‘The Wargame’: Review and Reflections

Author’s Note: I’d like to apologise for my recent hiatus. I have been running this website while searching for employment and recently, I have accepted an internship abroad which has kept me busy. I am looking to maintain and grow this project, but my commentary pieces will be written on a fortnightly basis and possibly a monthly basis depending on how busy things get. Thank you to everyone who has been so engaged with BIGA so far, I’m excited to see where we can take it!

Earlier this week, I was talking to a former lecturer of mine and they recommended a podcast made by Sky News called The Wargame. At a time when respect for international law is deteriorating rapidly, security places demands on the population meaning the population needs to stay informed on what might be expected of them and why certain decisions are being made. I was interested to see where this podcast would go. Enjoying the relaxed summer work culture of the Balkans, I plugged in my earphones and tuned in to the series. 

Wargaming is a form of simulation or a game that is used by government and academia to assess vulnerabilities and is constituted of two-sides. Hosted by Deborah Haynes, The Wargame is a five-episode series that brings together senior politicians and policymakers such as former Defence Sec Ben Wallace, Lord Mark Sedwill, former Home Sec Amber Rudd, and a variety of military personnel for such a simulation. Over the course of five hours, the listener is subjected to the terrifying, and plausible, sequence of events of a Russian attack on the UK. 

The Wargame

The simulation begins with a false-flag attack on Russia’s naval base in Murmansk. A false-flag attack is an attack that is used as an excuse, or casus belli, to initiate an offensive on an opponent that did not themselves launch the initial assault. In this case, Dagestani terrorists were to blame, but Russia uses the opportunity to blame and attack the United Kingdom. The goal is to cripple the security capabilities of a key European NATO member and fracture NATO as a whole on the calculation that a limited attack on the UK would not be enough for NATO member states to commit to a war with Russia. It is a worst-case simulation in which the US – performed by St Andrews’ Professor Phillips O’Brien (check out our podcast with him here) – pursues an ‘America-First’ policy and does not provide military assistance to the UK. 

Over the course of the next few hours of listening, the audience is provided with an informative lesson on the UK’s current defence capabilities. Much of the Russian threat stems from two tools: its cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. The former are rocket-propelled missiles and guided. They’re slower but more precise. The latter are fired into the atmosphere before plummeting down at speed. They’re much faster and have a longer range. The UK, unlike Israel, does not have an ‘Iron Dome’ and relies on its military presence abroad to deter attacks against the home islands. In the case of an attack on the UK proper, it is the role of the Royal Navy’s Type-45 Destroyers to provide the anti-missile capabilities that can fend off such threats. 

The entire simulation is built around publicly-available information, but publicly-available does not necessarily translate into being widely-known. As Russia launches its attacks, it is revealed that of the six Type-45 Destroyers the UK has ‘available’, four are almost constantly being repaired with a fifth also being re-fitted in Portsmouth. This leaves one Type-45 Destroyer to negate the Russian Navy’s missile capabilities. 

As one might expect, it does not fare well and military targets across East Anglia, Lincolnshire, and Scotland are struck. This is simply the first wave, however. Following Haynes’ explanations, simulated discussions with COBRA, and hurried attempts at diplomacy, Russia then launches its second wave targeting critical infrastructure such as undersea oil pipelines, the electricity grid, and emergency responders with one missile landing on Oxford Street, London. While there are UK victories in sinking a Russian submarine and Destroyer, it is here that the Russian playbook is revealed. Disinformation campaigns are launched with a range of lies and talking points; diplomatic overtures are made to the United States explaining that this was a proportional response to an aggressive UK; and NATO-member Spain is offered Russian political backing for their claim on Gibraltar. 

There is back-and-forth about ‘Strategic Dilemmas’ in which the UK actually deploys troops to the Murmansk naval base or launches F-35 jets into Russian territory on a bombing raid but what is clear is that, at least in the short-term, the UK comes away bloodied and limping from such a confrontation.

Regarding the UK’s defence capabilities, there are two major lessons. The first is that without investment in ‘conventional’ tools (Type-45 Destroyers, cruise missiles, anti-submarine tools, regular munitions etc,.) the UK’s only recourse is to its nuclear arsenal. This begs the daunting question of how much punishment would the UK accept before committing to Mutually Assured Destruction in a nuclear trade? Would it nuke Russia over losing air-bases in Lincolnshire? Over losing deep-sea oil pipelines? Likely not. But where is the threshold? The second lesson is that, on paper and in dust-covered civil service reviews, the UK has tools such as the Civil Contingencies Act, Local Resilience Forums, and a history of the Civil Defence Association that can provide tangible resilience to such attacks. None of these, however, have had the funding, encouragement, or participation to make them an asset in a military context despite their potential for offering a coordinated civil response to challenges like power grids shutting down and disinformation campaigns.

Economists vs Strategists

Towards the end of the series, barbs are traded between the Chancellor and the Chief of Joint Operations. The former accuses the latter of leaving the UK underprepared; the latter points out that the former had denied the Ministry of Defence the money it needed to prepare the UK in the first place. At the start of the podcast, Haynes explains that the UK – like much of Europe – enjoyed a ‘peace dividend’ following the end of the Cold War. Russia posed no threat and the US was a guarantor of stability in most of the areas relevant to European interests. From the 1990s onwards, funding was diverted away from defence and towards areas such as health care, social care, and education. What is politely left out of the conversation is that the Tories under David Cameron cut deeper into the military’s budget and hamstrung our current capabilities, but that is a discussion for elsewhere. Regardless, what is touched upon is a core tension between economists and strategists. 

In their book The Retreat from Strategy, British general David Richards and Oxford professor Julian Lindley-French argue (amongst other things) that the Treasury maintains the mistaken notion that investment in defence is ‘unproductive’. To an economist’s mind, defence spending is unproductive and therefore wasteful. Despite paying the wages of British factory workers and suppliers, spending money on bullets is spending money on an asset that does not add anything new to the economy. Not only that, but the UK would be paying for an insurance policy that it hopes to not cash in on. Investing in new computers in schools, by contrast, creates a more educated workforce that can contribute to making workplaces more efficient, boosting national GDP. The problem is that economics largely models its thinking on secure territories where coercive opposition does not disrupt the flow of trade and service. Such economic prosperity is, however, dependent on security.

If the UK is unable to secure itself or its interests abroad due to a lack of military funding, consequences begin with rising prices for its citizens and ends with rampant social inequality and extremist politics. Imagine that the UK was not able to deter Russian coercion and faced such an attack. Fuel prices would rise while international appreciation for free trade could diminish leading to further tariffs abroad and consumer prices rising. The only ones able to weather or even thrive domestically would be those already well-off, adding to social inequality. As the working person was squeezed into poverty and economic problems arrived on middle-class doorsteps, blame might be placed on immigrants with populists and extremists offering salvation in simplistic and unhelpful policies. We could credibly arrive at a future Britain that was poorer, increasingly unequal, more vulnerable, and ultimately nastier with all the knock-on implications that has on daily living. 

As much as defence can easily become mired in corporate interests and war-mongering, it is nonetheless needed to create the way of life we want. To over-invest in defence is to slow down meaningful economic growth – understood in reference to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, not just GDP – but to under-invest in defence is to hand over our ambitions to blind luck. 

Rule Britannia or Ruling Britannia?

The Wargame is a fantastic exercise for opening the public’s eyes to the very real threats that are present in the world the UK faces. Channel 4 shows about surviving SAS challenges and BBC renditions of rogue-ish heroes do not constitute preparedness against Kalibr and Shahed missiles nor do they undermine disinformation campaigns. Moreover, one of the premises of the simulation is that the home islands would have access to one of its aircraft carriers. At the time of writing, however, one is in the Persian Gulf and the other is in Singapore. 

Successive British leadership was criticised in The Retreat from Strategy for relying on reputation in the realm of defence. A series of spending cuts has left, they argue, the British armed forces as a ‘Potemkin force’ whose success is dependent on our opponents not looking too closely at our military capabilities. The British state has placed, and is currently placing, a lot of emphasis on projecting power but whether this generates power is up for debate. 

The Wargame ends with the UK badly damaged by Russian attacks but with its leaders discussing the diplomatic and military options remaining. The hosts decided to end the series on a slight cliff-hanger. As decision-making retreats from the military sphere and back to the political, the conversation is given to the public to finish. How the public answers is for us to decide.

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