I would have asked the subject this is I think it was my choice of title. I'm sorry about that is hopelessly vast.
But I think in a way it's good enough to provoke, I hope,
some discussion and to get some ideas in discussion which I can then plagiarise mercilessly as I try improve this tool.
So I hope I do too much injustice to the subject.
Let me begin by saying you're suggesting that security is achieved through both action and preparation.
In other words, I think security is about both the present and it's about the near and medium term future.
I think there are plenty of current security challenges we can talk about.
The defence budget I think is a pretty pressing security challenge in its own right
operations in Afghanistan and how to conclude them in three or four years time.
Piracy. Organised crime. Counter-Terrorism. Trafficking in narcotics and people.
And so on and so forth. But what I'm going to try and talk about this afternoon,
what I'm going to try to do is look a little bit further ahead if ultimately I want
to look at the problem of anticipation and prevention and deterrence and so on,
and indeed the question of risk. I'm going to be rather gloomy and I'm going to describe a few horrors and a few crises in waiting as I see them.
But I'm also going to suggest that the real challenge is actually not merely to describe these near term security features,
complex and volatile, though they are, but to analyse them and to ask what all this means.
Really, how can we, as they say, get our arms around it?
Have we, for example, moved into a new paradigm of not just national and international security,
but I'm also then going to think about the response and what sort of responses or responses might be most appropriate and by whom?
Bill Wolff So the description of it, which I called here, 21st century security challenges,
I think they will probably be terrorism, the proliferation of unconventional weapons.
Seaborne There'll be inter-state conflicts in the 21st century.
I think there might will be terrorist use of CB devices in crowded places.
And I think we can all think of other military and semi military scenarios to keep ourselves awake at night.
But there are also other challenges which might well, I think,
prove more problematic and which will have effect nationally in Europe and internationally and are listed on.
The slide and the other offenders on the ticket, I believe it was.
And I just want to find my.
Just. Fantastic.
And you could add to this list, but, you know, it doesn't really have a greater authority.
You're going to have terrorism, of course, in its own right. So you could have you had you could have tyrants and individuals who decide to, you know,
to do what tyrants and and despots decide to do, even though they did a very familiar list in order to go through.
Don't worry. Instead, I'm just going to select four of these topics and.
And just discuss them very briefly in turn.
And to give you some sense to relate what I some of the some of the difficulties I think we might be about to encounter.
I'm got as you can see, I'm going to look at what the Cabinet Office refers to as hazards rather than threats.
That's to say natural challenges, security challenges, rather than manmade threats.
But I think all of these could or will or are developing into more more human security problems as opposed to natural hazards.
Population and demography, first of all, according to the population division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
global population will rise from just under 7 billion last year to a predicted peak of just over nine in 2050.
The most acute stresses as a result of this, according to the UK CDC, the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, the think tank.
The most acute stresses are likely to arise from competition for energy, food and freshwater, as well as access to the global commerce.
All fairly obvious. Most of the points these stresses might be felt most closely in those regions of
the world are those sectors of humanity which already face the greatest economic,
social and political risks. And they go on to say that if the population of sub-Saharan Africa is almost to double by 2040,
and if the proportion of that region's population suffering malnutrition remains constant,
then almost 500 million people are likely to require periodic humanitarian assistance by the middle of the century, almost 500 million.
Food and fresh water. This is a gulf, according to the World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2010 report.
Current level of investments in agriculture will not be sufficient to drive a 70%
increase in food production necessary to feed an expected population of nine.
I call it 9.1 billion by 2050. So we're all starving.
Freshwater will also be an increasingly short supply. The US National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025 reported.
And if you're familiar with that, that's quite a useful document. Not as good as the DC DC one.
I hasten to add, the lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching unprecedented proportions in many
areas of the world and is likely to grow worse owing to rapid urbanisation and population growth.
And they go on to say that by 2030 there will be a 40% shortfall between the 40% for 0% shortfall between the
amount of water India requires to meet its own energy and food production needs and the water available to do so.
40% shortfall. Energy security and the judgement of the International Energy Agency.
Primary energy demand is expected to increase by 40% between 2017 and 30.
They go on to say that recoverable oil coal reserves could last for well over another century at current rates of usage.
Global oil reserves at the end of 39 could last another 40 years of consumption at current rates,
and proven gas reserves could be sufficient for another 60 years at current rates,
although that could be an available or recoverable gas resource base something like five times as big.
So gas is the future, but not for very long. Nevertheless, they say near term energy security concerns.
So this is the DC, DC.
Their concern is that the issue of energy security is one in which governments and defence organisations will have to be engaged
if states are to maintain their standards of living and to ensure adequate supplies of natural resources at reasonable prices.
Again, fairly obvious conclusion to be drawn climate change.
DC, DC once again describing climate change as a ring road issue,
but that they mean one of the four key drivers for change that will affect the lives of everyone on the planet.
It's difficult, they say, to know how and when life will be affected by climate change.
But the consensus among international security forecasters rather gloomy. So that's me neither.
Typical of the mood, I've just extracted a bit from the 2009 UK National Security Strategy.
Not the latest one, obviously, but I think it gets into this rather well.
They said a wide range of social, economic and political problems such as large scale migration, water stress, crop failure and food shortages,
faster and wider spread of diseases, increased scarcity of resources, economic instability, and the possibility of new geopolitical disputes.
Climate changes will increase poverty in the developing world, and though the links are complex, could to fragile states and to instability,
conflict and state failure, it sort of makes you wonder what the Cabinet Office chats about in a coffee,
you know, when they would use things like that. I mean, it's so utterly dismal.
I don't know if you've read Solo, the latest novel by Ian McEwan, as I just finished reading and enjoyed enormously.
At one point, McEwan refers to quote the indistinct cartoon of a calamitous future in which all must beg, shiver or drown.
Later in the novel, his anti-hero Beard reassures his colleague Toby They've got this deal going to make solar panels.
And Toby is quite anxious. He's heard doubts about climate change, about whether it's happening.
There's concern that there's this in Silicon City as doubts about climate change will affect the sales of the solar panels, Toby listens as beard.
It's a catastrophe. Relax.
The causes and effects of climate change seem suddenly open to debate, I think, and I don't want to get drawn into this debate at all,
but I think it is fair to say that there is debate about whether it's happening and if it is happening, whether we're causing it.
I simply don't have the scientific knowledge and the training to form my own judgement and I'm
wary actually being sort of expected to take a leap of faith in either one direction or another.
I like to see myself sceptical of these things,
but probably sceptical of these things I simply don't know, but I'm open minded and trying to find out,
etc. Nevertheless, I think it's important to know that in the end I see the US and I see National Intelligence Council again.
Global Trends 25 2025.
They make a key point that just worries inquests about these effects may cause nations to take unilateral actions to secure resources,
territory and other interests. In other words, it doesn't even need to be happening.
We're fairly confident that something is going on and we're going to see nation states and governments acting as if it were imminent.
I think a few paragraphs, these points I've been through, describe a future that is so singularly unattractive as to provoke a sort of innovating.
Pessimism of the sort that W.H. Auden describes almost 40 years ago when he said, Our world rapidly worsens.
Nothing now is so horrid or silly it can't occur.
I think the more prosaic point to make is that these security challenges and the threats and the hazards could either be expressed in military terms,
either directly or indirectly, or they could require a military response of some of some description,
or they can contribute to general turbulence, instability and insecurity.
And I think, taken together, all these security challenges make the more traditionally conceived Cold War and post-Cold War threats inter-state war,
terrorism, proliferation and so on pale somewhat into insignificance.
So not insignificant. But when you put them against the sorts of things that might be coming, they do look relatively less important.
What is needed, I think, is a response which is appropriate, comprehensive, decisive and above all, anticipatory and preventive.
Very, very easy to insist upon, but immensely difficult to organise in in policymaking terms.
Where on earth do we begin? When do we act? What should we do?
A recent document produced by the European Defence Agency sets out the scale of the task.
So forgive me, I'll quote this again.
The global context is sobering, with the central predictions of demography and economics foreshadowing a Europe which two decades hence will be older,
less pre-eminently, prosperous and surrounded by regions including Africa and the Middle East,
which may struggle to cope with the consequences of globalisation.
Defence will need to contend with public finances under pressure from a growing pension burden,
a shrinking recruitment pool and society's increasingly cautious about intervention in operations,
concerned with issues of legitimacy in the use of force, and inclined to favour security in inverted commas over defence, in inverted commas spending.
So that's the description full of gloom. What does it all mean?
So let me move on to the analysis bit.
I think the question here is how much of what I just described can be understood and managed through the prism of 20th century security and strategy,
which, whether we like it or not, is still pretty much the the prism with within within which we work.
The next slide shows some of the the typical features of 20th century strategic thinking as I see it.
Now there's even less authority on this.
And it's I think every time I come back to it, I change it and I, I bits and the more lines coming in and off all the time.
But as I did, I just simply trying to list the things that struck me as being typical of late 20th century strategic thinking.
And then and you've got the idea, I wondered how they how they might look in the 21st century,
how old strategy, in a sense, strains to meet the new adversary, in inverted commas.
I think the point here is that the old strategy might have to contend with the old adversary as well.
In other words, we might conceivably see the recrudescence of inter-state warfare within the way we already have.
George 28. So the list of scenarios and problems, it seems to me, keeps growing, and it's increasingly difficult to chop anything off the list.
It's, as I say, it seems unwise or even unsafe to eliminate anything from that list.
And for those responsible for national strategy and its implication, they can neither merely describe this future,
nor can they allow themselves to be overwhelmed by it, no matter how dismal it might be.
I think it has to be worthy of the name of its name.
The national strategy has to engage as fully as possible with scenarios of the sort described here,
no matter how uncertain, how dark and how overwhelming they might be.
National strategy, I think, should not only show not only that the preparations have been made to, it's to me expect.