The latest British Strategic Defence and Security Review, launched on 19 October 2010, was a budget-cutting exercise. It was not a statement of the strategic direction the United Kingdom should take and why. Instead, it was an across-the-board reduction in funding, with equal pain being shared by the three armed services and the civilian sector. Most analysts and commentators considered it a missed opportunity to define British defense strategy for the immediate future.
The Royal Navy has been decimated. Something has to give. The outlook now is even bleaker because of the economic climate. The UK is spread too thinly across just too many operational domains. As a result, it is in great danger of executing none of them well. Britain’s forces, while comprising outstanding people, simply do not have the resource base to continue to perform in all the domains that drive the country’s force structure, acquisition strategy, and investment in R&D. The UK simply cannot afford the luxury of trying to do things for which it does not, and will not, have the resources.
What is the answer? Let the UK execute a much more limited range of warfare domains that are both within its current and projected resource limits and in keeping with its most critical national interests. Failing to achieve in an environment of a fiscally strained and struggling industrial base is not a recipe for military success for a nation with such a fine military heritage. The answer is to specialize in those areas where the security return is greatest for the investment made.
Britain can afford only one strategic vision. It is, simply stated, the projection of British interests and their security through a forward-deployed maritime presence that supports all projected conventional maritime and irregular operations. The Royal Navy is, and must be, the linchpin of that strategy. All else must support this single strategy—influenced on and from the sea, with a global capability to provide and sustain conventional maritime and irregular operations.
The 21st century has ushered in global security issues that differ from those that shaped the 20th century’s continental strategy, which required large standing armies and air forces. New global resource and economic issues are accompanied by broad asymmetric and irregular threats and the emergence of a powerful China. Rogue states challenge the international order. The sea is the global commons that connects these vying interests and the potential problems that pose serious threats to the UK’s vital national interests. The maritime axes, or confluences of economic and threat challenges, are global in disposition. The UK cannot become an inconsequential player in this environment and should now create a maritime force and programs that support this new strategic vision.
The concern is about threats to the UK’s vital national interests, and by association, to those of its most trusted friends and allies who, because of economic and cultural globalization, are joined with it at the hip. Britain is a maritime trading nation and depends entirely on imports and exports for its lifeblood. The sea is the common factor joining these economic interests with other nations. Without maritime power the UK has no means of influencing and safeguarding its critical economic and political self-interest. It must accept that its ability to contribute to land campaigns will be seriously curtailed. Military authority on land will come from the sea in the form of Royal Marines, special operations forces, security-force assistance, and brief, low-intensity operations, with a logistics tail that is sea-based and supplied.
The Royal Navy should expand significantly all the principal maritime warfare domains and maintain the national strategic deterrent. All these elements must be joined in the pursuit of alliance building, multilateral operations, and forging security relationships through security-force assistance and multinational training and exercises.
The top-down breakdown of this strategy will determine massive cuts in the British Army and the Royal Air Force; there will be no Army sustained deployments and no Air Force operations other than to support maritime operations and logistics support through airlift.
Let the UK implement this vision and move forward while keeping to its traditional strategic roots—a maritime strategy based on the enduring strength of the Royal Navy, its people, its industrial base, and its global economic and security interests.