The Disintegrating Language of UK Defence
In October 2024 a new series was launched on BBC Radio 4. Presented by comedy writer Armando Iannucci and journalist Helen Lewis, the aim of Strong Message Here is to ‘decode the utterly baffling world of political language.’ As troubling as it was amusing, the programme brought to mind an essay, written a few years ago, in which I considered the tendency for UK defence to be discussed in a strangely private language, with its own, increasingly obscure terms of reference. With a new UK Strategic Defence Review on the horizon, a slightly amended version of the essay is reproduced here, by way of a plea for a decoded, intelligible language of defence.
Clausewitz and the Analysis of War (and Defence)
General Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth century Prussian philosopher-practitioner of war, once observed that the analysis of war can prompt an ‘ostentatious exhibition of ideas.’ A ‘serious menace’, he suggested, is the ‘retinue of jargon, technicalities, and metaphors’ that ‘swarm everywhere – a lawless rabble of camp followers.’ Analysis of 21st century international security – in all its instability and complexity – can have a similar outcome. There is, however, no possible benefit to be had from approaching that which we find confusing, challenging and even frightening, with language that serves only to push understanding and reason ever further out of reach.
National defence raises vital questions. Who are our adversaries and what do they want? How and when should we respond, and with what purpose? Who should decide when to act and to what end? And how much will it all cost in political, military, economic and human terms? In any democratic society these questions deserve clear and unequivocal answers. That is the task of the UK Strategic Defence Review to be published in 2025 (SDR 2025), just as it was the task of earlier reviews published in 2021 (the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy) and 2023 (the Integrated Review ‘Refresh’). But by what measure will SDR 2025 succeed in answering these vital questions of national defence and, just as importantly, by what measure will it succeed in communicating its message?
The priority for the forthcoming review will be to explain the UK’s strategic outlook and the military posture and capabilities that will support that strategy. Is it too much to hope that in meeting this task the SDR document will be lucid and logical, and written in plain English? The challenge of reviewing highly complex areas of public policy lies not only in how we analyse and act upon the problems the country faces, but also how we articulate our analysis and subsequent actions. This is not a new or difficult proposition – it simply involves using language as it should be used, for the clear communication of shared (or shareable) meaning. Where security and defence and the resort to armed force are concerned there are important moral, constitutional, strategic and budgetary reasons for seeking clarity of expression. But the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces have grown fond of using English in a pretentious and often bewildering way: using modish expressions that are laden with meaning that is not generally meaningful; a coded language to which few have the key.
Strategy as Reassurance
The challenges to international security and national strategy in the early 21st century are not to be taken lightly. We might well be in need of a new language to understand the evolving strategic environment but, if so, a much better job needs to be done of it. In seeking to explain these challenges, defence analysts, commentators and practitioners often resort to ostensibly commonplace terms of reference intended to reassure us that we already have the necessary intellectual and analytical equipment to cope with the challenges we confront. The idea here would be to domesticate and neuter these challenges by using vaguely familiar terms (as seen in earlier reviews) such as ‘persistent competition’ and ‘political warfare’. But what do these terms actually mean, and do they tell us anything new or even useful? To stay with these two examples, hasn’t international politics always been about ‘competition’, in one way or another? Doesn’t competition always ‘persist’, until the point that it is no longer competition? What would ‘non-persistent competition’ amount to? And hasn’t warfare always been ‘political’? Isn’t warfare meant to have some political purpose and to come to politically recognisable conclusion?
Strategy as Theatre …
There is an alternative, more theatrical approach to the communication of national strategy, one that employs a wholly new and elaborately engineered lexicon, apparently designed to shake us out of our strategic torpor. The theatrical approach seeks to reify both the challenges and our responses to them, turning loose metaphors into fixed, concrete terms with which to describe a dramatically changed and hazardous world and to animate our response to it. These terms are often signified by the use of Capitalised Nouns and Adjectives, as though they were proper names, the meaning of which is self-evident and beyond argument. Closer inspection, however, reveals many of these terms to be more confusing than convincing. The popular idea of ‘Grey Zone’ conflict, for example, tries to persuade us that the binary, monochrome distinction (‘peace’ versus ‘war’) that has for long governed our analysis of war and conflict can now be discarded in favour of a third option. But how is it possible to describe a notional no-man’s land between ‘peace’ and ‘war’ other than in terms of ‘peace’ and ‘war’? What is grey other than a blend of black and white?
‘Hybrid Warfare’ is an especially bewildering term; a hybrid animal is one that is not only descended from its parents but is also, importantly, different from both of them. Thus, a mule is neither a ‘hybrid donkey’ nor a ‘hybrid horse’ – it is a mule. The distinctive feature in much of what is often described as ‘hybrid’ warfare is that it is not ‘warfare’ as traditionally understood but a new blend of political competition and organised violence. Yet if it inherits more from politics than it did in the past, then it is odd that only the non-dominant parent (warfare) is acknowledged. What sort of a genetically confused hybrid is this? Is it really a mule? Yet another term, ‘Next Generation Warfare’, suggests that armed conflict evolves in more or less discrete phases and that wisdom lies in identifying where we (and our adversaries) lie on the evolutionary continuum before acting accordingly. But the history of armed conflict has rarely if ever followed a neat and predictable course and seems even less likely to begin doing so in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, given the pace and scope of technological change. If Moore’s Law is anything to go by, the ‘next generation’ might arrive next year, and another two years after that. How useful can it then be to speak of ‘generations’?
… With a Difficult Script
The Integrated Operating Concept 2025 (IOpC 25), published in September 2020 was the UK MoD’s principal contribution to the reviews of 2021 and 2023 – and remains authoritative. The full version of the paper was classified and is not available for scrutiny. However, judging by a brief summary of the document – Introducing the Integrated Operating Concept – also published in September 2020, IOpC 25 offers a largely persuasive analysis of the 21st century security environment. Several important propositions are made, some familiar and others novel: the strategic context is diversifying, with a broadening range of strategic actors (and competitors); information and data technologies are developing rapidly; Western military advantages, such as air superiority, can no longer be assumed; nuclear weapons are being modernised and new ‘weapons of mass effect’ are under development; and the UK needs a ‘theory of winning’ which should, by implication, be comprehensive and integrated across government if it is to succeed against the range of international security challenges. ‘Information advantage’ is another important and timely idea, defined as ‘the credible advantage gained through the continuous, adaptive, decisive and resilient employment of information and information systems’. But the most interesting of the IOpC 25 propositions (as summarised) is that as well as being prepared to fight, UK armed forces should also be prepared to operate in circumstances where armed violence would be either unnecessary or inappropriate. This seems to be a form of assertive and active deterrence (of non-violent aggression), intended to complement the passive deterrence (of violent aggression) provided by the presence of capable armed forces.
Unfortunately, however, the authors of IOpC 25 could not resist the use of the coded language found in the theatre of strategy. One such term, the ‘threshold of war’, is especially popular and appears no fewer than twelve times in the brief summary document. The problem with it is not only that it is a relatively new idea originating in a distinctly Western view of the international order, but also that it is a very weak metaphor. It implies that war (or armed attack, or armed conflict) is a clearly recognisable state of affairs; that we will know when we have entered into it and when we have not. It has its origins in 1949; Article 5 of the Washington Treaty speaks of an ‘armed attack’ which could trigger the collective self-defence commitment among NATO allies. NATO’s Article 5 draws its authority in turn from the United Nations Charter, published a few years earlier, Article 51 of which refers similarly to the right of self-defence being triggered by an ‘armed attack.’ Yet although the precondition for the exercise of self-defence is armed attack, neither the UN nor NATO have yet defined the latter term. The so-called ‘duck test’ seems to be the best guide.
We also know that the 70 year old idea of a ‘threshold’ has barely kept pace with modern developments in international security. NATO has invoked Article 5 on one occasion – the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 – which was arguably more a demonstration of political solidarity than an Alliance-wide commitment to collective self-defence. In 2007 Estonia (a NATO member) experienced a series of cyber attacks which were so intense that some argued for Article 5 to be invoked. But the ‘threshold’ had not been crossed, at least not indisputably. This prompted a debate in NATO as to the nature of a ‘cyber attack’ and whether it should trigger collective defence or the weaker ‘commitment to consult’ under Article 4. The outcome was that NATO decided that a cyber attack could indeed trigger Article 5, but only when the attack is ‘serious’ – a ‘cyber duck test’, perhaps.
‘Threshold of war’, and its derivative ‘sub-threshold’, are not strong metaphors and neither do they represent the norm in strategic history and current practice. A more accurate image is that of a continuum from peace and stability through to violence and instability; the notion that there could be a single, clear dividing line between one and the other is probably unsustainable.
Old Hat, New Hat
The summary of IOpC25 also sparks other concerns, such as the claim that our adversaries might have a novel and devilish plan ‘to win without fighting’ – but this is an idea with which we have been familiar for about 2,500 years, pace Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Reference is also made to the idea, derived from Clausewitz, that war has a constant ‘nature’ and an ever-changing ‘character’. We learn that the character of war is evolving ‘rapidly’ and ‘significantly’ and is ‘transforming’. But of course it is: this is what war does and is precisely what Clausewitz was getting at – surely we cannot on the one hand subscribe to his analysis and then allow ourselves to be surprised by it? The summary document contains at least one other exaggerated claim – that a ‘new model’ of deterrence is not only required but has been discovered. We are told that the addition of ‘competition’ to the ‘traditional deterrence model’ will make it possible to ‘compete below the threshold of war in order to deter war.’ This is the logic behind the ‘operate’ proposition discussed above. But the raison d’être of deterrence has always been to manage competition and tension without the resort to armed conflict; modern deterrence does not require a ‘more competitive approach’ – it already has one.
The Hogwarts School of Strategy
At least in its summary version, IOpC 25 also contains language that is far more strange. In what might be a nod to the Hogwarts School of Strategy, we learn that we should be searching for ‘a North Star to help us develop the modernised force beyond 2030.’ Force modernisation is a critically important task of strategic risk management but it is not helped by fanciful language such as this. Nor is it helped by the idea that we should distinguish between ‘sunset’ and ‘sunrise’ capabilities; the first being destined for the scrapyard and the latter worthy of our investment. Who is to decide, when should it happen and on what basis? Military innovation has seldom worked in such a clear-cut and decisive way – one notable exception being the change by the world’s navies from paddle wheel to screw propeller which took place ‘almost overnight’ according to Matt Ridley in How Innovation Works. And in any case, to extend the metaphor ad absurdum, it might be relevant to observe that neither sunset nor sunrise happen simultaneously all around the world.
The effect of these two approaches – the first to reassure and the second to dramatise – combined with the sheer silliness of some of the language used, is to make much of the UK defence discussion risible at worst and puzzling at best. Are we facing problems that are broadly familiar and manageable, or something strange, unsettling and unprecedentedly menacing? We might hope against the reappearance of this peculiar language in SDR 2025 but the temptation to indulge in such linguistic gymnastics is very strong, and one the UK defence debate has recently been unable to resist.
Industrialised Nonsense
The UK defence debate generates many insightful, informative and timely arguments. But it has also, unfortunately, become home to a cottage industry of nonsense. The language of national strategy and defence should be clear, solemn and uncluttered. It should also avoid hyperbole. Introducing the Integrated Operating Concept claims that its parent document, IOpC 25, represents both ‘the most significant change in UK military thought in several generations’ and ‘a fundamental shift in military philosophy’. The first of these claims might be justifiable but the second seems much less so; if this is ‘philosophy’ (let alone ‘fundamental’) then I am Aristotle. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ on 12 October 2020, Professor Tina Beattie, an academic and broadcaster, warned that ‘We are gradually anaesthetised to settle for the banality of words without substance, and jargon without meaning in our increasingly impoverished public discourse.’ She could well have been writing about the trend to pretentious obscurantism that defines too much of the security and defence discussion in the UK. But to make the point most vividly we should return to none other than Clausewitz, whom some would describe as the only philosopher of war to have emerged so far in the modern period. Clausewitz made these memorable comments in his seminal On War (the Michael Howard & Peter Paret edition, 1976): ‘
We will […] avoid using an arcane and obscure language, and express ourselves in plain speech, with a sequence of clear, lucid concepts. […] If concepts are to be clear and fruitful, things must be called by their right names.