What Does COVID-19 Mean For The Future Of The British Armed Forces?

The COVID-19 virus continues to dominate the global way of life. This pandemic has changed in a few short weeks how the planet operates and fundamentally altered many long held assumptions about our way of life and values, particularly in the West.

For the UK the response has been focused around the NHS and the magnificent people who work in it. But equally it has seen pressure and challenge placed on a wide variety of other sectors including the retail industry, the emergency services and a variety of other actors who have all found themselves called to serve in ways previously unimaginable.

For the British Armed Forces the response has been one of stepping up to provide military assistance to the civil authorities (MACA) – a well tried and tested process which has seen the military deploy assets across the UK to provide support on a range of areas.

The MOD has quickly deployed a combination of logistical support, air assets and other niche capabilities to help provide appropriate support to the civil authorities. For example, there is now a forward operating base at Kinloss housing a Puma helo detachment to provide emergency airlift in the Highlands and Islands region.

In London, City Airport has been closed to public traffic and is now operating with RAF C130 aircraft next to the Excel Centre (which with military assistance has now become a 4000 bed hospital). Around the nation the military is stepping up to offer assistance where needed. Full information on the MOD response to date can be found HERE

While the crisis continues the focus must be on delivering day to day support and achieving operational success, there are undoubtedly longer-term questions that need to be asked about what this operation means for the MOD and the future of the Armed Forces.

This was touched on in a fascinating twitter thread led by senior MOD staff a few days ago seeking views of what COVID-19 meant for the future of the Armed Forces and UK security. The purpose of this article is to try and capture Humphrey’s very personal views on what can be taken from this situation as it currently stands.

Right now, the Integrated Security Review is underway, although ostensibly intended to report later this year, it may well be the case that COVID-19 causes this to be extended as a result. This provides an ideal opportunity to review what has gone on, and whether this means more changes are needed to the armed forces, or if previous assumptions have been proven, broadly, correct.

Arguably COVID-19 is a strategic shock on the scale of the end of the Cold War or the 9/11 terror attacks. It has forced a profound change on the international system and will have repercussions that will be felt for many years to come. How the UK responds though will be of interest – will it act in a manner akin to the 1968 withdrawal from East of Suez, or will it be required to implement massive cuts in the manner of 1970s defence reviews?

At a high level we can probably safely assume that the review will conclude that MACA remains of fundamental importance as a key armed forces mission. But there are a lot of other hard questions and learning points that do need to be considered.

Firstly, this period has acted as a reminder that come a crisis, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily respect your planning assumptions. By this it means that while the armed forces are either locked down, getting ready for domestic operations or otherwise engaged, it does not mean that other nations will not make mischief.

The news that the Russian armed forces have demonstrated an unusually high level of activity in recent weeks around UK waters is telling – a combination of multiple Bear flights requiring mass scrambling of the Typhoon QRA, coupled with multiple warship visits requiring the activation of 9 Royal Navy warships to escort them safely serves as a reminder that for other nations, this is very much business as usual.

This is a reminder that while the UK may plan on attributing force levels and being able to respond to tasks in a certain way, there needs to be enough resilience built into the system to respond to other commitments too.

While the Russian presence in UK waters is a routine occurrence (and has gone on this way for decades) it still demands a Royal Navy response. The question is whether there are enough assets available to cope with this sort of surge from potential opponents who will not respect the fact that we are locked down.

If anything, this has served as a timely reminder that when the chips are down, our potential enemy may come to us whether we like it or not. Are we as a nation able to cope with both handling major MACA tasks such as a pandemic style lockdown and protecting our waters and airspace?

This then raises the next question about how the military is structured and operates. Does this crisis suggest to us that perhaps the time has come to look again at some of our assumptions around global basing and operations, and our desire to partake of them?

There seems to be a difficult question to ask around whether there is continued value in the UK maintaining small sized deployed forces around the globe on a variety of tasks. The global lockdown has shown that when the global air routes get turned off, its rather hard to get anywhere.

Similarly, if our people are deployed on military operations globally as part of a coalition, are they at greater risk during a pandemic outbreak, or event when supply chains are stretched, and is the UK able to render the assistance needed. For example, were there to be a crisis in the Gulf or South East Asia now, could the UK offer the assistance or consultation it is obligated to do under various bilateral treaties and pacts like the Five Power Defence Agreement (FPDA)? If help were sought, could the UK effectively respond in time in a meaningful way?

One key lesson from this crisis is that even for a globally deployed nation like the UK, which has one of the most extensive and capable armed forces for operating around the world going, there is a finite limit to what can be done. In the event of a crisis, can the UK hope to respond meaningfully if a second crisis kicks off?

Perhaps this is the spur for the ISR to start asking difficult questions around the extent to which the UK can meaningfully operate globally – is it sensible, for instance, to aspire to play a role in the Asia Pacific region if disruption to global supply chains means that we could not reach there in a crisis?

Likewise, is there an argument to be made that a ‘toe in the water’ approach is actually harmful – it implies a sense of interest and commitment to the host nation, but in a crisis could lead to more harm as not only would the UK be potentially caught up, but it would not necessarily be able to help. To that end, has the time come to use the ISR to think the unthinkable and step away from the global presence to a more limited one that can be sustained in a crisis?

There is a second school of thought though that asks what value the Permanent Joint Operating Bases have at times like this, and whether in fact this global footprint and laydown in fact is of huge benefit to the UK. For instance, the presence of the RAF in the Falklands is essential to maintaining the link to the UK, while more widely the Cyprus facilities provide sovereign basing in a busy part of the world inextricably linked to our interests.

An equally compelling lesson could be made that this crisis has taught us the value of having facilities in locations of interest to provide access when required. Unlike many foreign bases, the PJOBs provide the UK with a level of operational freedom that cannot be obtained via bases in third part countries.

The crisis could be said to show that the freedom of access to airports, ports and other facilities at times like this is essential as it allows the UK Government the ability to move its forces around the world with relative ease.

The experience of France, which has been able to maintain flights between Tahiti and Paris due to their being classed as domestic flights points to some of the benefits of maintaining a sovereign overseas presence – it permits the UK the ability to be able to deploy forces when required without the constraints associated with deploying into a foreign nations air/maritime facilities, and with the risk of having troops locked down in quarantine imposed by another nation.

This discussion though on whether the ISR should consider overseas basing also needs to look more widely at the expeditionary and logistics tail that the modern military requires. Since the 1990s the widely accepted dogma has been that ‘Just In Time’ delivery is all that is needed, and that stores and spare parts have been run down, because it makes as much sense to get them commercially delivered as it does to maintain stockpiles that will not be touched.

For some operations this makes perfect sense – if your holdings are limited and you only require small numbers of an item, then relying on the commercial sector to provide one under a support contract, paying as needed, rather than paying more upfront makes sense.

The challenge though is when large chunks of your expeditionary forces are reliant on contractor logistics or just in time models that then fall apart when pandemics lead to lockdowns, disrupting your support chains and throwing the system into confusion.

The big question that needs to be asked from this is whether this principle works well anymore- can we assume that it makes sense to plan on coalition operations with the assumption that firms like KBR or others will be there to pick up the logistics tail when needed? It worked in Afghanistan and Iraq to a reasonable level, but is this going to be the same going forward?

The challenge though is that to bring logistics back in house comes with a hefty bill – it would require re-establishing capabilities, building up spare parts and supply chains and associated headcount too. The question is where does the money come to pay for this enhanced resilience and what has to be sacrificed to pay for it?

There is unlikely to be any spare money floating around for defence, so any move to make the system more resilient will need to come from savings in the system, which in turn means stopping doing other tasks and roles. What has to stop being done in order to find the cash to enable the UK to do properly ‘in house’ logistical support?

Of course, the wider question is as much where is the UK going to operate in future anyway? Much as 9/11 saw the heavy shift of funding into handling CT work, and trying to build forces and capabilities that could respond to the threat of terrorism (the SDSR New chapter in 2002) and supporting home operations, will the COVID-19 pandemic drive similar fundamental changes to how the UK employs its military?

The 2002 New Chapter is well worth a read because it focused on trying to use the reserves via a ‘Civil Contingencies Response Force’ (CCRF) and trying to bring the military into supporting first responders at home. The CCRFs have long been abandoned, which feels a missed opportunity as they would have been ideal right now.

The question then is whether nearly 20 years later the UK decides to again focus more heavily on UK operations and support to other government departments as its main effort? UK Operations have long been something that the military has been involved in in a very niche way, providing specialist units and capabilities, but trying where possible to avoid becoming too heavily sucked in to working as the provider of last resort.

What COVID-19 has shown though is that in a crisis the military are the only part of the UK government apparatus that can bring heavy lift capabilities, logistics and planning functions to bear in a very short time frame to support government tasking. A lot of this has been improvised or come up with in short order to respond to the nature of the crisis, but it is reasonable to ask whether this needs to be done more?

Would it be sensible for the UK to invest more in supporting home operations, and being able to provide more support arm capabilities to ensure that the NHS and other organisations can cope, or would that be an overreaction? The risk is that if the pandemic is a once in a generation event, the military may restructure itself for UK operations in a way that will never be used again in our lifetimes – and potentially in the process stepping back from other capabilities and roles that will take decades to re-establish if needed again.

This is the heart of the problem facing the ISR team – does COVID-19 represent the new normal for defence, which needs to be tackled and embraced with the military working as a a supporting element to UK operations, or does it represent a one off event where the response has been helpful, but not a reason of itself to rush to restructure how work is done?

If homeland operations become of greater importance, then this in turn raises bigger questions about preparation for other activity. How much of the military will be held at readiness in the UK for this sort of work – can we risk deploying logistics enablers overseas if to do so risks the ability to respond to UK ops?

The challenge is that as with many military tasks, the more important the notice and readiness of the operation is in theory, the harder it is to cut assets free to go and do other things. Keeping units held at high readiness for UK ops may be good from a planning perspective, but would be a morale sucking task, and reduce the ability of the UK to operate more widely – what does this mean for our longer term interests and operations in the Gulf and Far East – do they fall by the wayside or do risks get taken?

There are other questions too around how Defence structures itself to respond to this sort of crisis. A major driver right now is to close sites, to consolidate organisations and reduce the size and holdings of the Defence Estate. Yet what this crisis has proved is that what is needed now is land – lots of land, with empty hangars and buildings for everything from mortuaries to hospitals to emergency accommodation.

The curious outcome of this may be that Defence finds that even though it has an estate far too big for its day to day needs (and one that it struggles to maintain or keep fit for purpose at times), it may not be politically possible to dispose of large swathes of land as a result. Suddenly this means Defence gets stuck with the bill for sites it doesn’t need, and has to find significant efficiency savings elsewhere as a result, at a time when it is already financially struggling.

Other questions that need to be considered are whether the force mix is right for Defence Medical Services. For years the sensible action has been to send the military medical personnel into NHS hospitals where they can run military units, but also get hands on training and experience in a way that wouldn’t have been possible under the old military hospital system.

The challenge though is whether it is possible to assume that Defence can rely on being able to draw those resources back during a future crisis, or if the NHS need is sufficiently great that it is forced to choose between responding to critical tasks at home, or discretionary intervention overseas. Whatever happens, there is likely to be a very difficult balance struck for the future of military medical staff as we try to work out how they are best employed.

As noted, the one thing this crisis has reminded us is that when the chips are down, don’t underestimate the ability of other nations to cause mischief. This is particularly the case with NATO right now. The Russians have already shown a willingness to sail in a way intended to put extra pressure on the RN and RAF, and they may well be thinking similarly about the Baltic states too. 

The challenge for planners in the post COVID world is to work out whether NATO and coalition operations can be credible in a world of pandemic lockdown? For example, is it sensible to assume that Article 5 is credible when multiple countries have their armed forces engaged in domestic security work, or supporting over stretched health services?

Is the UK intent to rely on coalition partners to provide troops, materiel and support sensible if these may not necessarily be available if required? Does this mean the UK needs to drastically rethink how they contribute to NATO in future, and whether more logistics support and medical support and all the other enablers needed to keep an Army battlegroup in the Baltics needs to be enhanced, or if it is even still credible. Can you mount multi-national deterrence in the land domain in a pandemic addled world?

This is the sort of question that is likely to dominate Staff Courses for many years to come, but whether these are virtual or physical classes is not yet clear. One of the most interesting and unexpected impacts of COVID-19 on the MOD has been the forced shift to electronic ways of working, and in doing things electronically rather than in person.

For the military this raises very interesting questions about adopting e-learning in far more depth than before. Has the time come to actively question the need for Staff College in the same way – can the teaching be delivered differently, for example via modules done in the evenings or weekend training? To what extent does building the social network from your cohort matter as a tangible part of staff training and how does this change in a world where virtual drinks seem the new hot thing to do?

Plenty of parts of Defence are likely to be asking similar questions – suddenly the move to working at home has focused attention on the infrastructure required to support this sort of work. It will be interesting to see the difference in terms of productivity and outputs if a dispersed team no longer has the same pressures to edit documents and amend work to make it JSP101 compliant rather than adding anything of tangible value to a document.

Perhaps this is the moment where Defence can finally break free from the shackles of the appalling document that is JSP101 – ostensibly a guide to defence writing, but in reality a tool beloved for generations by staff officers who have little of value to say, but who feel the need to make formatting amendments to a document in track change format. If this is the opportunity to instead focus on what people are saying, thinking critically about the document and not the formatting, then this can only be a good thing. If JSP101 dies because of COVID-19, more than a few will not mourn its passing.

The wider question too is of dispersed ways of working and using video and corporate IT to provide solutions for teams. This is a good opportunity to address the risk taking attitude of Defence to using ‘not invented here’ solutions to handling low classification video calls, and whether the time has come to embrace what is commercially available and accept an element of risk, or if it is better to rely on in house products. Is this the moment that the much trailed and hyped ‘Defence Connect’ in house app rises to the challenge, or does it fail spectacularly?

Already it is possible to see significant innovation in terms of getting staff to use apps more intelligently, so it will be interesting to see whether this continues post return to work, or if the move back into physical offices leads to a relative decline in productivity and increase in paper shuffling.

Hopefully this is the moment that ‘working from home’ becomes socially acceptable to the military. 

Already widely embraced across Government, there is still a sense in some quarters of the armed forces that to remote work is to somehow skive, or at the least miss valuable OJAR bumsnorkelling opportunities. Staff who want to work remotely are often looked at oddly, as if the idea of not coming to an office to work is wrong. Hopefully a big win for Defence will be the widespread adoption and acceptance that it is okay to work from home.

A final area that may need further examination is the role of the Reserves in supporting national operations. The volunteer reserves have spent many years focusing on recruiting and training people to be specialists in specific areas in order to provide additional capabilities to bulk units out on wartime mobilisation (for example the role of the Royal Yeomanry in providing MBT units to the Army) or providing highly skilled niche work for both regular and operational needs – for example press or intelligence officers.

This crisis has seen a call on the Reserves to provide people at short notice, not necessarily in their intended roles to provide general support to operations in the UK. This perhaps raises questions more widely about whether the Reserve could be the source of future headcount for this sort of op, effectively mirroring the long abandoned CCRF concept, or if it is still needed as contingency for wider operations.

Part of the challenge the Reserves have had in recent years is the perception that to join is to essentially be mobilised regularly to go abroad on operations – not an appealing prospect to many employers. A move to embedding the reserve more effectively in supporting UK operations, providing people with military skills and experience to enhance the response, as well as a repository of wider real world experience may help increase recruitment and see more support from employers who realise that if their staff are mobilised, it is for a genuinely national crisis.

There is likely too to be a need to examine the wider function of the Regular Reserve, the mobilisation obligation placed on all former regular personnel – reports suggest former soldiers are being called on to return to the colours, although it is unclear the extent to which this has been successful.

A number of public bodies have had success in asking for former members to return to help in time of need – for example doctors, nurses and police. One lesson from COVID-19 may be that the military could make better use of the Regular Reserve as a way of enhancing responses for UK operations.  

There is too a wider question for the role of the civilian in Defence. There are a large number of civil servants and wider contracted civilians working incredibly hard right now to deliver the response to this crisis. This is on top of a much wider piece where the Civil Service as a whole is working magnificently across the country, and wider world, to develop solutions to previously unexpected problems.

The question for Defence is how does it make the best of the experience its civil servants are getting, and more importantly how does it use this experience to learn about being a supporting asset for once? While the military response is crucial here, it is very much about responding to the needs and priorities of other Departments – unusually for the MOD, it is not the supported lead, which makes this a curious exercise for individuals used to being in charge, to suddenly discover their role is to facilitate and enable others to succeed.

There is a whole raft of work to be done around how in future Defence can learn from what the Civil Service has done for COVID-19, and how it can improve as a result. This is the perfect opportunity to go and see what could be done differently and serve as a good reminder that it isn’t just the military who do crisis operations. There is a massive opportunity to significantly learn from, and change, military culture here and it must be seized. The worst possible outcome from this would be the assumption that ‘what could the Civil Service possibly know about crisis management, we’ve nothing to learn from them’…

For Defence, the hardest part of all of this is probably going to be the discovery that the system can, and most likely will, be pushed to breaking point. There is only so far a ‘can do’ attitude can take you when dealing with a marathon like this. This is going to be the stress test to end all stress tests of the UK’s ability to provide support to operations at home and abroad. Whether the system can hold, whether it breaks, and if so, how quickly it regroups, repairs and reactivates are not yet known.

This is a challenge unlike anything Defence has ever really been ready to expect. A world of socially distancing self-isolating people, operating from spare rooms and officers messes, relying on people working ever longer hours to keep the system going, and trying to do so as just one part of the governments response. There will doubtless be many difficult lessons learned, and perhaps an acceptance that previous assumptions and risks were either too optimistic, or found wanting on the day. What matters for the long term is that these are properly learnt, that changes where needed are made, and that the system changes for the better as a result.

COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the way of life in the UK for everyone, regardless of age, gender, religion or location. Its effects will be felt for years to come, and the lessons are going to be hard learned. It is certain that Defence will change how it does business, and how it focuses its outputs – what matters now is that the changes made are done for the right, evidence based reasons and not knee jerk reactions which will need to be responded to by overcorrections in due course.