Future Force 2020

The world is more dangerous and unstable than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Is the UK ready to respond?

For the first time in twenty years, an advanced military state has challenged the borders of European nations, and the security challenges in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia have increased dramatically in scale and complexity. Russia has annexed Crimea, and Russian-backed separatists have taken much of Eastern Ukraine. DAESH (or ISIL) have seized the second largest city in Iraq, and now control areas of a territory larger than the United Kingdom. The Libyan government has retreated to a ship off the coast. The President of Yemen has fled from his capital. Boko Haram controls swathes of Northern Nigeria. South Sudan—the newest country in the world—is in Civil War. Over 10,000 civilians were casualties in Afghanistan last year. Serious instability persists in Darfur, Somalia, the Central African Republic, and Pakistan. Three million people have been displaced and two hundred thousand killed in Syria.

The UK cannot afford to ignore these challenges and retreat to isolation. Global peace and security is of immense importance to the world, and to the UK itself. The UK occupies a key leadership role in international organisations, and can leverage both its formidable military heritage, and its network of alliances. It still has the capacity to play a deeply constructive role in preserving and restoring security.

But the UK’s current Defence Assumptions are not sufficient for this changed environment. The 2010 National Security Strategy had assumed that “Cold War” capacities for state-on-state conflict were no longer needed, and that instead, the military would focus on ‘fragile states’, lightly-armed insurgents and terrorists, through enduring stabilisation operations (which were assumed to be relatively infrequent). The SDSR was primarily designed in the light of the UK’s presence in Afghanistan (a mission, in which the UK deployed fewer than 10,000 troops as part of a 100,000 strong, US-dominated coalition).

Future Force 2020 planned to deal with one problem at a time by deploying 6,600 troops on a decade-long enduring stabilisation operation in a single country. And even US doctrine, envisaged sustaining a deployment in only two countries.

Now there is a requirement to support stability in a dozen different theatres simultaneously, and to engage with both unconventional and conventional threats. The first task for the UK is to ensure that it is able to engage as part of a broad coalition or alliance in tackling these threats (which are beyond the scope of any one country). In particular, the UK must build on its strong alliance with the United States, and ensure that European NATO allies are operating at maximum effectiveness. It must use its leadership position in NATO to ensure that NATO has the full spectrum of conventional forces, trained, exercised, and psychologically prepared to defend the European order against a conventional threat. The UK’s commitment to spend 2% of GDP on Defence, will be an important mark of seriousness to our US allies, and an important symbolic marker for other NATO countries.