Defence Notes From A Small Island - The Commission On Defence Forces

 

One of the big challenges nations face in the 21st century is trying to work out how to prioritise security challenges, and properly resource their response to them. The rapid changes to the global security landscape, coupled with the rise in ways by which threats can manifest themselves makes for a demanding environment for national security policy makers to work in.

In Ireland a Commission on the Defence Forces has published its findings on the future options into how the Irish Government should seek to respond to threats, the types of equipment and force structure required to deal with this, and also the wider challenges of people and career management.

The report is lengthy, but worth reading if you are interested in trying to understand better the balance of challenges that nations face in trying to conduct defence policy making in a very uncertain climate.

Reading the report, several themes emerge which are worth further consideration.  The first is the difficulty in trying to define how a small broadly neutral nation with a limited population and resource base can adequately defend itself in the 21st Century.

Ireland has a population of approximately five million people, and the Defence Forces have an establishment strength of some 13,500 people, of which around 9,500 are regular full time staff. This means the full Defence Force comprises roughly 0.2% of the population. As a broad comparison, the UK equivalent is 65 million people, with around 150,000 regular personnel – which is roughly 0.25% of the population – a not dissimilar equivalent.

The big difference is financial – the Irish defence budget this year is some €780million, some 0.27% of GDP compared to around £44 billion for the UK – some 2% of GDP. While there are vast differences between the two nations in terms of their defence outlook and national security perspectives, it is perhaps helpful to understand the relative paucity of resources spent on national defence in Ireland in the context of this debate.

The Commission spent around a year reviewing the state of the Defence Forces and has produced a report which sets out three different levels of ambition (LOA1-3) that set out how the DF could be structured in future. Their proposals are built around these three packages, setting out how Ireland could develop its military power to credibly carry out a variety of different roles. The three LOA represent very different outcomes, and demonstrably increased capability if taken in full.

LOA1 is intended to represent the current force structure, and is intended to uphold sovereign rights and serve on peace support operations to the same extent as as present.

LOA2 is intended to build on current capability to address specific priority gaps in the ability to deal with an assault on Irish sovereignty and to serve on higher intensity peace support operations than at present.

LOA3 is intended to put forward proposals to develop a full spectrum defence capability to protect Ireland and its people similar to equivalent sized militaries in Europe.

This represents three very different types of ambition, but the paper is clear that it is not binary. It notes that maintaining LOA1 is in many ways the worst outcome as it condemns the IDF to a slow descent into obsolescence and irrelevance:

“In particular, the Commission is clear that LOA 1 – essentially the continuation of “business as usual” – will leave this country unable to meet its desired level of military deployment overseas… and, most importantly, without a credible military capability to protect Ireland, its people and its resources for any sustained period.”

This is the curious paradox facing countries like Ireland and how they try to maintain a defence capability in the world. The paper notes that the global security environment is complex and multi-faceted.

While Ireland may remain a neutral actor, committed to supporting peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, it may well come into contact with global actors like Russia and China, who can pose a threat to its sovereignty in different ways – for example via hostile state activities like espionage, cyber security or even presence in areas of mutual interest. Ireland may be a small nation geographically, but the paper notes that there are a range of ways by which it can be caught up in wider great power tensions.

For example, it could be targeted as part of wider efforts to attack the EU, or caught up in wider great power tension between the US and China. There are wider challenges around how technology, particularly in cyberspace and advanced manufacturing can become a proxy for targeted intelligence collection or cyber disruption.  

There is a wider acceptance that membership of the EU and its associated security projects could in turn see Ireland become embroiled in the challenges of handling instability on Europe’s borders, and in turn seeing military deployments to support wider political policy goals.

What this means is that even though Ireland remains a relatively minor player in international military affairs, it must still be ready consider how it could become embroiled in the full range of international crises, for a variety of different reasons.

This then drives Ireland down a path of trying to work out how to maintain a Defence Force that is credible to meet the missions placed upon it. At the moment the Irish Defence Forces are not designed or intended to carry out credible defence against a military rival – as the Commission notes, the Irish Army told them that it:

 “is not equipped, postured or realistically prepared to conduct a meaningful defence of the State against a full spectrum force for any sustained period of time”.

In other words Ireland maintains a Defence Force, but not once that can actually defend the State.

One of the most interesting themes emerging from this paper is the concept of trying to define how to defend sovereignty, and what is required to do this in an era when this seems a somewhat outmoded concept to some.

Many of the proposals made in the paper are built around the idea of trying to enable Ireland to be better placed to understand events within its area of interest, and exercise sovereignty over this. For example acquisition of the ability to develop and maintain a ‘recognised air picture’ (e.g. track air movements in airspace of concern), or enhance the ability of the Irish Naval Service to stay at sea for longer tracking ships and monitoring Irish waters.

This represents an interesting conundrum – what is the point of increasing visibility and awareness of your own areas of national sovereignty, if you cannot then do something about it? Knowing that, for example, there are unknown aircraft in your airspace is fine, but without some form of interception capability, you are ultimately aware that others are intruding, but powerless to do something about it.

This in turn leads to a slippery path of cost growth to provide capabilities to solve the problem. The Commission recommend that in due course Ireland looks to establish a squadron of fast jets to be able to defend Irish airspace – but this would represent an enormous financial expense to the State.

The cost of acquiring and maintaining a 24/7/365 ‘QRA’ capability is enormous – it requires jets, ground crew, maintenance and supply chains, and all the associated people and equipment required to be able to launch at short notice. It also needs effective airspace management, able to monitor the situation and direct aircraft to/from the aircraft of interest, as well as possible AAR capability too to ensure that aircraft can remain on station.

This is all before you begin to consider the work that needs to be done to ensure that in the event of the aircraft being scrambled, secure and effective communications are in place that permit a ‘shoot down’ order to be given by the Taoiseach to the aircraft crew. This would need to be done at speed, and with sufficient communication security to ensure it could not be compromised or spoofed.

QRA is an extremely time consuming and resource intensive activity, and one that is hard work for all involved. It would require careful thinking about how to support a fast jet squadron crew, whose entire operational career would be spent on QRA rotations, and where retention may prove to be very difficult.

This perhaps illustrates the challenges of choosing to protect sovereignty-  at the moment Irish sovereignty over large parts of its airspace and waters is purely theoretical – there is nothing that can easily be done to deal with an intruder using the resources of the state alone. But to be able to protect against these risks, poses a real resource challenge and would be both incredibly costly, and unlikely to result in a capability that could be more widely used. The result is that, baring major budget uplifts, it would starve other parts of the Defence Forces of cash to protect against a very finite set of threats.

This is the real difficulty in trying to determine, as a small nation, where to invest resources and effort when it comes to national defence. While it is tempting to develop lengthy shopping lists and propose ideas of good capabilities that could be acquired, they come at a price, and they are all expensive.

What makes it even more complicated is that the battle for resources is becoming yet more constrained due to the emergence of Cyber and Space as credible operational domains that will need to be handled too.

While the physical military threat to smaller states may be remote, countries like Ireland, which have thriving technology industries, are at ever greater risk of being targeted for cyber operations. This in turn calls for the development of effective cyber security capabilities, which are expensive, and require the recruitment of staff, many of whom are in scarce supply and may not be tempted by poorly paying government work compared to the private sector.

A well-timed cyber attack could cause immense disruption and economic harm, against which conventional military forces are of little value.  This raises real challenges for smaller countries because they need to find resources to fund defences in areas that previously were of little importance, but now are arguably the single greatest strategic threat they face.

This poses challenges on two fronts – firstly, decisions on force structure and procurement policy, and also on the approach to people and how to build a workforce that can respond to these challenges.

From a procurement perspective, the Commission comes up with a long list of capabilities that need to be purchased and brought into service in the next few years to replace and retain existing levels of military capability, and also expand it.

This in turn requires governments to commit to significant funding commitments, approving projects that may take many years to come to fruition, and which may be extremely costly. It is one thing to budget for routine replacement, but when you are establishing a capability from scratch, this requires a lot of extra cash, and a willingness to commit to spending it for a long time.

To buy a new armoured vehicle or ship may take years, and require project teams to sustain and deliver this into service. If you commit to bringing this into service, then that has committed resources for years to come – a change mid-way through effectively writes off all the money spent, and you have not only got nothing to show for it, but also you are now several years behind in your own replacement plans to fill the new gap that you’ve identified as a priority.

Expansion of capability is hard when different governments have different views around what is, or is not a priority for them. So to is trying to keep people in and motivated to do the job at hand.

One of the most challenging parts of the report was the section on people, the challenges of retention and how to get suitably skilled and qualified personnel into various different roles. It is clear from reading the report that the Defence Forces face significant recruitment and retention challenges, and that these will only increase over time.

The themes of these challenges are not unusual – trying to get people to stay in and engage in careers where there are slow promotion, limited reward and instability and for those that stay harder work to fill the gaps left by others is not a surprise. Many other countries seem to be experiencing similar problems too.

One of the clear lessons of the 21st century is perhaps that the military career model is looking ever less suited to the demands of a 21st century workforce. Why do people want to join organisations at the bottom when they already have credible skills and experience? Why work in an environment that sees pregnant women as a problem (some of the comments on gender diversity are truly awful to read – the Commission itself notes:

 “Firstly, and of particular concern to the Commission, is that there is evidently a culture across the Defence Forces which is masculine and has a limited appreciation of diversity of all kinds. There is a patriarchal approach that takes responsibility for lower ranks to the point of disabling them, and is resistant to females and so creates an uncomfortable place for them to work. This culture is grounded in long outdated social concepts, such as the male being the breadwinner in a family, a creation of male and female roles and linking salary to self‐worth.”

 And

“Observations expressed to the Commission by serving female members provided a sense of a culture that scapegoats women with children. Comments made included a view that if a female member is pregnant, or has a child, “it’s her that’s causing the problem”, that women have a fear of informing command authority if they are pregnant, and a perception that when women have children there is an expectation that they will soon be “bowing out”. In this context, the lack of opportunities for personnel to take time out from their careers for parenting purposes”

These sorts of comments help reflect the wider challenges of trying to build a truly diverse workforce that draws on 100% of the talent pool to best effect. While this may sound a minor point, and others will see it as ‘diversity nonsense gone mad’, the simple fact is that demographically, if you are in an understaffed workforce that you want to expand, you want to make it as appealing as possible to everyone to join – not just restrict it to a fairly closed group of likeminded people.

The more supportive and inclusive that the military is of female members, the more recruits will follow and in turn the easier it is to recruit for people in different roles. Noting that much of the reports recommendations are about trying to increase presence (e.g. double crewing ships) or get more people to do new roles, you can only do this if you recruit and retain people – otherwise you are doomed to fail.

A good wider question is perhaps why do so many militaries that rely on volunteer forces experience the same problems and why is this seemingly such an intractable problem to fix? Something is clearly going awry if there is a constantly recurring set of issues, across many different countries, and something has to give to fix it.

The fundamental problem seems to be that the military way of life is both rigid, disciplinarian and often extremely dull with limited prospects (particularly for junior staff), but at the same time needs to recruit highly intelligent, academically strong individuals with niche skills in high demand sectors (particularly with STEM backgrounds), who do not see it as a credible long term career.

Until we can reach the point of reconciling these two very different problems, then the West will continue to struggle to retain skilled talent. This may mean thinking very differently about how to offer career models, but it may also struggle to gain traction against naysayers and the ‘its totally impossible to do anything other than enter at the bottom’ school of thought. Irelands problems when it comes to military personnel are definitely not unique – other nations are in the same boat; however, it is unlikely that there will be a simple answer to this problem.

Overall this paper is a fascinating read, which is worth trying to find the time to explore in more detail. It sets out the challenges facing small military powers in how they try to maintain sufficient breadth of capability to remain credible, while doing so against an often extremely resource constrained situation.

In Irelands case, the challenge is both pressing and significant. The Commission pulls no punches in stating that to maintain the COA1 option is to essentially embark upon managed decline, with significant ranges of capabilities leaving service in the next few years without replacement, and thus denuding the State of its ability to properly defend itself.

The recommendation is for the adoption of COA2, which would require, it is estimated a near 50% increase in defence expenditure to deliver. To make the case though for this huge increase in funding, relatively speaking, at a time of financial challenge and multiple pressing issues is difficult.

Where this leaves policy makers is in a bit of a bind – on the one hand, continuing ‘business as usual’ is to essentially follow down the road of strategic retreat at a time when the threats to the Irish state are becoming ever more complex and multi-faceted. These too will demand additional funds and support, which may have to come from within existing budgets.

There is unlikely to be popular support for a substantial growth in defence spending -particularly if taxes need to go up to pay for it. At the same time though if you know that funding cannot increase, what is the managed decline you are prepared to accept, and what are the risks you will take as a trade off to permit enhancements in other areas?

This is where defence policy becomes extremely challenging to deliver. It is about balancing off finite budgets, political aspirations, the reality of project delivery and trying to deliver across a wide and complex range of military tasks with a very finite spread of resources.

The final thought too is that a temporary budget uplift to pay for new capability may work in the short term, but all equipment needs replacement, so by going down this road now, it effectively commits Irish Governments for decades to come to support and replace this equipment – is this a political price they are willing to pay?