Brithish National Strategy: Who Does It?

Abstract

Abstract: Since 2010, four Parliamentary committees have criticized Britain's failure to promote its capacity for strategy making. Publicly, this failure is identified with the decisions of 2002-03, and especially with the invasion of Iraq. But the 1998 Strategic Defence Review was in trouble before the 9/11 attacks because it was underfunded. More culpable was Britain's failure to learn and adapt in 2006. The formation of the National Security Council by the 2010 coalition has yet to deliver. ********** On 10 April 2013, the United Kingdom's (UK) House of Commons Defence Committee published its tenth report of the 2012-13 session, Securing the Future of Few of the 39 numbered paragraphs of conclusions and recommendations could be described as laudatory, and most took aim at the British government and specifically the Ministry of Defence. The overall tenor of the report was evident in its paragraph on strategic communications. It is vital that the process [of the hand over to Afghanistan of the responsibility for its own security] is seen as transition and not as a 'withdrawal through fatigue.' We have seen little evidence that the government's communications strategy is fulfilling its objectives. The strategy should contain as a bare minimum the following: what we set out to do; what we achieved; what remains to be done including managing the continuing risk, albeit reduced, of UK casualties; and the manner of the departure of UK Armed Forces. (1) Currently, the British government has yet to reply, but it can safely be said that no one is holding their breath. A communications strategy is impossible without a security strategy, and the absence of both has been the subject of comment by parliamentary committees in addition to that on defense. In March 2011, the Foreign Affairs Committee, in its report on the UK's foreign policy approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan, stated it gained the impression that the focus on tactical military gains in specific provinces is in danger of obscuring the very real security and other strategic challenges which exist beyond the military campaign elsewhere in Afghanistan. Tellingly, these words appeared under the overall heading Tactical Rather Than Strategic Success? (2) A year later the Joint Parliamentary Committee on National Security Strategy examined the National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) procedure which had been used to underpin the 2010 National Security Strategy. The latter had said Afghanistan had not been included in the NSRA as the risk assessment process was designed to address only future security risks, not ones. The committee expressed its surprise: We remain to be convinced of the Government's reasoning for not including Afghanistan in the NSRA. The Government has said that it is not including immediate security issues, but terrorism, accidents, flooding and cyber attack are included, though they are all current threats. While the date of troop withdrawal may be a firm policy, we take the view that Afghanistan and the surrounding region remain an area of risk for the UK's security and this ought to be reflected in the NSRA. (3) The Joint Parliamentary Committee's comments about Afghanistan in particular were set against a wider worry: that the problem was not confined to Afghanistan alone. Over the last five years a consensus has developed that Britain is not very good at making strategy, and that this represents a fall from grace for a generation inclined to cite Churchill and Alanbrooke as evidence that once it was. The National Security Strategy (NSS) published in 2010 by David Cameron's government, the Joint Parliamentary Committee opined, does not yet present a clear overarching strategy: a common understanding about the UK's interests and objectives that guides choices on investment across government departments, including domestic departments, as well as guiding operational priorities and crisis response. …