A few thoughts on strategy, both Grand and Military

I’ve spent the weekend thinking about strategy. Two new books are out this month making the argument - again - that the U.K. needs to get much better at matching the means of strategy - i.e., how we do things - with the ends (i.e., our Grand Strategy). They are Sergio Miller’s Pride and Fall and General Lord Richards and Julian Lindley-French’s The Retreat from Strategy. Both are uncompromising in their criticism of the increasingly severe chasm between what we determine to be our national interest (and therefore what creates our Grand Strategy) with the tools the Armed Forces are given to deliver it. (For the sake of brevity I’m defining Grand Strategy here in a specifically military way). This chasm has been getting worse year on year since the early 2000s and is, in my view, leading us to a crisis point in the defence of the U.K. Few in the political world seem to recognize the disaster they are leading us into, as a result both of sins of commission (getting our Grand Strategy wrong) and omission (failing to resource the Armed Forces adequately to meet the requirements of the aforesaid Grand Strategy). It doesn’t need a clairvoyant to explain where this will lead us if we continue to mess this up, and mess it up we are certainly doing. None of the mood music from Whitehall on the current SDR gives me any hope that the new government will get it right. Why? Because politicians of our current breed (not much different to the last lot, frankly) remain irrevocably and ignorantly committed to the principle of only paying for defence when the metal starts to fly. By then - and it doesn’t need a historian to prove this - it is almost always too late.

Obviously, we need to set our Grand Strategy first, before we decide how to achieve it via our Military Strategy. Its a subject that General Lord Dannatt and I explained the U.K. got badly wrong - in our book last year, Victory to Defeat - between two world wars. The problem then was that we foolishly got both our Grand Strategy and our Military Strategy wrong. When that happens, as 1939-1940 demonstrated, things can go very stratospherically wrong. We seem to be heading in this direction once more. Both Miller and Richards/Lindley-French pick over the coals of strategy, reflecting on what happens when the mismatch develops and the consequences of this not merely for the Armed Forces but for our nation’s security. On the subject of Afghanistan Miller develops the issues that many others have highlighted in the past, including General Lord Dannatt (Leading from the Front), Lord Guthrie (Peace, War and Whitehall), Ben Barry (Blood, Metal and Dust) and even the Patrick Hennessey in The Junior Officers’ Reading Club. As Con Coughlin wrote in his review of Miller’s book in the Telegraph on Saturday, ‘‘if you must launch a military intervention in a foreign land, first make sure you have the proper resources for the job, then have a clear idea of what you want to achieve - and when.’ Quite. There are many more. But how many of these books are being read? Not many, I suspect.

Richard and I are working on our forthcoming book on the Korean War, to be published in May 2025, where many of the same themes emerge. Korea is a brilliant example of how good strategy needs to be dynamic, entailing a constant conversation between the components of Grand and Military Strategy in which the ultimate objective - which needs to be rational and coherent - informs how the fighting (campaigns and battles) is conducted. In our book we argue that the U.S.A’s initial strategy was hijacked by hubris, and turned the war from a ‘just war to right a wrong’ into something of an unnecessary disaster, for Korea certainly. Would Korea remain divided today if the U.N. had not invaded North Korea in October 1950 and undertaken MacArthur’s crazy race to the Yalu? There’s a good case to be made that holding off for a negotiated settlement at the end of the first Korean War (June to October 1950) rather than trying to force unification by invading the North once this battlefield victory had been achieved, was a better long term strategy for peace. Charging off to the Yalu in a vainglorious attempt to destroy the N.K.P.A. and to win decisive military success resulted instead in a strategic disaster as it triggered the massive intervention of ‘Red China’ in the war, leading to its unnecessary prolongation. When hostilities ceased two years later, in July 1953, the warring armies remained almost exactly where they had been in June 1950. The difference? About 4-million dead. Don’t get me wrong: the war in defence of South Korea needed to be fought (and NSC-68 proved to be correct, and timely), but pursuing a Grand Strategy in which total victory was the goal was a disaster of the first rank. More on this anon. Today, both Ukraine and Israel need to be cognizant of the dangers of strategic over-reach. Fight the war by all means - and both countries must do so - but fight the war to end it, not necessarily to ‘win’ it. ‘Winning’ needs to be very carefully defined. In Korea the enemy of the good was a definition of victory that led to millions of dead in an extension to the fighting that, in our view, need not have happened if the U.S.A had got its strategy right once the North Korean armies had been defeated following Inchon in late September 1950.

But back to the present. The problem for the U.K. (and, I dare say, most other countries too) lies both in failing to establish an achievable Grand Strategy and in not having the means to execute it. The reality of politics is that it is rare for the ends of Grand Strategy to exactly match the means. What we often see is a bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul. If we agree that having two aircraft carriers to give expression to the U.K’s Grand Strategy of ‘pivoting to the East’ for example, it should never be at the expense of the air defence of the U.K., for instance, or the operational resilience of the nuclear deterrent, or the warfighting capabilities of the Army, to take just a few examples. And yet it has. There is no doubt about this. All too often trade offs are made in our Military Strategy that entirely invalidate our Grand Strategy. Not enough honesty is often given about how exactly we are going to achieve our country’s Grand Strategy with the means that we have available. Yet having a Grand Strategy without the means to achieve it militarily is a political deceit. All too often, as Richard and I attempted to demonstrate in Victory to Defeat, that deceit is paid for in blood and treasure when the balloon goes up.

But equally we can get our Grand Strategy grievously wrong, as we undoubtedly did with ‘Blair’s Wars’, trying somehow to make the world a better place by means of military intervention in crises abroad. This is where Richards and Lindley-French are blisteringly spot on. The similarities with political decision-making in Washington during the Korean War is remarkable, and salutary. Hoping to reform the world (think of David Cameron’s embarrassing ambitions during the Arab Spring in 2011) or to remove communism (Truman and Marshall in October 1950 - it wasn’t just MacArthur), or any other hubristic ‘strategy’, needs to be explicitly rejected by the government in exchange for a clear-sighted focus on our national interest. Once decided, the Armed Forces then needs to be given the tools to do the job. If there is no intention to fund our defence properly, then the only honest thing for a government to do its to remove it from its Grand Strategy. This is never likely, as Grand Strategy traditionally allows governments of all stripes to talk big; to over-sell and under-deliver.

So, writers of the current Strategic Defence Review: he honest, please. Let’s clearly define Britain’s national interest; ditch any residual notion of ‘an ethical foreign policy’ as the junk politics it is, and then be realistic about funding the result, in full. This will need political balls. Does our current government have them? Only time will tell, but I’m not holding my breath.