By kind invitation of Derek Twigg, MP, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security hosted a discussion with General Sir Mike Jackson GCB CBE DSO DL, Former Chief of the General Staff.
I want to reflect on how we got to where we are, what it looks like now, and where the future may take us. I served for 45 years and the first half of that career was spent with the Cold War as the strategic context. It was the primary function of the British armed forces to defend the territorial area of North West Europe, the seas around it and the airspace above. It was a relatively simple task though it would have been beyond awfulness had the Cold War risen in temperature. It made the choice of strategy and the structure and shape of the armed forces relatively, dare I say it, simple compared to today. It is also worth noting that this period following 1968 was a unique era. It is the only year since the end of the Second World War that no British soldier lost their life on operations. In 1969 we had the last riot in Northern Ireland.
I won’t dwell on Northern Ireland, save to put two thoughts into your mind. That conflict was the result of two groups of people on one small piece of territory who had quite different ideas as to where they had come from, who they were, and how they saw their future. That is a political problem; it is not a military problem. Remember your Clausewitz; ‘the use of force is politics by another means’. That was true for the terrorist groups as much as it was for the response of the British body politic. Point one: it was a political problem that could only have had a political solution. But, without the efforts of the Constabulary and the Armed Forces we may not have been able to achieve the space to allow that political settlement to emerge. Point two: it took an awfully long time. The operational period of the armed forces was nearly 38 years. I shall be drawing on those points later.
We come to strategic event number one in my lifetime, best symbolised by the extraordinary scenes of East-Berliners atop of the Berlin Wall, pulling it down with sledgehammers and indeed their bare hands. There was euphoria, peace in our time, Francis Fukuyama’s book ‘The End of History’; although a soldier would say this was a bit presumptuous. It has become clear that it was not the end of history; liberal democracy had not prevailed and we were not all going to live happily ever after. It is sad to relate but equally realistic. Unexpected perhaps was the release of the superpower hostility and pressure. The latent hostility that had been there for decades started to emerge as the lid of the pressure cooker came off. These were hostilities based on ethnic, religious, tribal and border grounds. We saw this first in the Balkans, as the former Yugoslavia was not able to withstand the force of the extraordinary breakup of the Soviet Union. We first became engaged in 1992, in this very different world in Bosnia. It was an intervention into another country by a multinational force.
Intervention shall now be my theme as I think it characterises this post Cold War period. We also had Kosovo coming on the heels of Bosnia and Sierra Leone which was, unusually, an intervention carried out by the UK alone (it is the default setting of this country to act in coalition). In the first few years after the Cold War an event took place, the consequences of which we live with today and will live with for some time to come. That is the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, an outright act of aggression against a small neighbouring state. Whilst the forced removal of Saddam was a solution to the immediate military problem, it did not solve the political problem of the nature of his regime.
With Russia we forgot the magnanimous victory. This is the country of Chekov and Tolstoy. The result of this was one piece of embarrassment for me at Pristina airport. The wanted to assert themselves on the world stage. We treated them badly. With no respect.
We remember Kosovo, undertaken without a UN Security Council Resolution – far more illegal than Iraq, which was legal under 17 Security Council resolutions. NATO needs to tread carefully before it extends Article 5 guarantees to countries in Russia’s backyard. What we should have done is get them EU and NATO membership.
We come to the second event in my lifetime which changed circumstances dramatically and very suddenly. That is the awful events of September the 11th. It was a declaration of war by Al-Qaeda on Western liberties and traditions. The consequences of that awful day were the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan – mainly by Afghan forces themselves – followed by the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime. We have travelled a long, hard road since the summer of 2003, a road that is getting a little easier in my judgement.
In the strategic and economic and financial worlds we have come to expect the unexpected. I cannot sit here and say the world is becoming more certain. The Cold War was nominally about ideology, democracy versus communism, although it was actually a Hobbesian zero-sum power game within the-then world order. We are now in a different situation where the battleground is not pieces of territory but people’s attitudes, perceptions and identities. There is a long haul in front of us. Our opponents are very clear about their strategic endurance. Many of them, I suspect, are of the view that the decadent and weak willed West will not have the stomach to see this through. So we need to match that strategic endurance.
At last it seems that this country has realised that it needs swift action, and that reliable access to energy is going to have political and, I fear, security consequences as well. That is equally true of water. Certain parts of the world are somewhat sparser in water where the politics seem to be difficult. We are also looking at nuclear proliferation.
The evidence, as far as I discern it, indicates that North Korea either has or is extremely close to having a weaponised nuclear device. How far Iran is away from that I do not know, but it appears not that far. Despite the laudable statements of our own Prime Minister and President Obama, I don’t think the genie will ever go back into the bottle. In Iran we have two governments, one nominally elected and the other a theocracy. The nominally elected government has said two things. Firstly that it is high time Israel vanished into the sea and the other is a denial to admit that there is any military dimension to their nuclear programme. Those two things are a fairly chilling combination for everybody.
The long, long running sore of Israel and Palestine is so unhelpful to a more settled Middle East that every effort must be made to achieve a political settlement there. We do not want to see recourse to force of arms. In all this we have that overworked word ‘globalisation’. I accept entirely that the world has become economic and financially globalised in the last 10- 15 years, but in my mind there is a question mark over whether the world has become culturally globalised. It seems to me there is cultural divergence rather than convergence, at least in parts. And so we ask Lenin’s great question, ‘what is to be done?’. Many will be asking what we are doing expending all our resources on far flung corners of the world when we should be at home pulling up the notional drawbridge and waiting for the storm to pass. I don’t think in the globalised world that this is an option. This brings into question the balance of our relationship with the US and the mainland continent of Europe. The balance of those relationships is the most valuable function this country performs.
Intervention has been the stratagem used to deal with failing states. There is a view that interventionism is some latter-day military adventurism, or worse a modern version of neo-colonialism. It is an extremely superficial analysis. Intervention takes place in states which have been through some dreadful past, be that civil war, tyranny, natural or humanitarian disaster. If a country is a failed state it is by definition unstable and capable of destabilising the region. Therefore the purpose of an intervention is nation building, to take the country out of its black past and move it to a future whereby it is at peace with itself and its neighbours. It will have a representative government, not necessarily a liberalised democracy like the ones in the West that have taken centuries to build, but a government with the broad consensus of its people. Building or rebuilding political institutions, demobilising warring factions, developing new security organs being built and the rule of law is imperative. It is the most challenging and complex task, but a noble one. The strategic interests of the United Kingdom usually coincide with those of the United States. We are not a poodle in our endeavours. I don’t see the transatlantic relationship as unbalanced, it’s about common interest. It is also not only a task for soldiers; the use of the military is by no means sufficient to achieve that end state. You need diplomats, politicians, NGOs, engineers and a long list of civilian parties. It is like the strands of a rope bound together. The sense that this can be achieved within the usual political time frames of elections, or even more difficult within the time frame of the media, is the wrong sort of yardstick to apply.
The thinking behind the invasion of Iraq did not consider the vacuum that emerged after the fall of Saddam. The US won the initial war quickly and fantastically. But until General David Petraeus it struggled to deal with an insurgency situation. But now, the American army has no problem seeing what needs to change and changing it. It is a very agile force. I don’t think we are as agile as the Americans.
My final words are about the armed forces of the United Kingdom, your armed forces. They are one of the major tools in this uncertain world. It is true that since the end of the Cold War they have been increasingly operationally engaged in a way which was never seen in that war. In my lifetime we have fought three conventional wars, the Falklands and Gulf One and Gulf Two as they are known. All of these were very swift, militarily decisive, and in the case of the Falklands decisive politically. An increasingly high tempo has caused strain, but you must not believe the lurid headlines sating that the British army is about to implode – it most certainly is not. The army is under strain as in 1998 the Strategic Defence Review published by the Labour government made assumptions about capabilities given the size of the forces. The difficulty is that events have overtaken those assumptions. The assumptions have not been adjusted to reflect the real world, and thereby the budget is inaccurate.
The distribution of the national wealth between the functions of government is a matter of high strategic importance for any British government. I am delighted to see that the recent budget statement included a modest amount of extra money for the accommodation of the armed services.
My last point is that in this uncertain world it is harder to make some very difficult choices over distribution of the public purse, and having made that choice, to decide how best to spend the allocation to defence. What needs to be judged is the balance between conventional war fighting ability and our ability to pursue unconventional operations, arguably such as we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. There must be a balance between immediate effectiveness and ensuring there is money for the longer term success of operations. It is imperative to us to think hard before we dispense with capabilities which may one day be vital to the defence of this realm. There is the balance between equipment and people, a judgement of great significance. I am not sure that the current organisation of the Ministry of Defence is capable of making these difficult judgements. At the end of the day all ministers and officials are useless without the servicemen and the airmen who are there to do their duty with such extraordinary cheerfulness, commitment and courage. We should be very proud of them and I hope you are.
There are problems in Afghanistan, and I wish they could be corrected. There are two trains of command. Nato, with a multi-national force, and the coalition. Broadly speaking they are pursuing the same aims in a different strategy. It seems to be that both chains of command are not singing from the same sheet of music. It takes more than soldiers to win wars. DFID’s aims are to relieve poverty, unqualified from geography and wider aims. But its aims are split from the Foreign Office. If the Foreign Office wants A, DFID will do B. This won’t do. The world is too important a place. This independence of action is a luxury to many. DFID, for example, spends more money than anywhere else on India – an emerging economy. I don’t understand the logic.
The Ministry of Defence is not agile enough. There are too many people in the MoD with the ability to say ‘No’ without the responsibility on that issue. Too many people who see process as the main purpose of the MoD. Looking at the MoD generally, I don’t want to cut spending on any area. We don’t know the kind of threats we will face. I am a carrier man. We can take airpower wherever we need it. 232 Eurofighters which don’t go on carriers are complemented by 200 Joint-Strike Fighters to go on the carriers. They are expensive beasts. Eurofighters are designed to shoot down Russian jets over Germany, not support troops on the ground. That is a fit-on. On the subject, if we are buying extra fighter jets and they are coming from Britain, why does the extra money come from the MoD? Why not from BERR as a boost for British industry?
The reserve forces. They are very difficult to tell apart. The TA is a different beast. They were a one-shot mobilisation in the cold-war. They are so much more part of the regular army nowadays.
Now, on questions of finances, the country’s budget is under the microscope right now, like at no other time. The defence of the realm must be the most important aim of any government of this country. As to the nuclear deterrent. If Iran gets nuclear weapons – and its likely to happen – then Syria, probably Saudi Arabia will try and get one as well. People ask when we will use it, but I say the whole point is that we don’t use it. 3 or 4 new submarines, at a cost of £20 billion, spread over years, plus £2 billion a year running costs is a fair price. With a huge government budget, it’s actually not that much for peace of mind.