Questions and Answers
Lord Powell of Bayswater, Member, House of Lords, UK; former Private Secretary and Adviser on Foreign Affairs and Defence to Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major
Thank you Chairman, and thank you to both speakers for a very interesting introduction. We had a clear analysis of the desirability of transparency, and in an ideal world it would be complete transparency. We should also pay tribute to the IISS for the contribution it makes to transparency through its publications. We also have to recognise there are always going to be some areas where states are determined to keep military programmes secret, at least for a period; they want to maintain a competitive technological advantage or it may be that the capability is only full effective if it is not known to exist, and I would say that is true particularly in relation to various counter-measures. If one was more cynical one would say that transparency which reveals the gaps in some country’s capabilities are actually an incentive to other countries to take advantage of those gaps.
The sort of situation I am describing, of black programmes and areas where things cannot be fully transparent, are increasingly rare as our ability in technical terms to monitor programmes develops; we all seem to have had a pretty good idea of what the North Koreans were up to ahead of their recent tests, we seem to know about the activities of Iran pretty fully. Equally we have to remember that we did not for many years get to the bottom of the Khan network operating out of Pakistan, and that is a very sobering lesson.
What I am saying is that the fact that transparency is never going to be 100% effective should not be in any way a reason for not pursuing it, but nonetheless there has to be an element of realism about this, that we are never going to be fully effective, and that maybe there are some arguments for not being entirely transparent.
Barry Wain, Writer-in-Residence, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, USA
I would like to direct my question to Minister Teo; I note your comments in support of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in which Singapore had a part in formulating. However, it sometimes seems that UNCLOS is a complicating factor in regional security. It seems to have encouraged the countries of east and south east Asia to make extravagant maritime jurisdictional claims, which inevitably overlap, and this creates a new set of potential disputes that did not exist before. At the same time many of these countries seem slow or even reluctant to enter into the discussions to settle their differences over these maritime jurisdictional claims that they are supposed to do under UNCLOS; would you care to comment?
Dr Tim Huxley, Executive Director, IISS-Asia; Editor, Adelphis; Corresponding, Director for Military Information and Analysis, IISS
My question is for Deputy Prime Minister Teo; you spoke in some detail about efforts in the region to enhance military transparency and to build confidence and trust between Asia-Pacific states, but despite these measures Asia-Pacific countries are investing more than ever in building up their military capabilities. My question is whether there are any specific aspects of contemporary military programmes in this region which concern you because of their potential to destabilise?
Participant
My question is for Minister Taylor, thank you so much for a very succinct speech. You are right, concomitant with Asia’s rise there is growing Asian responsibility for global security issues, but selling it to the public can be quite problematic, as you well know. My question to you is this, how do you balance alliance commitments versus intrinsic interests for the UK, for example, if you have to tell the public why you have troops on the ground in Afghanistan and why you have to have security commitments outside of the UK, and how does that impact domestic security, how do you balance that? My next question is, who takes the lead, is it the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, the Foreign Secretary; is there a considered strategy from the UK’s perspective to ensure that the public understands , and although they may not fully agree with the government’s policy all the time, do understand the linkages between global security and domestic security.
Major General Zhu Chenghu, Director-General, Academic Department of Strategic Studies, National Defense University, People’s Republic of China
A few comments, and then a question to the Deputy Prime Minister. Military transparency is very important in promoting the mutual understanding, increased trust and confidence among members, so therefore I fully agree with you on some of your arguments. However, I believe that the transparency s not absolute for any country, not a single country is totally transparent, and I believe different countries with different histories, strategies and cultures, and different levels of development, might have different understandings of military transparency. Is it possible for the US to work out a standard that can be widely accepted in promoting military transparency?
Narendra Singh Sisodia, Director, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, India; IISS Member
My question is addressed to Minister Teo; it needs to be recognised that we live in a world where nations may have different objectives; different national security strategies; different ethos; and different approaches to security. When there is not a great deal of similarity in those approaches then transparency faces a lot of difficulties.
There are governments that practice more openness, those that practice less openness; those that are democratic, and those that are not democratic, and therefore are under no compulsion to practice openness. Civilian control over the military varies from regime to regime, and therefore there would be a difficulty in having the same level of transparency. When there is not adequate assurance that any other nation that may be seen as a potential aggressor does not have that transparency, then there may be hesitation on the part of a government otherwise willing also to show similar openness.
There are other issues: there are no standard norms in which information can be displayed, they may have different methods of calculating defence expenditures, and formats may be different. Pensions may sometimes be displayed as part of the military expenditure and sometimes not, and paramilitary forces can be differently classified. What are the appointing methods that have been followed, because the problem becomes acute when it comes to the question of weapons acute when it comes to the question of weapons of mass destruction, about which there is a great deal of opaqueness.
A point was also made about state of the art technologies, where nations find it in their interest to keep it as secret as possible, because that alone guarantees its effectiveness. In this complicated situation, while some degree of transparency is possible, the kind of transparency which is expected is, in actual practice, very difficult to bring about. Perhaps some comments on that Minister Teo?
Lieutenant General Dr Mohd Aminul Karim, Commandant, National Defence College, Bangladesh
My question is to Minister Teo; I am very hopeful about the initiatives taken by the ARF, and I want to get your assessment as to how far it can go in tackling problems in the Asia-Pacific. You are basically doing dialogue, communication and diplomacy, but I am talking about the real issues in this part of the world, like the South China Sea; the South Sea Islands; Taiwan; the Indian Ocean given to the Indian Navy; the 80% of the energy passing through the route that belongs to your part of the world; and then the Straight of Malacca? How far do you think you can go in addressing these real issues?
Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Non-Proliferation, IISS
Baroness Taylor raised an issue that might be in the back of many of our minds, questions about Burma and the disappointing developments there with regard to democracy, which are all the more disappointing after a period when it looked like a cycle might have been in the process of being broken when the US was making some efforts to reassess policy towards Burma that might have contributed toward a lessening of the paranoid mindset of some of the leaders in that country. One of the other issues regarding Burma has to do with what we talked about yesterday, the North Korea connection, and concerns expressed about North Korea’s ability or willingness to transfer nuclear weapons technology. There are so many rumours about North Korea – Burma connections, rumours that are hard to pin down, but it is one of these areas where transparency would be helpful in knowing what North Korea is doing in Burma; is it involved in any nuclear cooperation? Is there anything that ASEAN states can contribute to encouraging this transparency in this area, so we do not have to be worried about nuclear weapons-related transfers from North Korea to this area?
Baroness Taylor
On the very last question, there is a real difficulty here, and it is an example, when you talk about Burma and North Korea, in terms of the international institutions that we have not being able to deal with some of the main problems that concern us all. That is one of the reasons why it is important that we have collective agreements on how we deal with these situations, and one of the reasons why this conference is so well timed. I gather that every year you have some kind of crisis that comes along, but this year to get people to together to talk about the need for concerted action on North Korea is timely, but our international institutions have not been able to deal as well as we would like with many of the issues that arise.
Can I say some words about a couple of other issues that were mentioned to our views, and mention was made about who takes the lead in terms of drawing up a national security strategy or indeed working out the balances between our commitments in terms of the international arena, and what we have to do at home. The national security strategy, as I said, was a new development, and it was the first time that we had really had a stocktaking of all of the requirements and assets that we had across government. It involved the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, but it also involved the Home Office, our Minister for the Interior, the Prime Minister’s Office, and it was coordinated through the Cabinet Office, so that we would really assess all the different kinds of situations that might arise. Indeed in the recent past, when we have seen the potential for a pandemic with the swine flu issue, we have been able to test some of the mechanisms that we have been developing for domestic security, which is extremely important.
In terms of how it links in, we have, as everyone knows, some very significant commitments at the moment in terms of the deployment of our forces, and CBS is here and he would say they are threats but not over-threats, because that is the phrase that we always use, and it is true. It does cause difficulties when you are working in an alliance, when you have to keep putting pressure on other people to ensure that they are carrying their share of the burden, and burden sharing is a problem when you are dealing with partners, because they do not always have the same arrangements for deployment that you have, they may have Parliamentary constraints, public opinion constraints, or they may wish to enter caveats on what their role should be. One of the things that we have been doing, in order to ensure that burden sharing proceeds as far as possible, is ensuring that the various roles that have to be adopted in any deployment are understood so that, for example, some people who might not be willing to deploy operationally their armed forces might be willing to mentor some parts of the armed forces that we were training or might be willing, for example in Afghanistan, to deploy on peace training, and that is in addition to the other reconstruction issues that come up, and people across the board have been helping on. It is a problem, but we would never embark on deployment that we felt left ourselves vulnerable at home.
Turning to the question about limitations on transparency, it is inevitable that there has to be limitations. It is not just the programme situation that you were mentioning, but it is also the case that operationally we do not disclose, even in answers to Parliamentary questions, all the details of what we are doing operationally, because clearly that could give information to those who need it in order to mount attacks against you. There is not just one mechanism, clearly international agreements can have a role to play in some areas of disclosure, and some issues on arms control are covered already. Clearly when you are entering into alliances there are issues about compatibility and interoperability, where different types of disclosure might be relevant, but we should not underestimate the importance of the democratic mechanisms that we have, for ensuring accountability as well as disclosure of certain information.
In the UK, our Parliamentary Select Committee system does a great deal to get that balance between what is disclosed and put into the public domain, and what is briefed to the individuals, but stays outwith the public domain, and that is extremely important. For a number of years I chaired the Intelligence and Security Committee in the UK, which monitored the activities, budget, and priorities of all of our security services. All of that work was done behind closed doors, but reports were made to the Prime Minister, which were subsequently debated in Parliament. That was an interesting area where we had to get the balance right between holding people to account who were making decisions, but actually ensuring that it was handled properly so that what was put in the public domain did not come back to bite us or cause us many difficulties. We have got a layered approach and different types of disclosure, but as well as transparency the other dimension that comes into this is accountability and some of those democratic mechanisms are important in that respect.
Minister Teo
Firstly I will take Barry Wain’s question on UNCLOS. I have a different staring assumption from Mr Wain, he said that UNCLOS is a complicating factor because it has caused countries to make extravagant claims that overlap with each other, and hence create a potential dispute. Actually, if you look at the historical development it is precisely the opposite; UNCLOS had to be convened because countries were making extravagant claims. They used their three mile territorial limits, countries were claiming 12 mile territorial limits, 200 mile territorial limits, jurisdiction out to the Continental Shelf and beyond, and it was very unclear what these claims constituted, what kinds of jurisdictions different countries were desiring over these maritime domains, and at the same time balancing those against the interests of user states, and the common heritage of mankind, which were the words that were used for those resources that were in the international waters.
What UNCLOS has done is to try to strike a balance, and it has very cleverly done so; territorial waters are well-defined – what they are, what rights coastal states have, and what rights user states have – and this has now been clearly defined in UNCLOS. The EEZ has also been defined in UNCLOS – 200 miles – and the regime that applies there is exclusive economic ownership of the economic assets in the sea, under the sea bed, for the coastal state, but the remaining rights for user states, for transit, etc. Then you have the Continental Shelf, which defines certain limits, and countries that have acceded to UNCLOS at the beginning have now registered those claims. They provide a framework in which countries can make clams, they provide a basis for assessing the legitimacy of those claims, and most importantly, which is the point I was making, they provide a way of balancing the interests of coastal state, countries who want to increase the rights that they claim over seas against the desires of users states, to want to have to retain their historical rights to the free use of the seas. I would say that UNCLOS addresses many of these issues, and provides a platform for addressing many of these issues. UNCLOS is not going to solve all of them, but it provides the platform on which the resolution can take place.
The interests of individual states may have shifted since 1982, when UNCLOS was negotiated, because the world is more globalised today, many more countries are trading nations, they have much more of their goods, energy and resources, moving on the sea. States that used to think of themselves and their interests largely as trying to protect their coastal states and trying to extend their jurisdictions as much as possible may suddenly find themselves in the opposite situation, as a major user state, wanting to use the seas that are being claimed by somebody else. Actually we need to balance these two interests, and UNCLOS provides the legal framework and basis for doing so.
Let me come to the other issues that have been raised by a variety of people, for example, the issue of standards, norms and accounting methods, and the ARF. Perhaps if I address the issue of standards and norms first; I come back to the basic question, what is the purpose of transparency? Transparency is not an end in itself. The first question is, what are you trying to achieve; the second, what are your underlying assumptions. The underlying assumption is that if you cannot resolve your differences then all the transparency you can hope to achieve is to try and find more about who you think your potential enemy is going to be. Under such circumstances, of course he is not going to tell you what he has, and vice versa. In that case you try and reduce accidents; that is about all, unfortunately transparency is also limited by your aspirations.
If your aspiration is higher than that, if your aspiration is to create cooperation, trust and confidence, and to build a better world, or a better region, then you can aim for a higher level of transparency. It may not be the issues of accounting and so on, and there are some standards applied, for example, if you look at the UN arms register there are various categories of types of missiles or ships, or artillery systems, and some classifications on what you report and how you report them, so there some categories. However, if your aspiration is higher, then it does not matter so much what these categories are; North Korea can tell all of us that it is going to conduct a nuclear test next week or it is going to fire a long-range missile; that is completely transparent, but does that make you feel happier or more secure? If somebody tells you, ‘my intention is to stockpile 1,000 nuclear warheads over the next 15 years’, I am not sure that makes you feel more secure. It is probably a fallacy to blindly equate transparency with security; it is not an end in itself, and it depends on what your aspiration is.
You have to move on to the next level, which is that if you are able to sit down, talk, understand what each other’s concerns are, why it is you are doing what you are doing, establish trust and confidence, then perhaps we can achieve a level where it does not matter whether you have 99 tanks or 101 tanks, or you have 1,000 artillery pieces or 1,200 artillery piece, that is of less concern. I understand what your concerns are, you understand what my concerns are, we understand what each other are doing, and we understand that neither of us wants to get into a fight with each other, and that we are able to maintain forces at a certain level, which makes each other feel comfortable and secure, rather than threatened. Perhaps that is the kind of level that we are looking for.
The US Chief of Naval Operations has suggested that the US is no longer thinking of a 600 ship navy, or a 300 ship navy, but is thinking of a 1,000 ship navy. That 1,000 ship navy comes from a cooperative effort of countries of the world, so if you talk about aircraft carriers, whose aircraft carriers count in that 1,000 and whose do not count in that 1,000? The more cooperative we can be in the world, the more of those aircraft carriers or ships can count within those 1,000. I was heartened to see that the deployment in the Gulf of Aden by various countries was seen in a positive light; quite clearly the deployment in the Gulf of Aden, those ships are have been deployed by the US, and count within the 1,000, because they contribute to international security and security of the sea lanes for all.
Quite a number of the questions that were asked on specifics have to do with what your starting assumptions are, and confusion between means and ends. Transparency will not solve all our problems; transparency at the bean counting end will not solve our problems, you need to go to the higher levels in order to be able to begin to address some of our problems.
Mr Karim also said that we have this list of problems, and asked what the prospects are for being able to resolve them. I would suggest that this is a huge potential market for IISS, because we may not be able to solve these problems today, but it does indicate that there is a list of issues in the Asia-Pacific, the Indian Ocean region, where more transparency and discussion is required, not of the bean counting type, but of the higher level type, where we start to talk and understand what our concerns are, slowly start to build cooperation and confidence, and a habit of working together. The opportunity for more dialogue, discussion and conferences, and a huge market potential for IISS is there, and over a period of time we will be able to succeed in building that level of transparency and confidence.
Dr John Chipman
Minister, thank you very much, and thank you also for ending with a comment about the IISS. Perhaps I should also say one word inspired by Charles Powell’s comment about the IISS publication, The Military Balance. We have published The Military Balance for over 50 years; it is the only publicly available unclassified assessment of the armed forces of every country in the world, as well as many non-state actors. I should advertise that Dr Tim Huxley is in charge of a review of The Military Balance that we are doing, because we are aware that after 50 years of publication it needs a fresh look. We have been extremely careful about trying to be very transparent in the way in which we show our methodology for the assessment of defence expenditure; it is very easy to list defence expenditure of NATO countries, because it is a single standard, but when you are assessing the defence expenditure in the world, some of whom do not have convertible currencies, then it become more an art than a science, and it is best not to pretend that it is an absolute science. However, it is important to be transparent about the type of methodology you are using, so that other people can begin to compare like with like.
We are also aware that we make essentially a quantitative assessment, but real military balances have a qualitative character to them, and assessing current military capabilities is difficult. As the minister implied, it is not enough just to count artillery pieces, we also have to assess the quality and quantity of training, and the relevance and quality of the military doctrine to which that military force might be applied. These various assessments are ones that in a modernised IISS Military Balance we would like to transparently bring to the general public, in order to succeed in doing so we would benefit greatly from the advice and comments of military staff in defence ministries around the world, including those represented here, so email Huxley@iiss.org with your concerns and your complaints, and we will try to incorporate them.
Ministers, we have had a tremendous discussion about transparency, and an awful lot of issues have been raised, as well as new ways to look at this problem; for your insight and for helping us to think newly about these issues, thank you very much Minister Teo and Baroness Taylor.
