Monograph 49: Defence Transformation, A Short Guide to the Issues, By David Chuter
This monograph is about defence
transformation: the process by which nations are adapting their defence
policies to the post-Cold War world, and rethinking defence from the
ground up. Although it covers issues such as budgets, organisation and
accountability, it begins with more fundamental questions about the role
of the armed forces and their place in society, and the way in which
the defence community makes and implements defence policy, because, in
any defence transformation process, these things have to come first.
There is no single process called ‘defence transformation’.
Every country’s experience and every country’s starting-point are
different. But, in almost all cases, transformation has its origins in
the decline and fall of the Cold War system, and the consequences which
followed from that. The dynamics of the Cold War, although dangerous and
illogical, did at least provide the majority of the states in the world
with some kind of framework within which to make defence and security
policy. States might be members of a formal alliance, they might provide
base facilities or political support, or they might, indeed, base their
entire defence and security policies on not being members of an
alliance. Few states, in whatever part of the world they may be, escaped
the consequences of the Cold War. Now, all that has gone.
As will be explained later, the dominant mode of the Cold War
was what can be called ‘threatism’, that is, the concentration on
developing forces to meet an actual or potential threat from outside. In
turn, this tendency itself arose from the ideological dynamic of the
Cold War, in which each side believed the other to be naturally
aggressive, waiting only for the right circumstances to attack. The
escape from threatism and the formulation of a defence policy based on
sensible objectives for the use of military force, amount between them
to the greatest single challenge in the process of transformation.
In addition, the tense atmosphere of the Cold War was not very
supportive of democracy, or the development of mechanisms to ensure the
proper degree of subordination of the military to the civil power and
its use in ways which were supported by the nation as a whole. Defence
policies tended to be conducted by a technocratic élite. All this has to
change now, and nations are grappling with questions around how to
conduct defence polices in a democracy. The respective roles of military
and civilian personnel, the influence of the finance and foreign
ministries, the role of parliament and civil society, all have to be
reconsidered from first principles.
The relaxation of international tension over the last decade
has brought with it the unthinking assumption that defence budgets and
defence forces should be reduced in size, even if the demands on them
are actually increasing. Partly, this results from the political need to
be seen to respond to the end of the Cold War, and partly reflects the
urgency which most governments have felt to identify money to divert to
tax reductions for the wealthy. But, any consideration of defence
transformation has to include questions of how and on what basis defence
forces are to be structured and paid for.
Finally, these rather mechanistic and bureaucratic processes
have to be accompanied by a process of cultural transformation as well.
In some cases, the armed forces and those who lead them have to be
introduced to new ways of thinking and acting which the rest of the
world is adopting or has already adopted. Issues such as race and gender
representation have to be thought through.
Consequently, this monograph is not concerned, except briefly,
with issues of theory. It is designed to be of practical use to those
involved in the formulation and execution of defence and security
policy, as well as those whose work or interest brings them into contact
with the military, or with military matters.
There is no shortage of books covering the same general area
but, in almost all cases, they have been written by those with no
practical experience of the military or politics. It seemed, therefore,
that there might be room for a contribution by someone with a little
experience of both. Nonetheless, although the author has spent many
years working for the British government, this is not a recommendation
for the British way of doing things. Indeed, one of the themes addressed
in this monograph is the way in which thinking about defence and
security must grow organically out of the political and cultural soil of
a country if it is to have any validity, and if it is to last. There is
no point in simply adopting the ideas of foreigners, especially
foreigners carrying books. In contrast, this monograph is based largely
on personal experience and the experience of colleagues and institutions
with which the author is familiar after having met, talked to, worked
with, and sometimes worked against, military officers, diplomats, civil
servants and politicians from nearly every part of the world during his
career. Judgements in the text are therefore made on the basis of
personal experience, unless otherwise indicated.
Freed from the intellectual shackles of the Cold War, nations
have begun to wake up and think for themselves about what they need
their military for. This has been a painful, intellectually demanding
process, and in most parts of the world has not progressed very far. The
greatest obstacles have been conceptual rather than tangible, and have
reflected the fact that people find adaptation to sudden change
difficult. There are Cold War nostalgics, who try to cling to the ideas
of the 1980s, substituting, perhaps, Islam for Communism, but otherwise
changing little. There are the security conservatives who argue that one
should stick to what is tried and trusted. There are also the liberal
vigilantes, who, after years of calling for smaller armed forces, or
none at all, suddenly want them to be greatly expanded and sent all over
the world. This monograph pronounces a curse on all of them, and is
intended to help people in a variety of cultures and societies to begin
the task of thinking for themselves about what they want and what they
need.
The monograph begins with a discussion of the place of the
military in civil society, and some suggestions about how to
conceptualise the relationship. Thereafter, specific issues are
discussed in more detail, including:
- the structuring of forces;
- the setting of the defence budget, and the best use of the money available;
- the planning of operations, and the military role in intelligence activities;
- the conduct and control of military operations if they arise;
- and the public presentation and justification of defence policy and activities.
