Into the Grey Zone - The UK, Military Operations and Strategic Ambiguity

 

As we head towards the announcement by the MOD that will set out the planned changes for Defence in the wake of the Integrated Review, news reports continue to highlight the changing nature of the threat. One of the key takeaways from the IR was that the challenges to UK security will be far more diversified in future, and could come in ways short of outright war.

The media this week had a good example of this by reporting about how there was, reportedly, GPS jamming going on near the major RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus. This was reportedly posing a challenge to aircraft conducting operations. This sort of ‘grey zone’ effect is a good example of the sort of ambiguities that need to be tackled in future.

Akrotiri plays host to a wide range of RAF units that are conducting operations in Syria and northern Iraq, as part of Op SHADER. In the last week there have been multiple strikes, including with Typhoons launching Storm Shadow missiles, on various targets inside Iraq.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Cyprus is the main operating base in the region, so this form of GPS jamming is effectively a way of targeting UK military capabilities outside the direct conflict area. How to respond though will be a challenge – is it being conducted by nations we are operating against directly under UN resolutions, or is it through proxy allies and friends? Is it a third party ‘mischief making’ to suit its own ends?

How do you respond to a threat like this where jamming of operations can potentially impact wider military operations? This highlights the real challenge of operating in this sub conflict space where actions and activity by other nations can directly attempt to have an impact on the UK’s ability to conduct military operations but falls short of open conflict.

This is the challenge facing defence and national security planners – on the one hand they need to be able to provide sufficient mass and resource to carry out conventional military operations. The ability to deliver the proverbial ‘big stick’ remains key as a visible sign of deterrence and warning to other countries. But, the ability to defend against less traditional military threats calls for a very different approach.

For example, how do you respond to challenges like GPS jamming – respond in kind elsewhere, carry out intelligence led operations to target the source and then attribute the country responsible, or do you do something else? The likely way to respond is probably not something that military power of itself can tackle, but the problem impacts military power.

Its this sort of head scratching dilemma that neatly captures the world that the UK intends to operate in in the future. One where we see all manner of work being done below the threshold of open conflict – for example training, mentoring or assistance to prevent problems further downstream. Or using intelligence capabilities to help mount law enforcement operations, perhaps using some very niche military assets to help.

So much of the threat to our national security now sits in this space – tangible challenges to our security and way of life, which require hugely different responses. Possession of an armoured division is extremely valuable for some scenarios, but equally its value in tackling drug smugglers, intellectual property theft or climate change is fairly low.

This makes for a really interesting debate – how do you structure and modernise the armed forces to reflect this? Is it stepping back from the traditional very high end warfighting spectrum, where mass and bulk has a quality of its own, and instead focusing on far more niche and small-scale but highly effective assets and capabilities to tackle security threats?

On the one hand the armed forces are held at readiness to prepare to go to war, in the worst case eventuality as part of a NATO led operation against a peer rival like Russia, and this calls for a certain range of assets. The ability to do this is of itself a key deterrence tool – showing that the UK is serious about fighting a war at this level helps reinforce the commitment to NATO, and sends a message to both friends and foes that there is a clear intent to remain a major power. This reinforces NATO and helps shape how other nations plan to act against it – they have to factor in UK willingness to act as part of their policy making calculation when considering various courses of action. To that end, maintenance of a strong conventional military achieves significant deterrent effect.

On the other hand though, the nations the UK is most likely to operate against or face of against may not be threatened or concerned by the conventional forces mustered against them. They may be more content conducting operations in the grey zone, working in cyberspace to steal secrets, or conducting activity to undermine faith in democracy or using intelligence services to assassinate dissidents or sow havoc.

These sorts of problems sit short of conventional war, but the damage they can cause if successful is enormous. For the UK (and others) the issue is how deter, defend and respond to this sort of provocation. Investment in cyber defence, strong intelligence assets and forces capable of mounting discrete sensitive activity is expensive, to do this properly does not come cheap, and it is something that cannot easily be bragged about or quantified in tables ranking military power.

Invest in them and you have a suite of tools to hand that provide very capable defences and options for policy makers to respond to aggression short of going to war. The textbook response to the Skripal case, where the UK Government deployed a range of responses to Russia is a good example of this – respond to a flagrant violation of international law via softer channels to inflict hard pain on Russia.

But in the cash stretched MOD, and wider national security space, what is the investment priority? Is there room for both conventional and unconventional measures, or does something have to give?

Many people identify our military strength as a nation from tables and rankings – they compare numbers and assume quantity equals capability and standing. They focus not on the equipment but the sheer mass – so numbers of planes, tanks and ships matter more than what they are equipped with.

Yet mass is only part of the equation, and needs to be balanced off against the ability to operate effectively with allies and pose a threat to hostile forces. Sometimes less is more – investing in a smaller number of more capable assets makes sense if this will overmatch the threats you plan to operate against. As many armies have found to their cost, large numbers of vehicles are no match for modern airforces and armoured units able to out see and outthink their opponents.

This makes for difficult choices, and consideration about what matters most – is it mass, or capability and the ability to operate at a range of different levels of response? Arguably what matters the most now is not sheer volume of numbers, but the possession of armed forces and wider security forces capable of operating across the full spectrum of conflict, ranging from countering information operations, protection of the cyber domain, handling the threat from private military contractors operating on behalf of a nation (e.g the Russian ‘Wagner Group’) and responding appropriately to provocations that fall short of automatically declaring war.

UK defence arguably needs to be far more able to respond and operate in a highly ambiguous world where numbers matter less than the ability to respond appropriately. Ensuring that we do not cede control of, and the ability to operate in the grey space so that we can fund a theoretical conventional warfighting ability is key here – the future is messy, murky and almost certainly unlikely to feature much in the way of conventional war as we’d like to understand it. Instead we seem to be entering an age of strategic ambiguity where we smile nicely at each other, while covertly conducting aggressive acts short of war.

It is this move to strategic ambiguity that perhaps lies behind the UK decision to expand the theoretical total of warhead numbers it is prepared to have in its nuclear arsenal. The IR committed the UK to having up to 260 warheads, but stepped back from previous commitments to open declarations on nuclear matters, by confirming that the UK will no longer provide information on warhead numbers, missile totals on submarines or how many warheads are at sea.

In a stroke the UK has put considerable ambiguity back into its nuclear deterrence posture. Opposing powers who could previously rely on open declarations of 8 missiles and up to 40 warheads at sea can no longer make this calculation. Theoretically a UK submarine could now deploy with 16 missiles and considerably more warheads, which in turn changes how other nations have to factor UK nuclear policy into their own defence planning.

At the same time, more ambiguity was introduced by a comment on the usage of nuclear weapon policy, which essentially stated that the UK was not ruling out reviewing its nuclear use policy if wider changes in areas like cyber or other attacks evolve. This does not mean that in the event of a single hacking event, that the UK would wipe out half of Russia.

But, it adds a layer of uncertainty to hostile planners calculations – what is the threshold where a dedicated cyber attack could generate a nuclear response? Would the UK deem an attack on its critical national infrastructure, where loss of control results in mass casualties (for example by a nuclear meltdown occurring) a trigger event sufficient to respond with a nuclear strike?

These calculations will unlikely ever be published, but what they do offer is an element of ambiguity that hostile planners have to factor in. They can no longer assume that conducting an all out cyber blitz on the UK, wiping out the economy or destroying the power grid or other damage will not result in a nuclear response. This is important – it tells people that the UK will not tolerate some actions and does not see these issues in isolation.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

In terms of the grey zone, arguably this increases the importance of the deterrent because it is now seen as a potential wider defence against all manner of threats, not just nuclear attack.

The statement is also powerful as it forces hostile nations to consider what this means for UK nuclear doctrine more widely. Does this rise in warhead numbers mean a change in targeting policy, does it indicate a return to interest in more tactical weapons to help defend the Baltic states from attack? Is UK thinking changing to respond to changes in Russian nuclear doctrine and tactics, or is it something else?

At the same time it represents a gentle reaffirmation to the US that the UK is serious about staying as a nuclear power for the long haul – a useful reminder at a time when both nations are committed to new generations of SSBNs that will share a missile compartment, and other technology.

Finally, this change gives an instant policy advantage to future arms control talks – a future Prime Minister can gain credit by providing more information on UK nuclear posture or numbers  as part of talks to improve global disarmament. It is a useful trick to have to hand if needed.

Overall then the move makes significant sense – it reflects that we as a nation are moving into an era of more uncertain strategic competition with other nation states. An element of ambiguity is no bad thing, if it forces other actors to not take the UK and its policy positions for granted, and leaves them realising that they cannot assume they know how the UK will respond to certain actions.

Of course the ultimate irony is that this measure may be the single cheapest measure of all the Integrated Review decisions. There is no certainty that any additional warheads will be constructed, or that the force will actually expand. It could be that the headroom exists to enable the regeneration of the warhead stockpile and introduction to service of the DREADNOUGHT class, or there could be another reason entirely. But the fact is that no one will know the likely numbers, or how many extra warheads (if any) are actually being built – at the stroke of a pen the UK has reintroduced considerable strategic uncertainty for its opponents – it could do nothing else and still have changed the dynamic completely.

Arguably this move encapsulates the new strategic challenges ahead – a world of uncertainty, lack of clarity and openness and an inability to assume that we will automatically know and recognise our opponent or when they are operating against us. It is into this complex and difficult environment that the MOD will now have to find and fund a force that can meet all these challenges for the long haul – it will not be easy.