About the Authors

Paul Cornish

Paul Cornish was educated at the University of St Andrews and the London School of Economics. He then served in the British Army (Royal Tank Regiment) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before completing his PhD in strategic history at the University of Cambridge. He is Chief Strategist at Cityforum Public Policy Analysis and Visiting Professor at the National Security College, Australian National University.

Kingsley Donaldson

KINGSLEY DONALDSON is a retired Army officer. He has served on operations in a number of European and Middle Eastern countries in various roles that span from countering weapons of mass destruction through to negotiating with armed groups in Iraq. His last appointments at the Ministry of Defence were concerned with national defence and security strategy. He now advises a number of governments in his role as Director of the Causeway Institute for Peace-building Conflict Resolution International.

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder and Stoughton
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Copyright © Paul Cornish and Kingsley Donaldson 2017

The right of Paul Cornish and Kingsley Donaldson to be identified as the Authors of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For Fiona, Emily, Archie, Charlie and Duncan.

Paul Cornish

To Helen for her love and support throughout and to those friends and colleagues who never came home. We have our tomorrow because they gave their today.

Kingsley Donaldson

To the memory of General Sir John Hackett GCB, CBE, DSO and Bar, MC, DL, BLitt, MA, LLD

Soldier and Scholar

AUTHORS’ NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We who have put this book together know very well that the only forecast that can be made with any confidence of the course and outcome of another world war, should there be one, is that nothing will happen exactly as we have shown here.

These are the words with which General Sir John Hackett and his co-authors concluded The Third World War, August 1985: A Future History. Having set out to write an adaptation of Hackett’s imaginative and provocative book, one more suited to the security challenges of the present day, we have all along sought to emulate Hackett’s caution regarding strategic prediction and over-confident ‘futurology’.

If events could turn out as described here, then that is reason enough to ask whether that possibility has been contemplated seriously and whether preparations have been made. Where security, defence and national strategy are concerned, what is not acceptable is to abandon thought, analysis and preparation until the future reveals itself.

Where we differ from Hackett’s approach is that we do not contemplate the possibility of ‘another world war’ or any other form of global cataclysm. Instead, 2020: World of War depicts twenty-first-century international security as a complex of interwoven pressures, challenges, hazards and threats.

In the course of this project, we have drawn upon countless conversations, discussions, seminars and conferences in the UK, Europe, the United States and elsewhere around the world. Our friends and colleagues in government, the armed forces, research institutes, universities and the media are all owed our thanks. These discussions informed the selection of topics and scenarios that form the core of this book. 2020: World of War was conceived and delivered as a collaborative effort and these scenarios could not have been written without expert contributions from the following:

• Professor Kerry Brown: Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute, King’s College, London; Associate Fellow, Chatham House, London.

• Mr Anthony Cornish: author and editor, Longmead Publishing.

• Professor Christopher Donnelly CMG: Director, Institute for Statecraft, London.

• Professor Julian Lindley-French: Vice-President of the Atlantic Treaty Association, Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow of the National Defense University in Washington DC, and a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

• Dr Rajiv Nayan: Senior Research Associate, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Delhi.

• Ms Prabha Rao: Senior Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Delhi.

• Mr Nathan Ryan: Defence and Security Analyst, RAND Europe, Cambridge.

• Dr Uttam Kumar Sinha: Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Delhi; Distinguished Fellow, Institute for National Security Studies, Sri Lanka.

• Professor Gareth Stansfield: Al-Qasimi Chair of Arab Gulf Studies and Professor of Middle East Politics, University of Exeter.

Following the example set by Hackett and his fellow authors, no contributions to 2020: World of War are signed since strict attribution would not be easy in so cooperative an enterprise.

Our final word of thanks must go to Rupert Lancaster, our publisher at Hodder & Stoughton and to Barry Johnston for his meticulous and patient editorial guidance.

Paul Cornish & Kingsley Donaldson

March 2017

INTRODUCTION

Our world rapidly worsens.

Nothing now is so horrid

Or silly it can’t occur …

W. H. Auden, 1972

Cold War Strategy

With the Cold War at its height, 1978 saw the publication of The Third World War, August 1985: A Future History by General Sir John Hackett and others. The Third World War was a work of fiction centred upon a scenario in which the armed forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact launched a major offensive into NATO’s Central Region, crossing the Inner German Border separating the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) from its estranged close relative the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The uneasy stability of the Cold War collapsed into full-scale conflict as both sides committed their land, air and maritime forces to the struggle for Europe.

Sir John Hackett was a highly decorated veteran of the Second World War, who had fought in the Syria–Lebanon campaign and in North Africa, where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Having begun his career as an armoured soldier, Hackett was only thirty-three when he commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade in Operation Market Garden, the unsuccessful attempt in September 1944 to capture vitally important bridges across the Maas and the Rhine. Badly injured in the operation, Hackett was awarded a second DSO for his service at Arnhem. After the war, Hackett rose to command both the British Army of the Rhine and NATO’s Northern Army Group, before retiring from the British Army in the late 1960s.

Hackett was subsequently to become the epitome of the modern ‘soldier-scholar’. A graduate of Oxford University, he was fluent in many languages and a noted author and lecturer in military history and strategic analysis. He concluded his academic career as Principal of King’s College London from 1968 to 1975. Known for the sharpness of his intellect as much as his physical courage, Hackett was a man of trenchant opinions concerning national strategy and defence. In 1968, while controversially still a very senior serving officer, Hackett wrote a letter to The Times newspaper in which he criticised the government’s complacency over the capabilities of NATO forces in Europe. Hackett’s critical edge was to re-emerge in 1978, in the form of The Third World War.

This was ‘future history’ driven by a very straightforward idea; it was one scenario, developing along a singular path to one conclusion (including the end of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, in a nuclear strike). This linearity was characteristic of Cold War strategic thinking at the time. The Cold War had begun in the late 1940s and for the following thirty years or so there had been no shortage of ‘hot war’ around the world. But none of these conflicts captured the Cold War strategic imagination, of which the core concern was the outbreak of war along the European Central Front (as it was known throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century), leading to the use of nuclear weapons between East and West.

The Third World War captured both the public imagination and that of Cold War politico-military experts; the book achieved popular and critical success in the United Kingdom and it was serialised in several newspapers in the United States. The success of the Third World War was attributable in part to Hackett’s reputation and in part to the convictions underpinning Cold War strategic thinking. The book also drew heavily upon the perceived certainties of recent history, conveying, as it did, that at some point international insecurity would probably lead to major war, the conduct of which would probably be fought – initially at least – along the lines of the Second World War in Europe. In that vein, The Third World War reflected growing disquiet that Cold War strategic certainty was not being matched by military readiness.

National Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

To a considerable extent, national security policy-makers and defence strategists are concerned with the passage of time; past, present and future. A national strategic outlook is rooted in a political, cultural and geostrategic past, perhaps several centuries old. The more recent past offers a bank of military, intelligence and other experiences, connecting to the deeper historical context and providing much-needed ‘lessons’ in the application of national power – both successes and failures. One of those lessons is that even the most compelling analysis, and the most reasonable scenarios can prove to be inaccurate. The Third World War did not begin in August 1985; by then Mikhail Gorbachev had been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for five months. Gorbachev’s coming to power instead signalled the beginning of the end of the Cold War in a manner very different from that imagined by Hackett and his fellow authors.

With the benefit of hindsight, the immediate post-Cold War period was also the point at which national strategy and defence began to decline both in substance and in relative political significance. During the 1990s, governments across Europe grasped the opportunity to make major savings in defence expenditure in both manpower and equipment, using such expressions as ‘new world order’ and ‘peace dividend’ to validate their decisions. After all, no serious case could be made for NATO members to retain large numbers of well-equipped troops in order to fight the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, both now defunct.

Yet while it must draw lessons from the recent past, national strategy must be concerned primarily with the present and the future; with articulating a view of the world, its strategic challenges and opportunities, and with organising national resources so as to achieve the optimal balance of capabilities – diplomatic, policing, development aid, military, trade, intelligence, cultural outreach and so on.

The obvious difficulty is that the future is by definition unknowable and therefore unpredictable. The economist J. K. Galbraith reportedly divided forecasters between ‘those who know they don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know’; an aphorism which at least makes it possible to distinguish between those so-called ‘futures analysts’ who have wisdom in their ignorance and those who do not. But the most that can be said of Galbraith’s words is that they describe the problem of the future without offering a solution to it. For those concerned with national security and defence strategy, the problem of the future is that it is not only vast and protean, but also inescapable; the most complex of problems to which a solution must nevertheless be sought, and to which scarce resources must nevertheless be committed.

When national strategists look to the future, they might be excused for finding it a rather bleak prospect; a dystopian world of competition, contest and conflict in which security and stability will be challenged in every conceivable way (economic, environmental, technological, criminal and ideological) and on every conceivable level (global, inter-state, intra-state, commercial and individual). This analysis could result in an exaggerated sense of crisis – if not impending apocalypse – crowding out the likelihood that the future will also offer plentiful opportunities for peace and prosperity around the world. But a pessimistic view of the future might also be accurate, and it is that possibility which cannot be overlooked, least of all by strategic decision-makers and military planners.

While national strategy is concerned with the future – including the worst of futures – it is also characterised by process and expenditure. National strategy requires assessment, decision, planning, purchase and implementation; all of which demand a protracted engagement with the future, in all its uncertainty. Development aid, for example, if it is to result in sustainable improvements, might involve investment and assistance plans spanning a generation or more. Taking a similarly long view, effective intelligence-gathering might require new technologies to be devised and deployed, information networks to be cultivated, and officers to be trained to high levels of proficiency in certain languages. And unless armed forces are to be given unlimited resources to undertake any sort of operation, anywhere in the world, they too must engage with the future; they must train for certain types of operations in certain regions using equipment that might have taken as much as a decade to design and acquire.

If national strategy is expected to be informed by the past, to manage the present and to be responsive to the future, and if that future could be as complex, intractable and dangerous as suggested above, then it is at least possible that strategic decision-makers and planners might revert to their ‘comfort zone’ and concentrate on what they know best – the past and the present. Yet to do so would be to succumb to the most non-strategic form of confirmation bias: since we do not know the future, we will assume the future to be what we know. How then can national strategy, and particularly military leaders, analysts and planners, remain engaged with a future that they cannot know, and make expensive preparations for contingencies that they cannot predict?

The international security picture of the twenty-first century is far from linear and straightforward. There is no singular, predictable adversarial relationship, as there was during the Cold War; governments around the world now face a more challenging combination of diversity, complexity and urgency. Current trends suggest that the international security future will be neither black nor white; the UK and its allies might not be at war, strictly speaking, but they might not be at peace either. Security threats might not be ‘existential’ but neither will they be trivial. It will be difficult to set priorities among a wide range of security challenges – both (natural) hazards and (man-made) threats. Twenty-first-century international security is likely to involve security threats and challenges that are largely unpredictable in their source, timing and consequences. And it will be difficult to discriminate between short- and long-term challenges to security and wellbeing.

National strategy must nevertheless be prepared to confront these multiple challenges to security. Challenges may or may not reinforce each other, whether unintentionally or as the result of deliberate collaboration, or as the result of unintended consequences in our own planning and reaction (for example, the crisis in Syria, where military operations have precipitated huge population displacement, which has in turn contributed to the migration crisis currently being experienced in Europe.)

The response to this complexity has so far been disappointing. With some rare exceptions, investment in broad-spectrum research and deep analysis of global security trends has become unfashionable or at best repetitive. Wikipedia, Google and online crowd-sourced ‘intelligence’ (something of a misnomer) are now considered authoritative and definitive sources through which many senior decision-makers are being given their information – ideally in the form of a two-page briefing note with accompanying ‘lines to take’ for use at press conferences. The wide availability of very shallow knowledge has led to the illusion of profound understanding. Certainly, more is known about the contemporary world than could be said for any previous generation. But our critical understanding and strategic wisdom are arguably much weaker than those of our forebears. They may not have had access to 24-hour news from across the globe, but that which they knew, they understood.

2020: World of War

While the attitudes of politicians to defence-spending reductions might not have changed much in the forty or so years since Hackett published The Third World War, the world has changed dramatically in that time. In order to gauge the depth and breadth of this change, 2020: World of War takes a fundamentally different, much less linear approach to contemporary challenges in international security.

Our first chapter examines the strategic challenge posed by Russia and asks how Hackett and his co-authors might interpret Russia’s capabilities and intentions, were they alive today and contributing to the policy debate. The second chapter shows that in the early to mid-twenty-first century, security policy and defence strategy must take account of a breadth of non-traditional, non-military dynamics such as climate change, resource scarcity and health security; all of which Hackett et al. might have considered peripheral or exotic, or both.

We then discuss the international security environment in terms of various scenarios. The first three scenarios take a broadly geopolitical approach to security in Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East respectively. These are followed by two thematic scenarios – the first dealing with crime and terrorism and the second with cyber security – before we turn to UK domestic security. Our final ‘omni-scenario’ makes the essential point that international security challenges might very well not behave themselves and arrive one at a time, at our convenience.

It is important to understand that our scenarios are illustrative; they have been designed in order to underpin the central argument of this book. That argument runs as follows: instead of waiting patiently for some new, large-scale and largely military equivalent of Cold War strategic certainty to reveal itself, national strategists must instead engage with international security as it is, in all its diversity, complexity and uncertainty. Used in this way, scenarios are simply an analytical device; they are not attempts at prediction and least of all do they seek to exaggerate or inflame situations or give offence to any government, people or organisation depicted.

There will, nevertheless, be those critics for whom 2020: World of War is ‘worst-case analysis’ or even ‘scaremongering’. We would reject the latter criticism, but welcome the former. This book is knowingly and deliberately an exercise in worst-case analysis and as such it is, arguably, precisely how security and defence policy-makers and analysts should be spending much of their time in a chaotic and often confusing world. Given the complexity and diversity of the international security outlook, it is only through well-reasoned, scenario-based analysis that strategic risk can be properly (and periodically) quantified and managed. This is never more important than when decisions are being taken not to act in a particular instance. Gaining an insight, through scenario-based analysis, into both the intended and unintended consequences of deliberate choices to intervene or desist, is crucial in making assured strategic decisions.

The scenarios are also bounded in time. 2020: World of War deliberately takes a very short-term view of the international security landscape, in order to accentuate the volatility with which national strategy must engage. In this regard, the book provides a counterpoint to the ‘ten year no war rule’ adopted by the United Kingdom in the 1920s and 1930s, and its ‘five plus five’ variant adopted in the 1940s. In a sense the ‘rule’, in either variant, amounted to a willing suspension of strategic judgement; in all three decades, the ‘rule’ was, arguably, a reasonable response (not least in times of austerity) to a linear threat projection – Germany in the first instance, the Soviet Union in the second – which seemed to suggest that a ‘strategic holiday’ could be taken, at least for some years. Conversely, we argue that this is the least appropriate moment to resort to a strategic/psychological comfort blanket of this sort; to suspend strategic judgement while adversaries’ intentions and capabilities are allowed to clarify. Strategic threats and challenges are no longer of one type (such as largely military) and in the UK and elsewhere, a national strategic outlook can no longer be narrow and linear.

Each of the chosen scenarios is sufficiently plausible and credible, and sufficiently complex to provoke serious strategic consideration. Taken together, they convey the sense of a strategically chaotic future. Although chaotic, 2020: World of War stops short of presenting an image of international strategic pandemonium. To do so would be alarmist, passive and ultimately self-defeating, describing a strategic future for which nothing can be planned, no preparation can be made and no action can be undertaken. To reiterate: these are scenarios, but they are not predictions; they are not required to be true, although they must be authentic; and their purpose is simply to provoke thought and analysis – and a little humility.

Whereas Hackett and his co-authors used what they considered to be the strategic certainties of the Cold War to warn against the lack of military preparedness, 2020: World of War conveys an image of global strategic uncertainty – even chaos – and warns against a lack of general strategic engagement (of which military preparation is only one part). The scenarios presented in this book are not intended to be taken literally, in quite the same way as Hackett’s ‘future history’. But if these scenarios, and the concerns that underpin them are not at least taken seriously, this will be the result of strategic complacency more damaging even than that feared by Hackett.

Simply because nothing on the scale of the Cold War seems currently imminent is no reason to lose interest in, and commitment to, strategic analysis. As the popular aphorism goes, ‘the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence’; in matters of international security and national strategy, the argument from ignorance is surely the least satisfactory of all.