Late in November 2015 the British government published the result of its 2015 defense review, the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). The policy paper responds to a new security environment in which major governments (Russia) are at least as threatening as insurgents (ISIS and its friends). As such, the balance chosen by the British may be of more than passing interest to a United States now facing similar problems.
The headline items in the SDSR included buying enough F-35Bs to fill out the air wings of the new carriers and also buying nine Boeing P-8 maritime-patrol aircraft to revive the British ability to, among other things, protect strategic submarines as they sortie (the Russians have been deploying their own attack submarines off British strategic submarine bases). Two new offshore-patrol vessels may have related roles. At the same time the planned purchase of 13 Type 26 general-purpose frigates has been cut to eight, the British government promising that it will design and build a less expensive frigate to grow the British surface force in the future. This simplified frigate is also hoped to have significant foreign sales prospects (past hopes for such exports have not been realized, however).
The headlines in many British papers described the SDSR as a triumph for the Royal Air Force, a minor defeat for the Navy, and a disaster for the Army. That seems naïve; triumph and disaster depend on what these services are supposed to do. Buying enough F-35Bs for the carriers is anything but a disaster for the Royal Navy, and the P-8s are doing a maritime job, whatever service owns them (in the United States, they would be wearing Navy colors). The Royal Navy is not getting all of the frigates it wanted, but that points to concentration on a power-projection naval force, not the worst possible objective. The change in ground forces looks more like a reorientation than a disaster.
Inevitable Jointness
The SDSR points to a growth in the deployable ground force, but that seems to mean growth in rapidly deployable units with limited staying capacity, and probably an overall cut in the size of the British Army. The main economy promised is a 30 percent reduction in civilian defense personnel. For years there have been suspicions that the Ministry of Defence is grossly overmanned, but it is not clear to what extent this cut means merely contracting out many jobs.
The last time British defense policy was reviewed (2010), the British Army was deeply engaged in Afghanistan, and large cuts of various kinds—including maritime patrol aviation—were accepted to support it. It was by no means clear, for example, that enough airplanes would be bought for the two carriers. A Royal Navy program designed to create a maritime strike force built around the carriers and high-capacity surface combatants seemed to be on the point of collapse, saved only by the fact that, once built, the carriers could be provided later with sufficient aircraft. The unstated changes in the situation since then presumably include the realization that protracted occupation of Afghanistan has bought very little, and that it may be far more effective to attack threats like ISIS and then withdraw. In the British system, any such attack is inevitably a joint operation, as the British Army has to be inserted either by air or by sea (the Royal Marines are small in number, not comparable to the U.S. Marine Corps in function). A carrier strike force, backed by the large amphibious force built up in recent years, would seem to be the best way to insert and to support such a land-strike operation.
The SDSR has been criticized by some in British industry on the grounds that the P-8s were bought without a competitive bidding process. But Russian probing of British strategic submarine deployment areas has made revival of maritime-patrol aviation urgent. The bidding and development process critics have envisaged would take some years to produce a real capability. That is a general problem, not just in the United Kingdom but in the United States as well. We take far too long to choose what to buy, because the procurement process is strongly biased to favor what seems to be efficiency at the expense of time (in some procurement systems, time is not even a factor).
Foreign Aid + Defense = Antiterrorism
The SDSR makes another interesting point. At the same time the British are increasing defense spending to 2 percent of GDP (the oft-neglected NATO goal), they are also maintaining a rate of 0.7 percent of GDP in foreign aid, which, according to the SDSR, exceeds that of other countries (it is a stated international goal). The takeaway is that, in the SDSR view, the two expenditures are both aspects of the same security policy. If economic development can be ignited in the Third World, its inhabitants are much less likely to be attracted by terrorist ideology. Alternatively, those who develop a real stake in their countries are less likely to tolerate those who would destroy all.
This is not a new idea. In the late 1940s President Harry S. Truman initiated the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe’s economies. He saw it as an aspect of defense spending, to be considered together with conventional Defense Department outlays. We now know that the Marshall Plan helped forestall a feared communist takeover of Western Europe.
What is the current connection between economic development and the rise of threats like ISIS? In Iraq, ISIS has gained largely by force; against men with guns, a desire for a peaceful prosperous future is unlikely to have much impact. Those running ISIS, like those who ran al Qaeda in Afghanistan, are essentially organized thieves. Their economic situation is fine as long as there are resources to loot. Whether the victim populations are unhappy (almost certainly they are extremely unhappy) is irrelevant. This is not a hearts-and-minds fight. It may, however, be a fight for motivation of the troops fighting ISIS, and it is encouraging that the Iraqi army seems to be gaining effectiveness.
In designing the SDSR force, the British seem to have been very much aware that success against an entity such as ISIS requires troops on the ground; ISIS can be destroyed only if it is forced to stand and fight. Air support is essential, but it is not a substitute for troops; an enemy can flee or hide from air attack. It may be that local armies will provide the necessary troops, but history suggests that they will expect us to risk our own troops alongside them. That was, for example, our experience during the advance through Afghanistan in 2003.
The Empire’s Example
To an American raised in the 1950s on movies of British imperial derring-do, it seems astonishing that no one looking at ISIS and its friends has brought up imperial experience. At its height the British Empire included more Muslims than any other political entity on earth. For the most part its subjects lived in peace and in a valuable degree of prosperity. Every once in a while, however, a charismatic religious leader turned up and ignited widespread rebellion and unrest. The figure most moviegoers probably remember is the Mahdi, who ignited the Sudan in 1884 (he was the subject of the movies The Four Feathers and Khartoum). It is left to the reader and to historians whether he was a terrorist leader or a nationalist seeking to break foreign rule.
To the British of the day, he was something else: an unambiguous threat. Eventually the British felt compelled to wipe out his followers at the devastating 1898 Battle of Omdurman. If the reader points out that those same British did not have to reckon with anger expressed by other Muslims, the answer is that (a) the Egyptian government, which nominally ran the Sudan (and was certainly Muslim) rather badly wanted the Mahdi destroyed, and (b) the fall of the Mahdi did not generate serious trouble elsewhere in the Empire. If anything, it calmed matters. The fate of the Mahdi’s followers was widely publicized. It did not, it seems, radicalize anyone. Sometimes a purely military solution is the only available one.
To go back to the SDSR, what was done to the Mahdi’s army was a quick strike followed by withdrawal. No one really wanted to occupy the Sudan in force (it ended up as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, until it gained independence after World War II). The British seem to be building a quick-strike ground force capable of appearing more or less suddenly, attacking an entity such as ISIS, and then leaving so as not to exacerbate tensions. Once the thieves have been removed, economic aid may work effectively to create resistance to further thievery.
Dr. Friedman is the author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems, Fifth Edition, and Network-centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars, available from the Naval Institute Press at www.usni.org.