The challenges facing the UK Armed Forces today are shifting, multiplying, evolving, intensifying and often bewildering. Since the end of the Cold War, the Armed Forces have operated in new landscapes of threats and demands.
The army maintains its long-standing engagement in Northern Ireland, although with the real prospect of a settlement and a non-operational role mid-year.
There are also enduring commitments in Belize, Bosnia, the Falklands and Kosovo and other worldwide settings, and the emerging doctrine of humanitarian intervention could well produce further demands resulting from both natural and man-made catastrophes.
The armed forces are also called on at home to give non-operational assistance to the security services, and in emergency situations such as foot-and-mouth or flooding. These demands are also more likely to grow over time rather than diminish.
The greatest new challenge is of course counter-terrorism, both at home and abroad. Northern Ireland gave the armed forces some familiarity with the operating environment but the terrorist challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan have a different order of complexity.
Our opponents have a different mindset and willingness to sacrifice themselves. They have proved both agile and innovative, qualities we must equal and indeed overmatch.
Despite the intense present demands of counter-terrorism and asymmetric warfare, in a volatile world we cannot afford to relinquish the capability to fight conventional wars.
This calls for an extraordinarily difficult judgment, of prudence and probabilities: will counter-terrorism continue to dominate our priorities, and how much should we invest in conventional warfighting or deterrent capabilities?
Alongside all these issues are the constant but ever more critical challenges of managing the costs and opportunities of new military technology, the necessity of international collaboration and inter-operability of equipment, especially in communications, and the new connectivity and cultural challenges presented by NEC/NCW (challenges revealed in the very existence of separate European and US acronyms for this new form of warfare).
We also face the tasks of establishing robust and effective supply chains, and meeting the need for business resilience and continuity among defence suppliers.
Military technology is changing exponentially. In particular, it offers a totally new level of information to military decision-makers at all levels, from the lone soldier with one hand on a weapon and the other on a hidden-explosives detector to the general commanding an entire theatre. But new military technology can also carry penalties.
The most obvious is cost – particularly the costs added by the search for perfection and the addition of the last 10 per cent of capability. Another penalty is obsolescence. When a military design is agreed, both the design and the system are effectively frozen.
Meanwhile technology marches on and by the time the system is operational it is no longer leading-edge.
Still another potential penalty is over-sophistication, particularly for systems intended for battlefield conditions.
Faced by all these challenges, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has undergone a process of intense internal change. I warmly welcome the Defence Industrial Strategy, which offers a fundamentally new interface between national defence and defence industries. Indeed, it represents the first serious attempt by MoD to write down a coherent philosophy of acquisition.
The challenge now is therefore to make the difficult decisions and follow them through to deliver the capabilities we need, where we need them and at a cost defence can afford. Commercial disciplines can certainly benefit defence, particularly in procurement, but only by acting as drivers and enablers of good decisions.
What do I mean by 'good' decisions in defence? I define this by their outcomes: good decisions are those which make it more likely that our armed forces will successfully achieve what has been asked of them. At the highest level their missions entail deterring attack on our country and fulfilling obligations to allies and international organisations. These missions are so fundamental to our national interest that for once the cliché is true: failure is unthinkable.
Underpinning these high-level missions, our armed forces face a host of tasks at a local, tactical, operational and supporting level. There is one common factor which determines success or failure in all of these assignments – the quality of the people in our armed services, their commitment and capability.
To make and deliver on good decisions in defence entails enabling acquisition change, establishing effective partnerships between government and industry, ensuring successful delivery of complex acquisition programmes, and realising the full potential of technological change.
In all of these ways, we can free up resources for the permanent and paramount component of our defence, the service men and women throughout our armed forces. Without them, the plans and hopes of ministers, generals, civil servants – and electors – will come to naught. They deserve not only the best equipment and conditions that we can give them but also the best thinking.
