![]()
p.3
PART I
Defence as policy
![]()
p.5
1
DEFENCE AS POLICY
Trevor Taylor
Introduction
It is almost conventional wisdom that the military capabilities, force structures and equipment sets that a country generates should be shaped by higher-level policy about the challenges and opportunities that a government recognises in the defence and indeed wider security domain. Moreover, responsibility for generating such policy is seen as a primary duty of a defence ministry, albeit under higher and wider direction; an official Australian document in 1949 stated:
An initial point is to explain briefly what is meant here by defence policy and its close relation, defence strategy. Defence policy should as a minimum articulate and justify the challenges (perhaps threats) to whose control defence forces are to make a contribution. It should also spell out the ends or ambitions of a government with regard to those challenges. In other words, it should provide detail as to the purposes of defence forces.
Policy moves into the related field of ‘strategy’ when it also addresses the ways by which the ends of governments are to be secured. For the UK during the Cold War, the physical security of the UK was to be assured largely by national forces (including the nuclear deterrent) and by membership of the NATO Alliance with its doctrine of flexible response guiding the creation and sustainment of force structures. However, pursuit of suitable arms control agreements also had a place.
A common analytic framework distinguishes ‘means’ to follow ‘ends’ and ‘ways’. ‘Means’ go further into detail and address how the ‘ways’ are to be implemented. As regards NATO in the Cold War, the means area would include reference to the deployment of precision conventional weapons capable of disrupting second and third-echelon adversary forces. A policy document may or may not get deeply into the means space but should do enough to give direction and credibility to the means proposed. The chapter returns to this point when discussing the desirable features of a policy document, but Figure 1.1 presents a crude picture of these distinctions.
p.6
In practice, governments are not absolutely rigorous about the titles or scope of their key documents: the 2015 UK review clearly is presented as covering ends and ways: it was called the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review. Japan, on the other hand, refers to Japan’s Defence Policy but that is located in the context of a National Security Strategy.2 The French MoD shows the key areas as viewed in France:
The 2016 German White Paper uses the term Security Policy but that is presented as offering a ‘strategic framework’ for the modernisation of the armed forces.4 Thus policy and strategy are overlapping terms and it is usually not clear where one ends and the other begins.
This chapter addresses four areas, analysing in turn:
• The functions served by defence policy
• Desirable characteristics of defence policy statements
• The risks of weakness in or an absence of policy
• The challenges of policy-making and implementation.
The approach here is to use a generic perspective on the relationships between defence policy and defence forces and capabilities, adding illustrations to provide clarity. There is prominent use of what has happened in the UK, in part because of the transparency and availability of information about its government, but also because, with the Strategic Defence Review of 1998, the UK achieved significant thought leadership regarding defence policy, both with regard to its content and the processes by which it should be generated. Moreover, the stronger aspects of defence policy-making that were a feature of 1998, while eroded by the haste with which the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security review had to be undertaken, were largely recovered in the British 2015 review.5
p.7
The functions of defence policy documents
An articulated defence policy can be seen to serve four related functions:
Shaping the direction of military effort
Unless a government explicitly studies and articulates the security challenges before it, there is an increased likelihood that taxpayers’ money will be wasted on irrelevant projects and forces and that a country’s security will be put at risk by a failure to address a challenge that has been overlooked.
UK defence arguably suffered from the Government’s reluctance to rethink the fundamentals of policy from the end of the Cold War until 1997–8, focusing instead on salami slicing across the three services and searching for increased efficiency/cost savings.6 Only in 1997–8 did the incoming Labour Government undertake a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) which formally re-oriented UK forces away from a focus on the defence of Western Europe and the North Atlantic and towards force projection into the wider world. The commitment in the 1998 SDR that the UK would be concerned primarily with the projection of military capability to protect UK interests and serve as a force for peace and stability (a commitment that subsequent reviews did not modify significantly) justified major UK investments in global communications capabilities as well as the acquisition of aircraft and ships for the movement of goods and people. The Skynet V system, Roll-on Roll-off ferries and the Voyager tanker/transport aircraft Private Finance Initiatives, the purchase of C.17s, and the commitment to the construction of two aircraft carriers all reflected the concern with force projection. This was a clear policy change from the Cold War years when the then annual UK defence white papers had consistently stressed the need for UK forces to concentrate on dealing with Warsaw Pact threats in West Europe and the North Atlantic.
The Obama administration’s ‘pivot to Asia’ announced in 2011 was another policy change with significant implications for the roles, structure and basing of US forces. To a significant extent the implementation of that policy shift was thrown into doubt by the Russian annexation of Crimea and other assertive actions using its armed forces. However, the pivot to Asia was an example of a policy statement that moved the signpost for the future development of the American military.
Moreover, armed forces are not a naturally integrated set of organisations and sub-units and, without a defence policy to integrate them into a coherent set of efforts, they are likely to waste resources in disjointed capabilities. Many countries, not least in Latin America, maintain separate forces for the land, sea and air, which often have their own agendas and sense of importance. Also space and the information/cyber domain are increasingly seen as environments in their own right but are often as well the foci for competition among the traditional service branches. But even within armies, navies and air forces, there are important subgroups: air forces can have branches based on combat aircraft (with air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities), multi-role transport aircraft, specialist surveillance and communication aircraft, and rotary wing fleets. Navies can have rivalries among their underwater organisations and their coastal activities including mine clearance, large surface combatants and air components. Even today the British Army is sometimes regarded not as a single organisation but as a federation of ‘ethnic groups and tribes’, in which infantry regiments, the armoured regiments, the Royal Artillery, the Royal Corps of Signals, the Royal Engineers, the Army Air Corps and the support bodies (Royal Logistics Corps, the Adjutant Generals Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) all vie for influence. Thus a key role for publicly available defence policy is to promote the generation of coordinated armed forces that can work well together.
p.8
A clear defence policy is no assurance that the worst effects of intra-service and inter-service rivalry will be avoided but it can at least make a start on the promotion of coherence and relevance.
Strengthening civilian direction of the military
A clear policy is also an important component of civilian direction of the military. Civilian in this context refers to political leaders/ministers, the civil servants who support them and the legislature. The basic reasoning is that the military are created and sustained to support the state and its people; they are public servants and need direction from legitimate civil authorities, as do other groups that execute government policy. A lack of defence policy frees up the professional military to pursue the directions they prefer, which may well not fit a country’s deeper needs and which may result in established ways being continued long after their sell-by date. To illustrate, despite comprising a mass of islands and having an extensive coastline, for many years Indonesia neglected its military maritime capabilities, with the army securing the lion’s share of resources to support its domination of Indonesian politics at national and local levels. Only well into the twenty-first century did Indonesia seek explicitly to articulate the threats and problems it faced and to shift the balance of spending.
Informing the national public
A freely available statement of defence policy serves as a source of information for taxpayers about why and how money is being used for defence. From the perspective of the advocate of democratic politics, taxpayers have a right to know in as much detail as possible about how their money is being spent.
However, even authoritarian governments frequently want their armed forces to enjoy popular respect and support, especially if they become engaged in military operations. It is obviously difficult for people to offer emotional backing to something about which they are not informed, so a clearly explained defence policy statement can be an element in any country for building popular support for defence spending and the armed forces.
Clearly the rise of the internet has much eased the problems of giving citizens and interested people overseas direct and easy access to government publications.
Informing neighbours and the wider world
Finally, a public defence policy statement can be a means of sending messages to friends, adversaries and countries not clearly in either category about what concerns a government and how it means to deal with the issues at hand. Defence policies can make a contribution to re-assuring neighbours and allies and strengthening considerations of deterrence, especially when the statements are subsequently reflected in the capabilities and force postures that a country deploys. Certainly when countries write defence policies, they usually facilitate access by neighbours and others by publishing at least an abbreviated version in English.7
The 2012 Brazilian White Paper recognised this issue explicitly:
p.9
There is of course no assurance that a defence policy brings reassurance to others: intimidation and deterrence can be the apparent intended outcome of some words: the 2015 Chinese ‘Military Strategy’ paper stressed China’s preference for peaceful relations but also stressed its commitment to the defence of China’s territory, and made clear how it regarded much of the South China Sea:
This language is presumably meant to deter other states from acting in any way to doubt Chinese claims, reinforced by island construction activities, to much of the South China Sea. An observation about Taiwan seemingly has a comparable purpose: ‘reunification is an inevitable trend in the course of national rejuvenation’ and ‘the “Taiwan independence” separatist forces and their activities are still the biggest threat to the development of cross-Strait relations’.9
The desirable elements of defence policy
Clearly, if a defence policy document is effectively to serve these four functions, it needs some specific attributes.
The first is that, as already noted, it...
