel for how everyday Americans feels about America and their place in the world. Thanks to my friend Sharyl Cross of the Kozmetsky Center at St Edward’s University and Global Austin I have had a chance this week to feel real America’s strategic pulse before I fly to the other end of NATO and the Riga Conference. My conclusion? There is a crisis of confidence and trust between DC power and the US people that feels not unlike Europe. Worse, the United States is drifting strategically, unable or unwilling to confront its many problems at home, and unsure and uncertain of its place in the world. My purpose in coming here was to talk about NATO and the EU. However, I will leave here with a profound sense that the greatest threat to the transatlantic relationship and the Alliance is posed neither by Russia nor ISIS, but by an America lost. America is tired.
The implications of a tired America for NATO are profound. Indeed, the Alliance is in danger of being ground down by Euro-isolationism and thirteen years of American over-exertion. The tragic irony is that Americans and Europeans have never needed each other more. NATO remains vital to a declining US and its over-stretched grand strategy. At the very least NATO should and could act as a force multiplier of US leadership and a legitimiser of US action. Indeed, NATO is as much America’s insurance against dangerous strategic change as Europe’s.
Domestic politics here is killing American strategy. Although a bipartisan deal was reached to extend the US federal budget for two more years at current levels and thus prevent federal shutdown the very fact that Washington is bumping along the bottom of politics in this way reflects the extent to which the US is lost in the strategic wilderness. The world is simply too dangerous for such nonsense.
A major victim of Washington’s seemingly endless political impasse is the US military which is still being ravaged by sequestration, which has in turn savaged US long-term defence planning. Worse, an awful lot of that money the US military does get is spent badly precisely because of stinky, pork barrel politics in Washington. The American taxpayer getting nothing like the bang for the buck they should expect.
America’s retreat is compounded by a Europe mired in Euro-isolationism with too much of the Continent obsessed with the shape of institutions, the workings or otherwise of the Euro, and the extent of social entitlements. This week’s decision by the British Government to shelve a parliamentary vote on extending RAF air-strikes to Syria simply reinforces the sense of decline, and irresolution at the top of power in Europe.
Consequently, the absence of US leadership will likely see Europeans continue to mouth platitudes about security and defence as they also continue to slash hard security to afford state-busting social security. Indeed, whilst the Allies agreed last year to try and spend 2% GDP on defence the NATO average (excluding the US) remains stubbornly stuck at c1.5%, whilst the EU average is around 1.3%. Indeed, thirteen of the world’s top twenty defence cutters between 2012 and 2014 were to be found amongst NATO Europeans who sliced a further $90bn from already weak defence budgets over that period. One simply cannot do more with less.
What to do? Crazy though it may seem the US should use NATO more not less. NATO is the European Wing of a US-led World-wide West that is today more an idea than a place. NATO is also the enabler of the West’s hard core – the Anglosphere. NATO Standards for force generation, command and control and military interoperability, and shared concepts of military transformation, also remain vital to a new balance that must be stuck between military efficiency and effectiveness that will help offset weakness (far more than the Pentagon’s latest gobbledygook called the 3rd Offset Strategy).
However, if NATO is to reinvent itself in American eyes the Alliance will need to confront once and for all its many weaknesses. The most important challenge is establishing a new ‘contract’ so that NATO can remain relevant to twenty-first century US grand strategy and thus ensure an America committed to the twenty-first century defence of Europe.
At the very least, such a contract will mean a NATO finally released from short-term politics and the sham that is the NATO Defence Planning Process. Indeed, if NATO collective defence and forward deterrence is to become credible it is vital the Allies together begin a proper consideration of the likely impact of new technologies and strategies on Alliance cohesion. This will include a proper analysis of such threats as area access, area denial (A2/AD) strategies and technologies, how to effectively balance so-called 6th Generation warfare at the high-end of conflict with 4th Generation ‘hybrid warfare’ at a lower level of conflict, as well as a collective grip of military nano-technology, cyber warfare, missile defence etc.
Critically, a new transatlantic contract will require Europeans to face a simple truth; their US-led defence can only be assured if Europe finally becomes a source of strength for the US not a bottomless pit of weakness and thus help take the pressure of an increasingly over-burdened America. Since the early 1950s Europeans have played at burden-sharing knowing full well that America was strong enough and rich enough to effectively go it alone. Not anymore. Those days are over.
My sense from being here in Austin this week that there is no room for any complacency on the part of Alliance leaders and yet complacent is precisely what Alliance leaders have become. Or, rather complacent and over-whelmed – a strange and acute condition. Whilst the people with whom I have spoken clearly remain committed to the transatlantic relationship they are by and large the converted. In truth here in Austin support for both the transatlantic relationship, and by extension NATO, is at the very best soft.
Therefore, European leaders must stop thinking that Europe’s defence is itself a form of ‘social’ security entitlement paid for by the American taxpayer. If not it may just be that real America here in Texas and elsewhere across this great country at some point concludes that America does not need entangling alliances like NATO and had best look after itself. In this complex and ever more dangerous world an America that seeks to combine exceptionalism, isolationism, and relative weakness would be as much a disaster for the West and the world as an irresolute Europe obsessed with petty and not-so-petty institutionalism.
As Winston Churchill once said, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies. That is to fight without them”.
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August 6th, 2015
By Julian French.
“Sixteen hours ago an American plane dropped one bomb on the city of Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy”.
President Harry S. Truman, 6 August, 1945
Alphen, Netherlands. 6 August. At 0245 hours local time, 6 August, 1945 Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew of seven took off in their modified B-29 Superfortress bomber from the tiny Pacific island of Tinian some 1500 miles (2400 kms) south of Japan. Six and a half hours later at 0815 hours local time at an altitude of 31,060 ft (c11,000m) Tibbins ordered the bomb doors opened and the squashed torpedo-like 10 feet (3m), 9700lb (4400kg) ‘Little Boy’ bomb dropped from hooks in the bomb bay.
44.4 seconds later at a height of 1900ft (625m) the world’s first atomic bomb detonated in a blinding white flash unleashing in an atomic instant the equivalent explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT. What had been one moment a bustling Japanese city of 350,000 souls was reduced the next to hell on earth. Seventy thousand people died in an instant. Over the next five years seventy thousand more would succumb to the poisonous radiation Little Boy unleashed.
Ever since that blinding flash of death and destruction burnt Hiroshima to the ground a debate has raged as to the ‘morality’ of a democracy using such power to kill huge numbers of enemy civilians. To some extent the debate is like many that take place today in which the morals of this age are imposed on the past. Still, given that nuclear weapons remain such a debate is entirely legitimate. However, perhaps a more searching question on this day of remembrance is this; what brought the United States and its partner Britain (the British were well ahead of the Americans in the development of the ‘bomb’ until they shared their research in 1942) to using atomic weaponry?
In 1832 Karl von Clausewitz wrote in Vom Kriege, “We see…that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means”. In most English translations of On War Clausewitz’s dictum has been reduced to war being the continuation of policy by other means.
The most pressing concern of the Americans in August 1945 was to reduce the casualties amongst its own citizens that they would doubtless have suffered if the US had invaded the Japanese homeland. Indeed, during the attack on Okinawa between April and June 1945 the Americans had suffered over 50,000 casualties. Rather, Washington believed that the dropping of the two atomic bombs would convince Emperor Hirohito to overrule the militarists and sue for peace. Some believed a mere demonstration of American atomic power would suffice, others not. In the end the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did of course convince the Japanese to sue for peace.
However, there is a more compelling reason why the United States had little compunction in unleashing such force against the civilian Japanese population. By 1945 the drift to total war in which all rules and norms are abandoned in the pursuit of the enemy’s destruction was complete. In 1939 the Germans had unleashed the power of the Luftwaffe against Polish civilians in Warsaw. In May 1940 the Luftwaffe attacked Rotterdam which even today bears the scars of that attack. Between September 1940 and November 1941 the Luftwaffe attacked over 30 British cities killing and wounding well over 100,000 civilians.
In 1942 the head of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris said, “The Nazis entered the war under the childish delusion they were going to bomb everybody else, but nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, Warsaw, London and half a hundred other places they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind”. The Luftwaffe’s bombers were not designed to attack and destroy cities. However, the RAF’s Wellington, Stirling and Lancaster bombers were. By May 1945 the RAF and the United States Army Air Force had attacked 61 German cities, including massive raids on Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden in an effort to destroy the Nazi war effort. After the war the US Strategic Bombing Survey suggested that the bombing had killed 305,000 civilians and injured a further 786,000.
In the Pacific Theatre between 1942 and 1945 the US attacked 67 Japanese cities killing an estimated 500,000 civilians and rendering over 5 million people homeless. These include the Tokyo Fire Raids which took place between November 1944 and August 1945 and which may have killed up to 200,000 civilians.
It is against that backdrop that the 6 August dropping of the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and its ‘brother’ Fat Man on Nagasaki on 9 August, must be seen. It was total war and by 1945 total war had come to mean precisely that – total destruction of the enemy. As such Hiroshima was not simply the continuation of policy by other means, but the total ending of total war by other means.
Critically, both atomic attacks changed the relationship between war and policy forever in a way that Clausewitz himself may actually have glimpsed. In Vom Kriege he wrote, “war is an act of violence which in its application knows no bonds”. That is why major war once started is rarely controllable and why the best way to ‘fight’ total war is to prevent it and deter it.
This blog is written out of respect for the people of Japan on this painful day of remembrance and in honour of the victims in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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July 28th, 2015
By Julian French.
The People’s Bank of China has already pumped some $7.8bn in the Chinese stock market over the past three weeks in an effort to stop the free-fall in Chinese equities. However, the market fell yesterday by a further 8% and today by 3%. The cause of such market turbulence is an equities and asset bubble driven up by investors betting that the Chinese Government would take whatever action necessary to maintain the value of shares.
This is because the political settlement put in place after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre is dependent on a ‘contract’ between the Chinese Communist Party and China’s burgeoning middle classes; the former will enrich the latter in return for the latter accepting Party control. Therefore, what is at stake is far more than a ‘market correction’ of China’s hybrid, partially open stock market. A power struggle is underway between the Party and its command economy and casino capitalism. It is also a struggle between economic nationalism, globalisation and ultra-rich money lords that has profound implications for China, Asia-Pacific, and the wider world.
The domestic implications for China are profound. When Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule I suggested that far from Communist Beijing taking over 1 July, 1997 marked the beginning of a struggle for China that would one day see uber-capitalist Hong Kong and Shanghai take over Beijing. That struggle is indeed implicit in the current market turbulence. This is because when Deng Xiaoping set China on the road to what he called ‘reform’ back in the post Mao late-1970s the Party deliberately left ambiguous the relationship between the command economy and China’s emerging market economy.
By 1989 the steady growth of a middle class fuelled by the new market had begun to challenge the control of the Party. The inherent tension was expressed by students during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations. However, the brutal suppression of those demonstrations was in parallel with the establishment of the ‘contract’ between the Party and the middle classes which enabled the Party to retain political control. It is that contract that is now under duress as middle class savings and investments are threatened by the stock market crash and with it China’s political stability.There are also profound implications for China’s neighbours and indeed the wider Asia-Pacific region.
The Party has clearly moved to exploit Chinese nationalism in the wake of the 2008 global financial and economic crash as a buttress against renewed domestic dissent. Indeed, China’s extra-territorial claims in the East and South China Seas and the development of an increasingly expeditionary-capable military seem to match the relative decline in China’s economic performance in the wake of the 2008 global financial and economic crash. Many years ago when I lived in Hong Kong I saw the power of Chinese nationalism. For many years the Party kept a lid on such passions by offering ideology as an alternative to nationalism. However, nationalism run deeps in the majority Han Chinese population, as does the sense of grievance many Chinese feel towards the West and its past treatment of China.
Critically, with year-on-year economic growth in double-digits for many years many Chinese had never had life so good. There was no need thus to challenge a national or a world order that was beneficial to China. That may be about to change.The implications for the wider world economy should China retrench both politically and economically are profound. China has used its extensive sovereign wealth funds to make investment in assets the world over.
These asset purchases have been particularly important in Europe where such investments have helped stave off bankruptcy both of major corporations and indeed states. They have also helped to fuel the ability of Western consumers to buy Chinese goods which in turn has helped maintain China’s export-led growth. Should those ‘investments’ now be turned inwards to maintain Chinese shares at an artificially high price then the implications for a fragile world economy are profound to say the least.At its extremes the struggle for China could go one of two ways.
The Party could re-impose a command economy and effectively close China’s economy to foreign investment in the name of Communist dogma. However, such a move would hasten China’s decline and impact negatively on powerful vested interests, not least the People’s Liberation Army which is a major player in the Chinese markets. Alternatively, the Party could lose political control in which case it is far more likely that extreme nationalism would raise its ugly head.
China has no experience of the kind of social-democratic, free market balance that has evolved (and I stress evolved) in North America and Western Europe.Therefore, the non-Chinese world should have no illusions as to the strategic stakes implicit in the current travails of the Chinese stock markets.
Huge forces are being unleashed and huge forces are under stress which without very careful management could see China’s stability and that of the wider world threatened. Therefore, not only is it vital China engineers a soft landing to this crisis, it is also vital China develops institutions that ensure more balance in the relationship between the Chinese state and its stock markets.
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June 3rd, 2015
By Julian French.
Alphen, Netherlands. 2 June. The May 2015 Chinese Military Strategy highlights the greatest and fastest ever shift in the balance of military power from the liberal powers to the illiberal powers. Implicit in the strategy is a simple but clear message; now is not the right time to challenge the American presence in East Asia but given the shift taking place in the balance of power that day will come and when it comes China will act to exclude the US from China’s preferred sphere of influence.
The Strategy is clear. “On the issues concerning China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, some of its offshore neighbours take provocative actions and reinforce their military presence on China’s reefs and islands that they have illegally occupied. Some external countries are also busy meddling in South China Sea affairs; a tiny few maintain constant close-in air and sea surveillance and reconnaissance against China. It is thus a long-standing task for China to safeguard its maritime rights and interests”.
In 2014 China will (officially) spend $132bn (and probably far more). On the face of it this figure represents a 12.2% increase on last year’s expenditure but in reality simply harmonises official and non-official defence expenditure. It is the latest year-on-year double-digit growth in Chinese defence spending since 1989. China’s strategic ally Russia is also engaged in a massive hike in its defence expenditure with 40% of all public investment now committed to Russia’s armed forces.
Meanwhile, the US defence budget will fall from $500bn in 2015 to some $450bn in 2020. The defence budgets of the European allies are still being raided to fund social security. The mythical NATO target of 2% GDP on defence is being observed in the breach as demonstrated by British Government plans for an insane further £1bn of cuts to an already hollowed-out British military.
Only the strategic denial and strategic illiteracy all too prevalent in European chancelleries these days can blind one to the implications of this shift – a major twenty-first century war – a Third World War – cannot be ruled out. Read between the ‘peace’ and ‘co-operation’ lines in the Chinese strategy and the message is clear; under the rubric of “active defence” China is the coming power, and the US, Japan, South Korea and rest of the region and the world had better watch out.
The six key takeaways of the Strategy are as follows:
- The South China Sea is Chinese and China will do whatever it takes to ‘defend’ its sovereignty. The Strategy refers to the Americans as an “external power” that meddles in “South China Sea affairs”;
- At some point China will act to ‘resolve’ the “Taiwan issue” on Chinese terms. “The Taiwan issue bears on China’s reunification and long-term development…reunification is an inevitable trend in the course of national rejuvenation”;
- China intends to create global-reach deployable military force. “In response to the new requirement of safeguarding national security and development interests, China’s armed forces will work harder to create a favourable strategic posture with more emphasis on the employment of military forces and means…”
- China is preparing for an arms race with the Americans that it believes it can win over time. The Strategy states, “In response to the new requirement arising from the worldwide RMA, the armed forces will pay close attention to the challenges in new security domains, and work hard to seize the strategic initiative in military competition”;
- The People’s Revolutionary Army and Navy is not a function of the Chinese state, but the Communist Party of China. Under Xi Jingping the Party has a) become far more strategic in its international ambitions; and b) combines a complex mix of ideology and nationalism; and
- Future war is a distinct possibility and China intends to fight and win such a war.
The strategic balance between the US and China in Asia-Pacific is almost the mirror image of the challenge Britain faced when the Germans passed the 1898 and 1900 German Navy Laws. On paper the British still looked vastly superior at the time. However, Britain had a worldwide empire to protect whereas Imperial Germany could choose where and when to complicate Britain’s strategic calculus. Britain had to respond.
Recently I chaired two American generals at a NATO meeting. At one point I challenged them with a scenario. It is 2020 or perhaps more likely 2025. The cuts to European defence budgets have gone on apace. The renewed cuts to the British defence budget have left the British Armed Forces emaciated, hollowed-out and dysfunctional, and the other NATO allies are little better. Suddenly a Russian-inspired crisis breaks out in the Baltic States as a snap Russian exercise starts to look like a prelude for the invasion of Estonia. Simultaneously, China moves military forces to occupy several of its reclaimed reefs and islands whilst the People’s Liberation Navy threatens Taiwan. The Americans find themselves in the worst of all strategic worlds, insufficiently strong in either Asia-Pacific or Europe and with allies that are more of a complication than support.
Given last month’s Chinese-Russian exercise in the Eastern Mediterranean such engineered crises-in-parallel cannot be ruled out. So, if you think I am exaggerating ask yourself this; do you think my strategic analysis wrong in fact or by assessment? Or is it that the whole, dark big picture I paint is so dark, so Edvard Munch, you would rather not think about it? Sadly, for most European leaders it is a crisis too far. They would prefer instead to appease a changing strategic reality than confront it.
US-China strategic relations are in the balance, but not yet on the brink. The world is a safer place when the West together is strong. It is about time our leaders remembered that. However, a strategic clock is ticking, and it is Made in China.
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May 26th, 2015
By Julian French.
Alphen, Netherlands. British Finance Minister George Osborne is Vladimir Putin’s most dangerous ally. This week it was announced that Osborne is seeking ever deeper cuts to the British Armed Forces, as I warned in my latest book Little Britain: Twenty-First Century Strategy for a Middling European Power (www.amazon.co.uk).
If the threat is carried out, and I have every reason to believe it will be, such egregious cuts to an already hollowed-out force will be the greatest act of strategic vandalism to Britain’s influence since the 1930s. It is a decision that not only Britain will come to regret but also the US and all of Britain’s NATO allies.
As for the Special Relationship with the US – it is over. It is completely the wrong strategic message to send at completely the wrong time and demonstrates yet again the strategic illiteracy of both Cameron and Osborne. Russia’s President Putin must be laughing all the way to the Baltic States, or wherever it is next he is going to de-stabilise.
The sad story of the Cameron Government(s) and its stewardship of British national strategy, and Britain’s defences since 2010 has been one of dissembling, deceit and outright lies. In 2010 then Foreign Secretary William Hague said that there would be no strategic shrinkage under the Tories.
Britain has been strategically-shrinking ever since. Pledge abandoned. Strategic Defence and Security Review 2010 was presented as the big financial hit Britain’s armed forces would have to take to right the economy. After 2015 the British defence budget, we were told, would see a real term 1% increase. Pledge abandoned. In September 2014 David Cameron badgered other NATO leaders for not committing to spending 2% GDP on defence. British defence spending is about to fall in the next year from 2.07% to 1.88% GDP and fall again thereafter.
Pledge abandoned. Cameron promised that the current size of the Army would be maintained at an already small 82,500 as part of Future Force 2020. Active consideration is now being given to an Army of 60,000. Pledge about to be abandoned. Worse, Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin has been charged with the task of trying to make the defence budget APPEAR as though it meets the NATO 2% GDP guideline. Pledge about to be manipulated.
The strategic-illiteracy of both Cameron and Osborne was brought home to me in a 22 April mail I received from an official in the Office of the Conservative Party Chairman which frankly insulted my intelligence. The email boldly stated, “I can assure you that the Conservative Party is committed to supporting our Armed Forces and maintaining Britain’s position in the world”. Nonsense!
The email then reminded me that, “…no country in the world can invest in, maintain and support their Armed Forces while having a broken economy…” Yes, but Britain resides on this planet not on Mars, is meant to be a leading power, and bad people are doing bad things.
The missive then went on to offer a rosy future. The “…Government plans to spend £163 billion on new equipment over the coming decade”, and the “…Government is committed to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence…” And then the sucker punch; “…with decisions on spending after the financial year 2015/16 to be determined in the next spending review”. In other words, ‘we told you more cuts were coming. Really we did’. However, the email left the best to last. “I would like to assure you that the UK remains a truly global military power…” What complete and utter tosh!
However, the real ‘cruncher’ came in a small sub-phrase towards the end of the email when it suggested that all the planned investment, “…will keep Britain safe”. It is a phrase Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, the safe-pair-of-hands defence minister charged by Cameron and Osborne with destroying, sorry cutting Britain’s armed forces.
First, it is not true. Britain recently had to rely on allies to find two new Russian nuclear attack submarines seeking to enter Britain’s territorial waters. Second, the true test of Britain’s defence is not the immediate defence of the island, but the fulfilment of its commitments to NATO allies, most notably the strategic reassurance, forward deterrence and collective defence of the three Baltic States.
Indeed, although Britain is offering to act as a key element of NATO’s new Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) the coming cuts will emaciate the very forces designed to undertake such as role. No wonder US forces call the Brits “the borrowers’.
Let me be clear; implicit in the new round of planned defence cuts is a form of isolationism that passes for foreign and security policy under this Government and the final and irrevocable British retreat from strategic influence – Little Britain indeed.
Sadly, London is now committed to another Strategic Pretence and Insecurity Review and the appeasement of a rapidly-deteriorating strategic reality at a moment when illiberal power is gaining the upper hand. Therefore, Osborne and Cameron’s strategic illiteracy is quite simply a recipe for disaster as they seek to abandon security to fund ‘prosperity’. In the real world the one cannot exist without the other.
On my extensive travels of late Britain’s loss of influence in key chancelleries has become all too apparent to me. Much of that is due to the butchering of Britain’s world-renowned armed forces which have long provided the hard power foundations for London’s soft power influence.
Frankly, I no longer believe any ‘commitment’ Cameron makes is worth any more than yesterday’s newsprint – be it on Europe, the economy or defence.
George Osborne – Vladimir Putin’s most dangerous ally.
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March 7th, 2015
By Julian French.
Is Obama Decoupling Israel?
Alphen, Netherlands. 5 March. The great historian A.J.P. Taylor once said of Winston Churchill, “If he could not do something effective, he would do something ineffective”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly has a similar view of President Obama and the latter’s efforts to secure a permanent P5+1 treaty with Iran that would prevent Tehran arming itself with nuclear weapons. In what was a brazen intervention into US politics, and a deliberate snub to President Obama, Netanyahu warned the US Congress Tuesday that any permanent deal with Iran “could pave Iran’s path to the bomb”. Netanyahu’s concerns bear a striking resemblance of European concerns during the Euromissile crisis of the late 1970s.
In May 1976, shortly after President Carter had taken office, senior State Department official Leslie Gelb wrote that the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles to Europe would create a Eurostrategic balance and thus have the effect of decoupling the US strategic arsenal from the defence of Europe. Consequently, the credibility of the US strategic deterrent would be reduced and with it US extended deterrence of Soviet aggression. Europeans also worried that as the Americans closed in on a warhead-limiting SALT 2 treaty with the Soviet Union the US nuclear deterrent would be further decoupled from the defence of Europe. Such an aim was clearly part of Soviet strategy at the time and the European Allies were particularly concerned by Washington negotiating over Europe’s security with Moscow, and yet over their collective heads. Netanyahu’s Washington speech echoes those concerns.
Some say Netanyahu over-played his political hand in Washington this week. Given Israel’s precarious strategic situation it is hard if not impossible for an Israeli leader ever to over-play a political hand given the possible alternative. Iran clearly has its own strategic interests as do all states and they must be respected. Equally, such interests remain driven by Tehran’s determination to destroy Israel to confirm Iran’s regional-strategic dominance. Therefore, whilst the Obama Administration has tended to emphasise an America that speaks softly, and not without effect, Washington must never forget its big stick. Indeed, when it comes to matters nuclear it is always better to do something effective than something dangerously ineffective. Of course, Tel Aviv’s ultimate deterrent is that for all the current friction with Washington Israel enjoys something the British, for example, do not enjoy – a real Special Relationship with America. Any decoupling would only ever happen by mistaken strategic calculation and it is that which clearly worries Netanyahu.
Putin’s Nemesov?
Alphen, Netherlands. 2 March. What does the murder of Boris Nemtsov’s murder mean for Russia and Europe’s security? A few years ago I met Nemtsov at an event in Geneva. Unfailingly courteous, even self-deprecating, he was highly-intelligent and offered a fascinating glimpse into a better Russia, a different Russia. Indeed, my impressions of the man and his ideas suggested that his great country still had a real chance of transitioning from autocracy to democracy, and through that transition, Europe could finally be whole, free, and at peace.
Sadly, all that Nemtsov stood for was blown away on Friday by four bullets in his back – the cynical act of that other, all-too cynical Russia. Many are blaming President Putin. However, this is simply not his style, and is in any case far too close to home. Why murder a leading opposition figure on the approach road to the Kremlin? It is pure speculation on my part but it is more likely to have been the deed of the now-multiple ultra-nationalist groups that stalk Russian politics. Well to the right of even President Putin such groups have tentacles that reach far into the so-called Siloviki, the security apparatchiks who run an increasingly powerful security state.
Nemtsov’s assassination is clearly a function of the very profound tensions that exist at the heart of Russian politics and society, and such tensions are likely to get worse. President Putin has manoeuvred himself into a political dead-end. He offers Russians no political vision, no political development, and no political evolution which would over time help ease such tensions and create a Russia with state institutions of sufficient strength to cope with pluralism. Rather, he is trying to divert such tensions by appealing to Russian nationalism, wrapping himself in the Russian flag, and by centralising all power on himself and using an assertive displacement policy. Consequently, Putin himself has nowhere to go but more of the same assertive displacement policy. If he fails Putin will be swept aside by the tides of change that are indeed boiling away below the surface of the Russian body politic. Putin’s ‘strategy’ may not make sense to many strategically-illiterate western European politicians. However, it makes ‘perfect’ Russian sense to the Baltic states, and indeed all states across Central and Eastern Europe who have ‘benefitted’ from past Russian rule.
So, will the murder of Boris Nemtsov be seen one day as Putin’s nemesis? No. However, it reveals a Russia that combines immense, over-centralised power with dangerous instability. And, if what is happening in and to Russia is not seen through the cold light of political realism Putin’s Russia could one day be the nemesis of us all.
Wake up!
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February 14th, 2015
By Julian L. French.
Alphen, Netherlands. 13 February. “Peace in our time”. Those hollow words came to define British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the wake of the signing of the Munich Pact on 29 September, 1939. A day after the signing of yet another Minsk agreement it looks on the face of it as if the illiberal
Realpolitik have once again trumped liberal naivety in an effort to bring ‘peace’ to Ukraine. Indeed, several commentators have alluded to the similarities between the Munich Pact and the Minsk Agreement. So, are there similarities and differences between Munich and Minsk?
First, I must issue a disclaimer. I am an Oxford historian who has studied the causes of World War Two in great depth. In spite of Russia’s blatant aggression in Ukraine I am still not prepared to equate modern Russia with Nazi Germany or President Putin with Adolf Hitler. This blog as ever is about hard analysis not gratuitous offence. Given the heroic struggle of the Russian people during The Great Patriotic War and indeed my respect for them I am simply not prepared to cross that all-too-easy line simply to make a point. However, there are some political similarities between Munich and Minsk that cannot be ignored:
Munich and Minsk both resulted from aggression against a third state by rapidly rearming, illiberal great powers dissatisfied by their place in the European order facing liberal powers weakened by economic crisis. In Germany’s case it was the rejection of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and in Russia’s case it is rejection of the post-Cold War European order.
Munich and Minsk both rewarded aggression by in effect confirming the ‘principle’ that might is right. Russia in effect now controls much of Eastern Ukraine just as 1938 Germany gained control over the Sudeten territory of a then Czechoslovakia that it was going to occupy in any case. Neither conflict would have existed but for great power aggression.
Munich and Minsk both established a de facto principle linking ‘sovereignty’ to ethnicity. Indeed, by confirming the ceasefire line as in effect the extent of respective ethnicity-based sovereignty Russia may well have re-established a dangerous precedent for interference in any state where sizeable Russian minorities exist. Prior to the September 1939 invasion of Poland that is exactly the principle 1938 Germany used to justify expansionism.
Munich and Minsk both revealed the weakness and division of the liberal powers and who then strove to mask that weakness by wrapping the respective agreements in a veil of empty legalism, such as international commissions and meaningless plebiscites. By so doing the liberal powers conferred some sense of legitimacy upon naked power.
Munich and Minsk both ignored previous breaches of international law in the hope that a line in the sand could be drawn and that no further expansion would be sought. Munich ignored both Germany’s 1936 occupation of the Saarland and the 1938 occupation of Austria. Minsk ignored Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea and thus confirmed it.
Munich and Minsk both reflected a culture of appeasement in that the liberal negotiating powers Germany and France rejected out-of-hand any military ‘solution’. No-one sensible is suggesting a force-on-force conflict between Russian and Western forces over Ukraine, but to reject a role for military force when such force is central to the strategy of the adversary smacks all-too-readily of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. There may be no military ‘solution’ per se but that must no mean that the credible ability to apply force if needs be and in some form has no utility in the process towards a secure solution. It is that point which most clearly divides the US from Germany and France.
However, there are also very profound differences between Munich and Minsk:
Munich and Minsk both involved a weak France. However, in 1938 Germany was the aggressor, revisionist power whereas in 2015 Germany is the status quo lead power. Britain was in the ‘lead’ in 1938, whereas in 2015 Britain is a foreign policy irrelevance, a small power, domestically-divided with small leaders stuck at the edge of influence.
Munich did not involve either the European Union which did not then exist, or the United States, which was then an isolationist power. The involvement of both means the liberal powers now have many more coercive tools at their disposal short of war to persuade Russia to honour agreements. No such tools existed for Britain and France in 1938.
Munich also took place in a Europe in which there was no NATO, no ultimate and credible guarantee against further aggression.
Therefore, on balance one should be careful about glibly citing historical comparisons because the Europe of 2015 is very different from the Europe of 1938. Equally, one should be equally aware of the consequences of failure. In March 1939 German forces occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and thus made World War Two inevitable. Were Russia to move on the rest of Ukraine Europe would be but one step from war and any historian knows what that could mean.
Seventy years ago today some 722 Royal Air Force Lancaster bomber crews were being briefed. Several hours later they took off from bases across Eastern England in two enormous “bomber streams”. Over the next two days the German city of Dresden was systematically-reduced to rubble and twenty-five thousand of its citizens lay dead. The true appeasement is to lack the imagination to realise the implications of what is happening in Ukraine.
Muninsk? Peace in our time.
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October 18th, 2014
By Julian French.
Rome, Italy. 16 October. Cardinal Richelieu, that great sixteenth century French homme d’état once said, “Rulers are the slaves of their resources”. In 1979 the Italian economy surpassed that of Britain. It was a great moment for Italians which they proudly dubbed “Il Sorpasso” – the overtake. In spite of chaotic government the Italian economy was booming. Italian satisfaction did not last long. In 1995 the British economy was once again ahead and the gap between the two economies widened rapidly.
Today, the British economy is some 22% bigger than the Italian with the gap still widening. This week the IMF highlighted a new Sorpasso. In spite of ‘soft’ world growth Asian economies are surging past European economies underlying the rapid extent to which the balance of world power and wealth is shifting. Il Sorpasso is not only apparent in the economic sphere. Europe and its defence is sliding rapidly down the defence league table. Since 2012 thirteen of the ‘top’ twenty defence cutters are in NATO Europe. Europe is sacrificing defence for economics. Can a balance between the two be struck?
Yesterday in London General Sir Rupert Smith, Professor Mike Clarke and I discussed hard defence choices with British defence chiefs. The UK may be in a far healthier economic position than Italy but in spite of David Cameron’s rhetoric to the contrary the British military still faces significant further cuts after the May 2015 general elections. Consequently, unless new moneys are found the British will no longer be able to afford the ‘little bit of everything, but not much of anything’ high-end force of today. They will be forced to opt instead for an even smaller force that retains a significant amount of a few significant things but only at the expense of some very important things. That will mean; a) a further loss of British sovereign independence; and b) ever more reliance on allies.
However, a British strategy that is more reliant on allies faces a big problem. Well, lots of them actually. Italy is of course an important friend and ally of Britain. However, the Italian public debt crisis could soon devastate public expenditure here. Like France Italy this year will not meet its EU commitment to keep the deficit no bigger than 3% GDP as part of the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact. Defence expenditure will again no doubt be raided by the Italian Government to maintain other ‘essential’ services such as health and welfare.
Contrast Italy and indeed Europe with the world beyond Europe’s borders. Frederick the Great once captured the ethos of the aggressive geopolitics when he asked to justify the use of force. “The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word the clear advantage we have over our neighbours”. President Putin is clearly a disciple of Frederick. Indeed, Russia for all its current economic travails, surpassed the UK some four years ago, now spends 20% of its entire public budget on defence and seems determined to continue to do so.
The contrast between Asia and Europe is even more worrying. China will increase its defence expenditure 12.7% this year, the latest double digit increase since 1989. India and Japan will soon surpass Britain and France to become the fourth and fifth biggest global defence spenders respectively.
Anyway and anyhow one cuts these figures they mark a massive and dangerous shift of military power away from Europe’s liberal powers and in the cases of China and Russia in favour of illiberal powers. If unchecked or unbalanced the implications for Europe’s future defence (or lack of it) and world security are profound, not least because of the pressure Europe’s defence ‘abstinence’ puts on the Americans, irrespective of the promises Europeans made at last month’s NATO Wales Summit.
Last week French IMF Chief Executive Christine Lagarde called on European leaders to do two things; undertake deep structural reforms to Eurozone economies to bring them into the real world and invest in economic stimulus in the form of big infrastructure projects. Viewed from here in my beloved Italy one sees the urgent need for such reforms. And yet it is questionable whether Italian society or indeed Italian state institutions are strong enough to cope with the kind of long, hard austerity shock favoured for example by Germany.
Faced by a collapse in tax revenues and living standards many EU leaders have in effect abandoned defence for economics. Consequently, many European militaries are on the verge of an obsolescence meltdown and are virtually unusable. And yet the defence of Europe and Europeans is a legitimate political and strategic obligation that cannot simply be opted out from.
Therefore, in parallel with improving Europe’s infrastructure via the proposed European capital investment funds it would also make sense for Europeans to create a capital defence investment fund. Such a fund would act in tandem with efforts to modernise and harmonise the European Defence and Technological Base (EDTIB).
Montesquieu once said, “…whenever an accidental, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state…” If Europe allows defence to be sacrificed for economic ‘security’ Il Sorpasso 2014 could mark the moment when the illiberal triumphed over the liberal in the pursuit of power and influence in the twenty-first century. Do Europeans really want such a world? If not Europeans should heed the words of Madame Lagarde this week; “just get on with it!”
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September 2nd, 2014
By James G. Stavridis and Julian Lindley-French.
“Interoperability with the Alliance is better now than it’s ever been because NATO forces have been training and operating together, non-stop, over the last 10 years in Afghanistan.”
Admiral James G. Stavridis, November 2012
1 September. The Atlantic Alliance must create a twenty-first century NATO Future Force if NATO is to remain a strategic military hub. This week NATO leaders sit down together in Wales to consider the future of the world’s most powerful democratic military alliance. As they commence their discussions Russian forces are dismembering Ukraine, Afghanistan’s future is again in doubt, Islamic State fanatics threaten the entire Middle Eastern state structure and rapidly developing cyber, missile and nuclear technology is changing the face of NATO’s two critical spaces – the battle space and the security space.
September 2014 will thus be remembered as a NATO ‘schwerpunkt’, the decisive moment at which NATO decided to be strategically relevant or irrelevant. If it is to be the former September 2014 must also mark the creation of a truly twenty-first century Alliance framed by a contextually-relevant NATO Strategic Concept with collective defence, crisis management and co-operative security driving the defence and force planning choices of all the Allies.
Alliances are created with two objectives in mind; to prevent wars and if needs be to win wars. Influence and effect are the two key strategic ‘commodities’ in which alliances ‘trade’. As such alliances rise and fall on the level of strategic unity of effort and purpose between members and the level of interoperability between their armed forces. Lose either or both and an alliance is effectively crippled.
On 21 March 1918 strengthened by the collapse of Tsarist Russia the Imperial German Army launched Operation Michael. It was a desperate attempt by Berlin to break the British and win World War One before the Americans arrived in strength. In the early days of the battle the Kaiser’s Stormtroopers made stunning gains. The advance was not simply a feat of arms. Britain and France and indeed the British Cabinet under Lloyd George were dangerously split over strategy. One side, the ‘westerners’ believed that the war could only be won by defeating the German Army in the fields of Flanders. However, the so-called ‘easterners’ believed that somehow the Kaiser could be defeated by attacking Germany’s flanks in Turkey and elsewhere. The lack of strategic unity of effort and purpose denuded the British defences in the critical area around the old Somme battlefield. Thankfully, in the years since 1914 the British Army had made truly revolutionary advances in military strategy and tactics. Rather than break the British retreated in reasonably good order and as they did so they steadily reduced the ranks of the elite Stormtroopers until the exhausted Imperial Germany Army could advance no more.
On 8 August, 1918 at the Battle of Amiens, on what General Ludendorff called “the black day of the German Army”, British Commonwealth forces with French and American support launched a massive counter-attack. The British employed an entirely new form of manoeuvre warfare, the All Arms Battle. Aircraft, tanks, artillery and infantry operated closely together in support of each other to smash through the German forces. What subsequently became known as the Hundred Days Offensive effectively ended World War One.
Thankfully, the Alliance is today not at war but NATO is certainly facing the political equivalent of Operation Michael. If nothing else Russia’s proxy and not-so-proxy invasion of Eastern Ukraine should be a wake-up call. However, Allied leaders remain strategically uncertain and deeply split about what to do about Russia’s incursions into Ukraine. This split not only reflects a lack of strategic unity of effort and purpose but a NATO deeply-divided between those who simply seek American protection and those Europeans who see military force as merely an adjunct to soft power. NATO needs to re-discover a shared level of ambition that has been notably lacking of late, something which Moscow has been all too happy to exploit.
Only Britain and France make any serious effort to generate the expeditionary military capabilities needed to remain militarily close to an increasingly over-stretched America. However, after a decade of continuous operations and repeated defence cuts the small British and French armed forces are worn out. Therefore, if the Wales Summit is to be NATO’s twenty-first century schwerpunkt the Alliance must take the first steps to re-establish some semblance of the military credibility upon which influence, deterrence and defence depend.
NATO needs a future force at its military core relevant to the challenges ahead. Therefore, the Alliance must go back to its military roots and radically reconsider the utility of force in the pursuit of strategy. To that end, the Wales Summit should take three fundamentally important and essentially military decisions:
- Collective Defence: Article 5 collective defence must be modernised and re-organised around cyber-defence, missile defence and the advanced deployable forces vital to contemporary defence. A twenty-first century All Arms Battle must be forged with NATO forces better configured to operate across the global commons and the six contemporary domains of warfare – air, sea, land, cyber, space and knowledge.
- Crisis Management: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the NATO Response Force and the High Readiness Forces (HRF) must be radically re-structured into the NATO Future Force. Such a force would be predicated on the principle of Alliance military unity of effort and purpose. This in turn would enable the Alliance to effectively force generate and efficiently command and control complex coalitions across the mission spectrum from high-end warfare to defence against the kind of hybrid/ambiguous warfare that Moscow is employing in Ukraine.
- Co-operative Security: The Alliance must be better configured to work with all of its strategic partners the world-over, states and institutions, military and civilians, if it is to remain credible in global security as well as European security. Indeed, re-connecting European security to world security could be said to be NATO’s Prime Directive.
The world-capable NATO Future Force must sit at the heart of a new NATO in which the current planning concepts of NATO 2020, Smart Defence and the Connected Forces Initiative are in effect merged with the NATO Response Force and the HRFs into a twenty-first century All Arms Battle. Deep or organic jointness between NATO forces will be the vital interoperability mechanism at the heart of the Force enabling nations to strike a necessary balance between capability and affordability.
Whilst much has rightly been made of the need for NATO members to spend a minimum of 2% GDP on defence not enough has been made of just what future force such expenditures should seek to generate. The 2% benchmark will only be politically credible if national leaders are convinced not just by how much to spend on their respect armed forces, but just what force such expenditure will realise and why. ‘Value for money’ is today’s essential and inescapable defence mantra.
There will need to be a critical new ingredient in NATO’s post-Wales strategic force posture – knowledge. For all the talk of military capability NATO’s critical war-fighting component is shared knowledge and the understanding of environments and practice it generates. Indeed, knowledge is the essential component of interoperability, be it at the directing political level of campaigns or at the military level of operations. Moreover, shared knowledge is also critical because it reinforces all-important trust between members which is today sorely tried. The Alliance must act fast because contemporary interoperability is built on the knowledge gained from over a decade of operations and an enhanced mechanism for sharing intelligence. Indeed, such knowledge could be very quickly lost if steps are not taken to systematically capture it and build it into the NATO Future Force via innovative exercising, education and training.
Above all, NATO must remain a credible strategic military hub. Therefore, the NATO Future Force must be a warfighting force and yet agile and nimble enough to sit at the threshold between US, European and Partner forces and between soft and hard power. German Chancellor Merkel rightly said at this weekend’s EU Summit that a resolution to the Ukraine Crisis will not be military in nature. She is right. Indeed, most crises in what will be a very dangerous century will require first and foremost soft power tools and political solutions. This reality places ever more importance on an effective EU-NATO partnership and civil-military co-operation. However, without the hard underpinning of credible hard military power that is NATO’s essence, soft power is as as Thomas Hobbes once wrote, “covenants without the sword” and as such “mere words”.
This dangerous twenty-first century will be safer if the West is strong together. A strong West means a strong and legitimate NATO built on strong and credible armed forces. Wales is the place and the time to act. It is also the place and the time for NATO to be radical.
NATO Future Force: facing Michael.
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August 17th, 2014
By Julian French.
T.E. Lawrence wrote, “In fifty words: granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy, time and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraic factors in the end are decisive, and against then perfection of means and spirit struggle quite in vain”.
Western leaders should heed Lawrence’s words but not in the way they may think. Seared by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, paralysed by the situation in both Syria and Ukraine the West has retreated into politics at the expense of considered strategy.
Indeed, having understood that the threats they face from across the great belt of insecurity require a big, long-term strategy it is as though having batted badly in the first inning they have decided to leave the field to the opponent.
And yet what is happening to Europe’s east and in the Middle East is forced change by opponents with potentially catastrophic consequences for the West. Indeed, far from being the exception to the twenty-first century rule such conflict is fast becoming one of its defining features.
British strategist Basil Liddell Hart wrote in the 1930s that, “In Strategy the longest way around is often the shortest way there. A direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, where as an indirect approach loosens the defender’s hold by upsetting his balance”.
The problem with Western leaders is that because they routinely put ‘no significant military action too close to an election’ politics before strategy they have lost the will, the patience and the statecraft to deal with complexity. And yet if the West is to re-generate twenty-first century grand strategy – the pursuit of large ends via large means – it is precisely statecraft and a new approach to dealing with complexity that they need. Indeed, complexity is the very stuff of international relations.
The indirect approach works because as a strategy it implies not just that the ends are political but also the ways and means. At times such a strategy will mean uncomfortable bed-fellows such as Iran; at times it will mean offending this group or that at home.
Above all, ‘strategy’ will mean a truly joined-up, whole of government approach to strategy that is so lamentably lacking from the celebrity politics of the age led by political vision and reinforced by political back-bone and staying power be it Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
In the Middle East unless the West together helps the people of the region generate a better future no-one else will and given the ensuing vacuum spill-over to Europe and beyond could be catastrophic. In that light the dropping of aid to ease the plight of the Yazidi people (important though it is) is not a function of a Middle Eastern strategy but rather a mask for the retreat from it.
The strategy-vacuum at the top of Western governments was put best in an email yesterday from a very senior American friend of mine. “Obama has no-one to do any serious thinking and doesn’t seem to know he doesn’t have it. It is the great “unknown unknown.” And the Europeans are not in the game, not even the Brits, whose government is all talk and no walk”.
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July 4th, 2014
By Julian Lindley-French.
4 July. Der Tag. HMS Queen Elizabeth is enormous. Officially named today by Her Majesty the Queen after her illustrious sixteenth century forebear she is the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy. She sits in her Rosyth dock against the backdrop of the massive Forth Railway Bridge itself a signature British engineering marvel from a previous age. Displacing 65,000 tons the ‘QE’ is the first of Britain’s 2 new super aircraft carriers. Her flight deck is the size of 60 Wimbledon tennis courts or 3 World Cup pitches. When commissioned in 2017 she will carry up to 50 aircraft in a hangar that is the size of 60 Olympic-size swimming pools. She is twice the width and some 90 metres longer than her predecessor HMS Illustrious which sits alongside her.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is also far more than a ship. She is a potent symbol of British power, unity, alliance and partnership that will fly the White Ensign the most famous flag of the most famous navy in the world. Indeed, a navy that in many ways made the modern world. In tandem with her sister-ship HMS Prince of Wales she will act as a hub for a new type of agile and mobile global reach military power projection that will assure and ensure maritime and land security across the globe.
HMS Queen Elizabeth will exert influence and effect across three strategic spaces – the peace-space, the security-space, and the battle-space. Able to reach 80% of the world’s population she will act in crises as diverse as disaster relief and help prevent and deter full-blown war which cannot be ruled out in the hyper-competitive twenty-first century.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is a symbol of national unity. She was built in sections at 6 shipyards across the United Kingdom. Indeed, she is perhaps the most innovative ship ever built with each section bought to Rosyth to be welded together. As some in Scotland contemplate secession she is a potent symbol of what this old great gathering of peoples can still achieve in the world together.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is a symbol of alliance. She is testament to Britain’s determination to inject real power into both NATO and the EU. As Americans complain about burden-sharing or the lack of it here is a European ally that in spite of many challenges is willing to invest in the highest-end of high-end military capabilities. Alongside the new Type 45 destroyers and Astute-class nuclear attack submarines joining or soon to join the Royal Navy this great ship will put Britain at the heart of NATO and EU task groups. Indeed, her very existence will underpin all the navies across both the Alliance and Union.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is a symbol of partnership. Britain made an historic mistake in the early 1970s by focusing exclusively on Europe and what became the EU. Whether Britain stays or leaves the EU this ship will help re-invigorate Britain’s traditional partnerships with countries like Australia, India and Japan (see history). She will also help reinforce key partnerships with close, powerful friends such as France and Germany. Critically, she will help keep America strong where America needs to be strong as Washington faces a growing gap between what it needs to be able to do and what it can afford to do. To that end HMS Queen Elizabeth will be a vital partner of both the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps.
My belief in
HMS Queen Elizabeth and
HMS Prince of Wales has been absolute from the day they
were conceived. This is not simply because of the power projection or fighting power the two ships will afford London or the Carrier-enabled Power Projection in the strategy-documents, or indeed because I favour the Royal Navy over the British Army or Royal Air Force. I do not. As I write in my new book
Little Britain (
www.amazon.com) my belief in these ships is because of what they say about Britain and its future as a major power. This has nothing to do with Britannia ruling the waves but rather the willingness of a twenty-first European state to confront political realism with imagination and determination built on the recognition that credible military capability still underpins all power and influence.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is a national strategic asset. She is an entirely appropriate statement of strategic ambition for one of the world’s leading political, economic and military powers and will serve Britain and its allies and partners out to 2060 and beyond. As such she will help reinvigorate the British strategic brand critical to keeping the West strong – the West that is today an idea rather than a place.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is a symbol of my country; a ship and a country of which I am justly proud. HMS Queen Elizabeth is a big-picture ship of a big-picture country in a big-picture world.
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June 6th, 2014
By Julian French.
D-Day. 6 June. 0430 hours Zulu. As I write this 61,715 British troops alongside 57,500 Americans and some 21,500 Canadians supported by 6939 ships and craft of various sorts and some 11,600 aircraft are three hours off the Normandy beaches. They are together with the air, sea and land forces of many free nations – Australian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Greek, New Zealand, Norwegian, Polish and, of course, the Free French on their long, dangerous and distinguished way home.
Just over four hours ago at 0015 hours 6 platoons of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry attacked and took the critical bridge (Pegasus Bridge) over the Caen canal that protects the eastern flank of the five landing beaches code-named Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah. The glider-borne force landed less than 100 metres/150 yards from their target and by 0026 hours had sent the coded success signal “ham and jam”.
At 0058 hours the 7th (light infantry) Parachute Battalion of the British Army began the first of the massed American, British and Canadian drops of some 13000 paratroopers behind enemy defences to help secure the landing beaches. In just over an hour at 0545 hours a massive naval bombardment will begin from the fleets covering the beaches that include seven battleships 4 of which are British and 3 American.
And, at 0725 hours troops of the 50th Northumbrian Division, 69th and 231st Brigade and the 8th Armoured Brigade will be the first of the six American, British and Canadian infantry divisions to set foot on the beaches. They are being preceded as I write by Special Forces of the Special Boat Service and Royal Marine Commandos.
Later today Prime Minister Winston Churchill will rise to speak in the House of Commons. “I have…to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning the first of the series of landings in force upon the European Continent has taken place. In this case the liberating assault fell upon the coast of France. An immense armada of upwards of 4,000 ships, together with several thousand smaller craft, crossed the Channel. Massed airborne landings have been successfully effected behind the enemy lines, and landings on the beaches are proceeding at various points at the present time”.
Under the ‘Supreme’ command of US General Dwight D, Eisenhower Operation Overlord is a truly multinational effort. The Allied Expeditionary Naval Forces is led by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay of the Royal Navy, the air forces by RAF Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory and 21st Army Group by General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery victor of El Alamein.
Seventy years on I had the honour Tuesday to watch Beating the Retreat on Horseguards Parade in central London as a guest of the First Sea Lord. This is an ancient British military parade that was performed meticulously by the massed bands of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines, the band of the Royal Netherlands Navy and the band of the United States Marine Corps. As I watched I reflected that my life today would not be possible without D-Day – I am a Brit, I am married to and live with the Dutch, I am a passionate believer in the United States and the continuing need for American leadership, I am soon off to Ottawa and I am a European. To that end, the precision of the military bandsmen of three great democracies marching and wheeling around Horseguards reminded me of the enduring importance of the military alliance of the Western democracies forged on those magnificent but bloodied beaches. Indeed, both NATO and the EU were born on those beaches.
Later, as I looked down on Horseguards from the Duke of Wellington’s famous office with a very nice glass of Royal Naval Chablis in my hand I was also struck by the enduring need for democratic values and liberties to be underpinned by hard military power in an unforgiving world. Indeed, if there is one testament to the men who put their lives on the line on Normandy’s beaches it is that the West is no longer a place but an idea – a global idea that must be defended globally. However, today as then sound defence means hard-nosed political realism and on occasions the same sad sacrifice by the same sort of young citizen-soldiers the bodies of whom could be seen strewn sadly across the D-Day beaches by the end of that fateful day.
D-Day should also hold a mirror up to today’s European leaders. Indeed, they need to take a long, hard look into it as not a few of them gathering in Normandy today should do so in chagrin if not a little shame. This week President Obama came to Europe to pledge yet more American money in defence of Europe. America’s $1 billion European Reassurance Initiative will enhance the training, exercising and (vitally) education of NATO European forces whilst the 67,000 US military personnel currently stationed in Europe will be reinforced. Frankly, as a European I felt a little ashamed by the President’s announcement. Indeed, with only three Europeans currently spending the agreed NATO target of 2% GDP on defence (Britain, Greece and Estonia) it is shocking that in 2014 an American president should be giving American money to relatively rich Europe in pursuit of its own defence.
D-Day also reminds all of us engaged in security and defence strategy of another strategic verity – the importance of the sea to our collective defence. After a decade of land-centric operations in Afghanistan and Iraq it would be easy for military planners to try and fight the last war better. That would be a mistake. There will be no more Afghanistan-type operations in which small forces are sent into distant places at great expense for long periods in pursuit of uncertain political and social ends. Indeed, with much of the world’s population moving ever closer to the sea and congregating in huge cities in the littoral much of future security will come ‘from the sea’.
Therefore, D-Day is not some relic of irrelevant history. Indeed, D-Day remains the marker for future coalitions of free peoples and a beacon of excellence (in spite of its many problems) for future operations. However, both lessons will resonate only so long as political and military leaders have the political courage and strategic vision to confront the many lessons D-day still has to teach us about will, intent, cohesion and innovation.
Above all, D-Day reminds of the need to stand up for what is right. Clausewitz said that “War is the continuation of policy (politics) by other means”. The presence of Germany’s Chancellor Merkel today on the Normandy beaches is testament to that. Indeed, D-Day was about the liberation of all Europe including Germany from Nazism. Dr Merkel’s presence today not only graces the commemoration but is powerful proof of a Germany that stands at the heart of Europe and the heart of freedom as a model democracy – friend Germany, not enemy Germany.
And, for all the current turbulence in the West’s relations with Russia and whatever one’s views on President Putin and his Machiavellian machinations one must never forget that the defeat of Nazism owes much to the sacrifice and suffering of the Russian and other peoples in Eastern Europe. What a shame Moscow simply fails to grasp the possibilities for great (not Greater) Russia in a free Europe. Apparently preferring instead to live in fear of freedom in a strange, new Cold World War in which no-one will win least of all Russia.
In his D-Day message to the troops General Eisenhower wrote, “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of the Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world”.
As the boots of those first American, British, Canadian and other troops set foot ashore on Normandy’s long, golden beaches democracy, liberty and security came with them. It is therefore incumbent on the rest of us to ensure that neither democracy nor security is frittered away by those who too often seem to have forgotten that both security and liberty can never be taken for granted and must be invested in then as now.
Operation Overlord was quite simply stunning both in vision and commission. A few years ago I stood on the cliffs above Arromanches looking down on Gold Beach where the famed British XXX Corps came ashore. To my right lay Juno and Sword beaches and to my left the American beaches Omaha and Utah. The sheer length of the front was stunning – some 100kms/60 miles in length. However, D-day was not without cost. And, although by the end of D-Day the beaches were secured and the bridgehead on French soil established some 9000 Allied personnel lay dead killed-in-action. Therefore, today must be seen for what it is; a day of remembrance for the American, British, Canadian and other forces that began Europe’s long journey back to democracy many never to return.
How can we honour these brave, ordinary men and the veterans who still honour us and remind us with their presence? We must complete a Europe whole and free and reinvest in the defence of liberty and democracy for which my grandfather and my great-uncle (killed) fought.
In November 1942 speaking of the British Commonwealth’s victory at El Alamein in Egypt Winston Churchill said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, however, the end of the beginning”. D-Day was the beginning of the end of World War Two in the European theatre of operations.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.
Thank you, Gentlemen.
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May 12th, 2014
By Julian French.
Alphen, Netherlands. 12 May. Seventy years ago to the day on 6 June 61,715 British troops landed on the Normandy beaches alongside 57,500 Americans and some 21,500 Canadians. The liberation of Western Europe from Nazism had begun. On 9 May, as President Putin enjoyed his ‘Triumph’ in annexed Crimea and on what the Russians call Victory Day the 1990 commissioned Ukrainian-built aircraft carrier Kuznetsov together with six escorts sailed provocatively through the English Channel and into the North Sea on her way back from a port visit to Syria.
Whilst this is not the first time the Russians have sailed through the Channel the Russian mission and the timing against the backdrop of the current crisis was clearly designed to send a message about Russia’s new Machopolitik and Moscow’s determination to project twenty-first century military power and influence. And yet far from trying to rebuild the strategic military relationship with Britain after years of British sacrifice in support of US policy the Obama administration is doing all it can to end the strategic partnership with Britain. In the new age of Machopolitik it could prove to be a profound strategic mistake. Why?
The tragedy of Obama’s foreign policy is the extent to which it has been captured by EU sympathisers who see Germany as the only state that matters in Europe. The Obama administration has always reflected an American ambivalence about Britain. Sadly, what the Administration fails to realise is that by ‘strengthening’ the EU and Germany at Britain’s expense Washington is also killing NATO. Do not get me wrong, Germany has made an amazing non-military contribution to post-Cold War European stability but Berlin will never be a reliable American partner.
Indeed, the current crisis has revealed all too clearly the deep ambivalence in the German elite about Berlin’s relationships with both Moscow and Washington. Equally, London must also take responsibility for Britain’s loss of influence in Washington. Some of the overly rapid and at times ill-thought through defence cuts in the 2010 British Strategic Defence and Security Review were rightly condemned by the US. A mistake that could be compounded by the 2015 ‘Silent’ Defence and Security Review as London again confuses politics with strategy by killing public debate on Britain’s big strategic defence choices.
Equally, the presence of the Kuznetsov also reveals some other strategic realities to which the ideologues of the Obama administration need to awaken. First, Britain will be Europe’s strongest economy alongside Germany and one of the world’s top ten for years to come. Indeed, with the euro-free British economy now growing at over 3% per annum London is next month going to wipe out all the losses suffered as a result of the American-inspired 2008 sub-prime loans banking crisis. Second, Britain will also strengthen its position as Europe’s strongest military power over the next decade and remain one of the world’s top five.
Furthermore, for all its failings SDSR 2010 also got some things spot on in the search for a balance between military capability and affordability even if the tortuous way Britain got there can only be described as well, er, British. Implicit in the new Royal Navy is a switch from the twentieth century land-centric forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to a new type of twenty-first century deeply joint core force able to operate successfully at the high end of missions across six global domains – air, sea, land, cyber, space and knowledge. And, if successful Britain’s novel new concept for reserves could see the British create a high-end professional force embedded in British society able to reach across and beyond government to civilian partners.
9 May also demonstrated Britain’s re-emerging strategic capability. Sailing alongside the ageing Russian aircraft-carrier was the 2012 commissioned HMS Dragon one of a series of new Type 45 destroyers with capabilities that impress even the United States Navy. Indeed, with the first of two fleet aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth about to be launched in the summer and new Astute-class nuclear attack submarines now joining the fleet by 2025 the British will be America’s strongest military ally anywhere combining unrivalled experience with real capability and knowledge.
So Mr President, in this new age of Machopolitik get over your anachronistic dislike of a past Britain. A strategic Britain remains a vital US interest because only such a power with real capability will be able to help lead Europeans and others to operate effectively in the field alongside hard-pressed US forces. Just like on D-Day.
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April 26th, 2014
By Julian French.
Alphen, Netherlands. When asked by a journalist back in the 1960s what worried him most patrician British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan allegedly replied, “Events, my dear boy, events”.
President Obama has clearly been taken aback by Russia’s use of force and insurrection in Ukraine. Obama’s opponents like to cast the President as a foreign policy naïve who does not really understand nor feel comfortable with the idea of American power. And yet as President Obama begins a four-nation Asia-Pacific tour in Japan far from lacking grand ambition the ideal of creating a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) built on open trade could be said to be the beginning of a truly grand strategic Obama Doctrine.
The problem is that the Obama Doctrine is more appearance than stated ambition which is the hallmark of this Administration. It would appear to emphasise trade power rather than hard, military power and it would appear to be built on two potentially grand free-trade deals with democracies. The apparent aim is to help America regain grand strategic pre-eminence via the twelve-state Asia-Pacific-focussed TPP and the thirty-plus state Euro-Atlantic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
The Doctrine also makes some apparent sense. Taken together a TPP/TTIP nexus would represent some 75% of world trade. The message to America’s strategic competitors China and Russia is clear (apparently); continue to rig the trading relationship in your favour and/or use force to resolve territorial disputes and you will be excluded from the partnerships at your cost.
It is precisely the apparent long-term strategic ambition of the Obama Doctrine where both the TPP and TTIP could have their greatest impact. Implicit in both is an American attempt to rebrand the ‘West’ as a global idea built on democracy and trade.
As such both partnerships (note they are not formal treaties) could provide the economic underpinnings of a new world-wide security web (WWsW) specifically but implicitly designed to constrain and contain dangerous revisionist powers such as China and Russia. In that light America’s emphasis on Asia-Pacific is less a pivot and more the rebalancing of twenty-first century American grand strategy away from Europe and and a hitherto exclusive post-911 struggle with Islamism.
As an aside Tony Blair’s rather strange intervention in London that the world’s great powers put aside their differences and refocus exclusively on Islamism as a threat was special pleading by yesterday’s man about yesterday’s big issue yesterday. Of course Islamism remains a threat but it must take now its place in the Pantheon of grand threats America and its allies must grand strategically consider.
However, what makes President Obama’s Asia-Pacific tour truly grand strategic is the implicit re-positioning of American grand strategy firmly on the Continental United States and the American interest.
Asian, Australasian and European allies and partners need to understand that. Of course, it would be nice to think President Obama understands the Obama Doctrine. Too often he presents American strategy more as theory than practice. This makes the Obama Administration not only appear unsure of strategic grip but particularly vulnerable to Harold MacMillan’s “events”.
Apparently…
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March 31st, 2014
By Julian French.
“Forget these frivolous demands which strike a terror to my fainting soul”. So pleads the Devil’s agent Mephostophilis to Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Goethe-inspired play.
Faustus has just agreed twenty-four years of power and luxury in return for the eternal damnation thereafter of his soul. The opportunity Moscow seized to annex Ukraine-Crimea was made possible by three factors; Europe’s energy dependency, Russian investments in European financial centres most notably London and European unilateral disarmament.
Today, Russia supplies EU member-states with 25% of their oil and gas. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland import between 70% and 100% of their gas from Russia. Russia has also created a very strategic cartel called the Gas Exporting Countries Forum which holds up to 70% of the world’s reserves. Russia is playing hard poker as Europe as ever plays bad chess.
The defence figures alone speak for themselves. The US invests roughly $100k per soldier in 2014 compared with an average European investment of $24k with the interoperability gap between US and European forces growing daily. And, whilst the US can deploy some 12.5% of its force many Europeans can only deploy on average 3.5% .
Moreover, whilst the US spends only 36% of its defence budget on personnel some Europeans are spending between 70% and 75%. Russia is investing some $700bn in a new military by 2020. Now, I am no nostalgist about defence. States should only have the minimum military power commensurate with the achievement of legitimate foreign and security policy goals.
All of this makes President Obama’s speech in Brussels last week sound not a little desperate. “Going forward, every NATO member state must step up and carry its share of the burden by showing the political will to invest in our collective defence and by developing the capabilities to serve as a source of international peace and security”.
Not a chance! As he was speaking I was talking to a high-ranking NATO officer who told me bluntly the Alliance can no longer carry out the very collective defence President Obama referred to. Another senior NATO officer mused with me about how far the new Russian Army would make it across Europe before it was stopped. Capability, will and intent are the stuff of power not wishful thinking. Now, I do not expect Russia to roll across Europe but the Baltic States are rightfully concerned.
There are two kinds of state in today’s world; those shaping reality and those denying it. Unless Europe’s hopeless leaders begin to take a long view about the emerging big global picture then something very nasty is going to happen to Europeans…again!
In his dying hour Faustus faces up to the consequence of his hubris as he watches the hand of a clock move inexorably towards his damnation. “O lente, lente currite noctis ecquis”, he pleads – “Oh slowly, slowly run the horses of the night”.
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March 21st, 2014
By Julian French.
Somewhere in Deepest England. 20 March. Russia has used force in twenty-first century Europe to militarily occupy a significant and strategic portion of a neighbouring sovereign state…and it is about to get away with it. It does not matter that a majority of Crimeans may have wanted to rejoin Russia. In taking Crimea Russia has made a mockery of several treaties, badly undermined Europe’s security architecture and reopened questions about the relationship between might and right in Europe that were thought to be the stuff of history. What must be done?
I have just been attending a high-level meeting to consider NATO’s strategic narrative and the agenda for the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales. My colleagues and I talked against the background of a faint but constant drum-beat as Russia consolidated its Crimean land grab. One must be conceptually clear at such moments; there are few if any short-term actions NATO and its members can take to get Crimea back to Ukraine, but there should be both a decisive response and medium-to-long term consequences for Russia.
First, the West must escalate not de-escalate. Therefore, the desire to rationalise away what President Putin has done must be pushed away. This is a strategic power struggle between Russia and the West about influence along the entirety of Moscow’s western and southern borders. As such Russia’s action has potentially the most profound of consequences for Europe and beyond.
Second, the invasion of Crimea should not be seen as an event but rather part of Russian strategy. At the meeting one of my colleagues said that Russia will pay a high financial price to maintain Crimea. Moscow could not give a jot. Russia’s invasion is about history and strategy. As such Putin’s masterstroke has been to destabilise every former Soviet republic with one act. He has also reinvigorated Russia’s sphere of influence and greatly damaged the strategic credibility of the West of which NATO is a central pillar. He has also ended any pretence to further EU and NATO enlargement and with it the idea of a Europe whole and free.
Third, President Putin has also come out of the power closet with a bang and in so doing redefined the meaning of ‘legitimacy’ in Russia. Any hope that Russia would at some point morph into a liberal European style parliamentary democracy is now gone. Russia is now a fully-blown aggressive revisionist power on Europe’s border with a classically Russian strong man at the helm who is wrapping himself in the Russian flag to justify power and position. That might not work for more urbane Muscovites but it goes down a hoot in much of rural Russia.
This precisely the kind of moment NATO is for. So, what can be done?
- NATO leaders must move quickly to place military forces in the Baltic States. This will reassure them and assure their security under Article 5 of the Treaty of Washington.
- A Western military tripwire must be established along NATO’s border with Russia to complicate Moscow’s regional-strategic calculation.
- The US must quickly bring back two additional Brigade Combat Teams to Europe to reinforce the existing force.
- Exercises must begin for the rapid reinforcement of NATO forces in Eastern Europe in the event of a crisis as part of a new Forward Deployment strategy.
- NATO must end its reluctance to base Allied forces in Eastern Europe out of fear it might be seen by Moscow as provocative. Russia is the provocateur.
- The NATO-Russia Council must be suspended;
- The modernisation of Article 5 collective defence must now be urgently reconsidered to include cyber and missile defence.
The invasion also completely resets the challenge NATO will face at the Wales summit in September which must now send a stiff message. High-level political guidance must be given to the NATO Secretary-General to undertake a broad sweep of the new strategic landscape, Russia’s place in it and thereafter begin the necessary planning.
Specifically, the Alliance must be tasked with considering all the necessary means to counter Russian intimidation and possible aggression and include within that wider consideration of Russia’s influence, not least in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Sadly, Russia will end the weak co-operation of late over Syria and Iran but that was probably intended by Moscow in any case. Critically, the summit should re-establish the symbolic commitment of all NATO nations to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence.
What will happen? Sadly, NATO is split right down the middle between Central and Eastern European members rightly alarmed by the invasion and Western Europeans fast rationalising Russia’s action away. It is that which Putin has understood and it is precisely the seams and grey areas of Alliance resolve that he has brilliantly exploited with speed and to effect.
Crimea is gone and the fate of Eastern Ukraine probably lies in the resolve and will of Western capitals. Thus far there has been no will and little resolve, particularly in Western Europe. Indeed, Ukraine could face a dark fate if Europeans in particular continue to show the almost derisory and utterly spineless response they have shown thus far.
If all of the above sounds assertive and uncomfortable…it is. This is not yet a new Cold War but it is certainly the start of a Cold Peace. It is time for the West to stand up and stand together. Failure to act and NATO’s strategic narrative may well have been written by Hans Christian Andersen.
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March 14th, 2014
By Julian French.
Alphen, Netherlands. 14 March. Four events this past month have highlighted the rapidly shifting balance of military power in the world. Yesterday General Sir Peter Wall, Head of the British Army, warned that “moral disarmament” would be exploited by Britain’s enemies and that he could not rule out future “force-on-force” engagement.
In fact, Britain is morally and actually disarming along with much of Europe. According to US think-tank CSIS cuts to European defence budgets between 2001 and 2013 represented a per annum compound reduction of 1.8% per annum or about 20% over the period.
Last month American Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced further cuts to the US armed forces. Hagel said it was “time to face reality”, as he followed Britain in announcing a 15% reduction in the size of the US Army, as well as other cuts. Russia’s February 2014 invasion of Ukraine-Crimea should have reminded Europeans of the inextricable link between military power and political ambition, particularly for the non-democracies.
Indeed, what was thought unthinkable in Europe even a month ago is very clearly thinkable in the Kremlin. By 2020 Russia will invest some $700bn in its armed forces and increase defence expenditure from the current $90.7bn per annum to around $122bn.
Last week Beijing announced that the 2014 Chinese defence budget will increase by 12.7% to $132bn per annum. Beijing has been growing the defence budget by at least 11% per annum since 1989.
If China continues to grow the military by about 12% per annum, which is implied in the China’s 2013 Defence White Paper then by 2020 China will be spending $230bn on defence. Whilst such expenditure will not match the planned US c$560bn of expenditures in 2020 taken together the combined Chinese and Russian expenditures on their respective armed forces will total some $350bn. Many of those forces will be modern. .
Read between the lines of both Chinese and Russian military strategies it is clear their aim is to complicate America’s strategic calculation by forcing the US to stretch its armed forces thin the world over. With most Europeans wilfully refusing to help resolve Washington’s deepening and acute strategic dilemma US expenditures of $560bn on defence by 2020 will in time come to be worth far less dollar for dollar and Chinese and Russian investments worth more.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine-Crimea and China’s serial hiking of defence spending really should mark the end of the fantasy of a new liberal world order. It is power that is shaping the twenty-first century not values. And, if values are to mean anything they must be backed by power.
It is indeed time to face reality.
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March 11th, 2014
By Julian French.
Izmir, Turkey is a strategic tipping point for NATO. The December end of major combat operations in Afghanistan is being foreshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine-Crimea. Ideally, at this pivotal moment NATO’s September 2014 Wales summit should consider the strategic and operational future of the Alliance into the 2020s.
To that end, I am attending high-level conferences in Washington, Britain and Paris to consider those issues and will act as rapporteur for one of those meetings. It is against that backdrop I have just attended and addressed the Corps Commanders’ Meeting at Allied Land Command in Izmir, Turkey in support of Lt. General Hodges and his team. Are NATO corps ready for the coming challenges?
So, what is my assessment of NATO’s corps? There were two NATOs on show in Izmir – hard corps and soft corps NATO. Some NATO nations get this and understand the need to re-generate Alliance deterrent credibility via a high-end force built on deployable strategic headquarters of which the corps are a key part.
Other NATO nations reject this and continue to emphasise low-level peace support operations and security force assistance – a kind of strategic Telly Tubbies land. The trouble is that too many of Europe’s political leaders are also attracted to this fool’s paradise and all too keen to make the false economy of endless defence cuts. It is a kind of strategic appeasement.
Therefore, NATO leaders must consider two options urgently. The preferred option would be a reformed force re-established on corps that are themselves firmly established on a high-end warfighting capability.
To that end a reform, experimentation, exercising and education development programme should ideally be put in place now to harmonise force concepts, structures, capabilities and doctrines.
Another option is in effect what exists today – corps that are similar in name only, operating at very different levels of ambition and capability. At present several NATO nations seem profoundly opposed to the idea of high-end reform.
My sense of the conference was of good people grappling with big issues and trying to back engineer grand strategic solutions via the military-strategic backdoor.
They will only get so far. What they need is clear political guidance allied to a renewed requisite level of ambition that properly prepares NATO forces for the undoubted challenges ahead. Surely that is one lesson of President Putin’s adventurism – if that is our politicians have the courage to see tha
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March 4th, 2014
By Julian French.
Alphen, Netherlands. 3 March. Article 30 of the May 2009 Russian National Security Strategy states, “Negative influences on the military security of the Russian Federation and its allies are aggravated by the departure from international agreements pertaining to arms limitation and reduction, and likewise by actions intended to disrupt the stability of systems of government and military administration…” The Russian invasion this past weekend is blatant flouting of international law. It is also a long-planned intervention that has been sitting in the files of the Russian Defence Ministry since at least 1991. The grand strategic reason for the intervention is the determination of Moscow to reassert control over what it sees as Russia’s “near abroad” with Ukraine as its lynchpin. However, there are five additional reasons why Moscow has seized the collapse of the Yanukovich regime as the moment to intervene – history, military strategy, military capability, politics and opportunity.
History: Ukraine has always had a strong pull on the Russian mind as it is the spiritual home of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1954 Ukrainian-born Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handed ‘control’ of the Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. As Ukraine was then firmly under Moscow’s control the transfer mattered little, although it did mean the de facto shift of ethnic Russians and Tartars under the nominal administrative fiat of Kiev. On Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 the transfer became a matter of both historical and strategic import to Moscow. ‘Loss’ of Ukraine to the EU (and eventually NATO) would be the final humiliation to the Kremlin following two decades of perceived retreat since the end of the Cold War in 1989.
Military Strategy: One of Russia’s long held strategic mantras has been the need to maintain a warm water naval base that could enable Russian influence in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Sevastopol has long provided just such a facility for the Black Seas Fleet, which is in fact the Russian Mediterranean Fleet. The nature of the Russian military operation this weekend and the use of Special Forces to establish a bridgehead at Simferopol and Sevastopol Airports are indicative. They point to a classic Russian expeditionary operation that creates and exploits local unrest to enable seizure of the seat of government as well as control of land, sea and air space. The initial aim is to secure the Sevastopol base and its lines of supply and re-supply with Russia.
Military Capability: In 2010 Russia announced it would inject $775 billion into the professionalization and modernization of its armed forces. This followed the disappointing performance of Russian forces in 2008 during Moscow’s seizure of parts of Georgia. The bulk of those new forces are established in the Central and Western Military Districts which abut the Ukrainian border. The kit being worn by the deployed force demonstrates a mix of Special Forces (Spetsnaz) and specialised forces and reflects the effort Moscow has made to improve deployability of its elite professional forces.
Ukrainian forces have enjoyed no such modernization. In any case the upper echelons of the Ukrainian military’s command chain are deeply split, as evinced by the defection this weekend by the Head of the Ukrainian Navy. Many senior Ukrainian officers owe their appointment to Yanukovich.
Politics: The Putin regime was established in 2000 and led to the cult of Putinism. It is a regime that consolidates domestic power by appealing to nostalgic Russian notions of grandeur. In particular the regime has endeavoured to recreate the sense of a Russia powerful enough to re-capture the influence Moscow enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Soviet Union’s super-power. The 2014 Sochi Olympics were very much part of the regime’s image-building. In 2013 US Secretary of State John Kerry gave equal billing to Russia in the handling of the Syria crisis and enhanced the reputation of the regime at home.
Opportunity: The Kremlin under Putin is first and foremost a strategic opportunist. The withdrawal of two US Brigade Combat Teams from Europe may seem small in and of itself. However, taken together with the ‘pivot’ to Asia and President Obama’s uncertain grip of grand strategy the US is no longer the stabilising force in Europe it once was. The Kremlin also has contempt for ideas of ‘civil power’ built around Germany and the EU. Moreover, Russia’s military renaissance has taken place in parallel with the West’s failures in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kremlin is also acutely conscious of Europe’s economic travails and de facto disarmament with total defence spending in Europe down by minus 1.8% per annum since 2001. Moreover, the refusal of all but two NATO European states to meet their obligation to spend 2% of GDP on defence has also led Moscow to conclude that Europeans lack the will and capability to block Moscow’s regional-strategic ambitions.
Implications for Russia and Ukraine: The seizure of parts of Ukraine will in the short-term strengthen the grip of Putin over Russia. However, Russia faces deep demographic and economic challenges which unless addressed will see Russia continue to fade as the West, China and others eclipse Moscow.
The east of Ukraine is very vulnerable. Moscow has a cynical view of the use of power and will almost certainly use the concerns of ethnic Russians to justify an intervention that would straighten Russia’s strategic borders and thus consolidate the new Russian sphere of influence.
Recommendations: There is no quick fix available to Western policymakers. However, Western allies must use all the non-military tools at their disposal to force the Kremlin to reconsider the costs versus the benefits of such action. That will include use of international fora to build a countervailing coalition, possibly with China which dislikes sovereignty grabs. All economic tools must be applied with sanctions imposed on key officials, with Aeroflot flights to Europe and North America suspended and Gazprom slowly removed from the European market. The accounts of senior Russians outside of the the country must be frozen. Finally, the US must re-position forces back in Europe, including the Baltic States and Europeans must commit to the re-building of their armed forces.
Conclusions: Over the medium-to-long term NATO allies must re-establish credible defence as part of a balanced economic, diplomatic and military influence effort in and around Europe. Former US President Bill Clinton and former US Ambassador to NATO Nick Burns said yesterday said that the enlargement of NATO to former members of the Soviet Bloc guaranteed their security. This is correct to a point. Without the modernisation of Article 5 collective defence the value of NATO membership will over time erode and if Putin remains in power the Kremlin will exploit such weakness.
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February 21st, 2014
By Julian French.
A brief survey of Britain’s world reinforces the challenges the country faces and the need for effective national strategy. Be it the threat posed by terrorism or states, the relatively benign world-view in the 2010 National Security Strategy seems already out-dated. There is clearly a growing need to compete effectively in the global race with states, which, in turn, suggests a new strategic mind-set is needed, together with a re-organisation of state tools and the commitment of appropriate resources.
Furthermore, the fusion of terrorism, global flows of illegal funding in support of such groups also raises the spectre of terrorists armed with mass-destructive power. Such a threat is not immediate but cannot be discounted and would act as an asymmetric leveller, forcing states such as Britain to seek a balance between a credible defence against such groups, and sufficient expeditionary military power to deter, disrupt and, if necessary, reach out and destroy. If that happens, then counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency and counter-intelligence would then need to merge and Britain’s security effort organised accordingly.
At the inter-state level, effective non-proliferation regimes enshrined in international organisations such as the UN, will, and must, remain central to British strategy and yet they are fraying and could fail. At the very least, Britain must work to continue to ensure the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other multilateral arms control regimes and slow the spread of nuclear weapons, but what if a state breaks out? If that happens, which frankly seems only a matter of time, the need for effective nuclear deterrence could well again become pressing, however ghastly that sounds.
Facing up to the challenges in Britain’s world will be challenging, but it is a challenge British strategy must grip. The problem is that Britain suffers from an overly one-dimensional view of threat – terrorism – important though that threat is. Not only is Britain in danger of ceding the strategic space in Afghanistan to the enemy, it has become overly focused on that enemy. As a result, Britain is failing to properly consider the large ends of grand strategy in the round and the large means that could need to be devoted to them in the coming years, given the growing pressures in the international system are not just about failed states and failed ideas. Power is back. Only if Britain’s leaders have the political courage to scan Britain’s strategic landscape and see it for what it could be, rather than what they hope, will the country begin to place security and defence in its proper context.
Indeed, the list of risks and threats discussed herein is by no means complete. There are also tensions in the Arctic High North, concerns over the security of the Gulf States, Baltic insecurity, conflict in the Horn of Africa, piracy, human and drug trafficking, trade insecurity, organised crime, the frictions caused by a rapidly growing world population – the list goes on. The challenge for Britain and its allies and partners will be to see these challenges in the strategic round, not as a series of iterative one-offs, which is, of course, the political temptation.
Clearly, the scope, extent and nature of change is challenging traditional British concepts of security and defence and demanding creative approaches to conflict prevention, response and consequence management. It is change that will also demand of leaders a determination to influence events not merely to react to them, and it is this challenge that British leaders schooled in politics rather than strategy will face in the coming years. However, to meet that challenge, London must think anew about British power and influence and to what ends they are applied and how.
Partnership will, of course, be central to British strategy. However, such method will only be achieved if Britain has the power to be an attractive partner and sufficient societal and governmental cohesion to act as a leader. Therefore, to compete effectively in the global race, the British must first have a sound grasp of the scope and extent of change and a clear understanding about where best to focus the British strategic effort. At the very least, Britain must re-develop a sound capacity to scan the strategic horizon, rather than merely react to the headlines of the moment.
Only then will the British establish a proper appreciation of the extent and nature of the power shifts taking place in the world. Only then can the fashioning of British security policy, from which national strategy flows, be properly made with any confidence. Such a response will need to be radical, rather than incremental. Such an appreciation will also necessarily lead to a range of assumptions and policy choices that will fashion Britain’s political, security, diplomatic and military effort into the future.
Given the nature of power in today’s world, how it is measured and quantified, both as an absolute commodity and relative capability, statecraft will be critical. Ultimately, soft power is nought without credible hard power. Therefore, how Britain conceives, makes and exercises strategy in the coming years will be critical. In the twenty-first century, only a clear-headed view of Britain’s place and power in the world will enable Britain to compete effectively in the global race and secure its interests, values and people.
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