| By TIM KILVERT-JONES Tim Kilvert-Jones, a career British Army officer and
honor graduate of the USMC SAW Course, is the manager of strategy, policy, and special
programs at the Center for Security Strategy and Operations (CSSO), TECHMATICS, Inc. He is
also a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhust, the Army Staff College, and the
Royal Military College of Science.
In his valedictory speech at the Royal United Services
Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI) in London, England, in September this year, Adm. Jock
Slater, the retiring First Sea Lord, described the recently published U.K. Strategic
Defence Review (SDR) as a historic watershed. The SDR had marked:
"... a point at which we have
reaffirmed the Royal Navy's joint tradition; a point where we have seen a swing from a
continental to an expeditionary strategy; a point at which we now envisage an operational
scenario much more complex and much less singular than in the past with a joint,
integrated, and indivisible battlespace; and a point in which maritime forces have a clear
and pivotal role."
The combination of the rapid
disintegration of the Warsaw Pact nearly a decade ago coupled with domestic budgetary
pressures acted as a powerful catalyst for a major defense review in Britain--and, indeed,
throughout NATO. Much has happened in the intervening period: an American-led regional war
executed by a broad coalition in the Arabian Gulf; a European-led intervention in the
former Republic of Yugoslavia; and the emergence of a revolution in military affairs that
has once again altered much of the military culture of the United States towards a
systems-oriented, technically based model for the resolution of future conflicts.
In the United Kingdom a new government
has taken office. Tony Blair's New Labour Party came to power following its May 1997
election success and after 18 years in the political wilderness. Committed to undertaking
a thorough review of Britain's defense policy and capabilities, he has since held to his
election promise of conducting a full SDR. The government is now shaping the United
Kingdom's evolving force capabilities and military doctrine by providing guidance driven
by the nation's foreign policy and the moral obligations that are imbedded in its
international treaties, alliances, and global interests as well as by purely military
considerations. As the Foreign Secretary stated at an SDR Review in July last year,
"You cannot have an ethical
foreign policy if it is an isolationist foreign policy. That is partly why, in rejecting
isolationism, we commit Britain to working to build a strong international community. If
we take the view that the principles of the United Nations Charter are a matter of common
concern, we cannot stand back when those principles are being violated."
Nor, it might be added, can Britain
neglect the fact that 92 percent by volume, and 76 percent by value, of its trade moves by
sea. The U.K. economy remains vulnerable to interference to the supranational shipping
fleets now in operation around the world.
Maritime and
Multinational
Yet Britain lacks the military resources
to act as a global policeman. Thus, fiscal reality has demanded that the government
qualify its ethically based policy with the caveat that interventions will be made
"as a matter of choice." Those interventions will almost certainly be made
within the littorals, therefore demanding forces that are characterized both by maritime
mobility and by the ability to operate jointly and, especially, within a multinational
structure.
The SDR has now pulled many of those
strategic, operational, and tactical threads together into a cohesive policy baseline that
lays down the U.K.'s global interests and security responsibilities. To meet these often
far-flung commitments, the United Kingdom requires a balanced expeditionary capability
that is flexible, responsive, timely, and an effective, demonstrable tool of power
projection. In essence, the SDR has clearly identified a maritime-dominated military
strategy for the United Kingdom. This is not a return to Mahanian principles, or to naval
pre-eminence. It is an acknowledgment that, as Adm. Sir John Woodward wrote in 1992:
"All U.K. Defence Forces are essentially maritime. Not naval, but definitely
maritime. From our position as an island race it would be absurd to think otherwise."
Over the last two years the U.K. military
has received clear guidance for a "Grand Strategic Policy." This follows the
release from the shackles of the Cold War and the spatial, and temporal, constraints of
forward defense in Germany and the North Atlantic. Other less public, but highly
significant, changes also have occurred in "The British Way in Warfare." Those
changes have touched the very culture of Britain's military forces in the most dramatic
manner since 1945. The British have now transitioned, like the U.S. Marine Corps, from an
attritionally based doctrine to what is called a "maneuverist approach" to
operations.
A Time of Evolutionary
Change
Many of the doctrinal and cultural
changes actually were initiated under the guidance of a single dynamic army officer, Field
Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall. The impact of his dedication and reforms--as commander of the
1st British Corps (19811983), commander Northern Army Group (19831985), and then as
chief of the general staff (19851988)--was as dramatic for the British Army as the
reforms instituted by Marine Commandant (19871991) Gen. Alfred M. Gray Jr. were for the
U.S. Marine Corps. Bagnall had invigorated British military doctrine, and galvanized the
professional military education (PME) program, by establishing a Higher Command and Staff
Course (a SAMS, SAS, SAW equivalent) in which the operational level of war was, at last,
to be studied. The doctrine and the new PME programs both addressed the operational level
and acknowledged the central role played by a maneuverist approach.
In 1996 the British Army formally defined
the maneuverist approach as: "an approach to operations in which shattering the
enemy's overall cohesion and will to fight is paramount. It calls for an attitude of mind
in which doing the unexpected, using initiative, and seeking originality is combined with
a ruthless determination to succeed." This approach encourages the application of
leverage or force in such a way as to preempt, dislocate, and disrupt an enemy's cohesion
and will to fight. However, it is essential for policy makers and military commanders to
remember that this is not a panacea for what the Duke of Wellington called "hard
pounding." It is not a bloodless soft option. As the soldier-historian Professor
Richard Holmes explained to the Army Command and Staff College in England in 1994, "...
the neatest blue maneuverist arrow on a map looks pretty attritional to the man caught in
the cone of fire."
In its institutionalized form, maneuver
doctrine can become dogma. Fortunately, this is a trend that is being countered through
astute conceptualization, dissemination, and education from the individual doctrine
commands to the single-service and joint school houses. Like the U.S. Marine Corps, the
United Kingdom is now effectively building on the lessons of the past and formulating a
warfighting doctrine as the focus and framework for a commonly agreed approach to the
conduct of operations in the future.
Today, Bagnall's reforms are
well-established facets of the Army's contemporary culture, while the maneuverist approach
now also forms a fundamental part of Royal Navy and Royal Air Force doctrines. That
sentiment was echoed by the First Sea Lord at the RUSI conference, and is clearly laid out
both in the Navy's capstone doctrine manual The Fundamentals of British Maritime
Doctrine (BR 1806) and in the United Kingdom Approach to Amphibious Operations.
A Maneuverist Tradition
The U.K.'s maneuverist approach to
operations is the antithesis of attrition. What the historian Bryan Perret described as an
"amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage, and bulldog
determination"--exemplified by the 57,000 British casualties suffered before lunch on
the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916--is unimaginable in today's
casualty-sensitive environment. Yet there is nothing new in the U.K.'s maneuverist
approach. It also is wholly consistent with the U.S. Marine Corps' current approach. As
the current series of U.S. Marine Corps doctrine publications indicates, this style of
warfighting is as old as war itself and through the ages has been the hallmark of the most
successful commanders, particularly those who found themselves faced with a numerically
superior enemy.
For a nation so rich in military history,
one does not have to look far to find examples of British commanders harnessing the very
tools of contemporary maneuver-warfare theory: sound intelligence, high tempo, joint or
combined capabilities, and a decentralized command process (mission command) that can
apply fires, maneuver, and direct offensive operations at the enemy's perceived
vulnerabilities. Consider a master of maritime maneuver, Adm. Lord Nelson, here explaining
to a subordinate how to deal with the French:
"No day can be long enough to
arrange a couple of fleets and fight a decisive battle according to the old system. When
we meet them, for meet them we shall, I'll tell you how I shall fight them. ... I'll tell
you what I think of it. I think it will surprise and confound the enemy. They won't know
what I am about. It will bring forward a pell-mell battle, and that is what I want."
Theoreticians such as Liddell Hart and
J.F.C. Fuller both added to the archive of ideas that are now being combed by a new
generation of U.K. maneuverists. Of course, the written sources can be traced back to Sun
Tzu, who advocated defeating an enemy with the minimum fighting necessary in order to
preserve one's own strength. He also focused on what Liddell Hart later described as
"the true aim in war [which] is the mind of the hostile ruler, not the body of his
troops." This concept is now embedded in the United Kingdom's definition of the
maneuverist approach.
The Nature of Future
Conflict
Mark Twain issued a sage warning when he
wrote that "prediction is easy, provided you steer clear of the future." Yet
without some vision the foundations of tomorrow's military capability would remain rooted
in the past. Contemporary maneuver-doctrine, future-planning, and force-development
processes are focused on getting that anticipation right. This is a considerable
challenge. As Michael Mazarr expressed the problem in 1994, defense planners "will
need to be more far-sighted than ever. For the changes of tomorrow are coming faster and
with more force than the changes of yesterday. It may no longer be enough to avoid
fighting the last war; now we may need to be thinking about the war after next."
But this is not just about technology.
Trend analysis is one product that contributes towards developing the necessary picture
from which military organizations can assess the validity of new doctrines, strategies,
and information-based technologies. The British Army's Directorate of Land Warfare
recently identified two key trends in its process:
(1) "States continue to arm
themselves with advanced high-technology weapons and equipment."
(2) "State and nonstate bodies are
resorting to criminal and terrorist activities."
The first trend reflects the fact that,
in 1994, 28 non-NATO nations possessed tank fleets in excess of 1,000 main battle tanks,
and 11 of those nations possessed more than 3,000. (Britain is currently planning to
acquire fewer than 400 Challenger II tanks to equip its army into the next century.) The
second trend reflects the increase in worldwide instability since the Cold War's end.
Such deductions endorse the view that
future conflicts may well involve numerically superior forces equipped, one would hope,
with qualitatively inferior systems (industrial-age armies such as Iraq's come to mind).
But future conflicts also could involve terrorist-style forces capable of mounting
technologically sophisticated but small-scale asymmetrical attacks, such as the one in
1995 now described as the Tokyo Subway Incident. To add to an already complex situation,
future conflicts are likely to involve all three threats throughout the length, breadth,
and multidimensional areas of the battlespace--with the outcome anything but predictable.
As the British military historian Sir Michael Howard has observed:
"Western societies have learned
how to kill on an enormous scale, but they may still fight at a disadvantage against
agrarian armies who have not forgotten how to die and know well enough how to kill. The
Vietnam War and recent experience in Somalia indicate that, if those agrarian-age armies
are well-led, and if their leaders develop superior strategies, they can prevail."
But military institutions and academics
have had an inglorious history of getting the future wrong; an anonymous British Ministry
of Defence official wrote, shortly before the Gulf War, that, "It is hard to conceive
any set of circumstances where the United Kingdom would engage an adversary equipped
with armor [emphasis added]." Martin Van Creveld, supposedly one of the world's
foremost contemporary strategists, has argued that nonstate warfare was well on the way to
becoming the only form of conflict. Within months after the publication of his thesis
Saddam Hussein had proved otherwise.
Erroneous Assumptions
However, for many observers and
commentators, the Gulf War heralded a new era in the long and painful history of conflict.
For some in the media, this experience indicated that wars had again become short,
decisive, and relatively painless--a historical watershed. Alliances or coalitions
centered on the military power of the United States could exploit postindustrial
technologies of the information age to gain decisive results. A military organization so
equipped could then achieve short, sharp victories against any foe rash enough to
challenge the interrelated interests of the democracies.
Indeed, the devastating military
technology of the late 20th century, under the centralized and coordinated control of
all-seeing, all-knowing commanders, induces a most attractive vision: the enemy's army
cowed and broken, surrendering in droves, its cohesion and will shattered, and its
industrially based combat power rendered irrelevant, or useless. All this achieved, of
course, by the judicious application of precision-guided munitions and a coup de grace
executed by highly trained, superbly equipped, and precisely choreographed ground, air,
space, and maritime components executing grand maneuvers at little human cost.
But will the next conflict really be
fought against another inflexible, over-centralized, semi-industrially based force that
lacks either information or credible sea and air power? Will it also be fought in a
depopulated desert more akin to a pool table than to the complex, populated, and urbanized
littoral environments of Europe, Africa, or Asia? Will it be fought in waters relatively
free from interference and hindrance? Will it be a virtually transparent battlespace, free
from fog and friction? In effect, will it be another Cannae--or another Kursk?
Attempts to predict the actions (and/or
attitudes) of future opponents may prove to be unhelpful, particularly given the nature of
the dynamic march into the next millennium. It may now be more constructive to measure
projected 21st-century force designs and capabilities against experience (the lessons of
history), and the potential type of enemy (state or nonstate), the projected technology
available to oneself, as well as hostile states or groups and their likely doctrines.
Any adversary could well be equipped to
the highest technical standards. There has never been a mono-poly on good ideas
(U.S./U.K./NATO doctrine is quite deliberately unclassified), or on the most devastating
tools and technologies of war, such as the sarin gas used in the 1995 attack on the Tokyo
subway. Even ancient conflicts and schisms have gained a new and more lethal dimension, as
Bosnia has tragically demonstrated. The world is now quite simply awash not only with
weaponry and effective, cheap, command, control, and communications systems--but also with
the means to corrupt or defeat them. In short, for every system there is always,
eventually, a countersystem.
Backfires and Bazaars
The world's arms bazaars have readily
filled up with high-technology military systems, their designers, and systems engineers.
With the demise of the predictable and somewhat reassuring bipolar power structure,
several former Warsaw Pact states and China--as well as other international defense
contractors from West and East--have cascaded new and redundant conventional
systems amongst client states and organizations.
While there has been more caution over
the direct transfer of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, the same cannot be said
about their associated delivery systems or support equipment and manpower. For example,
Iran now has over 20 ex-Soviet Backfire bombers, along with numerous former Warsaw Pact
nuclear scientists; it is unlikely that those scientists are being employed to design
power stations. Sadly, the news also demonstrates that, even within the conventional
meaning of the word conflict, events have conspired to make what former President
George Bush called the "new world order" a more complex and uncertain place than
he imagined.
The dynamics of this evolving security
environment do not just represent a challenge to diplomats and statesmen. For military
commanders, the end of the bipolar system has produced a host of problems and a
proliferation of roles across a wide spectrum of conflicts. These now range from general
war, or major regional conflicts, to equally dangerous operations other than war. For
example, a British commander must now expect future operations to occur in a joint and
combined forum, possibly within the framework of an existing and well-established security
structure, such as NATO, or within an ad-hoc coalition as in the1991 Gulf War. This
inevitably increases the complexities of planning and mounting operations, their inherent
friction, and the scale of operations to a point larger than anything that either Britain
or the other democracies could, or would wish to, mount unilaterally. To that end, Western
contemporary doctrine needs to encourage mental agility and not be rigid and
systems-oriented.
With potential enemies now ranging from
conventional industrialized forces (measured by mass), to nuclear-armed high-technology
forces on the American model, to asymmetrical threats such as regional warlords, terrorist
organizations, and crime cartels, the challenges are indeed complex. For the U.K. military
to be able to cope in this environment a maneuverist doctrine is the essential
prerequisite for success; fortunately, the force designs laid out in the SDR offer the
necessary tools.
The Desirability of
Visibility
When examining the SDR, it is worth
recalling Clausewitz's adage that "the best strategy is always to be very strong; first
in general, and then at the decisive point." As the 1996 Strategic Assessment observed:
"The destructive power of a battleship or a nuclear bomb is apparent to all. The
power of information warfare is far less obvious. Thus, replacing tanks and warships with
buried missiles that are linked to information systems may increase warfighting power, and
yet prove too inconspicuous to deter."
Such a view certainly indicates one key
characteristic of effective defense planning--one must not surrender the power of a
visible deterrent force in the name of less tangible progress. As George Robertson, the
U.K. Defence Minister, stated in a 12 March speech, Britain must be able "to deploy
forces rapidly to where they are needed. This is now more demanding than before because,
unlike in the Cold War, when we expected the enemy to come to us, we will in the future
have to transport our forces long distances to crises, whether in Europe or beyond."
So while armies of mass still exist, even
the most technically advanced societies need to retain credible and effective conventional
combat forces capable of operating in all types of environments around the world and
across the spectrum of conflict. British maneuverist doctrine acts as a foundation upon
which effective responses can now be framed. Technology and weapons systems also must be
assessed, and acquired in parallel with this attitude of mind. So if digitization and the
technical advantages of the information age are to play a role in conflict resolution,
they must be integrated with the more demonstrable tools of military power. The
democracies should not cut back their visible capabilities or skills to the extent that
one can no longer project force as a deterrent or lever. If military power can only be
applied as a last resort in general conflict, it may have become too inflexible.
An Unbridgeable Gap?
Future military operations will be
complex. The littoral environment will create frictions and challenges for commanders at
every level. Those frictions and complexities will increase both within the joint arena
and within alliance and coalition operations. To that end, issues of doctrinal,
operational, and technical interoperability must be kept in the forefront of all
force-development debates.
These concerns remain valid. As Britain's
closest military ally pursues the highly technical "Joint Vision 2010" and
"Army After Next" concepts into the next century, the technical gap between the
United Kingdom and the United States may become unbridgeable--a specific concern mentioned
in the SDR. The concept of treating close allies as irrelevant, or as mere minor players,
could prove at best to be diplomatically insulting, and at worst militarily debilitating,
as specific skills, and/or the cultural understanding of a specific threat and region, are
lost.
Within the United Kingdom, the SDR has
pointed the way towards more sophisticated joint-interoperability structures. However, the
United Kingdom remains some distance from fully integrating its land forces with the
limited amphibious capability offered by its Royal Marines. The Joint Helicopter Command
and Joint Force 2000 (a naval and air fixed-wing force operating off the two new carriers
now planned) are a step in the right direction. Perhaps Sir Edward Grey, a British foreign
secretary at the turn of the century, was actually correct when he said "The British
Army should be a projectile to be fired by the Navy."
If the full benefits of the maneuverist
approach to operations and the U.K. government's SDR are to be reaped, then the United
Kingdom will need to break down the final barriers standing in the way to true joint
interoperability. The Army must be seen as a full partner in the expeditionary role and,
therefore, trained in the art of maritime maneuver from the sea--regardless of the
delivery platform.
It remains essential for the U.K.
military to operate at any level of conflict and have a visible, effective capability that
fulfills both a deterrent and battle-ready function. If the changes outlined in the SDR
can be fully funded, then the United Kingdom will continue to play a crucial role as the
closest U.S. defense ally and a leading player in European security issues. With its
cohesive doctrine based on maneuverist principles, its rationalization of peacetime and
warfighting functions in a joint and combined environment, Britain will retain a crucial
military capability. As T.E. Lawrence said, "With 2000 years of examples behind us,
we have no excuse when fighting for not fighting well."
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