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From David Betz at Kings of War (hat tip to Charles Cameron)

Uk Strategy and Defence Policy, where should it go? Have your say

As many of you will know the UK MoD is at work now on the preparation of a Green Paper leading up to a full (and overdue) defence review next year. We have been discussing many of the key issues in British strategy here on this blog for two years already. I think it speaks well of the informed and thoughtful KOW readership that the MoD Strategy Unit is now reaching out to this little corner of the defence blogosphere to engage with us on such matters. Below I am posting a note from Vincent Devine, who heads the Strategy Unit, which is intended to kick off a debate here on these pages on issues of mutual concern. I am personally chuffed that we have been asked. More importantly, I welcome the spirit of openness to debate and alternative views which the gesture represents. Across the pond they have been better at this, see The Army Needs Your Help, for instance, and I think they have realized better policy and strategy in the doing. I could quote a bunch of clichés here about ‘sunlight being the best detergent’, or ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ but, really, it’s self-evident isn’t it? Here in the UK we’ve ground to make up and not a lot of time and resource to waste and so I find this development highly encouraging.

….From here down it’s Vincent Devine talking:

I’m grateful to David Betz for letting the UK Ministry of Defence Strategy Unit engage with Kings of War to gather views about the future of the UK’s defence policy.

The Strategy Unit, which I lead, is a small team of military officers, MoD and FCO officials and international exchange officers. We are pulling together the new Defence Green Paper, which will set out some of the key defence issues before a full defence review next year.  As we prepare the Green Paper we want to take advantage of the very active academic and think-tank debate on defence issues, and ideally provoke some of this discussion ourselves.  We running a series of traditional, real-world seminars and meetings with experts. Via Kings of War we also want to plug into the informed and interested defence blogosphere, hoping to reach a wider and (possibly) fresher audience.

This is, as far as I know, the first time the Ministry of Defence has done this, and it is something of an experiment. Depending on your reactions, we plan to post on several occasions between now and the end of the year. We’d like each time to pose one of the defence policy questions we’re considering, and ask for your views. We won’t plan to respond to each comment as it comes in (though we might chip in if any particularly live discussion kicks off), but will offer a set of reactions and impressions to wrap up the exchanges after about a week. And we want to be able to share with you some of our emerging thinking.

We hope the process will mirror the overall Green Paper approach: it’s about identifying the key questions, rather than trying to answer them now; it firmly places our defence policy within our wider international and security policy; and it’s based on the assumption that we may need to make some tough choices. If you want more background about the Green Paper process, you can find the Defence Secretary’s Parliamentary statement here , and of course some of you may have heard his speech at King’s on this last week.

We have agreed with David some ground rules for our participation in KoW, intended to help keep the debate lively. We are contributing as the MoD Strategy Unit, rather than trying to speak for the Ministry as a whole – we therefore won’t need to have all our contributions chiselled in stone before we submit them. Neither the Strategy Unit nor KoW make any commitment to agree with or support the views of the other – which indeed would undermine the whole point. We (genuinely) want to encourage people to say what they think – the most useful comments will be those which are informed, grounded and focused.

Finally, I’d like to suggest an open question to start the discussion: as we look at setting our future defence policy, what are the greatest problems we need to tackle and – equally important – what are the greatest advantages we can exploit?

There’s been a lot of good writing on this recently, including of course from David himself and Anthony Cormack, and from Theo Farrell, Malcolm Chalmers, Paul Cornish, Andrew Dorman, Hew Strachan and others. They’ve looked both at tactical/operational issues and at the overall strategic picture. Some see the glass half-full, some half-empty. Some focus on the need for success in current operations, others on the state of the whole defence machine. They identify a very broad range of issues: which of these are causes rather than symptoms, and which show grounds for optimism, which pessimism?

I look forward to seeing what you have to say.

Vincent Devine

Post any useful suggestions or comments over at Kings of War.

Professor Richard Pipes, the Harvard University political scientist, is a seminal figure among sovietologists, historians and scholars of Soviet Studies. I highly recommend his trilogy, Russia under the Old Regime, The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime ( I would pair the first with W.Bruce Lincoln’s The Romanovs Autocrats of All the Russias to see the differences between the way eminent historians and political scientists handle the same topic). Dr. Pipes has written an op-ed for WSJ.com and it was reviewed by his former student, Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett.

First the Pipes op-ed, then Tom’s assessment and then my comments:

“Pride and Power: Russia is caught between continents and haunted by its past,”

One unfortunate consequence of the obsession with “great power” status is that it leads Russians to neglect the internal conditions in their country. And here there is much to be done. To begin with: the economy. The Russian aggression against Georgia has cost it dearly in terms of capital flight. Due to the decline in the global prices of energy, which constitute around 70% of Russian exports, exports in the first half of 2009 have fallen by 47%. The stock market, which suffered a disastrous decline in 2008, has recovered, and the ruble has held steady, but the hard currency reserves are melting and the future does not look promising: The latest statistics indicate that Russia’s GDP this year will fall by 7%. It is this that has prompted President Dmitry Medvedev recently to demand that Russia carry out a major restructuring of her economy and end her heavy reliance on energy exports. “Russia needs to move forward,” he told a gathering of parliamentary party leaders, “and this movement so far does not exist. We are marking time and this was clearly demonstrated by the crisis… as soon as the crisis occurred, we collapsed. And we collapsed more than many other countries.”

….Today’s Russians are disoriented: they do not quite know who they are and where they belong. They are not European: This is attested to by Russian citizens who, when asked. “Do you feel European?” by a majority of 56% to 12% respond “practically never.” Since they are clearly not Asian either, they find themselves in a psychological limbo, isolated from the rest of the world and uncertain what model to adopt for themselves. They try to make up for this confusion with tough talk and tough actions. For this reason, it is incumbent on the Western powers patiently to convince Russians that they belong to the West and should adopt Western institutions and values: democracy, multi-party system, rule of law, freedom of speech and press, respect for private property. This will be a painful process, especially if the Russian government refuses to cooperate. But, in the long run, it is the only way to curb Russia’s aggressiveness and integrate her into the global community.

Read the rest here.

Now, Tom on Pipes:

Pipes the Elder on Biden comments: so impolite because they are so true

The biggest issue, like with China, is official corruption. The second is the pervasive depoliticization of the populace: they’ve never really had any experience picking their own leaders over the past 1,000 years. That fend-for-yourself mentality pervades the political system and its foreign policy. All citizens want from the state is order, and what they miss most about the Soviet past was that it preserved Russia’s contiguous empire beyond that of any in Europe or Asia.

Russians have no idea who they are today: they don’t feel either European or Asian. Eventually, they’ll come to some conclusion about what sitting between those civilizations means in terms of identity.

So patience and care is required.

Very nice piece by Pipes.

Read the rest here.

Russia has had repeated bouts of historical, “geographic schizophrenia”: the long Tatar Yoke, the age-old conflict between Petrine westernization and Orthodox slavophilism, the iron Soviet dictatorship, especially Stalin’s democidal rule. Russia has neither joined the West nor considered itself to be fully Asiatic. Instead, the Russians inherited a “Third Rome” complex from Byzantium that has helped keep them isolated from their own best opportunities as a great power. Fringe groups of ideologues promoting nutty “neo-Eurasianism” in Russia play upon this historical legacy.

To the extent that the cold-blooded Vladimir Putin and the Siloviki clan have made their nation into “Russia, Inc.” – a gas and energy monopoly in the tattered rags of a nation- state, the long term trend will be accepting globalization and integration, regardless of any deep cultural angst and Ivan Q. Public Great Russian nationalist-chauvinism along the way.

ADDENDUM:

“The Western View of Russia” by George Friedman

I have a mixed opinion on STRATFOR’s analytical products but Friedman is playing to his strengths here in a piece that is measured and thoughtful. Hat tip to Lexington Green.

Forget Me Not. Obama’s Russian “Reset” Risks Alienating Eastern European Allies by Mike Wussow

Adds some regional context to Friedman’s post .

After his skilled moderation of The Clausewitz Roundtable, my friend Lexington Green has announced a new roundtable at Chicago Boyz for Fall of 2009 that will be dedicated to Xenophon’s  The Anabasis of Cyrus.

For those interested in participating in this roundtable, leave a note here in the comments for Lex or over at Chicago Boyz.

New Yorker in DC has done an excellent region by region breakdown of the effect of the Russo-Georgian War on Russia’s “Near Abroad” as well as neighboring states, some which were formerly part of the Eastern Bloc and others, such as Turkey, that are NATO allies. It’s a very long post with many links but I wanted to highlight one particular section, from the introduction:

The situation in the Caucasus is slowly deteriorating. First, Poland and the United States reached an agreement on the missile shield to include 10 interceptor rockets at a base in northern Poland, and seemingly in response, Russia’s military pushed deeper into Georgian territory. Moreover, Russia also raised the ante by hinting that the US would have to choose, and soon, between what it refers to as its “Special Project” or issues which are more important to the US and the international community; mainly, Iran and North Korea. According to the AP, the US agreed in the deal with Poland, and in defiance of Russia’s recent victory, to include a declaration that the US will aid Poland militarily in case of a threat from a third country, and will establish a permanent American base on Polish soil.

The negotiations regarding missile defense have been ongoing but the sudden agreement with Poland was most likely intended by the Bush administration as diplomatic retaliation against Moscow for failing to adhere to the cease-fire agreement in Georgia.

In one sense, this might be a useful move to demonstrate that Russia’s policy in Georgia will come with a set of costs and that Poland’s swift adherence, after much earlier footdragging by Warsaw, indicates the unhappiness and alram of Russia’s neighbors. Unfortunately, it also represents more “flailing about” by the Bush administration to grab something that was already in the pipeline that the Russians would find particularly irritating in a country that is deeply anti-Russian for very good reasons.

Easy to do but putting an anti-missile unit in Poland really does not accrue us any new diplomatic leverage in the crisis. Or military advantages ( unless we are to believe that Putin intends to attack Poland, a member of NATO, with just one or two nuclear missiles -if so, problem solved!). In terms of reaching a declared goal of getting Russia out of Georgia this move was probably a net loss. But in the absence of any overarching strategy in Washington for Russian-American relations, the best that can be managed are tactical moves in isolation.