For those unaware that the Ministry of Defence owns 15 golf courses, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon's speech this week would have made interesting reading. For those looking for clues to the themes of the next Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), a review of defence spending due later this year, it was less helpful. So what are the big issues that Fallon—or his successor—will have to address in the review? Two stand out.
The first is the question of whether we fight out wars at home or away. A funny thing happened in the late 1990s. After a century in which we fought two wars of national survival in defence of liberal values in our own country, we started fighting wars in order to promote liberal values in other people's countries. For us, war stopped being the mechanism to address the balance of power between states and became the mechanism to address the balance of power within states. If there is a single moment that signalled this change, it was Tony Blair's Chicago speech in April, 1999—one month into the NATO expedition in Kosovo—which laid out the manifesto of liberal intervention. "This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values... if we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later," he said. The fixtures that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq were, by definition, away matches with all the risk and expense that expeditionary military operations imply.
Compare that to France after Charlie Hebdo. As a gesture of reassurance to threatened minorities and an illustration of political determination to take terrorism head on, the French army was deployed on to the streets of the nation in what was demonstrably a home match. The examples trivialise the argument, but do we fight Islamic terrorism home or away? In the West Midlands or on the upper Euphrates? Home will require a large low tech army that might increasingly resemble a gendarmerie; away will require a smaller army bristling with sophisticated capability. We can't afford both.
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However, a gendarmerie will not be much use in the Ukraine, the South China Sea, cyberspace or any of the unseen contingencies that will require a response beyond counter terrorism. So do we plan for the clear and present danger of terrorism, the more remote possibility of conventional conflict or spread our bets thinly between the two?
The second is the question of how to address our strategic deficit. If the fiscal deficit is the difference between what the nation raises and what it spends then the strategic deficit can be defined as the difference between our strategic ambition and our strategic capability (the sum of our military, diplomatic and economic instruments of power).The first is the defining political issue of our times while the second figures occasionally on the margins of national debate. The authors of the last SDSR might just have kept a straight face when, in 2010, they said there would be no strategic shrinkage but the subsequent evisceration of the armed forces now makes any such claim risible. How then is the gap between what we want to do on the world stage and what we are capable of doing to be closed?
We could increase spending on defence, the Foreign Office, MI6 and international development, but we won't. So we are likely to see a reduction in strategic ambition to match strategic capability—in other words, strategic austerity. Why is this not the best way for a middle sized, post imperial power with rather chastening recent experiences of overseas adventures to define its place in the world? Because the world is not that simple. We make our living on trade and investment in an increasingly globalised system where P5, EU,NATO, G8 and Commonwealth membership demands that we accept certain international responsibilities; renege on those and the world might renege on us.
This brings us to the only solution left standing—smart power. Smart power involves a combination of Hard Power (power achieved through the use of military force or the spending of money) and Soft Power (the influence a country can exert culturally). It has none of the linear certainties of Hard Power; it is capricious and difficult to direct; and, it would require us to regard the nuclear deterrent, the BBC World Service, the tertiary education system and the Burberry fashion label as co-equal instruments of power which generals, ambassadors and mandarins would have only limited competence to direct. In short, it would require a complete revision of our strategic thinking and a reliance on something that looks more like alchemy than rational calculation; but it may be the only choice we have.
Both of these are tricky questions, but they will need answers, soon.
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