After covid-19, what is the future of conflict? Part 2 | thearticle

_The following expands on ideas set out in a previous piece, which can be read here._ Part 1 described what has been titled, variously, as Hybrid, Grey Zone or Threshold Warfare. Of these

titles, it is probably Threshold Warfare that conveys the most explanatory meaning, in that this form of conflict uses military and non-military instruments to test the boundaries of Western

tolerance but does not cross the threshold that could legitimately provoke a conventional military response. The examples are legion and include the Little Green Men deployed during the

annexation of Crimea, artificial islands sprouting up in the South China Sea and relentless incitement by the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg. What the article did not describe is

_why_ Russia and China, in particular, have opted for this form of indirect strategic competition. For that we have to return to the first Gulf War, in 1991. Given the evidence of the

stunning US led victory, both countries decided that taking on the peerless American armed forces in conventional warfare would be folly. For Russia, this was no more than strategic realism.

Reduced in terms of geography, economic and military power after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it could no longer contemplate peer competition with the United States and drew the

appropriate conclusions. For a proud and touchy post-imperial power, this was an impressively honest and hard headed act of strategic calculation. For the Chinese, it was strategic

expediency. Chinese strategic culture lays store on preserving rather than spending power and they were always likely to favour a long game during which the terms of engagement might turn to

their advantage. Iran and other minor actors responded in the same way, but this is a field led and dominated by Russia and China. Russian national strategy today is both revanchist and

adventurist, but limited. Chinese national strategy is deliberate, global and unlimited; it is also probably the most integrated synthesis of the instruments of national power in play in the

world today. In strategic terms, both have prospered since 1991. In contrast and in a way that history might find inexplicable, the West has spent its power. The US-led coalition that

chased chimerical missions in Afghanistan and Iraq was deployed to show the extent of Western power; in the event, it only showed its limitations. America today is chastened both by military

failure and the inability of late stage capitalism to spread its rewards widely within US society; it has become a more limited and introspective actor on the world stage. Meanwhile, Europe

is ageing, burdened with debt and seems to have failed in what was previously advertised as the manifest destiny of political union. Western national strategies — where they can be clearly

identified — speak to retrenchment and consolidation. The West remains prosperous and, underwritten by American military power, strong, but it has seen a relative strategic decline since

1991. All this is a necessary scene setter to the big strategic choices that now confront Britain. We are likely to remain under hybrid attack for the foreseeable future: why would the

exponents of Threshold Warfare quit while they are ahead and as more instruments of hybrid engagement become available? We will also be clinging to the wreckage of the public finances as

Covid-19 legacy debt moves towards and beyond 150 per cent of GDP. The Brexit romantics may plead for a global role but we are going to have to cut our cloth according to the proximate

strategic threats and our financial means. That leads us ineluctably in the direction of placing homeland defence at the heart of national policy. It is hard to overstate how big a break

with our strategic tradition this represents. As an imperial and trading nation, we have always looked outwards and maintained small and professional armed forces, historically slightly

distanced from the society they serve. This distance was the necessary consequence of a large and globally deployed navy and the commitment to empire, but contrasted sharply with the

European tradition of _levee en masse _and armed forces rooted in and inseparable from the societies they serve. Now, rather than measuring our strategic capabilities in terms of an ability

to project force — the first requirement historically and still centre stage in the interventionist Blair years — homeland defence will demand that societal resilience becomes the first

priority. This strategic inversion will imply a far more interventionist role for government in guaranteeing the security of critical national infrastructure and, after Covid-19, it’s hard

to see the Chinese contractor Huawei being involved in the national 5G roll out. But it goes much further than that and comprehensive resilience can only be guaranteed by the integration of

government, civil society, the private sector and academia in a unified concept of total defence, to which the armed forces are an add-on rather than the first resort. The outstanding

exponents of total defence are the Scandinavian nations, a natural consequence of living close to the overwhelming military power of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and having to come

up with alternative intellectual constructs of deterrence than military escalation. The Swedish or Finnish models of deterrence by collective denial are not exact fits for our requirements

but speak to a depth and resilience in society that are the pre-conditions to meeting the hybrid threat. It comes as little surprise that the Scandinavian civil contingency mechanisms seem

to have coped far better with Covid-19 than ours. Britain is not going to become a Scandinavian social democracy overnight. We will retain our alliance commitments, our trans-Atlantic links

and our role in major international organisations like the G7/20 and United Nations. But Brexit, Covid-19, increasing global tensions and hybrid conflict are not going to permit business as

usual. National strategy is likely to become more unilateral, self-interested, domesticated and civilianised and this is bound to have consequences for some of our assumptions about force

structures, deterrence and war fighting. Force structures first. Just as the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, paired with the F-35 fighter jet, enter service, so they seem less and

less relevant to the strategic requirements of the day. Hybrid attacks are not susceptible to deterrence by conventional forces unless a threshold is crossed that makes the application of

conventional force legal, proportional and legitimate. The knack of Threshold Warfare therefore is to flirt with but not cross that threshold and so a cheap, lone cyber warrior can create an

effect disproportionally greater than a colossally expensive capital platform. That is not to say aircraft carriers do not have considerable utility in conventional battle — though they

also have considerable vulnerabilities too — but it is to assert that in a post expeditionary age, the quintessential expeditionary platform can look a bit spare. Deterrence next. Thresholds

can be a tricky concept and take on a rather plastic nature when used in a deterrent context. Threshold Warfare requires a line to be tested, but not breached; cyber operations, even when

included as an element of Threshold Warfare, constantly cross the line because they can be sufficiently ambivalent to be plausibly denied. A nuclear threshold should never be tested because

the risk of misinterpretation could create an irreversible process of escalation. Hybrid escalation, by its very nature, is opportunistic and reversible, sometimes capricious; nuclear

escalation, by its very nature, must be conscious and deliberate, never capricious. Yes, it’s confusing, but how much more confusing might it be in the heat of crisis for a political leader

with a license for nuclear release? The point is that the mixing of traditional and novel forms of conflict produce exquisite deterrent dilemmas that we do not want to encounter for the

first time, for real. There are a whole raft of PhDs and at least one seminal book to be written in bringing deterrence theory up to date. Finally, warfighting. The ultimate expression of

warfighting is nuclear release and we have committed to replacing Trident, at a cost of around £40 billion. Let’s leave to one side whether it’s going to be viable to operate submarines in

oceans of increasingly transparency for the 35-40 years after their entry into service and simply ask the question: for a medium-sized power with newly parochial ambitions, have nuclear

weapons had their day? If agile hybrid attack cannot be deterred by conventional military power, it certainly won’t be deterred by a completely disproportionate nuclear response. Cyber

weapons create equivalent mass effect but without catastrophic impact on life and physical infrastructure. They are also cheap, useable and buy us hybrid advantage. £40 billion will bend the

existing defence budget out of shape, let alone what survives after Covid-19; it would also buy a lot of total defence. If we end up with emasculated conventional forces and no tactical

nuclear weapons, how would we regulate the process of escalation from conventional fighting to nuclear release? Surrender or blowing up the world is not £40 billion’s worth of strategic

choice. And, of course, nuclear weapons aren’t very Scandinavian.