As Prepared:
Future Conflict and Its Prevention: People and the Information Age
IISS 18 January 2010: General Sir David Richards KCB CBE DSO ADC Gen
Thank you Lord Guthrie for those unmerited words of introduction. I will not demur although I hope you have the right man in front of you! And thank you John [Chipman] for inviting me this evening to address this fine institution. The IISS attracts some of the world’s most interesting and influential speakers. It is therefore something of a surprise to my friends, and to me, whenever I find myself asked to address it but I will attempt not to let you down!
To set the scene and perhaps to make life a little easier for my journalist pals, some headlines. These will do by the way, I don’t need any others!
1. Conflict today, especially because so much of it is effectively fought through the medium of the Communications Revolution, is principally about and for People – hearts and minds on a mass scale. This is much more than just about cyber attack and defence, albeit this is important.
At the press of a button, an embittered diaspora can be inflamed with a mission and furnished with the knowledge of how to construct a cheap but hugely effective weapon. Dealing with wars fought through internet proxies requires a cultural shift in our understanding of and approach to conflict.
2. A key sub-set of this huge shift wrought through the revolution in communications technology is the need to organise, equip and train to deal with the intense and often overwhelming multi-spectral time pressures of an unexpected moment of acute crisis and tension. We need to 'fill the space', as a crisis unravels and the images flow in relentlessly. We are way behind our opponents in understanding and exploiting this aspect of the battle for people’s minds. I commend Nik Gowing’s excellent book Skyful of Lies for those that want to understand this better.
3. Defence must respond to the new strategic, and indeed economic, environment by ensuring much more ruthlessly that our armed forces are appropriate and relevant to the context in which they will operate rather than the one they might have expected to fight in in previous eras. Too much emphasis is still placed on what Secretary Gates calls ‘exquisite’ and hugely expensive equipment.
4. - Our Defence establishment has not yet fully adapted to the security realities of the post-Cold War world and this complex and dangerous new century. US defence analyst David Wood recently described the US defence budget as encrusted with an "we've always done it this way'' convention and strategic choices attuned to the last century.
- Operating among, understanding and effectively influencing people requires mass - numbers - whether this is ‘boots on the ground’, riverine and high speed littoral warships, or UAVs, transport aircraft and helicopters. They have to be able to fight but this is no longer sufficient. No nation is any better than the US in this respect and nearly all are far worse.
5. If one equips more for this type of conflict while significantly reducing investment in higher-end war-fighting capability, suddenly one can buy an impressive amount of ‘kit’. Whilst, as you will hear, I am emphatically not advocating getting rid of all such equipment, one can buy a lot of UAVs or Tucano aircraft for the cost of a few JSF and heavy tanks.
6. - Can we take the risk? Well we have to take risk somewhere or run the far greater one of trying with inadequate resources to be all things to all conflicts and failing to succeed in any. Why this area of traditional state on state war though?
- Having learnt the lessons taught by AQ, the Taliban and many other non-state actors, and thought how to exploit them perhaps on an ‘industrial’ scale, why would even a major belligerent state choose to achieve our downfall though high risk, high cost traditional means when they can plausibly achieve their aims, much more cheaply and semi-anonymously, using proxies, guerrillas, economic subterfuge and cyber warfare?
7. - Alliances are the principal means to compensate for our inability to resource military capability that is less needed in the future but cannot be completely discarded; this is how perceived risk in any particular capability area should be mitigated.
- I emphasise again that I am not proposing that we get rid of all our more traditional military capability – it is required, with allies, not only to deter a war fought by such means from becoming an asymmetric attraction to an enemy but also because at the lower tactical level the requirement to fight and win hard battles will not disappear. The scale of fighting and the context in which such equipment is needed becomes the key discriminator in deciding what and how much we buy of any particular capability.
- Future wars of mass manoeuvre are more likely to be fought though the minds of millions looking at computer and television screens than on some modern equivalent of the Cold War’s North German Plain. Indeed some might argue the screen is our generation’s North German Plain, the place where future war will be won or lost.
8. We must put much more emphasis on preventing conflict, on ensuring fragile states do not become the Afghanistan of tomorrow. Whilst this is much more than a military role, we must be structured and resourced to play what can often be a key part. Hi-tech weapons platforms are not a good way to help stabilise tottering states – nor might their cost leave us any money to help in any other way - any more than they impress opponents equipped with weapons costing a fraction. We must get this balance right.
9. - If people’s support and understanding is central to our chances of success in future conflict, whether domestic or foreign, understanding them, working with the grain of cultures, is vital. Our armed forces need well trained, tough yet innovative, empathetic people who understand their enemies, see issues through their eyes and design innovative solutions that undermine them rather than, unwittingly, us.
- The right numbers of quality people, often interacting with suspicious populations, are a huge capability in themselves. Quality manpower must not be viewed as an overhead. It is a precious capability that has to be paid for, as any CEO of a FTSE 100 company will tell you.
10. - A linked and much under-sung issue: for far too long, we have hugely underestimated the critical importance of ensuring that our decision making mechanisms are up to the challenge of operating in the hugely complex world in which we operate. Conflict today is a Multi-Agency, Multinational business. Our opponents are agile and unconventional; experts at exploiting asymmetric advantage.
- Our command and control organisations must reflect this yet the reality is that we still create ad hoc temporary mechanisms that are culturally evolved from Cold War mind-sets. This theme is not just relevant to conflict; Haiti’s plight yet again demonstrates our unpreparedness for the unpredictable.
- For some years, I have been paraphrasing that great American General Omar Bradley who emphasised that professionals should place logistics before tactics. My version is that professionals first and foremost sort out Command and Control, followed by logistics, followed by tactics. Get C2 right, putting the right people into it, and anything is possible.
11. On the subject of money and the inevitable need to prioritise and take perceived risk somewhere, albeit mitigated as I have described, it is important to move away from accepting today’s Defence budget, carved up broadly as it always has been, as a ‘norm’. Or even worse, from the situation we have where members of RUSI staff are making statements that the next government will make a 20% cut in the size of Armed Forces, because that will create a new ‘norm’ in people’s minds. To ensure the fundamental safety of our nation, we must establish what we need before we establish what we can afford. If, as is likely, there is a gap, we can then have this recognised as a risk which the government is – or is not - prepared to carry.
12. To determine what we need, we must firstly establish what UK interests are, how we can best protect those interests, and what we need to do so. These interests can be opportunities to exploit or threats to resist. This is why all of us in Defence so warmly welcome a Defence Review.
13. This is not, as is often suggested, a matter of where the balance of investment should lie between the Services. Rather this is about ensuring we achieve a balance, across all 3 and with allies, between our ability to fight a traditional war of air, maritime and ground kinetic manoeuvre and being able to conduct a far more difficult one amongst, with and for the People.
This re-balancing could result in more ships, armoured vehicles and aircraft not less. But they will not necessarily be those we currently plan on. In sum, we must find the vision and the resources needed to re-balance out of being prepared for old conflict and into being prepared for new.
14. Finally, success in Afghanistan is necessary for our future. Not because of its position or resources, although our campaign there must be placed in a wider and longer-term geo-strategic context, but because of the global consequences of our success or failure.
Now let me briefly expand on some of what I have just summarised. Starting, if I may, with the UK and our global position. We are a permanent member of the Security Council, a lead actor in NATO, the EU, the G8 and G20, the Commonwealth and many other international bodies that link our present to our past through the communities and diversity that enrich our society and bind us in a unique way with nearly every culture and people across the world. This gives us reach beyond our size, and influence beyond our position. So do we punch above our weight or is this actually what defines this country? Along with our economic position, it is this wealth of history and culture flowing through our people that puts us into the upper tier of nations. And we sit comfortably in it.
You may say that this is the same, or at least similar to, the Britain we were in some 30 years ago when I joined the Army, ready to defend NATO against the Soviet Hordes. In some ways it may appear to be, but in a fundamental way, this is a new Britain in a very New World.
There are many reasons for this but key to them is in access to information. This has not just been a change of medium, from paper to electronic, but more than that: from producer push to consumer pull, a democratisation of the medium itself. And it is to this world that Defence must respond.
Consider this talk. Twenty years ago it would have been heard only by those in the room or prepared to read it on paper the next day. Today, with no razzmatazz, it can be watched live wherever there is power to run a small computer. Even by Mullah Omar for all I know!
Old assumptions need to fade with old frontiers and old frontlines. Our borders, and indeed our way of life, are not impregnable to the global networks of competing cultures and interests technology has liberated.
Over the past 20 years the information age has transformed the way we see ourselves and our neighbours, our communities and co-religionists, our rivals. Indeed anyone with whom we have an affinity or a dispute. It has provoked international action that might otherwise not have occurred from the Feed the World concerts of the 1980s, through the outstanding Australian led operation in East Timor, to our own intervention in Sierra Leone.
And it is now about much more than an impressively modern media industry. The internet and linked technology like mobile phones and mini cameras allow communications that are way beyond the state’s ability to control without threatening all the other functions of that state. We in the West are not alone in being influenced by the speed and reach of modern communications. Other nations and communities have also reacted to the changes in the world around them. They represent what Nik Gowing calls the “wave of democratisation and accountability … [that] shifts and redefines the nature of power”
Some of this manifests itself positively: the Velvet Revolutions in many of the former Soviet states and the Green Movement in Iran are part of this developing understanding of the power of ordinary people brought together virtually, and the corresponding limits of oppressor states in such an environment.
Others less positively: Al Qaeda’s use of technology has created a global network of grievances that are often only linked by a nihilist theology used to justify local violence. Dan Rather, the veteran US journalist, has commented that AQ’s physical location is virtual: “it’s a worldwide, internet-based movement.”
And those rejectionist ideas shared in chatrooms on the internet are central to the way AQ conducts its global military campaign. By understanding this we will learn better how to foil our opponents, both through the ether and by better addressing the root causes of
genuinely popular grievances.
This is not a change that happens once in a generation, it is less frequent than that. And in many ways this one is more fundamental than from horse to tank described by Liddell-Hart. While that occupied the minds of generals, the present shift is one that includes our entire society and therefore impacts our whole security infrastructure.
All this is not something simply to be feared but, better understood, embraced and exploited. In a different form, the way the City responded to similar pressures ensured the UK stayed at the economic hub of Europe and remained a global financial centre. The City got it; has Defence?
So two questions that fall from this are:
What does this mean for us now? And for what must we be prepared?
Let me start with Afghanistan. We are engaged in a war there, with troops in danger every day, in a land that some say is ungovernable. But they miss the point. We are not fighting for the land, nor for the strategic crossroads that Afghanistan dominates. We are fighting for ourselves and our own interests which sit happily with the interests of the Afghan people.
Let me demonstrate this. Just read the recent BBC poll which showed that 70 percent of Afghans now see progress and more than two thirds want ISAF troops to stay in their country for now. And while it is true that there are problems with Afghan democracy, anyone who claims it is foreign to Afghanistan has not sat in a jirga or shura, as I did many times during my time as ISAF commander, and heard the polyphony of opinions. In these tribal councils I see democracy in action.
The shared ideals are also seen in the take-up rates of school places, hospital beds and employment, when Afghans are freed from the oppressive control of warlords or the Taliban. Again the poll is revealing: more than 90 percent don’t want the Taliban back and two-thirds blamed them for the violence that plagues the country. But while these are important, we are not fighting for a system of government or an education policy. That is up to the people of Afghanistan. In our news coverage of the war, far too little emphasis is put on the people and their true wishes, on doing what is right, and far too much on the TB.
In the globalised world I have described, Afghanistan is both a great opportunity and a great risk. It is a testing ground for us and our enemies: a signpost to our global futures. Who has the patience, the will and the strength to succeed in this battle for the people? – that 90% who do not want the Taliban back.
For us, success in Afghanistan – a state stable enough to govern itself free from the oppression that violent extremists, foreign terrorists and warlords bring – would demonstrate our commitment to the organisations that have prevented global anarchy for more than half a century: NATO and the UN, and to the Security Council Resolutions and ideals which underpin them. Our defeat would act as a match, lighting the fuse that is already finding tinder in Yemen and could so easily set light to parts of Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.
Our war in Afghanistan is often mistakenly compared to the Russian experience of the 1980s. While we work with the grain of Afghan society, and its Islamic virtues and traditions, and are promoting the self determination of the Afghan people, they sought to impose their will. But even the Russians have lessons we can draw from. The regime they installed survived for 3 years after their withdrawal, until the money ran out. The general that led the Russian forces across the Amu Darya bridge in 1989 and now the governor of Moscow District, General Boris Gromov, is very clear that we must succeed in Afghanistan. Writing in the New York Times on 12 January he challenges us to understand the political ramifications for NATO, Western security and the future of central Asia should we fail. He writes that it is ‘imperative for all three that NATO keep to its commitment in Afghanistan’.
But now is not the time to be negative. Our own Prime Minister has led the way in increasing our troop commitment to Afghanistan. President Obama endorsed his military commanders judgement that the mission was under-resourced and increased his forces. Pakistan is enjoying mounting success on her side of the border.
The right military leadership is in place. Gen McChrystal, with our own Lt Gen Parker alongside him, are examples of how this war has forced the very best commanders to the fore. The right military strategy has been agreed; the resources, both personnel and equipment, are arriving in sometimes eye watering quantities. And the London Conference will play a critical role in ensuring all this is harmonised with a hugely rejuvenated civilian effort whose focus is on efficient implementation rather than on more ideas. The Afghan government, many of whom I know well and are too easily maligned, are already taking the lead in much of the aid, reconciliation and reconstruction effort as well as running security operations in many provinces against serious opposition.
So now I must come to the second question: For what must we be prepared and what are the implications for Defence, and in particular for the Army?
We have traditionally viewed state-on-state conflict through the prism of putative tank battles on the German plains or deep strike air attacks against strategic sites. While these are still possibilities, they are increasingly unlikely - certainly at any scale.
Let me pause on this for a moment because I have been misquoted and this is a fundamental point. State-on-state warfare is happening and will continue to happen but some are failing to see how. These wars are not being fought by a conventional invasion of uniformed troops, ready to be repulsed by heavy armour or ships, but through a combination of economic, cyber and proxy actions. Modern state-on-state warfare looks remarkably like irregular conflict.
This similarity is the confluence of warfare that I have spoken about. It is a virtuous congruence because less difference between the two types of conflict makes decisions on priorities easier to achieve. Economics, globalisation and the communications revolution are driving this congruence and recent history demonstrates it.
Hypothetical situations have been outlined to demonstrate this is not so. One such is a possible attack on Middle Eastern nuclear sites. They don’t. While an initial attack may be conventional, lessons from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and other places have shown us that the response would most likely include the sponsoring of proxies and terrorists wherever they could be found. Nations will do their utmost to bleed their enemies’ morale for the lowest economic, political and militarily cost as we have come to expect from non-State actors.
Russia learnt fast that to defeat the Chechen groups it could not rely on conventional power. Rather she had to adopt the tactics of the insurgent and the proxy. In Georgia these lessons were put to effect over many years to undermine the former Soviet Republic. The month of semi-conventional warfare was a brief moment in the long-running conflict which broadcast Tbilisi’s inability to counter Moscow’s strategy.
What these examples demonstrate is that state-on-state conflict persists. Indeed with climate change, population growth and the increase of UN members from 51 in 1945 to 192 today it is only reasonable to expect that the incidence of such wars, often merged and confused with intra-state and non-state conflict, may increase. It would be a foolish general who chose to assume otherwise and a foolish politician who let him.
This is why I agree with the Minister of the Armed Forces Bill Rammell who said last week that: “Going forward we face a series of threats the nature of which will require the projection of power beyond our borders to protect our national security.” And with the Foreign Secretary David Milliband who, given the reach of dispossessed extremists, said recently: “it is no good today a nation adopting what has been referred to as a ‘defensive crouch’ to deter or contain violence in other nations from affecting one’s own.” The case in principle for engagement and prevention is stronger today than ever it has been and accords with most politicians natural tendency to ‘make a difference’ on their watch. Our statesmen need credible choices, both in preventing and in winning inevitable conflicts in the future.
And like all soldiers who have seen the horrors of war close up, I know how much better it is for us to prevent the spread of conflict rather than to become embroiled in it. The Prime Minister’s welcome call to support Yemen is a reminder to us all that the network of defence attachés are not just there as reporting officers but to help us support our friends. Through their developed understanding and eye for need, we can respond before a crisis erupts. In the same vein, we must be prepared to spend money on training teams and specialist capabilities rather than wait until we have to take the more dramatic, and significantly more expensive, option of deploying combat forces to support or defend some vital interest.
There are other potential Yemens out there desperate for our help; somehow we must find the means of providing it, taking risk in areas where we may have a relative capability surplus. Whilst we must do more, the X Government Stabilisation Unit’s creation is an important example of the UK responding to the world as it is and being better prepared for future challenges. I have no doubt it will go from strength to strength, perhaps in the form of a Stabilisation Force recently proposed by The Leader of the Opposition.
Spending on future defence capability is invariably about managing risk, not eliminating it. This thinking shapes our strategic posture. It is how we prioritise some equipment over others, some intelligence and technological advances over others, and some force elements over others. Like any insurance, what this needs is an understanding of what must be covered fully and what can be taken at risk on the basis of alliance or likelihood. Making these choices is the basis of command. Whether as a platoon commander or chief of the Army, you can’t have everything and will have to choose if you are to succeed.
It is in that context that I come back to the theme of my talk: the communications revolution means that war of the present and the future is about people; their support and trust. To succeed we must be among the people. But we seem to be learning these lessons of globalisation more slowly than our enemies.
Our armed forces are primarily structured and equipped for the last war, for a war of technology against technology, armour against armour. We have pared down our force numbers, replacing people with hardware and thoughts with process. Yet as the war of the present and the future is for the people, for their understanding and loyalty, we must be capable of being among the people. Unless you are amongst them you cannot understand their pressures and needs, you cannot win their loyalties or their trust, and you cannot protect them properly.
But this has a radical consequence for Defence. It requires mass. The ability to have sufficient soldiers to develop the understanding I have just described and then to dominate psychologically if not always physically the human terrain in which they are operating. You need the green and brown water fleets and the land and air mobility platforms that allow you to reach into ungoverned space and make your presence felt.
We need interpreters, cultural experts, intelligence officers, CIMIC personnel and all the others so key to understanding the modern battlefield with its nuances and subtleties. We are looking for soldier / diplomats of the old school but with a modern understanding of the ideas and technology that allow us to take the fight to the enemy both among the people on the ground and in cyberspace. We need men and women able to partner confidently those of other nations and cultures to share knowledge and improve our capacity to protect our interests and those of our allies.
Over the past century the thrust of military advance has been technological. The horse / tank moment was but one example among many. And while the need for mass is reasserting itself the need for technology certainly hasn’t stopped. Technological advances will always be a vital part of warfare. It is how technology can be put to best effect that is changing.
We need to right the balance in favour of unglamorous technology: protected transport, communications and intelligence; technology that allows the Armed Forces to get closer to the people and that gets an understanding of the battlefield directly to commanders. The technology that puts the influencers in touch with those they seek to influence.
This does not mean there is no need for hard edged more traditional war fighting capabilities: missiles, tanks and fast jets. War will always require such capabilities but they alone are no longer sufficient to ensure success in war. As with everything in defence, it is a question of prioritisation: likelihood and alliances will be key discriminators, as will the scale and context of their anticipated use.
A renewed focus on mass is of course expensive and in these straightened times could come up against resistance from those who control the purse strings. It would, of course, be wrong for a nation to bankrupt itself on defence just as it would be wrong to bankrupt the country over healthcare or education. Led by the Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, this issue is a topic of serious, professional and very collegiate debate amongst the Chiefs of Staff, as you would expect.
But here again there is a virtuous congruence. While technology costs increase by an average of some 5 percent above inflation, personnel costs are in line with other wage costs in the UK of around 1 percent above inflation. Prioritising armed forces manned and equipped for war amongst the people, with a correspondingly lower relative equipment bill, is prioritising an affordable solution with huge utility and relevance to C21st requirements.
Technology designed to take on putative first world enemies is hugely expensive. Whilst accepting, with Allies, the need to retain these capabilities to deter and contain, the cost of equipment most relevant to population centric asymmetric conflict is much cheaper and one can afford many more of them. By so prioritising, we will also find the resources to spend more on the technology and equipment needed in all forms of conflict, whether state-on-state or with non-state actors: C-IED systems, UAVs, precision attack, or stabilisation forces.
The war we anticipate fighting, like the one we are already engaged in, can be geared to different economics. We get more bang for our buck from soldiers that can fight one moment and help others the next than from an “exotic” capability that is rendered irrelevant by advances in technology or ignored by those that fight on a different plane.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who as a former CIA official has grappled with security issues for as long as any official in Washington, identified the problems at the heart of this thesis in a speech last summer to the Economic Club of Chicago. "Our spending and program priorities are increasingly divorced from the very real threats of today and the growing ones of tomorrow."
Let our generation have the vision to break this paradigm; to grapple now with the ever evolving character of conflict rather than wait for it to be imposed on us by some frightful re-run of 1940 or even of 9/11; let us draw and apply the difficult deductions that will ensure this generation of soldiers, sailors and airman can preserve our freedoms in the way their forebears so nearly proved unable to do. Along with my fellow Chiefs of Staff, I observe daily with huge pride that they are intelligent, creative, courageous and honourable men and women with a gift for service and an unmatched sense of duty. They are rising, and I know they will continue to rise, to the challenges I have described tonight, as indeed they always have.
