The flawed promise of National Security Risk Assessment: nine lessons from the British approach^*

* This article reflects – but also significantly develops and extends – the author’s previous analysis of the UK NSRA’s extant limitations provided to two Parliamentary Select Committees in the wake of the 2015 NSS/SDSR. See: House of Lords/Commons Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015: First Report of Session 2016–17 (London: Parliament, 2016), e.g., p.34 (para. 101), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201617/jtselect/jtnatsec/153/153.pdf; House of Commons Defence Committee, Flexible Response? An SDSR Checklist of Potential Threats and Vulnerabilities: First Report of Session 2015–16 (London: Parliament, 2015), e.g., p.25 (para. 83), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmdfence/493/493.pdf

Abstract

Since 2010, quinquennial UK National Security Strategies – and the Strategic Defence and Security Reviews that follow – have been based on a public National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA). The purpose of the NSRA is to identify and prioritize UK security risks for the coming five-yearly cycle based on their likelihood and impact. This article recognizes that trading off severity against likelihood is a valuable strategic heuristic. Yet it concludes that until the NSRA can address nine key limitations, it will remain a flawed exercise. Such findings carry implications for UK policy, and for other states operating NSRA-style risk matrices.

Acknowledgement

I thank Sergio Catignani, Michael Clark, Helena Mills, Simon Pender, Patrick Porter, Joshua Rathbone, Martin Robson, Simon Strickland, participants in the 2017 Historical Analysis Symposium of the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), several cohorts of Exeter MStrat students, and the I&NS editors and reviewers for helpful comments, debate, and clarification. Of course, all opinions and errors remain my own.

Notes

* This article reflects – but also significantly develops and extends – the author’s previous analysis of the UK NSRA’s extant limitations provided to two Parliamentary Select Committees in the wake of the 2015 NSS/SDSR. See: House of Lords/Commons Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015: First Report of Session 2016–17 (London: Parliament, 2016), e.g., p.34 (para. 101), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201617/jtselect/jtnatsec/153/153.pdf; House of Commons Defence Committee, Flexible Response? An SDSR Checklist of Potential Threats and Vulnerabilities: First Report of Session 2015–16 (London: Parliament, 2015), e.g., p.25 (para. 83), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmdfence/493/493.pdf

1. For an explanation of the current NSRA vis-à-vis its antecedents, see: HM Government, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, 85 (hereafter, ‘NSS/SDSR 2015’). For a discussion of its introduction and methodology, see: HM Government, Fact Sheet 2. For its original introduction as the basis for top-level UK national security prioritization, see: HM Government, A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty, 25–31 (hereafter, ‘NSS 2010’).

2. Edmunds, “Complexity, Strategy and the National Interest,” 536.

3. NSS/SDSR 2015, 87. The specific time horizon is a five-year focus with a twenty-year outlook.

4. For the evolution of this critique up to the NSRA’s 2010 introduction, see: Strachan, “The Lost Meaning of Strategy,” 33–54; Cornish and Dorman, “Blair’s Wars and Brown’s Budgets,” 247–261; Strachan, “The Strategic Gap in British Defence Policy,” 49–70; Blagden, “Strategic Thinking for the Age of Austerity,” 60–66; Porter, “Why Britain Doesn’t Do Grand Strategy,” 6–12. For Parliamentary critique of the same failings, see: House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, Who Does UK National Strategy? Prime Minister David Cameron also invoked this rationale in explaining his post-2010 wave of reforms to UK national security machinery, including the NSRA’s creation: House of Lords and House of Commons Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS), National Security Strategy: Evidence from the Prime Minister.

5. As discussed subsequently, the incorporation of the language/methodology of ‘risk’ into security policy was already underway across the West from the 1990s – including the ‘precautionary principle’, seeking to shield society from the full spectrum of hypothetical harms – so the NSRA alone did not ‘create’ Whitehall’s risk-obsession (on the contrary, such obsession spawned the NSRA). Nonetheless, the NSRA’s creation has formalized the place of risk assessment as the very underpinning of the UK National Security Strategy and all associated domains of policy. On risk’s post-Cold War permeation of security policy, see (for example): Beck, World Risk Society; Morris, “Defining the Precautionary Principle”; Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War; Coker, War in an Age of Risk.

6. On security/defence policy in general, see: Cornish and Dorman, “Dr. Fox and the Philosopher’s Stone,” 335–353; Edmunds, “British Civil-military Relations and the Problem of Risk,” 265–282; Edmunds, “Complexity, Strategy and the National Interest,” 525–539; Hammerstad and Boas, “National Security Risks?” 475–491; Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 239–260. On intelligence gathering/assessment specifically, see: Strachan-Morris, “Threat and Risk,” 172–186; Phythian, “Policing Uncertainty,” 187–205; Gill, “Intelligence, Threat, Risk, and the Challenge of Oversight,” 206–222. Such critique of the NSRA’s approach has also extended out of academia and into Parliament – see, for example: House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Flexible Response, 5; JCNSS, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, 34. These UK-specific applications build, in turn, on a broader literature on the incorporation of risk methodologies and discourse into national security, especially from the 1990s onwards – see, for example: Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War; Coker, War in an Age of Risk. For a discussion of risk management theory, from which these national security applications have been derived, see: Bracken, Bremmer, and Gordon (eds.), Managing Strategic Surprise. For seminal sociological work on society’s increasing preoccupation with risk and its reduction, see: Beck, Risk Society; Beck, World Risk Society.

7. Omand, Securing the State, 58.

8. Blagden, “Strategic Thinking for the Age of Austerity,” 64.

9. Strachan-Morris, “Threat and Risk,” 185–186.

10. The British government’s official effort is the Ministry of Defence (MOD) Development, Concepts, and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) ‘Strategic Trends Programme’, and its operational-level derivative, ‘The Future Operating Environment’: MOD, Global Strategic Trends; MOD, Future Operating Environment 2035. The US National Intelligence Council has a similar series of forward-looking ‘Global Trends’ analyses: US NIC, Global Trends. On the strengths and limitations of such approaches, see for example: Horowitz and Tetlock, “Trending Upward”; Danzig, Driving in the Dark; Voros, “A Primer on Futures Studies,” 1–7.

11. Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 241–242. On the centrality of prudence to sound statecraft, see Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 4–15.

12. Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 241. On the deceptive allure of pseudo ‘science’ in international-political analysis, see Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, 189.

13. US Department of Homeland Security, The Strategic National Risk Assessment in Support of PPD 8.

14. French White Paper: Defence and National Security 2013, 96–97.

15. Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, “About the Office.”

16. Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, National Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines.

17. Public Safety Canada, Building a Safe and Resilient Canada.

18. Friesen, Giroux, and Villeneuve, Overview of the All Hazards Risk Assessment (AHRA) Automated Application and Capability Assessment Management System (CAMS).

19. UNHCR, Risk Management in UNHCR.

20. The Economist, “Germany Remains Reluctant to Pull its Weight in the World.”

21. Originally, Cabinet Office Briefing Room (A); now shorthand for the ad hoc assemblage of ministers/officials convened in central government to respond to emerging public safety/security crises.

22. There was a National Security Committee of the Cabinet prior to its formalization as a ‘Council’, of course; the idea of a sub-group of senior government ministers directing the British state response to security contingencies was hardly ‘invented’ by 2010’s importation of American terminology.

23. Specifically, the implications for the Defence Equipment Programme of Brexit-induced sterling depreciation, economic slowdown and inflation: Chuter, “UK Launches New Mini Defense and Security Review”. As discussed subsequently, the 2017–18 mini-review’s outcomes could yet include a full NSS/SDSR to replace the 2015 iteration earlier than the original quinquennial 2020 target, given post-2015 political shocks to Britain’s strategic environment.

24. The Government conducts a ‘finer-grained [classified] analysis’ underpinning the NSS/SDSR (Oliver Letwin, cited at para. 103: JCNSS, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, 34). The simple existence of more detailed analysis does not resolve the political-structural problems identified here, however, especially given that the NSRA’s purpose is to guide policy and public awareness nationally (i.e., beyond the bounds of those with classified access).

25. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 22–37; Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies,” 511–531. That does not mean, of course, that such social construals lack a ‘real’, material base: Douglas, Risk and Blame, 29; Blagden, “Realism, Uncertainty, and the Security Dilemma.”

26. Huysmans, “Minding Exceptions,” 321–341; Dudziak, War Time, 134; Neal, “Normalization and Legislative Exceptionalism,” 260–276; Porter, “Soldiers Fighting Alone,” 5–11. This is a situation that the US Founding Fathers cautioned against explicitly, of course: Rothkopf, “It’s not About Snowden—it’s About Madison.”

27. The 2015 NSS/SDSR was preceded by a public consultation, for example, while Parliamentary Select Committees are ever-more-energetic in their scrutiny and national security agencies are ever-more-engaged with external stakeholders: Blagden, “Politics, Policy, and the UK Impact Agenda.”

28. Porter, Blunder.

29. NSRA analysis is led by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), a sub-division of the National Security Secretariat (NSS) within the Cabinet Office: Tesh, “Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), Cabinet Office”. The NSS is led professionally by the National Security Adviser (NSA) – a career civil servant, with all four to date (since the role’s 2010 creation) having backgrounds predominantly in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The NSS answers, via the NSA, to the National Security Council: a Cabinet Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, formed of all Secretaries of State (drawn from Parliament) heading security-related government departments (with mandated attendance by the top-ranked military and intelligence officials). See: HM Government, “Intelligence and National Security: About Us”. Such analysis is conducted as part of the development work ahead of the publication of an NSS/SDSR, with the option for a periodic refresh outside the quinquennial NSS/SDSR cycle if directed by the NSC. The process does have democratic accountability, therefore, although it is conducted within a relatively small group of bureaucrats answering to a sub-set of senior ministers within central government.

30. For the counter-view that ‘big data’ coupled to modern computing power will in fact yield decisive improvements in political forecasting, see: Kukier and Mayer-Schoenberger, “The Rise of Big Data,” 28–40. The two views are not necessarily incompatible, of course: data-plus-computing could well improve forecasting, while the fundamental limitations discussed here nonetheless remain. On what such approaches may/may not be expected to deliver, see: Horowitz and Tetlock, “Trending Upward.”

31. Jervis, System Effects, 10–21; Edmunds, “Complexity, Strategy and the National Interest,” 525–539. This is why – while there can certainly be value in explicit predictive quantification – we should never expect it to carry us too far: Horowitz and Tetlock, “Trending Upward.”

32. Voros, “A Primer on Futures Studies,” 1–7.

33. Phythian, “Policing Uncertainty,” 190.

34. Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 239–260.

35. NSS 2010, 37.

36. Ibid., 25.

37. Moreover, even deep subject-matter experts in specific fields can be vulnerable to predictive failure, given the difficulties of incorporating intruding variables from domains beyond their specialism: Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement, 67. And ultimately, it is a social choice – albeit with a material base – how societies (and different groups/individuals within them) interpret and construe dangers, rather than an ‘objective’ matter for expert assessment, particularly when it comes to moral-political judgements over acceptability/cost-tolerance: Douglas, Risk and Blame, 38–40. This theme is picked up again in Lesson 6.

38. HM Government, Fact Sheet 2, 1.

39. NSS/SDSR 2015, 87. On the idea that avoiding rather than winning war became strategy’s principal concern with the advent of the atomic bomb, see: Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon, 76.

40. Of course, a recession-induced collapse in healthcare spending could indeed result in casualties. But then again, such healthcare reductions could themselves be avoided through increased taxation of citizens’ wealth – with potential negative implications for economic dynamism, obviously – further illustrating the centrality of morally-informed political judgement and the inevitability of costly trade-offs to all aspects of national strategy.

41. NSS/SDSR 2015, 87.

42. Ibid.

43. Lebow, “Miscalculation in the South Atlantic,” 5–35.

44. Achen and Snidal, “Rational Deterrence Theory and Comparative Case Studies,” 143–169.

45. Gompert and Libicki, “Cyber Warfare and Sino-American Crisis Instability,” 7–22.

46. NSS 2010, 25.

47. On the different moral standards applicable to national security policy-makers in their conduct of statecraft, which covers privileging one’s own state and its citizens’ survival over others – since states that do not survive cannot achieve any other moral purpose – in a way that would be indefensible when applied to private personal conduct, see: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 10–14.

48. Porter, “Soldiers Fighting Alone,” 5–11.

49. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 22–37. Such judgements bring together material need with social preference: Blagden, “Realism, Uncertainty, and the Security Dilemma.”

50. Klotz, “Norms Reconstituting Interests,” 451–478; Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory,” 171–200; Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies,” 511–531.

51. Gaskarth, “Discourses and Ethics,” 325–341; McCourt, “Has Britain Found Its Role?” 159–178; McCourt, Britain and World Power since 1945; Gaskarth, “Strategizing Britain’s Role in the World,” 559–581; Humphreys, “From National Interest to Global Reform,” 568–584.

52. On Britain’s prizing of influence as an end in itself, given its particular set of role and status concerns, see: Hill, “Powers of a Kind,” 393–414. On the notion that states can have ‘friends’ – countries whose welfare is prized as a valued end of the ‘friend’ state – see: Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 298–299.

53. Different departments of UK state bureaucracy do not even have a single agreed conception of the national interest, let alone the wider populous: Crowcroft and Hartley, “‘Mind the Gap,’” 479–502.

54. States may have a litany of interests, but if they do not fulfil the baseline criterion of survival, they will struggle to achieve any of them: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 91–92; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 31. This can be thought of as a ‘hierarchy of needs’, taken to the state level: Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” 370–396. Descending from the state to individual level, moreover, any reasonable definition of democratic states’ social compact must maximize their citizens’ prospects for survival: Phythian, “Policing Uncertainty,” 204.

55. NSS/SDSR 2015, 11–12.

56. NSS 2010, 26; NSS/SDSR 2015, 87.

57. On the role of internalized ‘common-senses’ in determining the strategic options that policy-makers even contemplate, see: Porter, “Why America’s Grand Strategy Has Not Changed”. On habit in foreign policy, see: Hopf, “The Logic of Habit in International Relations,” 539–561. On enduring consensus over post-war British foreign/security interests, see: McCourt, Britain and World Power since 1945. On recent British policy-makers’ deterministic confidence in their projections, even while professing ‘uncertainty’, see: Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 239–260.

58. McDermott, Political Psychology in International Relations.

59. See note 46 above.

60. Blagden, “Britain and the World after Brexit,” 14–15.

61. BBC News, Scottish Independence: Nicola Sturgeon to Seek Second Referendum; Blagden, “Britain and the World after Brexit,” 9–11.

62. Porter, “Why America’s Grand Strategy has not Changed.”

63. A target that may itself have been met through some creative accounting, moreover: House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Shifting the Goalposts?

64. HM Government, Cabinet Committees List (as of 18 October 2016), 10; Tesh, “Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), Cabinet Office”. On intra-governmental disagreement over UK security priorities more broadly, see: Crowcroft and Hartley, “‘Mind the Gap,’” 479–502. On the extent to which differences in bureaucratic perspective can shape security policy-making, see: Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision.

65. A similar point can be made in the context of attempted communication of security risk to the general public: Freedman, “The Politics of Warning,” 379–418.

66. Porter (Q4), in House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Oral Evidence, 3–4.

67. Jervis, System Effects, 10–21; Simon, “A Theoretical Perspective on Risk,” 123–143; Heal and Kunreuther, “Modeling Interdependent Risks,” 621–634; Cavallo and Ireland, “Preparing for Complex Interdependent Risks,” 181–193.

68. Mills, UK Military Assistance to Ukraine.

69. NSS/SDSR 2015, 18–19.

70. Corera, “The New Cold War”; Blagden, “Global Multipolarity, European Security and Implications for UK Grand Strategy,” 333–350.

71. Doherty, “Britain’s New Aircraft Carriers to Test Beijing in South China Sea.”

72. Osborne and O’Neill, “George Osborne: It’s in Britain’s Interest to Bond with China Now.”

73. Blagden (Q20), in House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Oral Evidence, 20.

74. As intelligence analysts well know, there is strategic value in the privacy of certain threat assessments: Warner, “Fragile and Provocative,” 223–240.

75. Morris, “Defining the Precautionary Principle,” 3.

76. Blagden (Q3), in House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Oral Evidence, 3.

77. I.e., security dilemma dynamics: Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” 157; see also Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” 167–214.

78. Gill, “Intelligence, Threat, Risk and the Challenge of Oversight,” 221; Phythian, “Policing Uncertainty,” 204.

79. 2017–18’s NSCR ‘mini-review’ notwithstanding, the 2015–20 NSRA period could yet be cut short if 2017’s early election – which wiped-out the ruling Conservatives’ majority – leads to another pre-2020 election and/or calls for a refreshed NSS/SDSR, despite (the then-newly-elevated) Prime Minister Theresa May’s 2016 insistence that it remained fit for the Trump/Brexit world: HM Government, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015: First Annual Report 2016, 3.

80. Newton, in House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Written Evidence, 5–6; Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 259.

81. National Institute for Clinical Excellence, “Judging Whether Public Health Interventions Offer Value for Money.”

82. Porter, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 258–259.

83. See note 8 above.

84. Blagden, “Global Multipolarity, European Security and Implications for UK Grand Strategy,” 337–342.