Why the UK needs to rethink homeland resilience in the wake of Covid

One area of strength, however, was the UK’s armed forces. These had, in early 2020, a ready availability of personnel, equipment, capacity and transferable skills that proved invaluable in mitigating these weaknesses at scale and at pace. 

The military was also made ready (although not used) to take over certain duties from the police. The UK Government came to rely heavily on its military. There was no other state agency that could have brought to bear the resources that it did. It was serendipitous that in early 2020 the Government had considerable military capacity to turn to. At this time, at least 96 per cent of regular forces personnel were based in the UK.

Never before in the history of the UK’s armed forces has this figure been so high. Military personnel were thus on hand in numbers – at a push they could have provided the sort of mass that the Government,at the start of the UK’s lockdown, was looking for.

According to Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, it was initially floated that it might be necessary for Army personnel to deliver 'millions' of meals to people shielding across the country. Another 1,000 were to be on standby to support the prison service and a further 1,550 drivers available for general supply deliveries. Moreover, to support the police 10,000 troops were held in the wings for, presumably, dealing with any pandemic-induced social disorder. As Heappey darkly put it: 'Crisis brings economic instability and economic instability brings insecurity. At times of insecurity Defence is at its busiest.'

Even though such numbers were not, in the end, needed, the military proved essential in other areas.This was not only in designing and building (and partially staffing) the series of Nightingale hospitals around the country, but also insetting up and delivering mobile testing facilities: at one point 95% of the mobile testing centres around the country were run by the military.

Its personnel also helped deal with the dire shortage of PPE. This assistance was not just a matter of military officers using their own contacts abroad to source PPE, but also essentially putting individual officers in charge of running the National Health Service’s PPE resupply system – including developing an online platform –with an admiral in overall charge.

But what if serendipity had not played a part – if the Army, in particular, had been tied down on operations abroad and not so readily on hand to help? The UK government, where pandemics and other possible future emergency situations are concerned, should not have to depend to such a degree on its armed forces. Virtually every other European country has a dedicated civil defence, civil protection or emergency situations body to improve its homeland resilience capacity.

There is a case for the UK to follow suit, releasing the military from having to perform such emergency duties. There may also be a case for creating a paramilitary force with the necessary capacity, scale and pace to also provide mitigations in a crisis. This new force could help provide the infrastructure needed, not only in dealing with nature’s pandemics, but also with expected future man-made contingencies.

It is true that there is the Civil Contingencies Secretariat in Whitehall, but this has only 75 employees. Compare this to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States with 11,000 staff, and Russia (with a population only just over twice that of the UK), whose Emergency Situations Ministry (Emercom) has over 300,000 personnel. Russia also has a body called Rospotrebnadzor (110,000), which is concerned with everything from consumer rights to epidemiological surveillance in the country. This latter organisation has come to the fore of Russian mitigation efforts in relation to COVID-19, including setting up mobile testing centres countrywide.

Even smaller European countries have dedicated civil defence/emergency situations bodies. Spain and Italy, for instance, the two countries that suffered almost as badly as the UK in the pandemic, could look for assistance from their substantial civil defence organisations. While they both used their armed forces,there was no sense of reliance on their input.

These organisations played a substantial part in generating swift action and in keeping the death rate in these two countries below that of the UK, despite their weaker health services and initially being very badly affected. Yet robust mitigation practices in the most extreme of emergency situations, such as in pandemics,require more than adequate civil defence. To re-quote Heappey: 'at times of insecurity Defence is at its busiest'. He was talking about domestic insecurity – when troops might be needed on UK streets to deal with unrest after the police have lost the ability to provide control (as happened in Northern Ireland in 1969 and as was initially expected after a no-deal Brexit).

This issue is particularly pertinent to the UK given that a large police force is not considered necessary: the UK population is used, more or less, to policing itself, based on the principle of policing ‘by consent’. Hence, England has one of the lowest ratios of police to population in the world. This stance creates a vulnerability, however, if it ever does become necessary to keep public order after consent is lost. And it has, in the current pandemic, come close to being lost. As one Chief Constable recently put it: 'these are the toughest times in the history of policing.'

Other countries do not have to rely on troops to deal with incidences of domestic ‘insecurity’. They have their paramilitary forces to back up the police. France has its Gendarmerie (100,000-strong); Spain the Guardia Civil (78,000); Italy the Carabinieri (110,000), and in Russia there are the 340,000 personnel in the Rosgvardia. The personnel of such bodies have,across all these countries, stepped in to provide extra levels of policing in the current pandemic.

They have set up roadblocks to prevent the movement of people in lockdowns, maintained a street presence that encourages compliance with restrictions and, when necessary, dealt with pandemic-linked social disorder. The governments of these countries have not had to rely on the delicate idea of public ‘consent’when it comes to imposing restrictions and, indeed, order – nor resort to their militaries.

In the UK, with low police numbers and without a paramilitary body, the actual physical imposition of lockdowns and of social control in extremis would be impossible without calling in military personnel. Thus, overall, when it comes to providing mitigation, at scale and at pace, in emergency situations in the UK – and when the call is for both civil defence measures and for extra policing – it is the military that is the first and, indeed only, option. This is a situation that does not appear tenable. The UK government cannot rely on the luck of having armed forces so freely available in future emergency situations.

Fundamental changes are needed. This is especially so given that, as appears to be the case, the frequency and severity of emergency situations will be increasing in future years. While the incidence of pandemics is, thankfully, rare they do appear to be becoming more frequent. There will also be an increase in the emergencies generated by climate change: the likes of floods, major forest and grass fires, and drought. But more than that, the current pandemic has exposed the UK’s general lack of homeland resilience to the activities of state adversaries.

Actors such as Russia and China, acting as revisionist powers and seeing themselves involved in an existential struggle with the West, are already engaging in what UK military doctrinal statements euphemistically refer to as 'persistent competition' with core NATO countries. In terms of this 'competition' both Russia and China will have noted the UK’s homeland vulnerability. This is a significant issue given that homelands have become the new frontlines of ‘war’.

The militaries of both Russia and China, in pursuit of government objectives, have come to understand that what Clausewitz called 'the character of war' is changing. The wars of the future are very unlikely to be fought kinetically on traditional battlefields. They are much more likely to be non-kinetic, long term in nature, and occur on the domestic terrain of adversaries. ‘Defeat’ will be induced from within, not imposed from without. Russian military writings, for example, are suffused with directions on how to create internal de-stabilisation within the likes of the UK and US. The aim being to gradually weaken governmental and societal structures to the point where, ideally, chaos is created and the state collapses.

The Russians refer to this as 'new generation warfare' (NGW). This is a type of warfare by now well understood in the West. Familiar headlines referring to Russian interference in elections are just one, albeit limited, manifestation. Other examples include the planting of fake news,the work of cyber trolls and social media manipulation. There are also more ‘hands on’ techniques such as ‘grooming’ Western political figures, the influencing of governments and the occasional attempts to conduct actual coups (such as in Montenegro in 2017).

All these Russian actions are the work of the Russian military or are coordinated through this military’s National Defence Management Centre in Moscow.Perhaps, though, the most profound means now available to generate degrees of state instability lie in the cyber-technical realm. In particular, destructive cyber attacks enabled by Artificial Intelligence represent a fundamental threat to any state’s homeland resilience capacity. The promise of such attacks is that they can be so targeted and so fast-acting (within hours) that they can radically disrupt the functioning of a state: the lights might go out, bank cards become unusable and there may be no food delivered to supermarket shelves. The consequences could be devastating.

NGW in fact seeks to use all the methods of de-stabilisation to engineer social agitation within the targeted state – to work on what Russian military doctrine refers to as the 'protest potential of a population'.

The ultimate aim of NGW is thus to make adversary states ungovernable because, in the end, the population, put under intolerable pressure from various vectors, no longer accept being governed. Control, let alone consent, is completely lost. This turn in the character of war to emphasise targeting homelands adds further weight to the argument that the UK needs to be fundamentally better prepared for future emergency situations. And these may come far more suddenly than COVID-19.

Preparation is vital. The UK government cannot continue to rely on the fortuitous ready availability of armed forces personnel to provide both immediate mitigation and to act as a pool of personnel to call into further action if necessary.There are several actions that maybe contemplated. The first could be to firmly ‘double-hat’ the military. That is, to add a series of specific homeland resilience tasks to its overall mission portfolio.

The Australian military already follows this model. As a force, it is specifically designed to provide homeland resilience capacity, including to act alongside the police and not just as a possible substitute for it. This was a fact highlighted by the recent employment of joint police-military patrols (with the military unarmed) to enforce lockdowns in Australian cities. Inevitably, though, such a change would lead to a dilution of core UK military skill sets and degrade operational deployability. Given this, and the fact that the armed forces would have to spread themselves more thinly, such a change would be resisted by the military itself; a point already made by Armed Forces Minister Heappy.

There appears to be a need to setup a substantial civil defence organisation whose sole mission it would be to provide immediate and dedicated emergency situation mitigation – but to act at scale and at pace, such a body would need a high degree of standing mass. This would be expensive to maintain. And what would be the tasks of such a UK body in the periods between emergencies? The actual organisational set-up of any new UK civil defence body requires substantial thought – Emercom, for example, has proved itself to be weighed down by Soviet-era clumsiness and many of Russia’s COVID-19 mitigation tasks have been better handled by Rospotrebnadzor alongside the military.

A further and more controversial step would be for the UK to establish a paramilitary force. Pandemics aside, if the aim of the UK’s state adversaries is to generate internal instability and social disorder then better preparations need to be made to deal with them. This new force could provide support to the police in emergencies. It would not, of course, be popular. It would likely be viewed as a vehicle for state control and would run counter to the whole idea of policing by consent. But, in the coming years with the changing nature of the threats facing the UK, control maybe more important than consent. A further and more controversial step would be for the UK to establish a paramilitary force.

Whatever the avenues explored, the UK must ensure that it is not as unprepared as it was prior to COVID-19. Relying on luck is not along-term option where future threats are concerned. There are profound arguments for setting up both a civil defence organisation and a paramilitary force in the UK. If they are, then the country may, indeed, become an ‘exemplar’ of emergency situation preparation.

This piece was originally published by Reform UK as part of their collection of essays 'Building a Resilient State'. This piece uses research funded by a British Academy COVID-19 Small Grant.

Dr Rod Thornton is Associate Professor in Conflict and Security in the Defence Studies Department, King's College London. 

Dr Marina Miron is a Post Doctoral Researcher in the Defence Studies Department, King's College London.