Of Chiefs and Indians

I’ve managed to avoid the news and reading about war for most of the last week. Thanks go to Peter Carey, Garrison Keillor and Julian Evans. Back to the fray today, with a question that came up in class last term, and draws the attention of Michael Evans today: why are there so many senior officers in the British armed forces? Evans notes that:

Although the size of the trained Army has shrunk to about 100,000 soldiers, there are now 255 members with the rank of brigadier or above — or one for every 400 service personnel. [...] There are now 65 generals in the Army, with 43 major-generals, 17 lieutenant-generals and five four-star generals. In addition there are 190 brigadiers, a one-star rank; 20 more than in 1997.

I can think of some reasons for over-officering, such as the historical need to dramatically expand the army at short notice, or the staffing of coalitions. But frankly, not much occurs that would explain the current phenomenon, except inertia and the tendency of unchecked bureaucracies to spawn senior and functionally unnecessary posts. The services themselves are responsible, of course, but I wonder about the role of politicians in this. Without sustained interest in strategic affairs, who will grasp the nettle of stripping out all those unnecessary posts and formations, particularly at a time when the public stock of the army is high, while that of politicians is less so?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been wars of small formations, requiring officers of brigadier and below. Granted, not all wars will look like this, and we may in time need to field divisions once again. But does an army that cannot at present deploy and sustain anything above a couple of brigades really need 190 brigadiers, or 43 major generals? It seems likely that the civilian component of the MoD will be slimmed down dramatically in the years ahead. It might be politically more challenging to force significant restructuring on the uniformed services, but I suspect nonetheless that it will happen.

By contrast, I see that the IDF, with some 170,000 active service personnel, is still commanded by a Lt General, with the three constituent services each led by a two star officer. Is there a reason we can’t do likewise?

Behavioural Conflict

** Updated below**

Via SWJ, a fascinating new paper by Major General Andrew Mackay and Commander Steve Tatham, in which, among much else, the authors have good things to say about KoW’s recent engagement with the MoD’s strategy unit.

This from the summary:

the paper argues that success in battle will demand as much understanding of social psychology, culture and economics as it does military art and science.

Readers may know of Steve’s research in influence and strategic communications. There’s some great stuff in here along those lines, although for my money while Kahneman and Tversky are fascinating psychologists and have done sterling work in moving social science beyond rational actor theories, the real action when it comes to influence is with social psychology, not cognitive. On which, more soon.

Also worth reading is the paper’s hard-hitting critique of the military’s engagement with the academy. The authors note

the absence of proper research within the MoD. Research forms the basis of education and learning, education and learning the basis of training. Yet even at the senior most levels education is wrongly seen as a ‘luxury’ and second to training. We believe that training develops an individual’s knowledge, skills and behaviour for particular roles through regular practice and instruction but that education develops an individual’s intellectual capacity, knowledge and understanding; its equips them to come to reasoned decisions, judgements and conclusions, including in unpredictable and complex circumstances and situations. The British military rightly prides itself on the quality of its training but we fear that careers are increasingly built on budgetary and management competence in place of the necessary education to conceptualise tomorrow’s challenges.

That’s harsh on KCL’s involvement, perhaps. More broadly, though, it warrants serious reflection, coming as it does from a senior and respected officer. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

Update: And here’s a response from West Point’s ever readable Colonel Gian Gentile, again via SWJ. He’s right, ‘war is about killing and destruction’ – those are what distinguishes it from other political activities.  They are both, though, only a means to an end, and the end is to change the behaviour of your adversary, either by coercing or persuading him. And so Gentile is again correct when writing ‘To be sure war ultimately is about convincing the other side to do your will.’ The problem is this following line:

we are placing the cart of convincing before the horse of killing and in so doing we are quickly losing our way as an Army of the free world.

‘Convincing’, for me, is the overarching goal – not just a cart. Killing is only one way of doing that: a horse, perhaps, but not the whole team.

When it comes to war not being ‘armed social science’, I’m sure you can have too much of a good thing, but we ought not to discount findings from the lab and the field about how people form their attitudes and beliefs, and under what circumstances they shift.

I agree with Colonel Gentile about the dangers of optimising for these wars, and about the limited perspective on war offered in The Utility of Force. There will be other wars when killing dominates the approach to coercion, and in which western armies will need excellent combined arms skills. The question then becomes the extent to which you believe seeking to enhance our performance in Afghanistan comes at the expense of those other skills.

Resolve

Their deaths harden our resolve.
Bob Ainsworth, RUSI, 17 December 2009

…the scale of their sacrifice does not diminish but strengthens our resolve.
Gordon Brown, House of Commons, 9 December 2009

…each death simply hardens our resolve to get the job done as well and as quickly as possible.
General Sir David Richards, The Telegraph, 7 December, 2009

That’s known as a line-to-take, in media management-speak.  The point of this one, I’m sure, is to seek to limit the impact of successive deaths on public support for the war. It’s our resolve that needs to harden, as well as the military’s. As Richards said:

The soldiers in Afghanistan now will grieve for their fallen comrade, but will then go forward with renewed determination. I would ask all of you to do the same.

The problems associated with having just too many good ideas….

Minister: I’ve had another good idea.

Official: Really Minister? Another one… that’s your fourth this week. We’re struggling to keep up with this torrent of wisdom. Dare I ask what this one involves?

Minister: Well, I had given some thought to preparing a proper defence review, like we did in 1998, that could weigh up our foreign policy priorities and try to match some capabilities to them….

Official: But…?

Minister: But, I decided that was all bollocks, so I thought I’d announce something completely disconnected to confuse the enemy…

Official: To confuse the enemy, minister?

Minister: Well, if it looks like we don’t know which end of the bat to hold, the enemy will be sure to disintegrate into panic and low morale!

Official: Yes, Minister…

Another day, and another large defence announcement. It’s not that I’m cynical about these announcements now, but they produce a Malcolm Tucker-ish response in my kitchen (often when listening to The World at One, on Radio 4). It’s nothing to do with Martha Kearney – she seems pleasant enough.. but it’s often the authoritative tone with which these announcements are delivered. It makes it sound like there is a plan – and I’m just not sure that’s true.

Today’s little gem is the purchase of 22 new Chinook helicopters (and please God, let them have bought the ones with the up-to-date avionics, so that there is a fighting chance that they can be used. And please, Father Christmas, can you grant me the festive wish, that some twit hasn’t decided to try and bolt some bits on in Britain to please some sour faced constituency MP about to lose his or her bell tower in an end of expenses electoral shocker) in exchange for the Harriers at Cottesmore and a squadron of Tornados.

Now, the helicopters are needed. No question about it. Sooner than 2013 would be nice (could we not lease them sooner?) because we might not have the money to continue fighting in Afghanistan nor Iraq come 2013, and could we not have a defence review to decide exactly what it is we are doing in the whole defence/security realm? Just a little one?

Because, we can debate endlessly the timeless classics of British defence:

* East of Suez

* The Special Relationship

* Nukes or no nukes

* Our special role as maritime power

* Europeanization

We can debate them. And I’m sure we will. But what I think would be nice is if the UK could adopt a set of hard and fast preferences – things which will remain stable for 30-50years. And within these preferences there will be, of course, policies and events that test the stability of the preference.  But we are without preferences at the moment. We want to be transatlantic, but we want to be European… we want to be a bridge between the two. And a naval power, and a humanitarian force.. oh, and a provider of aid, ooo, and a nuclear power, but not one that would ever use them, oh, and we’d like to do it cheaply please. Yesterday.

According to Pugh/Augustine curve projections (if I can re-find the link to my written submission to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee a couple of years ago, I will link it) there will be no navy by 2040. Because the costs will be too high to sustain it. Tinkering around the edges of the defence budget, and defence provision just simply no longer cuts the mustard. We have to come up with some stable preferences – that genuinely reflect our abilities and the size of our wallet – and we need to stick to them. I would say ‘bye-bye carriers’, but I’d have a swift pound that BAE will have made the government promise to give them £30bn quid for work in lieu.

There will be some sacred cows sacrificed, but they will be dying in a good cause. A very good one, we may even be a functional international actor, and one where good ideas don’t cause me to swear at my radio.

Wootton Bassett at war

I’m about to watch last night’s Question Time, recorded in Wootton Bassett – scene of regular, somber funeral cortèges bringing British dead back from Afghanistan. I spotted this quote in Frank Skinner’s column about the town:

The mayoress added: “We have stayed out of all the politics.”

Sadly not. Wootton Bassett is the politics of this war.

The townsfolk are undoubtedly the shining example of public support for the British military, a reminder that the bond between the people and their army remains strong, even in an era of unpopular wars fought by small, professional armed forces.

But the rising death toll and the ongoing media coverage of the town are increasingly the point on which public discontent can be focused. Wootton Bassett is a double-edged sword for a military keen to reaffirm and draw strength from its societal bonds, but also aware, as David Richards’ recent remarks suggest, that declining public support will undermine its staying power in Helmand.

A hard rain’s a gonna fall

Lean times lie ahead for the military. Perhaps very lean. The IFS has crunched the numbers and the figure being bandied is a 20% cut in portfolios including defence,  in order to maintain spending pledged elsewhere and still be able to cut the deficit. That’s steep.

I’ve always been more optimistic about Afghanistan than is the norm here, and I continue to be. It’s a dive, I’m sure, of second-order strategic concern. It’s costing us lives and money, and is making us reconfigure our forces in ways that might not be optimal in future conflicts. Our own population, insofar as they notice the war, don’t much care for it. When we leave, Afghanistan will still be a corrupt, drug riddled and somewhat violent society. That far, I’m more Porter/Betz than Farrell.

Still, I rather like the idea of drawing the wild parts of the world into the orbit of the modernity – I’m a sucker for the pictures of Afghan children in schools. That’s the way to nation-build; transforming the prospects of youngsters. And ours is also a strategy, despite much carping about strategic vacuums. Military power is addressing risk, at a cost that is (just about) acceptable to wider British society. There are no riots in Whitehall, and no jihadi bombs either. Does our commitment buy influence with the Americans? Perhaps not as much as we’d like, but it keeps us firmly within the embrace of their extended deterrence, surely no bad thing when you’re a maritime nation with a shrinking Navy.

I rather suspect, however, that some swingeing cuts are about to challenge my rosy picture. Cuts this large will bring strategic choices into sharp focus.

The timing may yet be perfect for the army. If the SDR goes through before the Afghan drawdown starts, our military might well end up looking like something out of the Utility of Force – light, agile, intellectually adept and culturally attuned, deployable for long periods to keep a lid on the uncivil wars at the margins of the state system. But thereafter, if/when the ebb tide starts running on Afghanistan, we could easily arrive at a point where our forces are perfectly configured for missions for which there is no longer much political appetite. Truly a case of preparing to fight the last war.

That wouldn’t perhaps be disastrous, provided we still had enough money for some other capabilities too. But 20%, if it happens, is a huge cut. This has the feeling of a transitional moment in British strategic affairs. As one serious scholar reminded me recently, the UK has fought four inter-state wars in the last three decades. It would be reassuring to retain the capability to do so again.

Exit Strategy

In August David Richards mused that the British army might be in Afghanistan for 40 years. Yesterday, the PM revealed his intention to turn provinces and districts over to the Afghans next year, paving the way for British troop withdrawals. Those two thoughts may be compatible, but only in the broadest interpretation of Richards’ long-termism.

Somewhere along the line, strategy seems to be shifting.  There hasn’t been a radical shift in political goals: the PM recently reminded us that securing a stable Afghanistan is ‘vital’ to make Britain safer. Debate rages (including here on KoW) about whether that’s right and, even if it’s halfway right, whether it can best be achieved by the sort of population-centric counterinsurgency/nation-building approach that NATO has been adopting.

But it’s intriguing that the PM should signal withdrawal just as the Army’s leadership prepares for the long haul, adjusting the physical and conceptual components of fighting power for Helmand-type operations. Just this week the military published JDP 3-40, a guide to how stabilization might be achieved in Afghan-like situations. It looks very ambitious to me – a way of striving to do Helmand better, not to avoid future Helmands.

Next year sees the Green Paper, and the start of the SDR. If the political decision by then is to wind down the Afghan mission, then the military, the army in particular, has some big problems. Should it structure and invest for low-intensity COIN? A more sceptical man than me might argue that if the Brits cannot turn Helmand, and they couldn’t hold Basra,  all the ambitious stabilization doctrine in the world is of limited utility. Moreover, he would add, what use is a strategy predicated on expeditionary forces capable of sustained deployment in the cause of rescuing failed states?

I’m still more optimistic than that. Are you?

Sound investment?

JDP 3-40 weighs in

The new Joint Doctrine on Stabilisation is out, and it’s a brick. Lots in there worthy of comment, but here’s my initial reaction:

1. It’s intriguing, and perhaps unfortunate, that this is published just as the Prime Minister announces his intention to craft a timetable to leave Afghanistan. Here’s what he said last night:

[We] should identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control and set a timetable for transfer starting in 2010.

That’s not much of a ringing endorsement of our ability to stabilise Afghanistan. Still, there is a good chapter on influence in the manual, and I reckon the PM may just have designated the British electorate as a target audience for the purposes of his influence activities.

Lots of effort went into this doctrine, and I suspect it’s going to feature heavily in my classroom. But has the high tide of stabilisation already passed? What do you think?

2.There’s a line in there that suggests we’re going down the James Mattis route on Effects Based Operations – and good riddance too, I say:

This is not a reprise of a mechanistic form of Effects Based Approach to Operations, which simply does not work for complex and variable human systems.

3. The doctrine is an amalgam of theoretical approaches. I’m intrigued particularly by the blending here of two distinct literatures: that on governance and state-building,  honed during the messy wars of the 1990s; and that on COIN, where most of the big thinking happened during the era of decolonisation in the fifties and sixties. One is the literature of the anguished liberal, the other that of the cynical colonist. Happy bedfellows?

4. As you’d expect of our august institution, there was a healthy KCL involvement – Tim Bird helped write the thing, while KoW’s own David Betz and Theo Farrell chipped in to good effect. Our path to world domination continues.

5. The process of writing this manual, and the result itself, seem a conscious emulation of the genesis of FM 3-24. Lots of academic engagement, both in person and with the literature. It’s doctrine, but not as we know it. That’s great for us eggheads, but does it make for good doctrine? It certainly seems to slow the process down – having stabilisation doctrine is a great thing, but we’ve been trying to stabilise Afghanistan for the better part of a decade now.

Any thoughts from you all?

Update: Another thought occurred while cycling to the library. This behemoth might be a bit big for practically minded officers – I recall hearing about one brigadier, who opined that any doctrine which didn’t fit in his pocket was staying behind; and I recall FM 3-24 gathering dust in the battalion commander’s office in David Finkel’s recent fly-on-the-wall account of the surge. Like FM 3-24, then, isn’t the real purpose of this doctrine to act as a big stick with which to beat institutional change into the British military? And change in the direction of low-intensity operations. Doctrine, I suppose, becomes the institutional memory of military organisation: if you write it, it will be so.

Blue Skies Thinning

Michael Smith in The Sunday Times has another eye catching UK defence story to add to his one about cutting a carrier that appeared a few weeks ago. This time the RAF is the focus, and deep cuts are apparently in the offing:

AIR FORCE chiefs are preparing to cut 10,000 staff — a quarter of their manpower — and close up to five large air stations.

Who’s behind the story? Could the RAF be outlining harsh cuts so that when the axe really does fall it doesn’t seem quite so bad? And the carrier? Maybe the Navy has the same strategy in mind: if we demonstrate frugality now, we can be an honest partner in SDR negotiations. No story about army cuts yet…

Either way, this sort of briefing is titillating, but utlimately frustrating. Call me naive, but I like defence planning that starts with the policy, then does the strategizing and develops appropriate force structures.

Is it a bird? Is it an elephant?

The view from there

Theo Farrell, KoW pioneer, writes in the Guardian on his recent trip to Afghanistan. He’s upbeat:

Notwithstanding the tragic events in Nad-e’Ali, the Afghan security forces are getting better, as is the partnership between Afghans and the International Security Assistance Force. I saw this most visibly in Garmsir, where I spent some time with the US marines. Garmsir district centre has tarmac roads, solar streetlights and a thriving bazaar. US-run Radio Garmsir pumps out popular programming courtsey of its two local DJs; it also receives over 1,000 letters a month from listeners. Most striking of all, the marines trust Afghan police and soldiers to secure the district centre. Garmsir feels very much like a society that is shaking off the shackles of war.

Sounds good. What do you make of it?