British civil-military relations and the problem of risk

Abstract

Drawing primarily on the experience of the UK since 2001, this article examines the increasing prevalence of risk as an organizing concept for western defence and security planning and its implications for civil–military relations and strategy‐making. It argues that there may be tensions between such approaches and the principles of good strategy‐making, which aim to link means and resources to ends in a coherent manner. Not only does risk potentially blur the relationship between means and ends in the strategy‐making process, it also exposes it to contestation, with multiple interpretations of what the risks actually are and the strategic priority (and commitment) which should be attached to them. The article examines these tensions at three levels of risk contestation for British defence: institutions, operations and military–society relations. In the case of the UK, it contends that the logic of risk has not been able to provide the same national motivation and sense of strategic purpose as the logic of threat. In this context, calls for a reinvigoration of traditional strategy‐making or a renewed conception of national interest may be missing a more fundamental dissonance between defence policy, civil–military relations and the wider security context. More widely, the strategic ennui that some western states have been accused of may not simply be a product of somehow falling out of the habit of strategy‐making or an absence of ‘political will’. Instead, it may reflect deeper social and geostrategic trends which constrain and complicate the use of military force and obscure its utility in the public imagination.

British Public Opinion after a Decade of War: Attitudes to Iraq and Afghanistan

“…Public support of government-led military action plays an important role in defence and foreign policy by establishing the political legitimacy of missions (Canan-Sokullu, 2012); maintaining military effectiveness (Szayna et al, 2007); sustaining the morale of deployed troops (Dixon, 2000); and justifying the budgets required to resource the military (Edmunds, 2012). Yet, robust evidence of what the British public thinks of the missions, and how opinion may differ between them, is lacking despite the length of the United Kingdom's involvement in both the Iraq and Afghanistan missions.…”

A Very British National Security State: Formal and informal institutions in the design of UK security policy

“…The SDSR is our focus, rather than the NSS, because of the resource-induced trade-offs between competing capabilities that it entails and the associated political contestation. That said, Britain’s post-2008 turn to a ‘risk-based’ NSS, underpinned by the NSRA, is an important part of the context to our argument (Cornish and Dorman, 2013; Edmunds, 2012, 2014; Hammerstad and Boas, 2014; Porter, 2016; Blagden, 2018). Attempting to weigh likelihood against impact for the possible universe of adverse security contingencies represents the heart of the planning challenge for both the NSC and the SDSR, and the informal networks that enable/sustain them.…”

The politics of mourning: The virtual memorialisation of British fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan

“…However, as Woodward et al (2009) points out, ‘the photograph of the soldier is never just a photograph of a soldier’ (p. 222). According to Woodward et al (2009), the preoccupation of the British media and, we might add, artists with the faces of fallen soldiers can be seen as a reflection of ‘anxieties about the legitimacy of the conflicts’ (Edmunds, 2012; Forster, 2012; Woodward et al, 2009: 219). These anxieties are expressed via decontextualised and face-accentuated representations of fallen soldiers because in these memorials ‘any context given to the exhibit in terms of its function as a memorial is provided simply by the aggregation of faces of the dead, all of whom died in the same cluster of conflicts and occupations’ (Grider, 2007: 275, 276–277).…”

“…These virtual memorials reintroduce the discourses of national unity, cohesion and support for the armed forces. These compassionate, yet sentimental and nationalistic framings of virtual war commemoration can effectively counter-balance the feelings of growing uneasiness with the seemingly unwinnable campaign in Afghanistan (Edmunds, 2012; Higate, 2012), as well as the ambivalence of other military campaigns.…”

“…In the case of Afghanistan, the analysis includes selected obituaries from the first period of the operation, from 2001 to 2006, all obituaries for 2009 – the year with the highest death toll for British armed forces – and obituaries for military fatalities in 2012 and January 2013. This period of analysis is determined by the number of casualties and changes in the political and societal context with regard to the operation in Afghanistan (Edmunds, 2012). Each obituary was manually coded as a single unit of analysis and saved as a separate .txt document and analysed with the Yoshikoder software.…”