Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Russell Brown

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on alighting on a vital capability. There was one thing that she did not say about it: if it were deployed, it would be the envy of the Americans, such is the sophistication of the capability. It is also a valued asset of many of our European NATO allies and I hope that even now, at this eleventh hour, there might be ways to explore how we can share the burden of the capability so that it can be retained. I fear that that underlines how the defence review was done in a rush and that, whatever the thinking in advance, it ended in the inevitable collision between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury which, as the letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to the Prime Minister advertised, threatened to be even more destructive than it was.

I would further underline, as the Secretary of State admitted, that the review has been distorted by our activities and the burden of operations in Afghanistan. To that extent, the review is raiding future capability to sustain current operations, which is an unstrategic approach. I fully accept—I think we have to understand the predicament faced by those on the Treasury Bench—that the Government have inherited a very difficult situation and not just in the Ministry of Defence. Of course the national deficit has to be addressed, but there is a deeper malaise at the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between the Ministry of Defence and the rest of Government and, indeed, in dysfunctional relationships at the MOD.

As shadow Secretary of State for two years and a member for four years of the Select Committee on Defence, I watched with increasing perplexity post-9/11 our first Afghan deployment, the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deployment to Helmand, as chaos grew due to policy that was increasingly reactive to events and less and less in control of them. There was increasingly an apparent lack of strategic thinking behind what we were doing. As we started calling for NATO to develop a new strategic concept, I began to ask myself who held the UK’s strategic concept and whether there was one. That was the starting point for the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry once I was elected its Chairman in this Parliament. Our report entitled, “Who does UK National Strategy?” is on the Table and tagged for this debate. The evidence, I am afraid, was more disturbing than I had imagined.

The word “strategy” itself has become corrupted. It has become a tool of management-speak for consultancies and people who do not really know what they are doing when they use it. We heard evidence from Sir Rob Fry and Commodore Stephen Jermy, who were both involved in decisions in the Ministry of Defence about the deployment to Helmand. They said that it was driven primarily by military concerns, without any strategic thinking going on in Whitehall about the reasons for it or its consequences.

In one rather telling piece of evidence, Peter Hennessy, shortly to be ennobled as Lord Hennessy, says that politicians too often reach for the word “vision”, and that we should be ready to excise that word with our red buzzer, because it is an excuse for a politician to disconnect his aspirations and the sunlit uplands that he dreams of from the reality of the world in which he, and the civil servants who have to deliver the policy that he is seeking to deliver, have to live.

We found that Whitehall Departments each have their own version of strategy, with their own strategy units, but none of them knows what they are meant to contribute to national strategy, if they even knew what that was. That applies to the Treasury in particular. There is no doubt that the main strategic effort of this Government has to be deficit reduction, but I think that, as far as the Treasury is concerned, it is the Government’s sole strategic effort. To have a sole strategic effort is strategic blindness, not strategy. It may be a necessity to have that imperative driving the whole Government at this time, but other strategic priorities have to be recognised.

Strategy is not just about reconciling ends, ways and means. It is not about having a document that is published as a Command Paper and stacked on a shelf afterwards—job done. Strategy is a state of mind. It is a process of thinking that has to be ongoing, has to be done continuously, and has to be continually adapted. A grand strategy, or a national strategy, is about reconciling all the instruments of statecraft to the main ends of promoting the security, peace and prosperity of the people of these islands. It is evident that both the national security strategy and the defence and security review lack strategic thinking—the consistency of analysis and assessment that is necessary to give them strategic coherence.

The problem is that the work simply has not been done, because Whitehall lacks the capacity to do it. There are no people working for the National Security Council or the strategy units of different Departments who are tasked with doing or trained to do such work. Some people say, “Strategists are not trained, they are born”, but that is like saying that a great gymnast is born a gymnast. Of course, someone has to have talent to be a great gymnast or a great concert pianist, but they also have to put in the work and the training in order to be successful before they give that first recital. There used to be a six-month civil service course on strategic thinking; at the moment, it consists of one module of one week’s training.

That lack of strategy is evident in all the contradictions in the documents. The national security strategy says that it is the first duty of Government to protect our people. Well, that is clearly not so. The first priority of Government is not defence. Health, pensions, schools, the Department for International Development, and even the European Union budget have taken priority over the defence of these islands in the comprehensive spending review.

The words “national interest” are sprinkled liberally throughout the documents. They are mentioned 26 times in the national security strategy and six times in the SDSR, and were even mentioned once by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor in his comprehensive spending review statement—but that was only in connection with justifying the increase in spending on overseas aid. In all those mentions, there is very little definition of what our national interests actually are. When I tabled a parliamentary question to the Prime Minister to ask him, he referred me to paragraph 2.12 of the national security strategy:

“Our security, prosperity and freedom are interconnected and mutually supportive. They constitute our national interest.”

That is really sub-GCSE stuff. If that is the depth of thinking that has gone into an assessment of our national interests, we can hardly expect much coherence from the Government’s documents.

The real inconsistency at the heart of all three of the Government’s reviews is the attempt to reconcile what the Foreign Secretary has said about having no strategic shrinkage and expanding our influence on the world stage with the savage defence cuts that will lead to a reduction of one third in our deployable capability. That is what the defence planning assumptions actually show. There has been an attempt to connect the Foreign Secretary’s vision of our foreign policy with the reality of the deficit reduction programme, but it has not been achieved.

Our Committee concluded that political strategic leadership is essential if we are to have a coherent national strategy. Strategic thinking is vital, and we need to examine all the threats, possibilities and opportunities, not just certain threats and contingencies. Within Whitehall we need challenge, with alternatives coming up through the system and people conducting thorough analysis. Ideally, we want a national centre of strategic assessment, protected for secrecy in a similar way to the intelligence services and able to provide a permanent resource to Ministers.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, given the time limit—perhaps I have bought him a little more time. Would he like to define for the House what he believes national strategy should be?