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| Updated: 10-Aug-2001 | NATO Publications |
Think Piece: |
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 Troubled times: Todays soldiers must train for a wide range of stressful situations. (NATO photo - 29Kb) |
Today, most European countries face the same problem. The forces they have, and which they maintain at considerable cost, are not suitable to meet many of the threats to security which Europe faces today and is likely to face for the foreseeable future. This is not just a problem for C&EE armies - many NATO member nations face this problem too. But for several reasons, the problem is more immediate for C&EE countries. Consequently, NATO members and partners have a strong interest in working together to resolve this problem in all its complexity.
It is Kosovo which has both brought the problem to a head and made it plain to see. European armies number over 2 million in total and less than 2% of this military manpower is deployed in Kosovo and Bosnia. Yet this is putting an enormous strain on national military systems. Furthermore, despite the significant sums spent on defence, Europe lacks certain basic, up-to-date military capabilities and cannot effectively deploy its forces out-of-area without US support. Something is wrong, clearly. The question is: what; and what should be done about it?
To date, many journalists commentating on the issue have concentrated on the need to buy high-tech equipment to match US capabilities, or on the need for HQ, C3 and heavy lift assets that EU members will have to acquire to make CFSP/ESDP viable. But there is a more fundamental issue at work here, and the whole situation is much more complex than it appears at first sight.
To get a grasp on the problem, we have to go back to basics and ask:
"What will we need armed forces for in the 21st Century? What will
the threats in Europe be? What will we have to do to meet these threats?".
The situation in the late 19th Century, for example in Britain, allowed
the duty of the soldier and sailor to be defined quite simply as "to
kill the Queen's enemies" without any fear of oversimplification.
Today that definition, with all its implications for training, organization,
equipment, morale, etc., - is patently inadequate. What is the soldier
for? What are his duties in the 21st Century and how should he be trained
so that he can perform them? How do we reconcile the basic need to prepare
for major conflict [which is always possible but not immediately probable]
with what
may be contradictory requirements to perform today's very different [and
highly probable] security tasks? How do we assess the threats to security,
evaluate the probabilities and risks, and set priorities?
It is easier to start by saying what the main threat to Europe's security today is not - it is not WWIII. European nations, East and West, no longer fear mass invasion and total war. There is still a fear of regional war in the Balkans and, for those intimately engaged in it, this can be as intense as any world war. A 'hot' war involving relatively large forces is still a potential threat in many places outside Europe in the 21st Century. But most conflicts will be on a reduced scale and will not be fought with the most advanced technology. However, the fact that the overall scale of conflict is small and the overall level of technology employed is low will be of little relevance to the soldier whose platoon is caught in a fire-fight. All soldiers must therefore still be prepared for the hard reality of battle. But what other skills will they need as well?
The threats to national security in Europe today are, in the main, non-military in nature, viz:
There are other threats one could think up with a little imagination which affect the security of the individual or of the state, and there are different threats in other parts of the world. But in Europe this list will do for a start. All the above, often in combination, threaten the very existence of states. The less a government makes adequate provision to meet these threats [by developing an effective crisis management capability and investing in the right type and quality of security forces - army, police, intelligence, etc.], the more serious will be the danger that the threats themselves pose.
In the 21st Century as in previous centuries, the threats to security and their prevention are interlinked. It is the very nature of today's society that makes certain problems become security threats. As a consequence, in many Western societies some security problems will be inherently insoluble, at least by means acceptable to our liberal societies. It is to no small extent the nature of a society which determines the nature of the threat. This can create an assymetry between threat and response that is itself difficult for our societies to accept.
The media today can come to play an enormous role both as a driver of conflict and as a driver of intervention. Its role is now so fundamental that it has to be considered as a basic factor in any threat and response. This is because the media has today become a medium in which every operation takes place. There was a time when governments and MODs had some degree of control over media coverage, but this is no longer so. It is the essence of conflict today that it takes place 'amongst the people'. It is this very fact that allows those initiating this new kind of warfare [freedom fighters or terrorists, dictators or patriots, depending on one's point of view] to operate below the threshold of 21st Century weapons. Conflict is no longer confined to the combatants. Through the medium of the media it will be played out before an audience and will be designed to appeal to interest groups amongst those observers. Those designing armed forces for the 21st Century must understand this and it must be reflected in the armed forces they design.
In reality, for most of the past 50 years in Europe, both 'East' and 'West' could use 'defence' and 'security' as synonyms. It was primarily our investment in defence which provided us with security. What is difficult for our national and international establishments to grasp and act upon is the fact that this is no longer the case. Armed forces designed for defence are no longer adequate to provide security. All countries in NATO are striving to deal with this dilemma. The Partnership for Peace programme can be seen as the Alliance's response mechanism to help its European neighbours tackle the issue in concert with the Allies. That is, PfP is a security rather than a defence programme.
So whereas 10 years ago, national security was chiefly measured in military, ie, defence, might, today that is only one of several units of measurement and, for most countries, it is one of the least immediate. Most of the above threats call not for a traditional military response but are rather issues calling for police or para-military forces. They require investment in ministries of interior, border and customs forces, crisis management facilities and the like. It is fairly safe to conclude from this, therefore, that as investment in internal security goes up, the pressure on MOD budgets to go down is likely to increase even further.
This is the first main point to be drawn from today's security situation in Europe: it can in some cases be counter-productive to urge countries to spend more on soldiers if what they really need is more policemen, both for their own security and to contribute to international security operations.
Recent experience indicates that when soldiers are called on to meet a security challenge today, it is likely not only to be to fight, but to do a whole host of other duties. The Bosnia and Kosovo operations have demonstrated not only the need for soldiers [including of course airmen and sailors] to fight in what for the individuals concerned are very 'high-intensity operations', but also to be capable of a wide range of very stressful and demanding skills that modern 'peacekeeping' requires. These cover the whole spectrum from diplomat through policeman and arbitrator to first-aid worker, hospital manager or city administrator.
Another characteristic of modern operations is that, when force is to be employed [in contrast to when forces are to be deployed], its employment needs to be contained at the tactical level. If this cannot be done then, to a large extent due to the medium of the media, a crisis is perceived and a political battle is lost. Thinking in this way about employing force requires a change of attitude on the part of senior officers, and a corresponding change in their military training and education.
Two more things can be added to the above. The first is that today's soldier is likely to have to exercise his skills away from home, and not in his own country. The second is that the above list of threats [and the skills needed to meet them] is almost certainly incomplete. More challenges are likely to arise which are today unforeseen.
Our second main point is, therefore, that tomorrow's armies will have to have a much broader range of competence than was the case in the past. The individual soldier will have to be more flexible and have a wider training and education, and the forces will have to be capable of rapid, decisive, and sustained deployment abroad.
At the same time, it may become possible for armed forces to shed non-warfighting tasks to other ministries which could jointly provide forces and other resources for peacekeeping operations. To make this possible will, as with the other considerations referred to above, requires not only a significant change in our thinking about what security is, but also imply very great changes in the overall investment in security.
Changes in thinking, of course, are already underway. The realization of the need to be able to deploy European armed forces 'out of area' without excessive dependence on US support has spurred the recent rapid evolution of the European Security and Defence Policy. But this issue is not just one of new equipment and new C3 or logistics mechanisms. It is also a question of the capabilities of the soldiers, sailors and airmen of all ranks who form the all-important human element in force projection.
If we now turn our attention to the current state of Europe's armed forces and security forces, we can see a mismatch. Ten years ago, at the end of the Cold War, most European countries had relatively large armed forces based on conscription and large-scale mobilization, and designed to fight in defence of national territory. Neutral countries [such as Finland and Switzerland] had to maintain very large force structures capable of independent operation in order to make their defence credible. Members of NATO, secure under the US nuclear umbrella, could afford to spend less and maintain smaller armies, and still have credible defence through mutual support and deterrence. Yet the guiding principle of NATO is that each country maintains its own sovereign armed forces with national chains of command, national procurement systems and balanced forces organized on individualistic national lines. To be sure, this is not an absolute situation. Within the last few years there has been a growing tendency towards military and industrial integration and multi-national military structures. Furthermore, the whole aim of NATO is to avoid 'nationalized' defence and security policy and to deepen integration. Nevertheless, for European nations, this has meant that within NATO, although membership guaranteed collective and integrated defence and thereby permitted defence expenditure to be reduced to a minimum, the insistence of most nations on totally independent national defence establishments meant that there was never the theoretical economy of scale possible in a large national system [such as the US] or in a system with a fully integrated and standardized structure [such as the one the USSR enforced upon the Warsaw Pact].
Ten years on, under pressure of finance [the need to find a peace dividend] and logic [no Soviet Union = no threat of WWIII and therefore no need for large armies], most European countries have reduced their budgets and force structures considerably. But many have not yet fundamentally changed their structure. Instead of large conscript armies for national defence, they now have smaller conscript armies.
Not only that, but these armies, East and West, are today very reduced in capability. This is due to a combination of political and financial reasons. Conscription periods have been shortened [in many cases to below the desirable minimum time]. Equipment has not been upgraded. Munition stocks [especially of the more expensive high-tech items] have been allowed to fall. Training has been cut back [both to save money and under pressure of civilian societies no longer prepared to accept low-flying aircraft or roads blocked with tanks]. European NATO armed forces allowed themselves to become dependent on US 'force multiplier' technologies which were available because of coalition warfare.
As, during the Cold War, the probability of conflict was actually deemed low, and deterrence depended on a highly visible political and military stance, it was more important for NATO's European members in particular to maintain a show of military power than it was to develop real combat performance. This resulted in procurement policies which emphasized force structure rather than capability. For example, it was more important to buy aircraft than the EW, night-attack capability, PGMs and so on that would make them effective. Rapid technological developments plus institutional pressures reinforced the logic of this process.
There were three further things which particularly affected C&EE countries after 1990. Firstly, they continued to maintain far too large an administrative, command and military education infrastructure which now takes a disproportionately large share of the defence budget.
Secondly, C&EE countries also still lack an effective modern and transparent personnel system, retaining instead a diminished version of the system they had in Warsaw Pact times. This constitutes probably the single greatest institutional obstacle to the reform process in these countries as, without such a system, there is no mechanism for evaluating, rewarding, promoting or posting to key jobs those actually qualified to drive reform and implement new plans.
Thirdly, C&EE countries also suffer from a lack of national governmental capacity [ie, a lack of people with adequate overall competence] for defence policy formulation, defence planning, and crisis management. This is because as part of the Warsaw Pact or as constituent elements of the USSR, these countries had not had the opportunity to develop truly national sovereign control over their armed forces. Such governmental expertise takes many years to develop, and few C&EE countries have yet reached this level of expertise.
As a consequence of the above, most C&EE countries need a fundamental change in their military cultures if they are to develop forces suitable for fulfilling the kind of tasks which, as Kosovo demonstrates so graphically, European security is likely to require in the next decade.
To summarize the requirements of both defence and security which future armed forces are likely to face, I would identify the following:
Of the above functions which are related to security tasks, some do not require soldierly skills but could be better done by policing agencies. The question must be asked, therefore, as to whether a Gendarmerie would be a more appropriate force than an army in certain circumstances. Certainly in Kosovo today the great shortage is of this kind of police, rather than soldiers. When more soldiers are needed, it is communications and engineering troops or psyops officers, rather than infantry men or artillery. Soldiers will always be needed, but not all those needed in such operations will be soldiers.
Furthermore, it is clearly best if we can avoid overloading soldiers with civilian professional functions. Yet it is also clear that we will need to have these functions and structures ready for almost simultaneous deployment with the military in peacekeeping operations. Experience in Kosovo with outsourcing certain functions will be very valuable here, to help us determine how to come to terms with this issue.
The most frequent answer I hear to the question: "What sort of an army will be needed to meet the new security demands of the 21st Century?" [for example from UK or US officers with their own national experience behind them, or from officers of C&EE armies who have worked with NATO in Bosnia or Kosovo and are fed up with the problems of dealing with unwilling conscripts] is as follows: "What is needed is a regular, fully professional army".
This may well be true for large rich countries, particularly if they are separated from any possible enemy by a wide stretch of water. But for small countries, and particularly for countries with an underdeveloped economy, this poses serious problems. The first of these is cultural and social. In some countries the ethos of national service is deeply rooted, and the idea of a regular 'mercenary' army is not widely accepted. It may even have pejorative connotations.
The second problem is expertise. Because a military and political leadership has had the expertise to set up and run a conscript-based reserve system does not mean that it knows how to manage a regular professional force. A lot of learning is involved.
The third problem, and the focus of our attention here, is cost. Countries capable of fielding very large conscription based and largely reserve armies might only be able to afford very small well-equipped regular forces. This is the essence of the dilemma which now faces many C&EE countries.
There are four things that contribute to this cost: personnel, infrastructure, equipment, and sustainability.
Conscript soldiers cost relatively little in terms of cash. There is, of course, a high social cost to the country of taking a young man out of education or productive work. But in modern economies with several percent unemployment, this cost is less evident. Moreover the cost is not borne on a defence budget. The conscript suffers a low standard of living, and needs little by way of support, being unaccompanied by a wife or children. The regular soldier, by contrast, must be paid at a rate comparable to the commercial world, provided with adequate housing and associated infrastructure for his family and other social support, otherwise he will leave the army for better conditions elsewhere. The average cost of a regular soldier or officer is approximately 2-2.5 times the per capita GDP per year for wage, pension and social support, and training [including an allowance for replacement personnel in the training pipeline]. In the US, for example, this is $65,000 per year. The regular soldier is expensive. The extra infrastructure needed by the regular soldier [and his family] itself generates more administrative costs.
Moreover, the conscript is always available for service. He gets little leave. The regular soldier not only has to have reasonable leave periods, but during his service he will be detached for in-service training courses and the like which will reduce his availability. Furthermore, the experience of US and UK shows a very high turnover of regular soldiers - many leave without reenlistment after three-five years. This, of course, undermines the rationale of having regulars for long service. Moreover, most regular professional militaries employ individual rotation and replacement. This is very disruptive since personnel turnover is continuous and often exceeds 50% per year within many units. This reduces small unit cohesion and therefore compromises readiness. It is difficult to form units for an extended operation from personnel all of whom must have over nine months left before reassignment. By comparison many conscript/reserve-based militaries tend to use unit rotation and replacement. This, like a sausage machine, generates interchangeable cohesive teams, platoons and companies. This increases small unit cohesion and results in relatively high readiness, once units are formed and fully trained.
There is no doubt that the 'conscript versus regular' debate needs to be expanded and developed. There is not a clear-cut case for the regular soldier in small armies in poor countries.
For the last 30 years, as weapons and equipment have improved, their cost has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Consequently, as forces modernize, if they retain the same size of force structure, the cost of equipment procurement as a percentage of the overall budget will double in real terms approximately every 18 years. If the percentage of GNP allocated to defence is constant, and if GNP does not grow annually in real terms by a considerable amount, then the costs of procurement will lead inevitably to a reduction in the size of the force structure. It is this which, more than anything, drives countries to conduct defence reviews. The politician who promises that 'leaner will be meaner' and 'smaller equals better' is in fact making virtue out of necessity.
The USSR provides a good example of a country which tried both to maintain the size of its force structure and to keep it up to date. This contributed in no small measure to the destruction of the Soviet economy.
It is possible, of course, to save money by careful defence spending. Countries often incur extra cost for political reasons, building their own aircraft instead of buying a cheaper foreign one, for example. However, the scope for such saving is limited. In the end, modern armies cost a lot, and regular armies cost a lot more than conscription-based reserve armies.
Very few armed forces on a peacetime footing can sustain their total force structure on operations for extended periods. Countries can afford only a limited budgetary allocation for unplanned operations and limited stocks of combat consumables.
If a modern army is to be sustained on operations, experience shows that a simple rule can be applied. Land forces need to have at least three times the manpower of the actual battalions making up the force structure deployed. To generate a combat force [including all necessary direct support functions] of 60,000 will require a total force of some 200,000. In addition, a large number is needed to staff the infrastructure to support the whole. To buy a modern regular army, you need to buy five or six men for every one you want to deploy, and many would argue that this estimate is on the low side.
Working out the cost of sustaining a modern force structure, therefore, is relatively easy, and in broad terms can be done by anyone. There are only five main items:
1. Manpower - the cost per year of conscript versus regular personnel.
2. Infrastructure.
3. Research and development - this is a highly variable amount.1
4. Operations and maintenance - ie, spares, fuel, training, etc.
5. Procurement - the cost of replacing equipment
Today, all the above are tending to increase in cost in real terms and are driving down the size of forces that can be afforded.
At this point, I should add that a soldier does not need to be 'regular' to be good. Conscripts can be very good if they are well trained and instructed. But whilst this is relatively easy to apply to specific skills, it is not so easy to apply to a wide variety of skills. It is difficult for the conscript to be versatile. Reservists, on the other hand, can bring support skills from the civilian economy. Their biggest problem is maintaining combat skills.
There is clearly no easy answer to the question of 'Regular or Conscript'. It is clear that some countries have made a political commitment to professionalizing their armed forces without thinking through the implications this will have for cost and organization.
A further problem arises if force structures are reduced but remain conscript- based. Either the conscription term must be reduced or conscription must become selective. The former reduces effectiveness, the latter is socially divisive. The time is now ripe to seek some alternative form of service avoiding the extremes of either conscript or regular service, but blending the advantages of both.
Although we have just addressed infrastructure costs as they apply to regular armed forces, there is another infrastructure cost that afflicts armed forces in transition - the infrastructure that we retain from Cold War days. These are the structures for commands, mobilization, defence organizations, garrisons, the logistic stockpiles and so on which formed the basis of our Cold War defence systems and which are in the main not used in today's security operations. Even though these structures are being reduced everywhere today, their cost is still enormous.
To be sure, there are many arguments that can be, and are, made to retain this Cold War infrastructure. "It is needed to provide a proper officer career structure"; "It is essential to keep the armed forces in touch with the population"; "We might just need to have a mass mobilization in the near future"; "We cannot afford the social disruption and cost of so many redundancies". It is amazing how similar these arguments are in all countries, and how difficult it is for military establishments to accept the necessity for fundamental change. But if they are not cut down drastically, and to an absolute minimum, they will absorb so much of the available human and financial resources that the proportion of useable personnel in an armed force will be in turn reduced to below the essential minimum and crucial reforms will be unaffordable.
If we draw together the above trends, we find that they move in the same direction. As forces need to become more flexible, versatile, and capable of being sustained abroad, their cost will increase and the size of force that can be afforded will drop. We may even find that the cost of maintaining small active regular forces, that are very likely to have to be used either for 'peacekeeping' or regional wars, becomes greater than the cost of maintaining large reserve-based conscript forces during the Cold War for a WWIII.
All this presents the smaller countries of Europe today with a particularly acute problem. If cost forces their armies to be reduced more and more, they will quickly reach a point when they cannot maintain high-technology forces because of the disproportionate cost on a small scale. They will likewise not be able to maintain balanced armies that can do all the functions required in a national defence force. The smaller the national force, the larger percentage will be taken by MOD and HQ infrastructure. C&EE countries with small budgets and the need to reform large Warsaw Pact-style force structures face this problem now. Their armies are rapidly becoming non-functional, and they do not have the luxury of time to seek a slow and elegant solution.
Unwittingly, the desire of some countries to join NATO, coupled with the lack of a military culture which recognizes realities, is adding to this problem. The demands of meeting the requirement to provide competent forces to participate in NATO-led operations such as Kosovo push a nation down the route of developing small competent forces which are NATO-compatible. But these are so expensive that in order to afford them the country may have to switch scarce resources from a force structure for national defence. For countries which are unsure as to whether they will ultimately be able to join NATO, and which in consequence feel that in the future they might once again have cause to fear invasion from a large neighbour, this presents them with something of a gamble. Preparing for the MAP may actually reduce independent defence capability in the hope of future protection by Alliance membership. If that hope is not fulfilled, the gamble may prove to be a costly one.
An argument often made in favour of smaller forces is that, as weapons become more capable, the density of forces needed [ie, the force:area ratio] falls. This is true for open battle, but much less so for fighting in built-up areas, as the Russians have found in Grozny, where they chose to ignore the civilian population and fight the battle in an old-fashioned 'conventional' manner. It is not true at all for most 'peacekeeping' tasks, which tend to be very manpower-intensive because we deploy largely unemployable forces.
In fact, the essence of the problem is that many countries are so involved in the rapidly evolving problems of force cuts, defence reforms, democratic transformations, financial reviews and the like that they find it difficult to step back from dealing with hard and painful details to review the whole issue. They fail to see that we are today all facing what amounts to a revolutionary change in requirements which demands that we take a new look at the classic interaction between Ends, Ways and Means. They are trying to reorganize 'Means' without addressing 'Ends' and 'Ways'.
In the Cold War, there was no need to discuss the End. It was fixed and agreed upon. All our intellectual energy [and mechanisms for discussion] could be concentrated on ways and means. Today, we have two, potentially contradictory, ends - 'defence' and 'security'. We have tried to rationalize this by addressing both these ends in sequence, ie, we conclude that we will not need to worry about 'defence' for at least a decade, so that we can concentrate now on meeting the needs of 'security'.
In theory, the 'way' we deal with defence has not changed. We still think of defence as requiring mass armies. But in practice we are rapidly doing away with this capability everywhere. In fact, it is no longer clear what 'the way' should be either for defence or for security in the 21st Century. What is clear is that 'the means' which most countries now have are not optimized either for defence or for security. We do not know what kind of armed forces we all need for the 21st Century. What we do know is that the kind of armed forces most countries have today are not right for the tasks which now face them.
What we need, therefore, is to focus debate on finding a new 'way' that satisfies both ends of defence and security and which is within our means.
Without prejudicing the outcome of this debate, which is yet to be held, it seems to me that trends are likely to lead in the following direction if we grasp the nettle of making forces employable. Manpower will give way to firepower. Quantity and mass will give way to quality [ie, of personnel and training, precision of weapons and equipment, etc.] There will be a premium on reach/range and speed of action, of deployment and of employment. Of first importance will be the information, intelligence and decision-making process which confers the capability to act preemptively, because in the new environment, action will have to be preemptive and offensive.
In this respect it will be essential for European force planners to face the realities of how difficult force projection will be in the 21st Century. Over the past 10 years European military power has declined relative to military power now available elsewhere [for example, the Middle East]. If the 'quality' edge is not developed and maintained, and the political will to use [and lose] forces is not adequately nurtured, then our investment in armed forces for security will have been an illusion.
I have so far been talking about developing a force to meet the needs of security. It is worth addressing at this point just how a government makes its assessment as to what sort of force it needs to meet the risks it faces. Here, C&EE countries have a particular problem in that, in the communist system, such assessment was left to the Party, and governmental expertise was slight. For Central European countries, Moscow decided. There was overall, even in the USSR, so little military expertise among civilians that military men really decided everything. There was no real civilian governmental control of defence policy, and no civilian governmental capability in defence planning. Instead, there was the concept of 'military buildup' [stroitelstvo] which is a very difficult process.
We see the result today, in Russia, in the new National Security Concept. This is a list of all possible threats prepared by each ministry or agency having anything to do with security. It is a collegiate review of facts. But there is no prioritization - no analysis of risk versus probability. The National Security Concept is therefore of little use as a policy planning document.
How would a Western government make that analysis and prioritization which the Russian National Security Concept avoids? To do so it would need a very good information system. Note the words. An information system is just what it says - a system for getting and analyzing information of all sorts - from the press, commerce and industry, diplomatic sources, common sense, and finally, but only finally, secret sources. Modern Western intelligence services do this well. But in many C&EE countries, their intelligence services' staffs still reflect the heritage of closed societies, and a culture of secrecy still prevails. If a government has no system of incorporating both open and secret information into its information system, but relies only on secret sources to make its analyses, then it is likely to go badly wrong in its choices. Open information, a system to evaluate it, and politicians and civil servants educated to understand it, are essential today to enable intelligence to be used properly. How many of the new democracies have yet had time to develop this particular attribute of modern society?
People are the most important asset of any armed and security forces [MOD, MOI, Border Guards, Police, etc.].
Establishing a personnel management structure which both reflects the changes and developments in society and which can also meet the new demands placed on these forces [by social change and by the new security environment] must therefore be an absolute priority in any programme for modernizing and rebuilding the forces in C&EE countries.
The first requirement of all those concerned [ministries, uniformed services, parliament] is a ruthlessly realistic assessment of the true situation in the country and the services. This will be very painful. It requires an honest and detailed evaluation of the current position in the forces, with all its problems, plus a calculation of what can be realistically afforded. The biggest temptation will be to try and maintain inflated structures and old methods which are no longer either appropriate or affordable.
Just as with force structure or as with civil-military relations, there is no one standard model for a personnel management structure which can be copied. Every country has different conditions, limitations, priorities and traditions, and every country therefore tackles this problem in its own way. NATO and EU member nations show wide variations in the systems they have adopted. But there are features common to all: firstly, there is a system; secondly, it is implemented; thirdly, it contains the opportunity for redress of grievance. In large armed forces with large separate services, the services may each run separate policies and systems. But a small armed force cannot afford more than one personnel policy within a MOD. Service staffs, who have to implement the policy, should always have an input or feedback to ensure that a single MOD policy meets specific service needs.
The personnel systems introduced by most C&EE armies today are so totally inappropriate to modern needs that they require complete revision from top to bottom. This is so difficult and so painful for the institutions concerned that there is tremendous resistance to beginning the reform process. The consequent delay creates anger and frustration, especially in the lower officer ranks, and results in an increasing loss of good officers. The officer corps gets steadily older and more top-heavy and more resistant to change. But delay is destructive, particularly in the always difficult area of dealing with people.
Of course, not everything can be done at once, and of course reform takes time. But experience shows that if a sensible plan is made, publicized and initiated so that every officer knows both what is in store, and when things are likely to happen, then pain and problems are minimized and young officers will hold on in the career they have chosen and in which they believe.
Whatever policy and reform process is adopted, a great many officers are going to lose out. It is inevitable that many of these will be beyond mid-career and will find it difficult to adapt to a new career without help. The more reform is delayed the worse this problem will be. Consequently, any such reform programme will need an accompanying redundancy plan and resettlement programme. This will not be cheap. But it will be a lot cheaper in the long term than retaining masses of unnecessary or ill-qualified officers who will create an enormous bottleneck in the career structure.
As far as defence reform itself is concerned, the most important feature of a personnel management system is that it should deliver the right sort of officer that the new force requires. To do this and to sustain the process over time, so that officers can be developed and can grow in the necessary competences, a 'career management' process must first and foremost have a means of identifying qualifications. The choice of qualifications today will determine the form of the armed forces of tomorrow. This is how the system will identify people who have or who do not have the potential to acquire skills needed for the future.
It is these people with the newly needed qualifications who, once identified, must be the ones to receive training in skills needed for the future. In today's world, no country can afford to waste scarce and costly training on those who will be incapable of using it effectively to the good of their service. Career management must be done with the interests of the country in mind.
Identifying qualifications and running a career development programme requires a system which is not only thorough and effective but above all honest and transparent, and with a means for the individual to voice his complaint fairly. Most forces do this with a system of confidential reporting and evaluation by more than one level in the command chain. Perhaps the single most difficult element of a personnel management system comes next. That is to devise a posting system which sends people with appropriate qualifications into the right jobs, using skills they have learned, to the benefit of their service and their country.
This process is complicated by the fact that career management must serve not only the interests of the force but also of the individual. He or she must be posted to jobs which provide a satisfying and enjoyable career, otherwise, in a healthy economy, the best officers leave the service.
Again, there are various ways to accomplish this, but all have in common the regular and frequent rotation of individuals in posts. In poorly-managed systems, officers spend too long or too little time in post. Most systems settle on two-three years as the optimum time in post in peacetime conditions of service.
This rotation is demanding, because it will inevitably mean that the officer [and his or her family] will need to move around the country. Such job mobility requires proper provision for housing, health and social care, and education for the dependants, otherwise the scheme will not function properly.
All these factors add up to one simple thing - creating an environment first to attract, and then to retain, the right officer material for the armed forces or security forces. If officers cannot see a good future for themselves then, in the conditions of an open market economy, they will leave their service before time, and that too will impose a heavy cost burden on the system as well as denying it the talent it needs.
Personnel management is one of the most difficult things to get right in any large organization. In an armed force, failure is catastrophic. Getting this right must be a top priority. It will be difficult, it will be painful, it will have a cost, and it will take time. But if it is not done well, then no amount of good equipment will compensate. The country will not have an army [or police force, etc.], it will just have a waste of money.
There is a widely held view that what is really needed by C&EE armies struggling to reform is a strong, reliable and competent regular NCO cadre. The models of US, UK, Germany and France are often held up to justify this. C&EE officers with experience of these armies will often be quick to agree, seeing the value of these NCOs as incontrovertible evidence of the truth of the assertion, an assertion I would certainly not challenge in principle.
But in practice building an effective NCO corps will not be an easy option. Armies reflect the social structure of their countries. For example, UK, US, France and Germany have civilian societies in which there is a long tradition of reliance on the middle-management level - the foreman in a factory, the independent modern farmer, the manager of a shop, the owner of a small business. In civilian life these people have the independence, initiative and education to accept responsibility. National culture carries this into military service, albeit in different styles. If this strata of society has been weak in C&EE countries because of the communist heritage, the material for the US/German style of NCO will only gradually become available. Furthermore, the culture of the officer/conscript system will not find it easy to 'grow' this strata of military society and to allow it the initiative, authority and respect without which it cannot exist. This is an issue to which I shall return.
Over time, to be sure, it will certainly be possible to develop this strata of command. Both the British and German armies today base their NCO structure on training and education within the armed forces themselves. It should certainly be possible to replicate this in a Central European military system. But this will have to be accompanied by a cultural evolution so that this command structure is prepared to delegate authority right down to the NCO level. A good example to study here would be the Bundeswehr 'redefinition' of East German Army officers' posts [up to lieutenant colonel] as senior NCO [Hauptfeldwebel, etc.] posts. It would also be very instructive to study how armies such as the British and German today make good use of promoting regular NCOs into the ranks of officers with specific or limited - but immensely valuable - functions. But all this will take time, and will require a specific and dedicated effort to accomplish. But it will be an effort well worth making, and this is one area where practical assistance from armies with a strong NCO tradition can really help speed up the process of developing an NCO cadre in C&EE armies.
Along with the NCO issue, much faith is also placed in the new generation of young officers in C&EE armies for advancing the cause of reform and renewal. It is argued that one cannot expect senior officers to change their way of thinking, but once a new generation has come into the armed forces, all will be well. Old thinking and old practices will be swept away and the officer corps will be modernized, in tune with the new conditions of society.
In fact, this is not so automatic a process as is often assumed. The rather unpalatable fact is that many C&EE countries have so far done little to reform their officer selection and training processes and Western countries in their assistance programmes have either not adequately addressed this issue or have been specifically prevented from doing so by the C&EE country concerned.
It has been easier to run short-term courses for officers who have already completed their basic military education [which was indeed the top priority for those educated under the communist system] than to tackle the fundamental contradictions of the communist-pattern officer training system. In the meantime a new generation of junior officers has in fact been educated largely in the old style.
This has, arguably, been the biggest failure of the reform process. It has resulted in a new generation of junior officers emerging who have, after all, received their military education within a 'democratic' system and who are proud of their technical and academic achievement and of their officer academy. However, because in many cases the training system has only changed superficially, it has often failed to teach this generation such fundamentals as leadership, responsibility, integrity and respect for subordinates. Even worse, many of these young officers have a jaundiced view of further Western military training. They feel that they have already learnt all that is needed and so why should they have to 'do it all again'? Many of them feel strongly that they should be left to get on with running their own armies without being constantly hectored by Westerners who, in their eyes, are no better trained than they themselves. In consequence, where there was previously only one layer of conservative opposition to reform - the more senior non-linguist level with a lot to lose - there is now a second group - young men and women who, whilst they are certainly not communist-minded, do not necessarily share Western values and who may become increasingly resistant to external advice and to change.
This could be a major obstacle to the introduction of many essential reforms, not least an effective NCO system which relies on the delegation of responsibility to subordinates who are trusted and respected. Of course, not all recently trained officers are narrow-minded and not all officer academies remain unreformed. But if this issue is not tackled soon, and with greater energy, then it will inevitably slow down further reform despite the best efforts of Central European military and political heirarchies.
I would now like to summarize the particular features of former Warsaw Pact/Soviet militaries which will complicate their transition in the post-Cold War world:
1. The philosophy of preparing only for national defence in WWIII, and never studying alternatives, makes it difficult for officers brought up in this system to appreciate alternative force models.
2. The very efficiency of the Soviet military system at producing greater raw military power than NATO systems [more bangs for the buck] makes it difficult for officers trained in the Soviet/Warsaw Pact system to accept the need to transform to what to them will appear to be a less militarily efficient force.
3. The lack of interference by politicians in the Warsaw Pact system [a very desirable circumstance to soldiers] makes it difficult for these officers to learn to deal today with the democratic political process, especially if the new politicians are not competent in military affairs.
4. The lack of interaction with the public before 1991 makes the officer today disdain to do so. This tradition also makes the public uninterested, or feel they have no right to get involved in military affairs today, as they were prevented from doing so in the past. Civil-military relations are often fragile as a result.
5. Experience, often very unpleasant, of incompetent 'reform' by 'democratic' politicians in the early 90s, of neglect [even more destructive of morale] or of the breaking up of military forces between ministries has resulted in great suspicion of governmental efforts to propose reform today.
6. In many countries, the armed forces have suffered a loss of prestige and society has not yet established a new set of moral values. This makes it difficult to recruit young officers and to build a new moral basis for the armed forces.
7. The Soviet/Warsaw Pact system of edinonachaliye led to poor internal communication between ranks. Top-down orders stopped bottom-up ideas. Where this continues today, resentment has no outlet.
8. The Soviet/Warsaw Pact military systems lacked a transparent and consistent system for officer evaluation and posting or promotion, making career development subject to political reliability or the whim of the senior officers. Where this tradition continues in C&EE armies today, it creates demoralization, obstructs reform, and prevents new standards being set for officer promotion and force development.
9. Because of the reserve-mobilization nature of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact armed forces, they maintained enormous officer education systems with very long courses, but concentrating only on inculcating military operational skills and not on general education. Officers developed only skills for fighting WWIII, making it difficult for them to adapt to the new security environment.
10. The specialized nature of officer training before 1991 made officers very difficult to reemploy in civilian life. There is no tradition of this. This, coupled with economic uncertainty, can make officers cling to their posts and become an obstacle to reform.
11. A lack of strategic planning - formerly done in Moscow - means that there are few officers [and no civil servants] trained to rethink fundamentally the key issues of force structuring, MOD organization and the like. As a result, most C&EE MODs lack an effective defence planning process.
12. The financial systems [or rather, lack of them] in C&EE countries before 1990 have resulted in a serious lack of transparency in financing and budgeting today. This is a problem both of attitude and mechanisms. It is a problem compounded by point 13 below.
13. In many C&EE countries there is also very imperfect legislation on many aspects of armed forces. Many old laws are still in place which are no longer appropriate. Laws sometimes impede the modern functioning of the forces. In many cases even minor decisions [such as for officers to attend courses overseas] can only be made by the Defence Minister personally.
14. Soviet and Russian equipment has always been very good, but some key items are not compatible with peacetime usage rates [eg, aircraft flying hours between major overhaul]. This is an important technical point which is often ignored in the equipment debate.
15. There was no linguistic competence except in Russian.
I conclude that the problems of defence transformation for all European countries today are both great and urgent. But for C&EE countries with a Warsaw Pact or Soviet heritage, they are extreme, and the smaller the country, the more extreme and intractable they are.
It seems to me that this is now such an acute problem that we must recognize at once the need to address much more attention to it. We can all pool our efforts in this. There are no ready answers. We will only find answers if we are able to help these countries establish stable and transparent defence planning processes so that they can adequately address this issue for themselves. For most countries, very serious choices indeed will be called for. For NATO and the EU this also implies that the two organizations must collaborate more closely because they are complementary and can each address different aspects of the solution. In particular, it forces upon us the need to be prepared to contemplate hitherto taboo issues, such as role specialization for smaller countries. The example of Benelux may serve well here. Regionalization may become a process which facilitates role specialization. Given the pooling of sovereignty that happens in the EU, it may be easier for the EU to cope with this issue than it is for NATO [although the EAPC actually encourages regionalization, and existing NATO mechanisms could be further evolved to work out who can do what].
It is clear that the rapid development of the EU's defence and security capability will have a great impact on finding a solution to these problems. The closer collaboration between NATO and the EU [which will be a prerequisite for the successful evolution of both organizations] in its turn will increase the importance of SHAPE, where the coordination and standardization process which will guarantee interoperability is found.
Whatever the ultimate situation, it points to the idea of security through alliance as being the only sensible approach - whether it be with NATO, the EU or some other body. 'Going it alone' does not seem to be a realistic defence option for small C&EE countries today.
Acknowledgements: Ken Brower; Sir Rupert Smith; Sir John Walker; Manfred Diehl; Will Jessett; Efrem Radev; Witold Nowosielski; Peter Svec; David Clarke; Manuel Morato; Phil Leadbetter; Jennifer Drummond; Janis Kazocins
Footnote: R&D is not arbitrary. It should be a function [%] of the current value of equipment divided by the lifespan of use. If all equipment is imported the R&D investment is near zero. If equipment is all developed domestically R&D will nearly equal procurement. In the US R&D includes extensive testing, which in other countries may be considered part of procurement.
