Mary Kaldor examines challenges for Labour’s Strategic Defence Review and argues for a collective rather than national security approach and putting nuclear arms reduction in the mix
On July 16, the Government announced that it planned to undertake a new Strategic Defence Review (SDR). The terms of reference (ToR) for the SDR are curiously old-fashioned. They focus on defence (meaning military capabilities) whereas earlier security reviews assumed a much broader concept of security including economic, environmental, health or virtual threats, and proposed a more integrated set of different capabilities. They prioritise geo-political military threats, mainly from Russia and China, reminiscent of the Cold War period. They talk about partnerships and alliances, mainly NATO and AUKUS, but do not mention multilateral or regional organisations such as the UN, the EU or OSCE. And finally, the ToR are explicit that the independent nuclear deterrent cannot be questioned although issues of effectiveness and efficiency are allowed.
Nevertheless, the Government have appointed three independent experts to conduct the review, including George Robertson, Defence Minister under the Blair Government, who was the first to order the arrest of war criminals in the former Yugoslavia and later became Secretary General of NATO, and Fiona Hill, the Russian expert who has advised several US Presidents, as well as a military expert. They can be expected to be open to new ideas and arguments so it is worth putting forward some considerations that are more in tune with contemporary circumstances. There is also a case for focussingfocusing on how defence capabilities need to change within a wider conception of security.
A starting point is that we live in a world in which we face existential threats to humanity, including, but not only, a major war. National security used to mean the defence of British people and British territory from attacks by a foreign state. Nowadays, the only way to guarantee the security of British people and British territory is through a more secure world. This is why a contemporary version of national security needs to be based on human security, which is about the security of individual human beings and the communities in which they live anywhere in the planet, from both physical threats (violence) and material threats (famine, climate change, pandemics etc.), not to mention virtual threats emanating from cyber attacks and misinformation. Human security is linked to the idea of a law based world, especially international humanitarian law and human rights law, what Ruti Teitel calls ‘humanity’s law’. And human security entails a collective approach where the UK contributes to global efforts to address existential threats.
Defence has an essential role to play in this but the kind of defence capabilities needed for a human security based approach are different from a classic war-fighting approach. The Ministry of Defence has already established a human security unit and issued a Joint Service Publication in 2021 aimed at mainstreaming human security throughout the armed forces. While there are continuing debates within MoD about what this means, I would argue that the central issue has to do with the protection of civilians. Within the framework of human security, the central goal is the protection of civilians whether from the threat of aggression, genocide or other crimes against humanity, rather than something to take into account when engaged in war-fighting against an enemy.
Under International Humanitarian Law (the ‘laws of war’), the killing of civilians is permitted provided it is necessary for military victory and is proportionate to the gains that would be achieved by victory, something that is open to very elastic interpretation as we have seen in the Israeli justifications for its attacks on Gaza.
Within the framework of human security, it is the other way round. The killing of enemies (combatants) is permitted provided it is necessary to protect civilians. Nowadays the goal of protection of civilians is the only way to establish the legitimacy of military operations, something the UK emphasises in contingency training for Ukrainian soldiers. As a UK MoD official put it, in an interview with me, ‘Russia is focused on delivering human insecurity – brutality towards civilians, destruction of cultural heritage, sexual violence, looting.’
So what would this mean in terms of the issues raided by the ToR? First, in terms of geo-political threats, there is no doubt that we need to be concerned about Russia and China, especially Russian aggression against Ukraine and Chinese provocations against Taiwan and in the South China Seas. Both countries have modernised their armed forces and China, in particular, is challenging Western air and naval superiority. But military threats are not the only issue. The Russian talk about ‘non-linear’ war to describe the blurring of war and peace, and the use of unconventional means such as cyber attacks and malicious disinformation to destabilise a society. Brexit could well be an example of this type of non-linear interference. Most authoritarian states have armies of hackers aimed at disrupting both politics and infrastructure.
A human security approach would contribute to collective defence against aggression, whether virtual or real, but this is different from engaging in military competition along geo-political lines. Rather than matching capabilities of potential aggressors, the idea is to be able to demonstrate effective defence and societal resilience, to show that neither military nor cyber aggression can succeed, without at the same time being perceived as a potential threat to other states and a pretext for further armaments. The main military threat posed by Russia and China is to their own populations as well to neighbours, and we need to contribute to their defence as in the case of Ukraine, but a continued war-fighting posture by the West, however intended, provides an ongoing argument for denying democratic demands. While I do not accept that NATO expansion ‘explains’ the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it did provide a fertile basis for justification.
During the 1980s, there was much concern about the offensive posture of NATO and the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. At that time, proposals were put forward for what was known as defensive deterrence, i.e. deterring foreign attacks through a credible conventional defensive posture rather than through the threat of nuclear or conventional retaliation. It was the idea behind Gorbachev’s notion of ‘reasonable sufficiency’. Proposals for area defence or in-depth defence were put forward that would have meant drawing down nuclear weapons as well as conventional offensive capabilities, such as bombers or massed tanks (though evidently some are needed for defensive purposes).
Today, within NATO, a similar debate is being conducted, especially in the Baltic states about deterrence by denial rather than defence by punishment. What this implies is that defensive and human rights considerations need to be integrated into the design of military capabilities, including the training of personnel and the development of new technologies such as cyber, drones and AI.
Secondly, there is still an important role for UK forces in global crisis management. The UK continues to contribute to KFOR in Kosovo and to UN operations in places like Mali and Somalia. There is a desperate need to address the continuing intractable violence in large parts of the world – Syria, Yemen, Sudan, DRC, Somalia, not to mention Gaza and the Red Sea. It is not just that literally millions of people face the daily threats of killings, displacement or starvation but also that these ‘black holes’ cannot be insulated from the rest of world whether as a consequence of forced migration, transnational crime or terrorism, or the obstacles they pose to dealing with climate change or pandemics.
There is a role for military capabilities within a multilateral framework in efforts to dampen down violence. The tasks include: protecting civilians from attack and creating a safe environment in which a legitimate political authority can be established; monitoring and upholding local peace agreements and ceasefires as part of multi-level peacebuilding involving civil society, especially women; establishing humanitarian space through corridors and safe havens that allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance; and arresting war criminals.
A similar approach was adopted by the British in Northern Ireland and the EU-led anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden, which combined the arrest of pirates with non-military measures such as the introduction of fishing licenses on the coast of Somalia.
Thirdly, multilateral organisations like the UN and the EU are key partners in a human security approach. Alliances like NATO and AUKUS need to reorient their postures towards human security. Like the UK, NATO has established a human security unit and the new Strategic Concept, adopted in Madrid in 2022, emphasises the need to ‘integrate human security’ across all the core tasks, although there is still a debate about how this should be interpreted. A new security arrangement with the EU, whose external policy is based on human security, as proposed by David Lammy, could be very important,
Finally, even though this point is excluded from the ToR, the possession of nuclear weapons contradicts a human security approach. A single UK warhead is a hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Any use of nuclear weapons would be a humanitarian catastrophe. Further, in the UK case, there are major issues of efficiency and effectiveness. Recent test failures of UK missiles, said to be ‘event-related’ call into question effectiveness, while the mind-boggling official cost of £31 billion (with £10 billion in reserve) seems an incredible diversion of resources from both conventional defence and other badly needed repairs to public services. Getting rid of nuclear weapons seems to have been ruled out for the moment but it would be important to revive nuclear arms control efforts especially, the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Iran nuclear deal.
These are some of the questions that need to be raised about Britain’s defence posture. At the very least, the SDR offers an opportunity. Perhaps the most useful recommendation is to conduct a public consultation about security and defence, as has been done in Ireland. In particular, the debate about nuclear weapons has become a taboo issue – it would be important to open it up to the public. Indeed, an inclusive approach to security is a necessary part of any strategy designed to strengthen societal resilience.