Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s speech at the RUSI
Strategic Command Conference: Sharpening the UK Defence’s edge in
the 2020’s.
"It’s all about integration today I noticed in the themes, and
there’s always a tendency to treat integration as the Holy Grail.
And there are indeed champions of it who pursue integration for
integration’s sake with a sort of purity that leads us into being
exclusive rather than inclusive. And to do so would ignore the
threat that we see today and the strengths that we in the West
hold.
Let’s start with what strengths we have – and what Russia doesn’t
have for example, and others – we have alliances. So integration
must in my view be first and foremost about policy integration,
campaigning integration, the culture of burden-share and playing
to our strengths. An integrated response is what is demanded by
today’s threat. Multi-domain, broad action, inter-government,
international relationships – sub-threshold and above threshold.
And next it must also mean interoperability – but not to the
extent that we become over-dependent on one ally or another. And
there are I’m afraid too many examples of that. The future of
foreign policy and defence is in my opinion going to be
bilateral, trilateral and small groups of countries with common
cause. Of course, with one major exception – that being the tried
and tested alliance of NATO.
So we have to be more generic, less exquisite. And lastly, and
only lastly when it comes to integration, we need to find a way
for our own forces to be more technically integrated, so we can
dominate the kill chain, ISR process and exploitation of
explosive actions on the battlefield, while at the same time
allowing a range of partners to operate alongside. Easier said
than done. But they must not do so at the expense of being deaf
to those allies and their capabilities.
The challenge of achieving all three levels of this type of
integration, with cybersecurity demands and multiple alliances,
is not going to be an easy one. In fact, it will be harder if
policy leads, equipment programmers and military leaders don’t
speak to each other, which is why at the Command Paper’s heart is
the threat. The start point is we coalesce around a common threat
picture. We will begin to drive integration much better. It will
become our demand signal that shapes our generators and
partnerships.
While much of the media’s focus on our paper was on the usual
tired numbers game, many failed to notice the significant uplift
in focus on defence diplomacy. Which is why Strategic Command is
so important, and what it does in the next few years is set us up
to deliver Global Britain. Better integration, a leader of
culture and a leader of fast decision-making. What I expect to
see from Strat Comm is also a step change in joint force
development across Defence, both in the leaders and the culture,
in its dynamic decision-making process and its response to the
demand and the threat, and indeed influencing the equipment
programme to make sure we have a better portfolio management of
our requirements.
So I look forward to hearing Sir Patrick speak on how he’s going
to set about that. I look forward to seeing over the next few
months how the Command Paper will be implemented by Strat Comm.
Because Strategic Command has a really key, important place in
this process. I visited it only the other week, no it was last
week, the week before, time moves fairly fast these days. But
what’s key in that was everyone in that building worked on the
process of an integrated purple joint interest in defence. They
worked together no matter what service they had come from. And I
am afraid we still see in some of our other services, the single
service view of the world. Well in today’s threat, global
competition we can’t afford to have that anymore. We have to
burden-share. We have to work with our partners. We have to find
a way to weave in that integration. And it starts with the
mindset of the policy leaders rather than technology."
