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By Admiral Sir Peter Stanford, Royal Navy (Retired)
As HMS Battleaxe and Jupiter break away from the USS England (CG-22) in a recent exercise, so must the rest of the NATO allies steam toward a new strategic mission—minus much of the organization’s bureaucracy—and discard its orientation toward the obsolescent Warsaw Pact.
History is a fickle jade. The rapidity of its course has a habit of confounding those who prematurely try conclusions with it. Yet despite prevailing turmoil in the Persian Gulf, there has perhaps never been a moment more pregnant with possibilities for new thinking about the purpose of navies. Some will, even now, protest that nothing has changed: the U.S. Navy must still police the oceans of the world; the Soviet Navy will relentlessly pursue its quest for growth. The Soviet threat remains and will endure; nobody can tell whether Mikhail Gorbachev will still be there in the time it takes to build a destroyer.
But that is so much spitting to windward. What has changed, with the undisputed collapse of the Warsaw Pact, with the progress under way in arms control negotiations, with the gathering momentum of work in the Conference on Security and Cooperation (CSCE), and Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), and with the dramatic realignments at the heart of the United Nations Security Council reflecting new pressures in the Gulf, is the perceived strategic balance between security concerns within the North Atlantic Treaty area and those beyond it: wider threats, less easily foreseeable, to peace and stability. Nothing in the pattern of recent world events suggests that the latter will become less likely to erupt. In a sense, the necessary readjustment of force structures and levels may not pose for the U.S. Navy—grown accustomed to its worldwide role—too much of a problem, apart from the obvious need to scale down everything- By contrast, for the navies of U.S. allies, the historic imbalance between resources devoted to NATO and those applied to “out-ofarea” activities is much more stark. Their problem is of a different order.
For all Western nations, and especially for their navies, the present offers a unique opportunity to clear the intellectual decks of all the political clutter from NATO’s 40 years. In particular, it is necessary to destroy the dominance of the existing Warsaw Pact-oriented, continental land/air mindset that has been allowed to distort the size and shape of British forces, specifically to the detriment of maritime arms. Until recently, there were more British soldiers in Germany than there are sailors in the entire Royal Navy.
A number of obstacles to clear thinking exist. Common to all the allies—but complicated for Britain by its close relationship with the United States—is uncertainty regarding U.S. strategy. The U.S. Navy will be unlikely (in the short term, at any rate) to wean itself away from some form of the firmly espoused “Maritime Strategy,” even though its basic thrust has become increasingly questionable. In addition, no impartial observer of the U.S. scene can fail to wonder how any significant change can come about while its three warfare communities engage in passionate internecine struggles to keep the U.S. Navy the way it is. Yet there are alternatives, as William Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, suggested at the Naval Institute’s 1988 “Future of U.S. Naval Power” seminar in San Diego. For the navies of the allies, it is important to know how the U.S. Navy sees its strategic mission so that they can best measure the extent to which they must share the burden.
In Britain’s case, other obstacles are more formidable. The economy, for all the rhetoric and the statistics, remains under constant pressure for the diversion of resources into activities fondly imagined by politicians to be election winners. Britain’s Conservative government stridently protests its devotion to a strong defense policy, yet its defense ministers have a consistently abysmal record of concessions to the treasury. In a fit of pique over a Minister for the Navy, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher some years ago swept away the three ministers for the single services. This leaves us with no singleservice understanding, let alone expertise, in government; no champion of any one service’s interests against an onslaught by the other two, and less and less interest in the defense debate in Parliament. Many suspect that the wave of “peace dividend” euphoria will, despite today’s glaring realities, wholly engulf any possibility of rational strategic argument. Government sources continue to signal that the bravely titled “Options for Change” study now under way in the Ministry of Defence will, by a process of impenetrable ambiguity—bizarre as it is opaque—give birth to nothing more than another short-term, resource- driven exercise in program-lopping. The need to match the Treasury Minister’s views on a vote-winning public expenditure profile, in the approach to a general election, will once more have triumphed over the nation’s longer- term strategic interests.
One of the major weaknesses of the British parliamentary system is in its jumble of outdated and restrictive procedures. Ministers use these—and a general obsession with secrecy—to obstruct and evade the workings of the Parliamentary timetables and the committee structure, to obfuscate real issues, to discourage dissemination of information, and to permit, under the inefficient organization for questions, easy and generalized deflection of enquiries >n any depth. Thus, Members of Parliament, who vote only 10% less money for defense than they do for the nation’s health, appear content to tolerate virtual impotence in the overseeing of defense expenditures. Lack of all incentive to command anything but the simplest understanding of defense issues discourages intelligible debate and permits ministers almost total freedom from accountability.
The debate in the House of Commons on the 1990— 1991 Defence Estimates, which took place in June 1990, illustrates the point. It was typically ill-attended. Ministers spent their eloquence on either the vaguest of generalities or the fine print of meaningless detail. While no one anticipated that they would, in advance of consultation with allies, develop the ideas presumably being canvassed in “Options for Change,” it was legitimate to expect some statement of principle, some acknowledgement of the fundamental shift in defense policy orientation.
But no such message was forthcoming; no statement even of aims and objectives, no vision, no reflection of the “planned and orderly process of matching commitments and resources” for which the Select Committee on Defence had called in its report on the Defence Estimates. Elaborate bluster, specious party politicking, and what one Member of Parliament described as “shopping-basket economics” filled two six-hour sessions. At this juncture no coherent expression of maritime policy, even in outline, informed or inspired by the merest breath of strategic reality, was to be forthcoming from the foremost maritime ally of the United States. The sort of merciful release from indecision that the Gulf conflict provoked is no substantial basis for national policy.
Even if “Options for Change” amounts to little more than another arbitrary accounting exercise, it is important for the Royal Navy not to abandon hope that some future
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British government will allow a glimmer of strategic understanding to illuminate its defense policies and create an appropriate structure. Western European navies must insist on a major shift toward a maritime orientation in strategy. Armies and air forces garrisoned on foreign soil have lost their utility; the need for the capacity to deploy warships remains and will endure.
The Economic Dimension
Three principal dimensions define the limits within which any strategy must develop. The economic is probably dominant. Economics will constrain the place of defense budgets alongside competing claims on the public purse, as well as the technological shape of its forces and the infrastructure of research and development. A nation’s human resources for armed service will be defined by various conditions of society. As French history and the revolutionary concept of a nation-in-arms fostered the values of service national, and the way in which the U.S. Constitution assigns Congress the duty of raising armed forces, so in British tradition does the memory of objections to a standing army live on in the insistence on all-volunteer forces, their size fundamentally limited by the cost of their pay. The assumptions that underpin recruitment and conditions of service in Britain’s armed forces probably will not undergo any significant changes. The position of women—recently dramatically modified by the Royal Navy’s agreement to employ them in combat-ready ships— may be an exception.
Britain also has too long and too flagrantly neglected the contribution of a properly balanced mercantile fleet. International trading vessels, ferries, coastal, support, and research ships all have parts to play. In 1987 the merchant navy earned nearly £1.5 billion for the United Kingdom’s fragile balance of payments. While shifts in world trade patterns—too many ships chasing too few cargoes at low freight rates—were responsible for more than halving the capacity of Britain’s merchant fleet in the decade before 1985, tax law loopholes have more recently encouraged U.K. companies to sell up or to “flag out” by switching to offshore registrations that avoid certain U.K. taxes.
Such a scale of decline has grave implications, for defense—amply demonstrated recently—and objectives calculated to minimize them must be included in any national maritime strategy for a future that is no less bleak. Reflected in the numbers of people engaged in seafaring is the consistently cavalier attitude of successive ministers, not only to the want of suitable shipping to support the nation in war but also to the more intractable problem of providing trained British subjects whose loyalties can be summoned to man them. Not only are present cadet entries
insufficient to crew existing levels of tonnage, let alone support expansion, but current low inputs threaten future shortfalls in infrastructure—coastal and harbor pilots, harbor-masters, and marine superintendents—without which a trading nation cannot operate.
The European Dimension ________________________
NATO is not dead, but its strategic goals are now obsolescent. This is not to say that a possible threat to allied Western Europe no longer exists. As the 12 nations of the European Community coalesce economically, and inevitably to some extent politically, so will Europeans find the defense of their shared interests increasingly important. As Europe proper—reflected more accurately in the 35- nation CSCE than in NATO’s mere 16—move in this diaction, the limitations of NATO, the arbitrary nature of 'ts geography, the newly irrelevant orientation of its command structure, the handicaps of French agnosticism, as Well as the now misplaced emphasis of its priority claims national resources, become more and more obvious.
NATO has served its purpose. It probably would be premature to dissolve it right now, principally because it provides the institutional base for allied nuclear policy. For the rest, and specifically in its maritime aspects, it enshrines—at least in the North Atlantic—much doctrine and practice of operational value at sea the world over. And it will endure. The same cannot be said about its land and air force dispositions, however. Apart from the warm feeling that they allegedly give Mr. Gorbachev, ol an organization firmly under the responsible thumb ol his superpower opposite, the arguments tor retention ol NATO’s continental shape and its political-military hierarchy are markedly less convincing. But sooner or later, NATO must go.
Whatever replaces it must answer to all the values that NATO members hold most dear, and to a few more besides. It must create an alliance within Europe, perhaps more loosely structured than NATO, to accommodate a wider constituency drawn from the nations of Eastern Europe, yet tight enough to exercise the cohesion and solidarity required to deter. It must convey the commitment ot the United States and Canada to assist in the defense of Europe, a clear conviction of U.S. readiness to help, with its hint of ultimate nuclear sanction. Without such a guarantee, large numbers of Europeans are likely to feel unprotected. It must provide a framework for political, economic, and military defense developments and policy among a community at least twice the size of NATO.
A community the size of the CSCE cannot work as a strategic alliance. The unwieldiness of NATO’s bureaucracy pales in comparison. On the other hand, the European Community of 12 nations has steadily matured over the last few years, from its fledgling origins in economic matters, toward a corporate political identity. Its member nations have committed themselves, in the Single European Act of 1986, to the joint formulation and implementation of a European foreign policy. They have affirmed their readiness to “co-ordinate their positions more closely on the political and economic aspects of security,’’ and are pledged to maintain the necessary technological and industrial conditions. All three of these concepts are conspicuously lacking in NATO.
As NATO begins to look distinctly anachronistic, so can the natural extension of European coherence in foreign affairs be seen as a common defense strategy. Remove NATO, and the Brussels Treaty remains—the very source from which NATO sprang. This treaty, between Britain, Belgium, France, Federal Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, is, in effect, the governing agreement on the collective defense ot Europe. Descending from it, the Western Europe Union lost its defense (unctions to NATO following France’s rejection of the European Defence Community in 1954. Its council and assembly remain in being, and continue to provide a lively.
Economically, one of the major maritime challenges is finding crews for big merchant vessels, such as the Encounter Bay. With only 427 merchant marine cadet entries in fiscal 1989, that could soon become a tall order.
authoritative forum for European defense issues.
Here, waiting poised in the wings of the new Europe’s structural theatre, is a ready and convenient vehicle adaptable to the purposes which Europe needs to implement. It has four outstanding attributes. It exists, and—in the limited context of the Anglo-Belgian-Netherlands mine countermeasures force in the Arabian Gulf in 1988, and again, more widely in the past six months—has been tried and proved successful, certainly as a basis for maritime operations world-wide. It enjoys unqualified French support. It provides close integration with the technological and industrial relationships within the European Community. And above all, it has, through an assembly whose membership coincides with the Council of Europe, a measure of parliamentary accountability.
Its outstanding disadvantage, of course, is its inapplicability to the United States and Canada. Yet it cannot be beyond the wit of statesmen to devise a contractual basis for expanding the scope of the Brussels Treaty on its existing foundations. Indeed, Europeans must be prepared to devote all the skill and effort at their command to the structuring of a flexible alliance that will both satisfy the aspirations of the “new democracies” of Europe and engage the trans-Atlantic partners.
The Global Dimension
The issue of whether Britain has a worldwide role in the exercise of armed force is still endlessly questioned. Many contend that such a role is a delusion. But if Britain’s and the European Community’s interests in overseas trade and access to raw materials call for a strategy aimed at preserving stability and security on a global basis, such a strategy must have a strongly maritime flavor. The history of the last 40 years bears repeated witness to the perceived political utility of deployed military maritime power, and no evidence in the world’s political circumstances would support the idea that international violence is on the way out. The difference now is that Western Europeans can justifiably cease to apply to NATO the rigid priority that has been necessary to bolster its political coherence—if not to keep it from falling apart—to the exclusion of maritime interests.
It is time for a look at whether and how national and European Community interests may need protection, policing, or stabilizing in the future. Some nations will conclude that no case can be made for such intervention capability. For Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and perhaps Germany, however, there is likely to be some coincidence of strategic purpose. Collaborative possibilities will include weapon development, ship construction, propulsion, and logistics. No less important, however, will be what the U.S. Navy is doing. The range and scale of a defense effort devoted to global objectives by the allies of the United States will very much depend on the range and scale of deployed U.S. forces, and even more on when and whether it is acceptable to the allies and the U.S. Navy to integrate.
Technologically, the allies simply cannot keep up with the U.S. Navy. Britain has managed, over an ever-
narrowing range of capability, but is unlikely to remain able to do so. Indeed, it is possible that the impact of the technological and industrial aspects of a European Community security strategy would be deeper and more harmful to the harmonization of operational issues within the Western alliance than anything else. A European collaboration in the procurement of sensors and weapons, in competition with the United States, would unquestionably mean that Europe’s navies would fall even further behind in real capability. The gulf between European and U.S- development paths would widen as well. Both effects would result in mounting operational and logistic incompatibilities. In particular, evolution of command, control, and communication systems at different rates and in different directions could speedily weaken the closest allies already tenuous interoperability with the U.S. Navy.
This may not matter; the interests of the individual European Community nations will not necessarily always coincide with those of the United States (or indeed with those of their neighbors). The United States might see advantage in the concept of European Community forces operating separately. Or they may have some appeal as a surrogate where U.S. responses could be provocative.
Dancing in the Dark
There are presently few indications of evolution along these lines, although in the June 1990 debate on the U.K- Defence Estimates a number of the more far-sighted backbench members of Parliament—among them the one-time Minister for the Royal Navy “handbagged” by Mrs. Thatcher—touched on the promise of the Western European Union as a framework for a “measured and orderly’ response to the new face of world politics.
Her Majesty’s Government appeared determined to ignore it. The range of ministerial vision extended no further than some rather feeble fabricating of “new roles” for NATO. This sort of conclusion appears to be the widespread resort of those too idle or too faint-hearted to think far enough ahead. NATO is a defensive military alliance, j not some sort of political club. To attempt to fit new pat- c
terns of geo-politics into the NATO mold, or to massage t
NATO into a wider spectrum of activities of a wholly dif- t ferent order, are retrograde distortions.
The Western allies must create a new, broader, “flexi- j, ble geometry” structure to safeguard their defense inter- 1r ests on a global scale in which proper account has been $ taken of their maritime enterprises. j.
Some aspects of such a new architecture may look very much like NATO. The Brussels Treaty, due for renegotiation in 1998, offers a more-than-adequate framework.
Aims should now be drawn, and critical paths set out, so , that the navies of the Western allies can enter the new millennium in a properly organized alliance, confident that it can keep the world’s peace. »
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Admiral Stanford is the former Vice Chief of Staff for the Royal Navy. He has also held the positions of Commander-in-Chief, Naval Home Command, and of Flag Aide-de-Camp to the Queen of England.