‘At war with a peacetime mentality’

by | Feb 19, 2008 | UK

I was planning to write a more comprehensive analysis of RUSI’s journal article yesterday. I didn’t, which was fortunate, because Michael White has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian on why the military feels misunderstood while The Times leads with why Britain’s security must be a narrowly defined priority (which I will post separately about). All three pieces echo a set of assumptions that are out of date and unless interrogated risk sending UK HMG back to the early 1990s.

In order to understand the view of the traditionalists in the ‘defence community’ you have to go back to the beginning of the week and listen to the Radio 4 interview with Gwyn Prins. At one point Prins suggests the UK is at war with a peace time mentality.

I first heard this phrase at Wilton Park a year or so ago, more recently at Defence Academy and last week at the Rag. It is, I think, becoming the mantra of the traditional school within the defence community and is borne out of their view of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how the community sees the world through the lens of global terrorism, instability in the Middle East and other latent threats (Russia being the prime example).

In this context the reason for why the military feels misunderstood is not as simple as Brown spending more on security than defence as White suggests but a reflection of how isolated the defence community have become in the current debate about national security and resilience.

It is Browne who lacks the necessary overarching narrative that would act as a strategic anchor for MoD during this period of uncertainty. Devoid of such a narrative (let alone a strategy) the three services have resorted to damaging campaigns (invariably about procurement) with each other, played out in the harsh light of the media, as illustrated by Michael White:

Hence this Thursday’s ministerial search to cut the Astute nuclear subs and Type 45 destroyer programmes, to sell some Eurofighters (ordered but irrelevant) to the Saudis. The army’s new multi-purpose vehicle is probably safe from a Navy-RAF pincer movement. So are those two carriers: Rosyth dockyard is in the PM’s constituency. But defence contractors may be told to “sort it out yourselves”.

There are a number of different strands to the current debate on national security and defence but 3 are important in the context of the RUSI/ White/Times articles.

The first strand has to do with the role of UK defence in the current security environment. Here the debate rarely moves beyond the dual dichotomies of latent threats and poles of power (i.e. uncertainty of Russia) and the perennial debate over defence spending. The point here is that these debates are usually separate discussions and lack a necessary strategic anchor to bring them together. The result is that debates over defence end up being dominated by equipment rather than UK priorities.

The second emerging strand is about the focus and level of risk. Past debate has focused solely on the threat from terrorism. Since last December however there has been a concerted effort by departments and think tanks in the UK and across the Atlantic to place terrorism in context within a spectrum of risks (see Alex’s post on McConnell for instance). In doing so what is clear is that while most agree terrorism remains a threat to the UK it has become increasingly apparent that it is not the only risk.

This is disconcerting for the defence community which traditionally thinks in terms of one big threat. It is why, for the last couple of years, the question whispered along the corridors of Main Building been what is our role today?

This latter point is why many commentators felt what RUSI served up at the beginning of the week was well past its sell by date. By arguing that the UK is now in a time of remission between the frontal attack of 9/11, and its eventual successor the RUSI article was creating the image of a threat that they claimed would deliver an even greater psychological blow . It didn’t help that they were unable to support this with substantial evidence and to make matters even more confusing the authors conceded later on that we know much less about what threatens us.

The final strand concerns the present debate over counter-terrorism legislation which, at its most simplistic, pitches the security camp against the liberty camp. The new Counter-Terrorism Bill is the current focus of dispute with the former camp claiming (wrongly as it turns out) that only they understand there is a threat from terrorism and if everyone else knew what they did the legislation would be accepted without complaint. The liberty group meanwhile has chosen to use the ‘42 days’ as a stick to prod the apathetic public and NGO community into standing up against such draconian laws citing the last three pieces of CT legislation as examples of how disproportionate the government has been in the face of the terrorist threat.

Given that both Tony Blair and Tony McNulty have admitted that the ‘rules haven’t changed’ when it comes to fighting terrorism and that they got some things wrong it was therefore a mite confusing to read that RUSI thought the UK was a ‘soft touch’.

It is these three strands of debate that explain why the RUSI piece makes sense to the traditionalists in the defence community but to everyone else looks like a reckless piece of polemic based on spurious and an unconvincing analysis.

Iraq the place and Iraq the abstraction

by | Feb 19, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa

Over the past few years, the New Yorker’s George Packer has provided some outstanding reporting from Iraq. (He was also the author of one of the best articles on counter-insurgency we’ve come across, which introduced the State Department’s counter-insurgency boffin David Kilcullen to a bigger stage.) Now, in the current edition of World Affairs, he’s reflecting on the difference between ‘Iraq the place’ and ‘Iraq the abstraction’. 

It’s a terrific piece of journalism.  And it’s also a reflection on journalism, as in this surreal snapshot of life as an embedded correspondent:

A friend who went in with the Marines during the assault on Falluja in November 2004 paused one night in an abandoned house, with mortars landing outside, and downloaded his e-mail using a satellite modem. Pro-war readers had filled his Inbox with angry complaints that he was concealing the progress of the Marines—the “mainstream media” was too lazy and unpatriotic to get off its ass and go find the war.

And yet, he continues, “For all the television news coverage, Americans have the slimmest sense of what the war actually feels and looks like”:

The image of Iraq is flickering and formless. Each year of the war seems like the last, and the patrols and meetings with Iraqis that soldiers conduct every day don’t make for good television ratings. With the exception of Falluja, there have been no memorable battles. The mundane character of counterinsurgency, the fact that journalists have become targets, and the media’s sheer lack of imagination have combined to make this most covered of modern wars one of the least vivid. Iraq is more remote in our consciousness than Vietnam ever was.

Part of the reason for this, Packer thinks, is that opinion on Iraq was so polarised in American minds even before the fighting began – unlike, say, Vietnam, where the arguments only became “truly poisonous” after a few years of fighting:

Once, after a trip to Iraq, I attended a dinner party in Los Angeles at which most of the other guests were movie types. They wanted to know what it was like “over there.” I began to describe a Shiite doctor I’d gotten to know, who felt torn between gratitude and fear that occupation and chaos were making Iraq less Islamic. A burst of invective interrupted my sketch: none of it mattered—the only thing that mattered was this immoral, criminal war. The guests had no interest in hearing what it was like over there. They already knew.

If that sounds like oblique criticism of the blogosphere, it is: “the Iraq War coincided with a revolution in technology that allowed … reclusive twenty-somethings to register their reactions every seventeen minutes on their blogs (and become influential commentators at the same time”.

The flood of information and commentary resulted in an intense, irritable, balkanized view of the war, but not a clearer view. The same combat that partisans waged over impeachment and the Florida recount found its latest battlefield in Iraq, where the American political debate was largely irrelevant and quickly became an impediment to understanding.

Towards the end of his article, Packer reflects on the movies that have been made about Iraq, and how those movies have portrayed US servicemen:

It’s curious that the Vietnam War, during which some Americans demonized soldiers, generated a number of movies that depict military personnel as thinking, feeling human beings, capable of committing terrible deeds but also possessed of insight, sorrow, and even redemption. Iraq, the war in which everyone loudly supports the troops, has produced a film genre that systematically dehumanizes them. I doubt these filmmakers truly regard American servicemen as moral degenerates. Instead, they treat soldiers as abstractions, empty canvasses on to which the filmmakers can project their own fantasies about the war.

What Packer describes here is in some ways the the flipside, the shadow if you like, of what Clay Shirky was discussing in the clip I posted here yesterday. Clay Shirky’s interest is in how the internet enables groups of people to organise themselves on a grand scale (for good or ill); on how it can produce coherence and order. What George Packer describes is the opposite, how participatory media can produce incoherence: chaos, disorder, cacophony, where the very idea of any objective truth is lost amidst the blizzard of commentary, opinion and white noise. It’s not such a great leap from here to Baudrillard’s famous position on the first Gulf War – that it never happened.  And yet, Packer points out, this kind of lazy subjectivism obscures the fact that “…the war was not about nothing. No war ever is.”

I’m curious about what makes the difference between the two polar opposite ‘modes’ that Shirky and Packer describe, and I think it’s another case in point of what happens when “the centre cannot hold“. If participants in a conversation approach it with a genuine desire to forge consensus and uncover the truth, and start from respect for different opinions, then the way is open towards the mode of operations that Shirky describes. If, on the other hand, they start from rigid certainties and dismissive attitudes, then presto! – back to the white noise. The how, in short, plays a big part in determining the what.