Don't Send a Gunboat - The Military and solving domestic crises...

 When things go wrong at home, or natural disaster strikes, there are often calls and demands to ‘send in the armed forces’. Often this is entirely sensible, permitting access to much required equipment, people and resources to render emergency support and save lives. This process is well tried and tested and works well.

But there is also often suggestions that when things go more widely wrong that somehow ‘sending in the military’ is an essential requirement to fix whatever problem has emerged. The general argument is that they represent a disciplined, accountable force that will follow political direction and resolve the problems put in front of them with a ‘can do’ attitude and a sense of accountability.

Is this really the case though and does involving the military in domestic crises help or hinder responses? The big challenge with involving the armed forces in UK operations outside of their own pre-existing commitments is that there are not many spare resources hanging around waiting for a job to do.

The modern armed forces are small, and have very finite supplies of equipment, stores and people to draw on. These resources are all held at readiness to embark on military operations, and if used in the UK, can impact on their ability to do the job intended for them.

For example, deploying a logistics or medical brigade to support the COVID-19 response may make sense in the short term, but if it is being committed, what impact does this have on training and readiness? Will it still be capable of deploying on operations if its people and all over the place and resources and stores diminished?

There is a constant balancing act to be struck between being able to meet domestic short term needs and support wider commitments. While it may be appealing to want to see some camouflaged warriors striding forth in a range of random berets, cap badges, black buttons, and 58 pattern belts outside of shirts to reassure the public that the military is in charge, it also could weaken the nations ability to respond on the international stage.

This is partly because it involves drawing on assets that may be committed to operations. For example right now a not insignificant chunk of the British Armed Forces are exercising or operationally deployed across Europe and beyond.

For example the Royal Navy has, or has had, ships deployed in the Arctic, Med and Black Sea in support of a range of exercises and operations. The British Army is deployed doing joint training with the Ukraine, while the RAF is deploying air assets to provide support to a range of theatres.

This work takes time to prepare, particularly exercises, and is often scheduled months or even years ahead of its time. Other nations will invest time and money in getting ready, so to pull assets at no notice is seen as extremely poor form and can damage international relations.

Its also important to understand that many of these exercises are planned over a wide range of areas and not necessarily completely co-ordinated-  so for example the RN is unlikely to co-ordinate too heavily with the Army over the simultaneous deployment of ships inside the Arctic Circle with a parachute exercise in the Ukraine.

What this means is that it can be easy to look at facts and assume that some brilliantly planned British operation is underway, when in reality its merely a bit of a coincidence that all of this is occurring at once. (Hence we should be slightly wary of taking at face value suggestions that the UK is trying to carry out ‘ferret missions’ in case this turns out not to be the situation).

The wider problem too in addition to the risks to our international standing and ability to meet our commitments and promises is that the armed forces are often really not the right answer to complicated questions.

Just because there is a perception that ‘track and trace’ is failing does not mean that deploying the Army will make the problem go away. There is a slightly depressing narrative here that people think that only the Armed Forces have the wherewithal and the ability to fix things, and that the rest of the British State is often fairly useless.

In a situation like COVID-19 you are dealing with a situation which requires significant national response. It needs a wide mixture of skills, training, equipment and logistics to resolve and people with a lot of scientific training and experience.

The British Armed Forces have many things, but they do not have the people qualified in any great number to meet this national challenge. To think that they can turn up and solve the problem is dangerous for it is fundamentally not true.

There is absolutely a small and appropriate part to play – for example providing some planners, advisors and guidance. This can be fed into the national response in an appropriate way – for example by having trained military liaison officers working at local levels with local authorities explaining what can, and cannot be done.

It can also be delivered nationally by having the military feed into wider operational planning. It is not the case, as some have suggested that the military have tried to make their way to the Prime Minister but been prevented from doing so by officials and advisors.

Far from it – not only has the military been involved in an appropriate way since the outbreak of COVID, but it continues to be engaged. Also the Prime Minister is not kept isolated from the armed forces – he has his own ‘Military Assistant’ (MA), usually a full Colonel/Captain/Group Captain whose job is to represent the Armed Forces in No10, and ensure that they can have their interests appropriately represented.

If the PM wants immediate military advice, or if the military would like to put proposals forward, then they have someone permanently with access to the PM who can do just this. It is frustrating that some think that the armed forces are kept at distance from the PM by those who would frustrate them for it is simply not true.

It is also dangerous to assume, as has been suggested, that the Armed Forces represent fresh capability to solve the crisis. They don’t – at best they represent a very limited pool of people, and they will have been pulled off other jobs and tasks to resolve the situation. At best you get a hastily assembled force that will spend the first few weeks and months trying to work out what on earth is going on and how is it fixed?

Military leadership is great for very short-term problems when a quick blast of ‘JUST F*CKING DO IT’ can be helpful. This is not one of those occasions. This is a very complicated national effort which requires a huge cross Whitehall response to resolve, not expecting a bunch of Army Officers to turn up and solve from the outset.

The final issue of course is that of sheer capacity – it is easy to imagine that the UK armed forces can do stuff well. They absolutely can, and they can adapt and resolve problems quickly and effectively – but they have a very finite set of supplies and equipment. There is nowhere near the people or equipment capacity in the system to fix the challenges ahead – suggesting otherwise is dangerously misleading.

This perhaps comes down to a real challenge with the fact that people dislike that complicated multi-agency problems are not easy to solve. The Armed Forces have a good reputation because by and large they are called into solve otherwise insurmountable problems, and these generally require highly visual equipment and a use of short-term crisis management skills that they excel at.

By contrast much of Whitehall’s work is slower, less exhilarating, and infinitely more complex. Those trying to wrestle with the challenges of COVID testing are doing so on the basis of rapidly changing information, different policy priorities and hugely complicated circumstances.

This requires longer term skills and the ability to balance off different interests, equities, and perspectives to come up with solutions. This is a long-term battle and not one that will be solved quickly. That is not to say the armed forces can’t help, but that they aren’t the only people able to help here.

Perhaps instead of focusing on why we should be breaking the glass and calling the military in, we should be focusing on what is needed to get the civil service response to the point where it is smoother and more efficient.

Part of this is about getting the right people in at the right point and paying them appropriately. It was deeply ironic to see complaints in some papers about the number of civil servants earning over £100k per year increasing. The reality isn’t that the public sector has got people who have grown fat from a career doing nothing but shuffling papers and adding red tape earning lots of money for nothing.

Civil servants who promote into the ‘Senior Civil Service’ (roughly analogous to the 1* - 4* ranged military ranks) get a 10% payrise on promotion, thus keeping salaries nowhere near the £100k discussed in these articles.

Instead the big pay is going to people who will be joining the civil service direct from industry, usually with significant amounts of private sector experience. This form of direct entry is long espoused by those who want to see private sector experience brought into the civil service, but it does come at a cost.

In the real world, trying to attract talent to join the civil service to run the big challenging projects at senior level requires getting people to accept taking potentially huge pay cuts. The civil service cannot compete with industry on compensation packages, stock options or cars with drivers etc.

As such it means that the money (which to 99% of us seems extremely generous) is the best that can be offered for the job – and it may well not be enough. If you’re used to a salary of £200-£400k per year, why would you take a 50-70% paycut to join the Civil Service?

Part of the challenge here for the Civil Service is trying to balance off the many competing demands on what it should be doing. Attacked for not having enough specialists, it is then attacked for ‘paying too much’ to the same experts that it was told it should have brought in to fix its problems.

The really deep irony perhaps is that while people complain about Civil Service ‘fatcats’ earning far too much money, many people who expect the military to come in and solve the problem probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at the cost of the military salaries.

If you want to bring a Lt Col (SO1) level in onwards, then you’re paying a £75k per year salary as a minimum for their time (roughly the same starting point for a Senior Civil Service salary), before any allowances are added. Senior Colonels and Brigadiers are on over £100k per year, yet no one questions that they are not worth it.

It leaves us in a curious place – on the one hand commentators expect the military to come and solve the problems of the British State, despite it being ill equipped for the job at hand and having no real expertise beyond an enthusiastic problem solving attitude and a very effective ‘hand of command’.

But on the other, similar commentators seem to be complaining when the Civil Service tries to recruit and pay competitive rates for good talent, and suddenly paying almost identical wages (if not slightly less) is seen as a bad thing and a sign of fat cat waste.

Perhaps as a nation we need a genuine conversation about the value we place in public servants and how we want the relationship to work. It is tempting to ask what is it that people want – do they want the Civil Service to be capable of handling complex crisis with the best possible people, or do they want it done as cheaply as possible and then call in the Army, who cost even more, to fix things?

There is perhaps a deeper issue here around why we seem so determined to rely on the safety blanket of the military, trusting it to solve our problems, even if it is not the right organisation to necessarily lead this response.

Is it the discipline, the sense of direction, the unfailing ability to see positive outcomes in almost every situation or is it something else? Is there a sense that to see someone in uniform arrive to take over somehow shows both that the problem is being taken seriously and also that its going to get fixed (somehow or other)?

This isn’t an effort to do down the armed forces, who can do sterling work in very difficult situations, but more an observation around the curious relationship the UK has with its public sector – placing trust in those perhaps least able to solve the situation, while simultaneously decrying those who do understand the tools and challenges as not being up to the job, and probably overpaid into the bargain.

How we move to a culture where the perception of the Public Sector more widely shifts is a fascinating debate to be had. What needs to change in order that we can feel comfortable as a country in the Civil Service and know that when a crisis hits the call ‘Send in the Civil Service’ reassures us that all will be well?