Making British Defence Policy

Continuity and Change

Robert Self

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000600230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the process by which defence policy is made in contemporary Britain and the institutions, actors and conflicting interests which interact in its inception and continuous reformulation.

Rather than dealing with the substance of defence policy, this study focuses upon the institutional actors involved in this process. This is a subject which has commanded far more interest from public, Parliament, government and the armed forces since the protracted, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The work begins with a discussion of two contextual factors shaping policy. The first relates to the impact of Britain's 'special relationship' with the United States over defence and intelligence matters, while the second considers the impact of Britain's relatively disappointing economic performance upon the funding of British defence since 1945. It then goes on to explore the role and impact of all the key policy actors, from the Prime Minister, Cabinet and core executive, to the Ministry of Defence and its relations with the broader 'Whitehall village', and the Foreign Office and Treasury in particular. The work concludes by examining the increasing influence of external policy actors and forces, such as Parliament, the courts, political parties, pressure groups and public opinion.

This book will be of much interest to students of British defence policy, security studies, and contemporary military history.

1 Making defence policy in contemporary Britain

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228523-1

‘Policy-making is like the dance of the seven veils’, a frustrated Labour MP mused less than two months after the outbreak of the Iraq War. ‘Policy seems to be made by the few for the many. . . . Who is consulted?’¹ This bewilderment has particular relevance for an analysis of Britain’s foreign and defence policy which is perhaps the least transparent aspect of a political system chronically addicted to government secrecy. The disillusionment created by the perceived failure of much recent external policy has fuelled a broader interest in exploring the alleged irrationality of the process by which it is made. This is scarcely surprising given that during the last two decades, Britain has slipped effortlessly into major conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan which have cost the country dearly in terms of its financial resources and the lives of its troops, either killed or suffering life-changing injuries. During the Iraq campaign (2003–07), 179 British service personnel were killed with another 5,970 wounded in action. In addition, the direct financial cost of British participation in Iraq was at least £9.2 billion (the equivalent of £12.2 billion at 2021 values). Yet, as Sir John Chilcot emphasised in his 2016 report on the events leading up to the Iraq invasion, ministers were not provided with estimates of the potential cost of this conflict or its affordability when decisions about the scale of the British contribution to the US-led invasion were made. In Afghanistan, a further 457 British service personnel were killed and 2,188 were wounded. According to some independent studies, if all costs, including long-term healthcare for veterans, are taken into account, by 2020 British taxpayers had already spent over £40 billion on the Afghan campaign alone – enough to recruit more than 5,000 police officers and nurses and pay their salary throughout their careers.²

Even if one concedes that in both Iraq and Afghanistan these conflicts removed brutal and tyrannical regimes, it is equally true that they conspicuously failed to achieve the much more ambitious goals these operations had ostensibly been launched to achieve. Above all, Britain’s lead role in the fight against opium production made it infinitely more difficult to achieve its primary military and political goals because it proved difficult to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Afghan farmers while destroying a cash crop upon which many depend for their survival. According to the UN, Afghanistan is now the world’s largest producer of opium and heroin, reaching a new record high of around 4,800 tonnes in 2016, double that of 2015 and in 2017 production rose again by a spectacular 87%.³ This failure was symptomatic of far broader problems with operations which, from the outset, were handicapped by confused (and often contradictory) political ambitions and even greater confusion about military tactics, strategy and the locus of responsibility for the management of these crucial issues.

The lessons to be learned from Iraq and Afghanistan were all the more pungent because they conflicted with deeply rooted public perceptions of the quality of British military power. Like the Falklands conflict, the Gulf War in 1991 apparently demonstrated an impressive military capability as British forces advanced almost 300 km in 66 hours destroying three Iraqi divisions in the process. But the effort to deploy a force of 135,000 personnel and 13,500 vehicles imposed an extremely heavy burden upon the rest of the army which was stripped of spare parts and skilled personnel to bring the two armoured brigades to combat readiness.⁴ After John Major’s frustrations with peacekeeping in Bosnia (1992–95), Blair was determined to use force to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing. He also dispatched an infantry company to support a UN mission in East Timor in September 1999 and the following year he deployed an amphibious task force to Sierra Leone to protect the population from brutal rebels advancing on the capital. It is against this benchmark of past military success that the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan tend to be judged.

Britain’s intervention in Iraq in 2003 certainly provides ample grounds for concern. Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry published its report in July 2016. It consisted of a massive 2.6 million words and provides a valuable insight into the confusion and unsuitability of the political and military methods employed, particularly with regard to reconstruction. In theory, the Secretaries of State for Foreign, Defence and International Development were jointly responsible for directing post-conflict planning in Iraq, but their efforts were obstructed by conflicting departmental cultures. In the absence of a single recognised team responsible for overseeing all aspects of reconstruction, therefore, these departments simply pursued their own separate objectives with very little coordination with their notional partners. As a result, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) focused on policy-making, diplomacy and negotiation, but it lacked the experience and resources necessary to undertake reconstruction and nation-building on the scale required in Iraq. The Department for International Development (DfID) doggedly continued to pursue its general statutory objective of ‘poverty reduction’, but it proved profoundly resistant to engagement with anything other than immediate humanitarian responses to the conflict. A similar narrowness of perspective afflicted the Ministry of Defence (MoD) which battled on with the military campaign despite inadequate resources which left it utterly incapable of producing the conditions needed for either a political settlement or viable reconstruction.

Ministers and senior officials also failed to conduct any systematic analysis of risk and capabilities while too many of their assumptions remained unchallenged and untested – not least the viability of plans for the synchronised military rundown in Iraq while troop numbers were built up in Afghanistan. In consequence, Iraq’s ‘liberation’ soon degenerated into wholesale looting and a crisis of lawlessness, to which neither officers on the ground nor military personnel and ministers in London had any coherent response. Indeed, an institutionalised culture emerged in the Army, the MoD and No. 10 designed to avoid direct responsibility for issuing instructions on how to establish a secure environment – leaving commanders in the field to use their own judgement. Some like Brigadier Graham Binns, commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, concluded ‘the best way to stop looting was just to get to a point where there was nothing left to loot’. But in other cases, the chosen measures led to civilian deaths and judicial investigations into alleged British war crimes. Despite the abundance of informed warnings from senior ministers, soldiers and officials about the likely problems of reconstruction, Blair blithely ploughed on regardless in the campaign to depose Saddam Hussein. In January 2011, in a rare moment of candour, Blair admitted:

with hindsight, we now see that the military campaign to defeat Saddam was relatively easy; it was the aftermath that was hard. At the time, of course, we could not know that and a prime focus throughout was the military campaign itself.⁵

Yet, as the Chilcot inquiry later observed caustically, this conclusion ‘did not require the benefit of hindsight’.⁶

Nor was a crystal ball needed to understand the impact of severe resource shortages upon British forces and their strategy – particularly with regard to helicopter support. Even less imagination was required to comprehend the effect of a debilitating shortage of military personnel upon efforts to present a proactive posture towards looting and terrorism in Basra, while the belief that it would be possible to transfer seamlessly the military effort from Iraq to Afghanistan simply beggars belief – particularly given explicit warnings in the 2002 New Chapter of the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) that Britain’s Armed Forces would be unable to support two enduring medium-scale military operations at the same time.⁷ The ‘strategic balance’ between the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure that both campaigns were properly resourced was thus never achieved because a raft of ill-founded assumptions failed to materialise. Convinced that Iraq was an unwinnable conflict, the military leadership thus simply decided to find salvation in the more promising circumstances of Afghanistan where Britain’s fighting reputation could be restored. This strategic transformation in search of a ‘good war’ placed an enormous burden on the resilience of Armed Forces already operating above the level of concurrency, defined in the 1998 SDR and several specialist trades were in breach of Harmony Guidelines specifying the length of time troops must spend away from the combat zone. Furthermore, there was a failure to share knowledge on strategic thinking and to accept departmental ownership by both military and political leaders who were equally culpable for the disaster which befell these operations. Unfortunately, the deployment to Afghanistan simply exacerbated the many-sided nature of strategic failure in Iraq.

Parliament’s verdict on Iraq was damning. ‘There is perhaps no clearer recent example of the problems of decision-making in the Ministry of Defence’, the House of Commons Defence Select Committee (HCDC) proclaimed in March 2015, ‘than the decision to move British troops to Helmand in Afghanistan in April 2006, and then, subsequently, into Northern Helmand in May 2006’. As the Committee’s report made clear, the same problems were systemic across all of those involved in the policy process from the core executive downwards. Having accepted responsibility for Helmand, the decision to deploy troops to isolated ‘platoon houses’ in the north of the province grossly underestimated the scale of Taliban and jihadist insurgency. This left British troops in dangerously exposed positions fighting some of the fiercest battles since the Korean War, often from beleaguered outposts which were exceedingly difficult to defend and even more difficult to supply. A province that Whitehall decision-makers initially proposed to control with just over 3,000 British troops, ultimately required a force of 32,000 British and American soldiers plus another 30,000 men from the Afghan defence forces. Brigadier Ed Butler, the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand, bore the brunt of the criticism for the decision to deploy troops in these fortified ‘platoon houses’ – if only because neither the Defence Secretary, the MoD, nor the Chiefs of Staff actually admitted authorising a pivotal decision which had the most profound implications for strategy and tactics. Even more alarming, everyone, from the Brigadier on the ground to the Service Chiefs and the policy staff in London, appeared to disagree as to who was formally responsible. As the Defence Select Committee lamented:⁸

The structure of decision-making was bewildering. One Secretary of State claimed that he was not aware of being in the chain of command. Some civilians seemed uncomfortable challenging military advice. There was little sense of any long-term strategy underpinning the decisions. All this seems to have created a system which struggled to establish and prioritise their objectives, evaluate alternatives, or manage the risks of a decision. Immensely important and costly decisions appear to have had remarkably uncertain foundations.

As a result, the overall objectives of the mission remained astonishingly vague from the outset – even to British officers on the ground. But even where a clear strategy did exist, it was ‘relegated to low priority’ and according to MPs ‘it certainly failed to provide any sensible framework for assessing the risks, costs, benefits, or objectives of the mission’. As Brigadier Butler argued, ‘there was no clarity about what our strategic objectives were; and there was no real definition of what success or failure might look like’, a strategic myopia which permitted for far too long the ‘self-deception’ that there could have been some sort of victory. In addition, the Select Committee concluded there was ‘at the very least, a “tangled” chain of command, in which responsibility appeared to have been a vague and unregulated concept’. This alarming lack of clarity about the precise strategy was mirrored by a corresponding uncertainty about who was in charge, and as Lieutenant General (retired) Sir Robert Fry noted, ‘dialogue across Whitehall . . . didn’t have any fundamental discipline or structure about it’. ‘What I think failed, and failed signally’, he told MPs, ‘was the ability to combine that [military chain of command] with all the other instruments of national power which should have been part of a co-ordinated strategy’.⁹

The cost of British participation in these protracted conflicts cannot be measured simply in terms of lives lost and money expended. The outcome of these humiliating failures seriously blighted the reputation of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) which had ‘over-promised and under-delivered’.¹⁰ The perceived credibility of the British Armed Forces was even more seriously damaged despite the UK expending a large...