Introduction

Humans are naturally drawn to stories, since we use narratives to make sense of a complex world, to order information into chains of causality, and to communicate and respond to ideas.¹ Confronted with novel technologies or tactics, we are often drawn to narrative vignettes of how these capabilities could be employed in order to visualise their effects.² However, narratives are not merely descriptive; they implicitly promote frameworks that prompt behaviour and judgement. It has long been recognised in economics that narratives shape expectations, stimulate imagination and guide investment decisions in ways that empirical analysis often struggles to match.³ Within Defence, the shaping influence of uncritically accepted narratives can have problematic consequences.

In many areas of defence policy, such as cyber warfare, space or novel weapons systems, deep subject matter expertise is required to understand the potential benefits and limitations. The same is true of attempts to assess the policies and actions of strategic competitors with very different cultural and geopolitical viewpoints. Crucial nuances and practical constraints are almost unavoidably lost in translation as senior decision-makers shape policy and generalists rewrite doctrine and strategy documents based on their own understanding of briefings given by specialist practitioners and subject matter experts. This tendency is exacerbated by a natural inclination to over-hype the potential for novel technologies or strategies to provide transformative effects. Incompatible political demands for increased financial and manpower efficiency, equipment modernisation, improved force readiness, resilience and constant engagement in global competition incentivise defence planners and policymakers to seek silver bullet solutions. Once policy has been stated on an issue, further nuances and important caveats are often lost as the wider policy community try to tailor their own outputs to align with what they perceive as the new high-level consensus. As such, the narratives that end up shaping much of the ‘coal face’ work in Defence are not the (usually) nuanced and well-caveated statements on novel technologies, domain activities or adversary tactics prepared and published by specialists. Instead, they are often mantras or collective ‘received wisdom’ that in practice have been oversimplified or distorted by repeated translation, repetition and transmission.

In the Chief of the Defence Staff’s annual lecture, delivered at RUSI in December 2020, General Sir Nick Carter asserted that ‘our rivals seek to win without resorting to war’. He suggested that there is ‘a clear trend towards military action that uses the cognitive elements of war with arms-length instruments like drones and mercenaries to provide a plausible degree of deniability and strategic ambiguity – thus enabling intervention without the risk of entanglement’. He argued that ‘competition below the threshold of war is not only necessary to deter war, it is also necessary to prevent one’s adversaries from achieving their objectives in fait accompli strategies as we have seen in Crimea, Ukraine, Libya and the South China Sea’, and posited that ‘the means to control others – principally through the application of technology - is the crux of the matter’.⁴

The authors contend that narratives such as these are not only fundamentally unsound but also produce potentially harmful distortionary effects throughout Defence. Far from seeking victory without war, Russia used overt conventional military force against Georgia and Ukraine to seize territory, as did China in Ladakh,⁵ and in the South China Sea to militarily occupy atolls. Russian operations in Syria,⁶ Libya⁷ or the Donbas have not evaded ‘entanglement’.⁸ The insinuation that the bombardment at Zelenopillya⁹ or the vicious battle for Donetsk airport¹⁰ were part of fait accompli strategies or were actions which fell short of warfighting is indefensible. While adversary campaigns have used novel technologies including uncrewed aerial vehicles and cyber attacks, it was hard power and not ‘the application of technology’ that provided the means by which they coerced and controlled their opponents. In order to coerce Kyiv in February 2021, Moscow applied pressure through the build-up of over 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border,¹¹ the tangibility of which contrasted starkly with Western statements of solidarity and concern.¹² Similarly, China is able to coerce its neighbours with its maritime militia in the South China Sea,¹³ not because it is carefully avoiding escalation, but because of the size of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, which makes the Philippines and Vietnam wary of providing a pretext for Beijing to apply overt military force.¹⁴ Russia and Iran have used undeclared military forces in their recent campaigns. But this is not new. The use of undeclared forces featured prominently throughout the Cold War by all sides, from the Korean War and the Vietnam War¹⁵ to the Angolan Civil War¹⁶ or the UK’s campaign in Oman.¹⁷

Through years of repetition, narratives about the rapidly changing character of warfare and the transformative effects of novel technologies have become akin to gospel truths, enshrined in policy documents. The Integrated Operating Concept, published in September 2020, stated that ‘old distinctions between “peace” and “war” … are increasingly out of date’.¹⁸ Just as General Carter argued that technology shall provide the means of control, so too does the Integrated Operating Concept ‘require us to embrace combinations of information-centric technologies to achieve the disruptive effect we need’.¹⁹ As General Carter warned, ‘our rivals … developed long range missile systems; they integrated electronic warfare, [and] swarms of drones connected digitally to missile systems and used these to defeat tanks’.²⁰ And so the Integrated Operating Concept argues that ‘expensive, crewed platforms that we cannot replace and can ill afford to lose will be increasingly vulnerable to swarms of self-coordinating smart munitions – perhaps arriving at hypersonic speeds or ballistically from space – designed to swamp defences already weakened by pre-emptive cyber attack’.²¹

The fact that technological change forces militaries to adapt how they fight is axiomatic. Yet, it is striking how a narrative that places a disproportionate emphasis on technological transformation betrays a poor understanding of how these technologies work, and consequently misrepresents their likely effects. To take the example from the Integrated Operating Concept above, while swarming munitions, smart munitions, hypersonic and ballistic missiles, and cyber attacks will feature on the future battlefield, many of these properties are mutually exclusive. Self-coordinating smart munitions – let alone hypersonic ones – cannot be cheap enough for most states to field them in sufficient numbers to ‘swarm’ the battlefield. This is especially true given that, in Defence, capability ambitions consistently outstrip available funding.²² Nevertheless, such capabilities are regularly combined in a form of word soup as the basis for transformative narratives in speeches by senior officials and high-level policy documents.

Although the misconceptions that this Whitehall Paper seeks to confront have been widely promulgated by senior officials publicly, it is important to recognise that many of those who propound them take a more nuanced view in private. Nevertheless, that nuance is often absent from policy documents because of biases that perennially afflict bureaucracies. The result for Defence is that once adopted by decision-makers, phrases like ‘competition below the threshold of war’ gain a gravitational power that distorts surrounding debate. It can even lead to the recycling of outright disinformation – such as the existence of a Gerasimov Doctrine – which survives in the discourse among non-specialist officials years after the original error was corrected.²³ In bureaucracies, once ideas are codified into policy documents, those who challenge the consensus risk being bypassed as obstructionists or side-lined as heretics. However, it is the contention of the authors that challenging some of the narratives which form part of the current consensus view in UK defence discourse is a necessary heresy.

The authors do not dispute that the character of warfare is evolving. Emerging technologies are already changing how militaries are structured and how they will fight in the future. However, many of the interpretations of how emerging technologies and supposedly novel adversary activities will shape the future defence and security environment in the current discourse are provably false. This paper is an attempt to correct some of these misleading narratives before they drive acquisition decisions that undermine the UK’s conventional forces. The related arguments it seeks to refute are:

• That new domains of warfare, from space to cyberspace and ‘information’ render traditional land, air and maritime platforms as ‘sunset’ capabilities.

• That adversaries prefer to fight in the ‘grey zone’, rather than being forced to pursue inefficient strategies because of the effective application of conventional deterrence.

• That technology will eliminate the relevance of critical combat mass in future operations.

• That information operations, cyber attacks and precision-strike capabilities can in themselves decisively cripple a state’s capacity and will to fight.

Confronting these propositions is made difficult by the fact that they arise from a constellation of conceptual and technical misconceptions. The mischaracterisation of the grey zone, for instance, is both a product of conceptual inaccuracy in how adversaries approach escalation and of an overestimation of the efficiency and efficacy of grey-zone tools such as cyber operations. The belief that mass is no longer relevant to operations arises from inflated expectations as to what can be delivered by technology at an affordable cost, and a failure to map out the tasks that fall to militaries that will continue to require people to carry them out. Furthermore, some underlying errors inform more than one of the conclusions that this book seeks to refute. For this reason, the chapters do not directly rebut the conclusions above but are instead aimed at correcting the underlying technical and conceptual misconceptions.

In Chapter I, ‘The Slow and Imprecise Art of Cyber Warfare’, Justin Bronk and Jack Watling seek to unpack how cyber attacks work and what they require to succeed, in order to provide a measured assessment of what cyber capabilities can actually deliver in a military context. Few subjects better highlight the gulf separating the technical and policy communities. The authors contend that, against hardened military systems, cyber attacks take far longer to prepare than political planning for conflict usually provides and, once emplaced, enduring capability is difficult to assure. The result is that while cyber warfare can provide unexpected opportunities when used in combination with conventional military capabilities, it is slow, unpredictable and demands exceptionally long planning cycles to produce results. It is a potentially potent enabler and will continue to form an important component of the modern security and defence toolbox, but it is not interchangeable with, nor a replacement for, kinetic power. Moreover, if defence establishments do not establish an operational echelon that can link cyber technical experts into the planning cycles for other domains, then cyber capabilities are unlikely to be in place when and where they are needed.

The long lead times in emplacing cyber capabilities mean that such operations must be carried out long before the outbreak of hostilities. Indeed, a cyber attack is often the main example desired to describe grey-zone activity, prosecuted with hostile intent but below the threshold of warfighting. The discourse surrounding the grey zone has become amorphous but has a tendency to frame certain capabilities as grey-zone ‘tools’ or ‘strategies’. The problem with this framing, as Sidharth Kaushal explores in Chapter II, ‘The Grey Zone Is Defined by the Defender’, is that the threshold between warfighting and the grey zone is not fixed. A cyber attack could, in fact, prompt a conventional military response. What determines whether an attack is ‘below the threshold’ of armed conflict is whether the defender is prepared to escalate to violence in retaliation. States do not pursue ‘grey-zone strategies’ because they are necessarily preferable, but rather because they have judged that certain activities are what can be pursued without unacceptable consequences. To this end, the grey zone can in fact include kinetic fighting if the defender is deterred from retaliating with conventional forces. Grey-zone activities are often an inefficient way of prosecuting a campaign and are a function of the relative balance of conventional deterrence between parties. The policy question therefore is not how to deter grey-zone activity, but which activities will elicit a response, and which will not.

That conventional hard power underpins deterrence and buys the capacity to constrain the parameters of the grey zone means that the credibility of the UK’s conventional forces bears examination. There is a pervasive trend in UK defence discourse to assert that technology can deliver more capability with fewer personnel. In Chapter III, ‘Doing Less with Less in the Land Domain’, Nick Reynolds explores the practical limits to reductions in conventional forces before capability suffers from exponential decay. While acknowledging that technology can allow fewer personnel to deliver greater effects on the battlefield, there are irreducible minimums to be able to project power in the land domain. From a force generation point of view there is a requirement to train, project, sustain and deploy a force, which must then have a presence across the ground. A deployable division is the minimum viable force for participation in even limited wars. However, if a force lacks further reserves, its tactical options can be severely constrained because preserving the force becomes a pre-eminent task. Historical campaigns are replete with early setbacks, and this is even more likely in the future, given the lack of data to guide expectations about how technologies will manifest in combat. In this context, the capacity to reconstitute a first echelon and being large enough to absorb failures is vital to having credible military forces and therefore deterring adversaries into using grey-zone tools.

The scale at which transformative technologies are anticipated to populate the future battlefield is vastly inflated, overlooking their cost and complexity. In Chapter IV, ‘Swarming Munitions, UAVs and the Myth of Cheap Mass’, Justin Bronk examines the promised revolution in terms of increased combat mass through the use of swarming munitions and so-called ‘attritable, reusable unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs).²⁴ There are important grains of truth fuelling the narrative. Prototypes for attritable, reusable UAVs and swarming munitions are being rapidly developed by several states and offer novel tactical options and potential efficiency gains across a range of key mission sets. These weapon classes will significantly alter the way in which air forces conduct operations at the tactical and even operational levels. However, despite being technologically feasible, many of the visions for how such capabilities might be employed at scale greatly overstate the cost and performance efficiencies achievable. The result is that while militaries will gain significant flexibility from these novel weapons systems, they will not be applicable to all mission sets and are unlikely to be affordable in the quantities envisaged. Thus, they should not be assumed to offer a large-scale replacement for traditional combat aircraft, nor do these technologies represent a silver bullet solution to a persistent lack of combat air mass. Finally, if states will have limited arsenals of these capabilities, then they will need to be very discerning as to what targets they employ them against.

Exaggerated expectations as to the volume and effects deliverable by novel strike capabilities are arguably leading to dangerous assumptions about mutual deterrence. The threats posed by long-range precision strike – combined with cyber attacks against critical national infrastructure – are often presented as capabilities that could win a war before it starts by preventing an adversary from being able to deploy. This is tied to the notion that the infliction of major casualties would politically cripple an adversary’s will to fight. In Chapter V, ‘The Lights May Go Out, But the Band Plays On’, Peter Roberts argues that, throughout history, states have proven highly robust and adapt quickly in response to shocks. Unless physically occupied, they are usually able to reconstitute and conduct prolonged operations. Furthermore, casualty tolerance is not a fixed variable but is highly context dependent. In any major conflict, casualty tolerance often increases drastically. Even in small conflicts, states are able to sustain a high level of attrition and maintain support for operations when the public has confidence in the cause for which they are fighting. The implications are that, when evaluating the likely outcome and risk of conflict, policymakers should pay careful attention to the relative strengths of their second echelons – they should not just ask who will win the first battle, but extend their analysis to the second. They should also work hard to ensure that there is public support for key causes, rather than self-deter their policy by assuming a blanket intolerance of casualties.

In contrast to the resilience of states, space-based infrastructure is robust in its component parts but systemically fragile. Although redundancy in a growing number of constellations is increasing the challenge of countering specific military space-based capabilities, the risk of denying access to orbits through the creation of debris creates a form of mutual deterrence. Dependence on and increasing capabilities in space are seeing its progressive militarisation and fuelling a misplaced fear of kinetic anti-satellite capabilities and weaponised vehicles in the space domain.²⁵ In Chapter VI, ‘In Space, No One Will See You Fight’, Alexandra Stickings argues that the fragility of access to the space domain creates strong disincentives for states to conduct kinetic operations in orbit. While these may occur on a highly limited basis, most conflict in space will comprise manoeuvring for advantageous orbits and the application of non-kinetic effects to enable operations in the other domains. The process of competition will occur continuously, while targeting in space will be strongly tied to the imperatives created by terrestrial operations. Thus, the key question for understanding warfare in space is less the interaction between orbital systems, but rather the effects these systems have on the ground. Indeed, the highest-intensity conflict for access to space may well comprise the targeting and occupation of the ground-based infrastructure. Therefore, space should not be a siloed specialism but must be integrated into other warfighting domains. Most importantly, space may stand as an important example of how political constraints will remain a feature of military decision-making even in large-scale warfare, a fact often ignored in military concepts and wargames.

While the wholesale destruction of space-based infrastructure is unlikely, denial of access for a limited duration at critical moments from defined geographic areas pose a serious threat to the assurance of communications on the battlefield. There is a growing obsession across militaries with connecting all parts of the force into an ‘any-sensor-to-any-shooter’ network. While ensuring that systems can talk to one another when links are available, the implications of this network are highly uneven across the domains. In Chapter VII, ‘More Sensors Than Sense’, Jack Watling explores the challenges in sharing data around a battlefield within a contested electromagnetic spectrum and argues that the advantages gained from interconnectedness are highly context dependent. While transformative in the maritime domain, there are operational limitations on its usefulness to air forces, and massive technical hurdles to expecting reliable advantage from such systems in land operations. This is not to say that a networked force will not have advantages, but that those advantages will be more incremental, contextually dependent and less assured than is widely supposed. Thus, the regular use of ‘combat cloud’-enabled concepts in narrative descriptions of future military operations needs careful scrutiny if dangerous distortions to force planning are to be avoided.

As the UK military seeks to modernise in accordance with the Integrated Review, it is vital that this is done with a sound conceptual understanding of both how adversaries are operating and what is technologically possible. If the UK is to increasingly deploy forces to deter Russian and other hostile activity and to compete without escalation into warfighting, it is vital that military planners understand what the adversary is doing and why. Moreover, while investment in novel technologies and force modernisation is key, policy must be tempered by contextual and technical understanding. Policy based on uncritically repeated and amplified narratives risks overinvestment in capabilities with insufficient deterrent value in the eyes of adversaries, and would fail to deliver victory unless fielded in coordination with more traditional tools of hard power.

Notes

1 Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York, NY: Harcourt, 2013).

2 A phenomenon that explains the success of books like P W Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next War (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2015).

3 Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk (eds), Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

4 Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Nick Carter, ‘Chief of Defence Staff Speech RUSI Annual Lecture’, 17 December 2020, <https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chief-of-defence-staff-at-rusi-annual-lecture>, accessed 10 July 2021.

5 Shashank Joshi, ‘A Border Dispute Between India and China is Getting More Serious’, The Economist, 30 May 2020.

6 BBC News, ‘Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane on Syria Border’, 24 November 2015; Thomas Gibbons-Neff, ‘How a 4-Hour Battle Between Russian Mercenaries and U.S. Commandos Unfolded in Syria’, New York Times, 24 May 2018.

7 US Africa Command Public Affairs, ‘Russia and the Wagner Group Continue to Be Involved in Ground, Air Operations in Libya’, 24 July 2020, <https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/33034/russia-and-the-wagner-group-continue-to-be-in>, accessed 11 July 2021.

8 Andrew Kramer, ‘Fighting Escalates in Eastern Ukraine, Signaling the End to Another Cease-Fire’, New York Times, last updated 30 April 2021.

9 Bellingcat Investigative Team, ‘Bellingcat Report – Origin of Artillery Attacks on Ukrainian Military Positions in Eastern Ukraine Between 14 July 2014 and 8 August 2014’, Bellingcat, 17 February 2015.

10 Amos C Fox, ‘“Cyborgs at Little Stalingrad”: A Brief History of the Battles of Donetsk Airport’, Land Warfare Paper No. 125, Institute of Land Warfare, May 2019.

11 Robin Emmott and Sabine Siebold, ‘OFFICIAL Russian Military Build-Up Near Ukraine Numbers More Than 100,000 Troops, EU Says’, Reuters, 19 April 2021; Cyrus Newlin et al., ‘Unpacking the Russian Troop Buildup Along Ukraine’s Border’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 22 April 2021.

12 Andrew Hilliar, ‘Biden Offers Ukraine “Unwavering Support” Over Russia Standoff’, France24, 3 April 2021.

13 BBC News, ‘South China Sea Dispute: Huge Chinese “Fishing Fleet” Alarms Philippines’, 21 March 2021.

14 Sidharth Kaushal and Magdalena Markiewicz, ‘Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones: The Trajectory of China’s Maritime Transformation’, RUSI Occasional Papers (October 2019).

15 Francis X Clines, ‘Russians Acknowledge a Combat Role in Vietnam’, New York Times, 14 April 1989.

16 Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, ‘Intelligence Memorandum: Soviet and Cuban Intervention in the Angolan Civil War’, March 1977, <https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000518406.pdf>, accessed 11 July 2021.

17 John Akehurst, We Won a War: The Campaign in Oman, 1965–1975 (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1982).

18 MoD, ‘Integrated Operating Concept’, August 2021, p. 5.

19 Ibid., p. 16.

20 MoD and Carter, ‘Chief of Defence Staff Speech RUSI Annual Lecture’.

21 MoD, ‘Integrated Operating Concept’, p. 6.

22 Claire Mills, Louisa Brooke-Holland and Nigel Walker, ‘A Brief Guide to Previous British Defence Reviews’, Briefing Paper No. 07313, House of Commons Library, 26 February 2020.

23 Mark Galeotti, ‘I’m Sorry for Creating the “Gerasimov Doctrine”’, Foreign Policy, 5 March 2018.

24 For example, RAF Chief of the Air Staff, ACM Mike Wigston quoted in Aaron Mehta, ‘Britain’s Royal Air Force Chief Talks F-35 Tally and Divesting Equipment’, Defense News, 10 May 2021.

25 For example, BBC News, ‘UK and US Say Russia Fired a Satellite Weapon in Space’, 23 July 2020; Kim Sengupta, ‘UK Seeks to Prevent Space Arms Race After Russia Launches Anti-Satellite Missiles’, The Independent, 26 August 2020.