Time to Scrap The Thin Red Line? The SDSR and aspiration for land operations...

The Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace MP has questioned the previously unthinkable assumption that the UK can expect to go to war alongside the US. In a wide ranging interview in the Sunday Times, SofS openly questions whether the US is a reliable partner anymore and what this may mean for the forthcoming Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR).

To many commentators and fans of Defence an SDSR is a process by which they can spend hours discussing orders of battle, buying more equipment and trying to develop a dream fleet / air force / army that meets their needs. Already you can find threads to this effect all over the internet.

What is often neglected in these discussions is the fact that an SDSR is much less a shopping trip to the defence equipment bazaar, and much more a chance to take stock and reflect on the UK’s national strategic priorities, policies and choices about how it sees its position in the world, and what this may mean for the levers of government.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The current SDSR is promised to be the biggest since 1945, and the admission that the UK may have to rethink its level of integration with the US is a sign that this may be true. One of the central planks of UK defence policy for decades has been that the US, primarily via NATO but latterly in a more bilateral context is the axis around which the UK can expect to operate.

The armed forces are structured to effectively ‘plug in’ to wider US constructs, for example the Army can operate as part of a bigger US command at different levels (e.g. a UK Division could happily work as part of a US Army Corps, or a Royal Navy warship could sit integrated as part of a US Navy task force). The military is built with the view that it will work with the US at the highest levels of conflict hard baked into its DNA.

The statement that the UK is therefore looking at reducing elements of the dependency on specific US capabilities is eye opening. The UK has benefitted from a range of US programmes and special access – one reason for investing heavily in capabilities like the SSN force, SF and the Intelligence Community is that it is essentially the price of entry to gain access to a much bigger level of US support when required.

The suggestion that the UK could have to rethink where it gets its support from is particularly intriguing then as it raises some fairly deep questions about the size, structure and roles of the Armed Forces.

If you were to scrap the armed forces in their totality and start again with a totally blank slate, then it is easy to make some straightforward deductions about the sort of military and security capability that the UK requires.

As an island nation the main drivers would be both maritime protection, and the ability to monitor and defend airspace against external threats. As a global trading nation the ability to exert protection of economic assets, be it shipping, choke points or the cyber domain is also increasingly important – for without these the underpinning economy would begin to struggle and be at risk.

The question of what ground presence is required is more intriguing, as arguably outside of a small gendarmerie style force to handle counter terrorist work and some elements of domestic security and disaster relief, there is very little need or requirement for a large standing army for home operations.

The key focus for the UK to maintain a reasonable sized ground force, with supporting enablers allowing it to deploy and operate at reasonable size abroad is its commitments to NATO and wider allied partners to provide a credible deterrent, and also to provide a ‘deliberate intervention’ capability if required.

This raises questions then if the UK is not to assume it will automatically be able to operate alongside the US in an operation about firstly the appetite for future military commitments, and secondly who the partners are to provide the replacement capabilities.

The decision to step back from the EU will have repercussions for the UK and Europe in a huge range of areas, but particularly in Defence. The likelihood is that in future the UK will not be engaged in the development of an EU security capability in the same way, nor will it play a leading part to shape how it evolves. This means that whatever security arrangements emerge in Europe in coming years, they are unlikely to reflect UK needs or requirements for military operations.

In the Middle East, traditionally the UK has worked and relied on close bilateral relationships with a range of partners to help defend the region and support friendly states. The era though when the UK was the default partner of choice to most rulers, and where friendly British advisers could be found dotted throughout the region whispering in the King/Sultans ear has all but passed.

This coupled with the passing on of the previous generation of elderly rulers, for example the death of His Majesty the Sultan of Oman over the weekend seems to symbolise a changing era.

While the UK remains a valued and influential friend to many of these states in the Gulf, the relationship has changed and become one where other nations, particularly Russia and China, are increasingly vying for influence and access. This in turn has led to decisions to diversify defence procurement, with all manner of different nations providing kit to Gulf states.

In practical terms this makes it extremely difficult for the UK to look to provide a credible deterrence force in the Gulf, it is getting harder to find a way to operate in a cohesive way that can rely on genuinely integrated and effective forces to work together. Instead the UK would find its forces operating alongside partners with effectively shopping lists of Gucci kit that hasn’t been properly integrated to work together, and where the ability to share information is perhaps difficult. What this means is that the Gulf is not necessarily the environment to look to in order to provide replacement capabilities.

Beyond this the UK looks unlikely to deploy larger ground forces, and any operation is likely to be maritime or air focused  in nature – for example in the Asia Pacific region the FPDA grouping would likely involve ships and aircraft and very limited land power in any work they did. In Africa and South America there is no credible military structure to speak of that would lend itself to working as part of a coalition.

This then points to the fact that if the UK wants to operate at a distance with capabilities that don’t come from the USA will probably need to self-fund it and put it into service as a purely national capability. For the MOD this may present a very significant funding challenge that cannot easily be solved without cutting the armed forces.

At present the ability to deploy significant forces overseas is built around the idea that at best effort the UK would deploy a Division plus enabling air and maritime assets into a coalition environment (so realistically relying on a third party nation to host the forces) and carry out these operations for about 6 months.

This implicitly assumes a coalition operation led by the US, and that the UK would get access to appropriate US support as part of the wider force – for example shared HQ’s, ISTAR and so on. If the new planning assumption is that the UK has to ‘come as we are’ and be prepared to fight either in national isolation or as part of a wider and less tested alliance, then a lot has to change.

For example there would be a need to find funds to invest in more ISTAR assets, better HQ structures, enhance our logistical and airlift capability and so on. In other words invest in the sort of dull, unglamorous areas that rarely excite the attention of ‘fantasy fleet’ builders, but without which the military would fail.

The question is whether the cost required to build all of the indigenous capabilities to operate at this level is affordable, or if instead it means a scaling back of ambition to fight at the highest levels.

The bill for creating a purely national capability to support this work would be huge, and, bluntly, the money does not exist to do this. If the UK wants to operate in a self-supporting manner then it must either scale its ambition back, or it has to be prepared to scrap other assets to make it happen.

In practical terms this means having conversations around the practical limits of ambition – if the UK wanted to have an entirely nationally self supported deployable capability, what is the biggest it could affordably do? Is it a case that a deployable Division is no longer feasible because the costs incurred for all of the associated support is just too great, and is it the case that the future level of ambition may be a nationally deployable Brigade?

Once you start having this sort of conversation though, it quickly leads to a follow on one about what is the actual purpose of such a force? Why does the UK need a nationally deployable Brigade – where would it be used, for what purposes and why?

At its best a deployable Brigade allows you to operate in a fairly small part of an operating environment, but it does not give you the ability to maintain control over large amounts of land, nor is it enough to stand and fight against larger forces. In many ways it’s the worst of both worlds – too big to be just a token contribution, too small to be able to win the war on its own, it is perhaps a dangerous level to operate at because it neither offers easy exits nor quick victories.

The problem this raises is that for the Army it is hard to define what the role of the Army actually becomes in a world where we cannot assume the US will be present to help. It seems increasingly unlikely that the UK will be involved in deliberate intervention operations in future in significant scale – the associated costs and challenges are just too great.

The challenge is that at the scales the UK is likely to be able to operate, there is unlikely to be a willing opponent able to grant an easy victory. There is a wider public aversion to long term commitments that seem to resolve little but cause problems.

Even Sierra Leone, arguably the poster child of a successful intervention operation probably could not be done in the same way today due to the way that Africa has become a complex area where Russia and China are vying for influence, and where they may seek to disrupt or impact our operations in a negative way.

For the SDSR then this means having an honest conversation about what role landpower plays in the future part of Defence and whether the UK would be better advised to move to a maritime and air based strategy.

If we assume that the concept that the UK needs a large army to field a Division to enable us to scale up and operate with the US is now being actively questioned, then this means that the Army needs to be able to define what it can offer instead.

The maritime and air domains offer a combination of presence, agility to respond quickly and the way to coerce, influence and deter potential aggressors without physically committing to the operation. By definition much of their work can, and is, done as a purely national capability even at up to larger scale operations – for instance the deployment of a carrier task force.

The challenge for the land domain is that the moment it is committed to the ground, you are politically committed to resolving the situation in a different way. You are tied to the conflict or cause and either have to see it through or withdraw in ignominy. Neither option is particularly appealing and in the worst case comes with a high cost in blood and treasure.

Perhaps the future role for land power is to be used much as SofS hints in his interview – a smaller enabling force providing discrete SF style training and mentoring or aggressive raiding rather than larger scale formations on the ground.

This sort of capability, particularly when coupled with investment in the sort of soft power assets like the FCO, trade missions, national industrial capability and so on helps create a model where the UK takes a conscious decision that its national security is best resolved via investment in a combination of soft power, influence and training and not boots on the ground.

Such a decision to consciously step away from the highest levels of operations, as is hinted here by SofS, and instead focus on what we can afford means that the SDSR is likely to see cuts to troops, forces and orders of battle.

For example, if the SDSR identifies that the need to deploy a division is credible or affordable given the wider international situation, this then means significant cuts can be made to the forces which exist to support this capability. As a way of illustrating this, the decision to say only deploy in Brigade strength would reduce the number of logistics units required, the number of sealift ships needed to carry vehicles, the number of aircraft needed to fly troops into theatre and in turn the number of RN Escort ships needed to get the sealift into theatre safely.

Given the MOD is some £15bn overcommitted and the chances of the Treasury benevolently buying out this risk with an injection of cash is minimal, this sort of hard decision taking would be a good way of generating the short and long term savings required to make Defence solvent again.

The wider issue too is that the sort of areas that the SDSR needs to worry about and which will require cash investment are not the sort of areas that appeal to fans of ORBATs. To maintain a UK national capability in say imagery and cyber will require discrete investment in UK industry to keep it a sovereign capability, people and technology and not hard military power.

But is it better for the UK to invest resources in security which is not necessarily tangible but which stops threats – for instance better cyber security, better information warfare assets, and more investment in the UK intelligence community as a whole, or is it better to maintain heavy military assets that can only be used in an increasingly unlikely set of scenarios?

The SDSR is clearly being looked at in Whitehall in a way that will change how national security assumptions are made, and which will change how Defence sees its place in the world. The problem is that the outcomes, despite being right for UK security as whole, are unlikely to appeal to those who want to see more tanks, planes and guns. What seems to be emerging instead is a line of thinking about how the UK can play a credible role as a sovereign nation state, but also the costs of this and the limitations that this imposes on what can, and cannot, be afforded or delivered.

There is likely to be a lot of pain and cuts ahead which will not sit well with many. When added to a wider sense that the military role in future seems to be more about mentoring, training, discrete operations and maintaining a stand off strike capability that can be delivered by air or sea, the thinking about the model for the future security of the UK seems to be focused far more on effects, intangibles and wider government capabilities than it does ‘the thin red line’.