American Enterprise Institute

Web event — UK Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace discusses strategic priorities

Introduction: Mackenzie Eaglen, Senior Fellow, AEI

Remarks: Ben Wallace, Secretary of State for Defence, UK Ministry of Defence

Discussion: Mackenzie Eaglen, Senior Fellow, AEI Ben Wallace, Secretary of State for Defence, UK Ministry of Defence

Tuesday, July 13, 2021 12:00–1:00 p.m. Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/uk-secretary-of-state-for-defence-ben- wallace-discusses-strategic-priorities/

Mackenzie Eaglen: Good afternoon. Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute’s live web event on the strategic priorities for the United States and the United Kingdom. My name is Mackenzie Eaglen. I’m a resident fellow here on national security and military budget issues. It’s an honor and a privilege to be joined today by the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace. We’re coming to you from the AEI library today here in Washington, DC. And it’s remarkable to meet again in person, sir, after so long of a break.

The Right Hon. Ben Wallace MP was appointed secretary of state for defense in July of 2019. He started his career in the British , commissioning from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and saw active service in Northern Ireland, Germany, Cyprus, and Central America. He was mentioned in dispatches while on operations in the 1990s. After leaving the army, Secretary Wallace joined the aerospace company QinetiQ, where he gained experience in the defense industry writ large. He first entered politics in 1999 as a member of the before being elected to the UK House of Parliament in 2005. He served in a variety of government roles, including the UK’s longest-serving security minister. He was in that position during the terror attacks of 2017 and the Russian nerve agent attack in Salisbury in 2018.

I’m glad to have the chance today to speak for a variety of reasons, and I want to highlight just a few of them. I am pleased and honored that you chose AEI for your public address this week in what is a very busy schedule packed with national security events. Earlier this year, as some of our audience knows who tunes in regularly for my events, in March, the United Kingdom released its of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, followed by the Defence Command Paper, both agenda-setting documents that have a lot, I think, for the United States to learn — that aim to set out how the UK would engage and operate differently around the world, highlighting the armed forces will be more active and abroad.

Then last month on the eve of the G7 summit, President Biden and Prime Minister signed an update to the 80-year-old Atlantic Charter. Of course, the original charter was signed by Franklin Roosevelt and . This new agreement pledges our governments to work together on a range of issues, including the rules-based international order. Third, the United States is undergoing our own series of strategy reviews led by this new administration that I know are of great interest to our closest allies in the world, including the United Kingdom.

So, the secretary’s first visit to the United States in a year and a half, almost, due to the pandemic is a very welcome visit. I know that yesterday, of course, he met with the Secretary of Defense and will be headed to Fort Bragg and other places on the West Coast before headed to INDOPACOM theater of operations. I’m looking forward to our conversations.

Our audience — just a quick logistical note — can submit their questions at any time this afternoon including now for the secretary. You can send them through an email account or use a hashtag on Twitter. The hashtag is #UKDefenseAEI. That’s defense with an S and not a C as our British counterparts might hope. If you would like to send questions via email, it’s also — that email is on my bio page, or it’s under [email protected] as in c-o-y-n-e. I will take a brief intermission after the secretary’s remarks. By brief, I mean mere seconds to change up the room to allow for our interview and then take your questions. And with that, Secretary Wallace, thank you.

Ben Wallace: Thank you very much, and thank you for AEI to inviting me here today. So, it’s great to be back here. As you alluded to, I was here literally the week before lockdown in March last year. So, it’s great to come and see things coming back to life and to see Washington as it should be. New administration, new threats to tackle, and obviously new decisions to make. But the intervening period has taught all of us the new meanings of national security and the importance of national resilience. And it’s a huge pleasure to speak here at this enterprise institute, a place which has for nine decades been consistently and persuasively making the case for expanding freedom, opportunity, and enterprise.

Last time I was in DC, I spoke publicly about the importance of such values and continuing to motivate and mobilize our shared efforts in an increasingly anxious world, and I explained how the UK was undergoing an integrated review of its foreign, security, defense, and development policy in order to do just that. I’m not going to rehearse the diagnosis of evolving security threats in the current strategic context. Instead, I’ll limit my remarks to what are, following the Integrated Review’s publication, my strategic priorities for improving our response to those threats and what more is needed if we are to reverse what I believe continues to be a deteriorating environment for our shared interests and our shared values. Then I hope we can open up to a discussion and get some more detail on whatever issues are of most interest to you.

Since the establishment of this institution, the world has experienced much turbulence. It is 80 years since the strategic shock of an attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated the US’ decisive entry into the Second World War. It’s just over 70 years since the US and British forces joined our allies in the Korean Peninsula to repel Communism at the earliest proxy skirmishes of the . It is now three decades since our tomahawks and tanks sped across the desert to free Kuwait from Saddam’s tyranny. And it is almost 20 years since 9/11, when global terrorism on an epic scale came to this continent — to this part of the world.

The world has since been then thrown into more turmoil. We commemorate the service and sacrifice of each of those anniversaries, and I was humbled to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery yesterday. But there is also much more that we — those charged to defending our nations — must learn from those anniversaries. There is currently a lesson on the impacts of technology development. There’s certainly lessons on the impact of technology developments and proliferation. Exploiting new technologies, especially in combination with wider innovation and strategic surprise, can provide significant advantage, but it is often fleeting and rarely decisive. That is because of an associated lesson that it is the actor’s underlying intent, creativity, and sheer willpower that ultimately determines the arc of history, not just technological superiority or capability advantages. Perhaps the most salient lesson of all, those anniversaries, is that the threat against which we defend that combination of intent and capability is constantly evolving, and if we are to do our job, so must we.

Today we’ve entered a new competitive age, as it is referred to on our Integrated Review, an era of resurgent authoritarian states, with an ever more aggressive and regressive Russia and an economically and militarily expansionist China. But it is also an era of diversifying threats with nations like North Korea and Iran destabilizing their regional security. Violent extremism and terrorism not just enduring but evolving and increasing in lethality. Both state and non-state actors exploiting digital technologies to undermine the rule of law and societal cohesion, and as well as all the wider pressure on governments like climate change, global health, population growth, urbanization, and migration, all with their associated human security implications. The threats pile up.

Put more succinctly, it’s an era of both the dragons and the snakes that James Woolsey described in all those years ago and David Kilcullen has most recently expanded on. And the methods these actors are employing bypass our strengths and exploit our weakness, enabling them to target everything from our satellites, computer networks, and critical natural infrastructure to our legal frameworks, political process, and societal cohesion. They constantly test our thresholds for armed response, avoiding open conflict, and in doing so blurring our self-imposed lines between home and abroad, friend and foe, peace and war. So how should we respond?

Perhaps by listening to the wisdom of those who have wrestled with such challenges before, among them former AEI scholar, US Navy veteran of World War II, and your 38th president, Gerald Ford. President Ford saw his fair share of turbulence, too, and his approach was to always return to first principles of shared values. Setting out in his national security policy 45 years ago, he summed it up in three words: peace through strength. I would argue that today that means not just hard military strength but the strength of our values and the conviction of proactively promoting them and the strength of our partnerships, whether across government and society or between international allies and partners. It is the strength of these relationships, the human sinews between our traditional stand-alone institutions that will ensure peace and prosperity for the future. It begins with the strength and conviction of the values we share. For the UK and the US alike, these values — democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and our belief in the power of free and open societies — is what sets us apart from our adversaries and binds us to our friends.

But the international system we built together out of the ashes of World War II is under unprecedented pressure. President Biden is right to say the central challenge of our age is ensuring that democracy remains durable and strong. The autocrats will not win the future. That is why at the recent G7, he and the Prime Minister Johnson signed a new Atlantic Charter to deepen our bilateral cooperation to shape and secure the international order of the future — to tackle these evolving threats and to build back better for the 21st century. Our armed forces absolutely have a role to play in that. Hard power underpins soft power, defending those values wherever they are challenged, whether on the global scene as we saw in the Black Sea last month or helping guard our societies from subversion in cyberspace as we did during the COVID pandemic.

We are giving our forces the military strength they need to deter adversaries in this new competitive age, pushing back to compete in the subthreshold. Crucially, that is not by sacrificing our values or the rule of law by mimicking their subversive actions but by maximizing our advantages, building up our partnerships, ensuring our presence and persistence to build resilience and relationships where nations are coming under pressure from those who seek only to buy or bully their way to dominance. Of course, deterrence also requires the ability to fight and win. So we are investing heavily in modernizing our warfighting capability. We’ve increased our defense budget by 14 percent over the next four years, including almost $120 billion on new equipment and support. In the skies, there will be new F-35 Lightning fighters, upgraded Typhoon combat aircraft, new unmanned protector systems capable of striking remotely, next-generation fighter jets, and swarming drones. On land, the army will be more mobile, more protected, and more lethal, with the new Ranger able to train, advise, and — when needed — to operate alongside our partners in complex high-threat environments. Their formation was influenced in part by your famous Green Berets, and I’ll be visiting them in Fort Bragg tomorrow to see what more we can learn. At sea, the Royal Navy will benefit from the first increase in the size of the fleet since the Cold War, with new frigates and submarines joining our HMS Queen Elizabeth–class aircraft carriers — more active and more globally deployed.

Our wargaming, like yours, consistently shows us that speed is the decisive factor in future conflict: speed of information, speed of decision-making, and speed of response. To reduce the time from sensor to shooter and to ensure decision-making at the speed of relevance, we are building a secure network, or digital backbone, to share and exploit vast amounts of data seamlessly across those domains. Of course, cyberspace is also now a highly contested domain, and we’ve built on our world-class defensive cyber capabilities to establish a new permanent national cyber force that brings together the best operators from defense and the intelligence services to provide a fully transformative offensive cyber capability.

In space, we have more to do, but we are strengthening our secure satellite networks and growing our space domain awareness, something else that I’m looking to learn about when I head to the West Coast later this week. Underpinning all that progress is cyberspace and space, and throughout our increasingly Information Age force is a significant uplift in our spending of R&D, around $9 billion. So we can exploit innovations not just in current areas like artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and directed energy weapons but start identifying where we might gain advantages from generation-after-next technologies. Crucially, we are seeking to do this all in a single, more coherent process, starting with our recent science and technology strategy to identify game changes and then combining with the new defense and security industrial strategy to ensure we achieve the pull through of such developments. We are seeking to join up innovative companies, large and small, to sharpen our cutting edge and ensuring that everyone can benefit from the prosperity dividend.

But as those anniversaries of former conflicts teach us, technology advantage only gets you so far. You must still combine them with a strategy to address the threats before you. I believe that modernizing defense must start with ensuring we are a credible and truly threat- orientated organization — learning from both contemporary and future conflict — and always challenging ourselves to meet those threats and then overmatch them. So the first step I took in UK defense reform was establishing a net assessment and challenge function in the Ministry of Defence, and very much like your own version, it is now providing rigor and challenge encompassing wargaming doctrine, red teaming, and external academic analysis.

This laser-like focusing on threats rather than prioritizing legacy force structures and equipment plans is urgently needed as this more competitive age rapidly unfolds. It’s already showing us that we can no longer remain a contingent force focused solely on preparation for the big war, which, being frank, can become our armed forces’ comfort blanket and is precisely the conflict our adversaries seek to avoid. So instead of waiting for threats to become acute like the fable of the slowly boiling frog, we must deter and address them at source, becoming more forward, present, and persistently engaged; constantly campaigning; ceaselessly pushing back against our adversaries while building the capacity of allies.

Modern deterrence has to get smarter and become as much about competing below the threshold of open conflict as above it. I’m pleased to say that this is precisely the direction of our doctrinal development. Last year, Gen. Sir Nick Carter, our chief of the defense staff, published the Integrated Operating Concept. It recognizes that changes in the information and political environment now impact not just the context but the conduct of military operations — that the notion of war and peace as binary states has given way to continuum of conflict. That requires us to prepare our forces for more-persistent global engagement and constant campaigning, moving seamlessly from operating to warfighting.

The armed forces working with the rest of government must think and act differently. They will no longer be held as a force of last resort but become more present and more active around the world. Our forces will still be able to warfight as their primary function, but they will also increasingly have a role to play outside what we traditionally consider war, whether that is supporting humanitarian projects, disaster relief, conflict prevention, and stabilization — because helping partners help themselves reinforce their resilience. And because, yes, we must always be ready to fight and win, but as we all know, it is better to win without fighting.

All the instruments of state power must be employed in balance. Otherwise, our policy options risk becoming war or nothing, and that is not how we can ever win a strategic competition. As I’ve already been suggesting, winning that competition, I believe, will require the strength of our values, the strength of our military — crucially both above and below the threshold — and finally, the strength of our partnerships across government and around the world. So President Biden was right to say in the Interim Strategic Guidance that our strength is multiplied when we combine efforts to address common challenges, share costs, and widen the circle of cooperation. That’s why the UK is not merely reinforcing our place as the leading European NATO ally in spending and capabilities but also the conceptual development of NATO 2030.

We are also now looking to other regions where the strategic competition is presenting itself, the high north across Africa, in Central and South America, and not least, the Indo-Pacific. And it is the Indo-Pacific where both the great challenges are but also the great opportunities arise if we get it right. It is where the UK as a global trading nation seeks to be the European partner with the broadest and most integrated presence there for the long term, with closer and deeper partnerships, defending freedom of navigation, political and legal freedoms, and free and fair trade. That does not mean exclusively military posturing but a more strategic whole-of-government campaign, including economic, cultural, and diplomatic tools, to name but a few.

For years, people have been talking about joint working, but the track record shows we haven’t really meant it. If we are going to compete constantly, we’re going to have to orientate ourselves to constantly campaign to bring to bear on our competitors the broadest range of tools of national power, for potentially generations to come. As a politician, I understand the meaning of campaigning in the world we face. When I’m not in power, I’m campaigning to win. When I’m in power, I’m campaigning to govern, and when I’m out, I’m campaigning to win again. It is a never-ending cycle, because it is the values that endure that we campaign for — and not as individuals. So if we really do mean it, how far are we prepared to go? Will we change our laws and reform our structures? Will we expand who we share our precious intelligence with? Will we empower those charged with leading those campaigns the authority to execute them with the same determination as our traditional operations? And as part of that, we must be ready to stand firm with our allies, chief among them the United States. As Prime Minister Johnson has said, America is back, and that’s a good thing.

Our defense cooperation is the broadest, deepest, and most advanced of any two countries in the world. We are ready and able to share your burden of global leadership, wherever and whenever it is required, but let’s not leave it until a major conflict breaks out. The status quo is not self-perpetuating, and our forces must adopt a campaigning approach now. They are already deliberately designed to fight seamlessly alongside the US. We train and exercise together, and now we are just starting to operate together in the same region. Our carrier strike group now entering the Indo-Pacific proves the strength of such partnership in action. Your Arleigh Burke–class destroyer USS The Sullivans is providing our strike group with air defense and anti-submarine capabilities while a squadron of 10 US Marine F-35B Lightnings, the “Wake Island Avengers,” are proudly flying side by side with their UK counterparts. The deployment has not only contributed NATO’s first fifth-generation carrier to alliance operations and visibly defend the rules-based international order, but its convening power is strengthening alliances further afield and developing new partnerships in strategically vital corners of the globe.

So the carrier group really is the embodiment of everything UK defense is seeking to achieve through our indicator review, a major multilateral deployment of cutting-edge military capabilities and partnering with our closest allies — not to confront an adversary in a crisis, but to confidently project our shared values. Right at the heart of the carrier group are British and American sailors, marines, airmen, and airwomen working side by side every single day as one team. That is the strength of our shared values and deep partnering, and I pay tribute to them for all they are doing for our two nations in the region. My colleague and friend Secretary Austin told me yesterday the motto of the USS Sullivans, the ship named after the five brothers who died in the naval battle of Guadalcanal, was “We stick together.” And that for me pretty much sums it all up, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I thoroughly enjoyed your remarks, and it sounds like a lot of big changes are underway in terms of this constant campaigning — this new operationalization — that’s not a word — but changing, I guess, the posture of the UK armed forces to be constantly operational, if I’m saying that correctly. I was struck by your threat-based approach. I think that’s actually the — it’s the right answer for the moment. What we have found, I think, in the United States, though, is being constantly forward, particularly for our forward-deployed naval forces, because I think they seek to do a lot of what you were hoping to accomplish with your armed forces — is that without capacity, there’s a tension there between what you can get done and how quickly and wearing out man and machine too fast. Let’s go back to the Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group and the deployment with the United States in the INDOPACOM theater. Are you learning any early lessons? Are you hearing any instant feedback? Are you gaining any insights yet? Or maybe not until you travel out there. I’m keenly following this deployment — and as I mentioned with Sir Wigston when he was here as well. And I’m just curious if there’s any sort of initial lessons learned that you can share with our audience.

Ben Wallace: Yes, I think the first lesson is deploying a large force anywhere is as much a political act as it is a military act, and making sure that we get our information correct, our comms correct, around it is really important. You know, military — military comms — that’s fine. Telling our media about what it’s like on a ship, that’s fine. But making sure the strategic messaging is well honed, properly coordinated, properly delivered to the right audiences is something that we are learning as we go. We need to be better at it. You know, our adversaries are quickening. You know, adversaries don’t usually have to worry about facts and figures. They can make them up. So we have to be better in that information so we get the premium of what we’re doing it.

And, you know, I often find in comms — in the department — they’re very good at communications for our own audience, but actually, if we’re to further Britain or United States influence, what comms are we doing in those host countries that are hosting one of our ships? What are we doing to help them? Not in a propaganda way. What are we doing to say to people of Ukraine, you know, “The British navy is here. We’re coming to support your freedom of navigation.” And so getting those in the right places, I think, are really important.

I think the second thing is interoperability. We’re not really learning this, but we’ve seen this emerge over the last few years, which is a Russia that is quite provocative. Never mind the Black Sea. We saw only a few days ago in the eastern Mediterranean, Russian aircraft getting dangerously close to our carriers with weapons on — going against all the normal norms. We saw a few months ago a US aircraft in the western Mediterranean with Russian fighter jets getting incredibly close to them. That’s showing two things. One is that our adversaries seem to have worked out our risk appetite, and we haven’t worked out how to put them off balance and to communicate to them what’s acceptable — not acceptable. So I think we all are in a place where — you know, it’s why I referenced in the speech — we need to be more comfortable subthreshold. You know, it’s almost as if we’re waiting for the actual violent event, but our adversaries aren’t. And so I think that’s what’s tested every day.

Now, to be fair to our navies, even when the Cold War ended, they were constantly competed with. When you go to sea in a ship, people compete with you all the time, and that hasn’t stopped. The Russians have had submarines in the Atlantic on and off ever since — and the Pacific as well. Of the three services, getting them into the sort of global competition mindset, the navy has been the easiest. And, I think, both our army and your army have been grappling with what their future role is and how they should configure for it. I think there is still a lot of debate to be had about what is the army of the future. Is it going to change? How is it going to be more decisive? But also, how is it going to feed into that resilience network that I think is so important?

Mackenzie Eaglen: I agree. I’m captured by your honest take on the world, and not only our shared, in many cases, strengths, but I think — based on our societies and our values and our principles — are some of our weaknesses just because of what we believe in our open society, our pension for transparency, et cetera. It’s our risk appetite. I 100 percent agree with you on where the enemy is and where we are. Our ability to be militarily deceived, putting aside just wider citizenry, right, election interference, disinformation, et cetera — but on the military level, particularly as more artificial intelligence comes online, that information and data can be easily manipulated. And I’m not convinced, at least in the US, we’re ready for that.

But let’s go back again to this threat-based view of the world — this threat-based budgeting — which I’d argue the US was really good at in another era but not so much today. Well, this department has said China is the top. The “pacing challenge,” I believe, is the term that Secretary Austin uses as opposed to “threat.” Specifically, he calls it a challenge. It’s gotten a little muddled over the years with China versus Russia. What does that mean with these two very different types of competitors and, of course, dealing with middle-tier challengers like Iran and North Korea and the constant grind of counterterrorism? So, in your Integrated Review, you suggest Russia is a pacing threat and that China, of course, is a long-term chronic and strategic challenge. So can you give us a sense here in the United States what — parse those words into actionable meaning for me, because I think I’m going to agree with what that means. I want to make sure I do.

Ben Wallace: So Russia is quite an acute issue for us, you know — 2018 using nerve agent on the British streets, ending with the murder of a British citizen and then just blatant dishonesty, and if you remember, follow-up arrested, I think — the Dutch, if you remember, intelligence officers who then came to try and corrupt the investigation of the OPCW. Russia has engaged in very malign activity, whether it’s cyber, whether it is military intimidation, whether it is, you know, espionage or murders that we’ve been seeing. And, you know, that is a real hard-edge threat. If you think of a government that is prepared to authorize those things, what are the boundaries left? Belarus, we saw — effectively a European aircraft hijacked. I mean, it was taken out of the sky, forced to land in Belarus, and a journalist was arrested. And, I think, President Putin came out in support of that action. Since when was that acceptable?

Russia poses lots of problems for us. Only a few weeks ago, they surrounded Hawaii with, I think, nearly 22 surface vessels — biggest deployment since the Cold War. Now, we can say on paper, well, their economy is half the size of Britain’s. You know, we can say on paper that they’re nothing like the scale of China. They’re not posing risk. Well, they’ve got nuclear weapons. They’ve got a very proficient submarine service. They are experimenting with new capabilities, and they do something which both China and Russia do. They proliferate, and they use proxies. We’ve called out the behavior of the Russian Wagner Group, a mercenary group who are remarkably well equipped for a mercenary group with Russian equipment.

And, you know, why are our troops more at threat from terrorism? Why is Iran more spiky? You know, why are Houthis firing missiles — that you wouldn’t thought they had those capabilities? Well, because the direction of travel in the last few decades is precision has proliferated down to people who didn’t use to have it. So many capabilities used to be the preserve of about five countries. Encryption precision is now in the hands of non-state actors, never mind state actors. And, I think, you know, some of the people feeding that Russian exploitation technology we should be concerned about.

So, for us in the United Kingdom, Russia is probably for us the most direct pressing challenge to us. We don’t have a problem with the Russian people. We would like President Putin to desist and to, you know, return — to try, sort of, normal behavior, but every time, he plays the type, you know, the latest being Belarus. So I think that is a worry, and I think it’s also a worry because it’s not well thought-out. I mean, for all of his aggression, strategically, in the long term, he’s made problems for himself.

So, Ukraine: He made Ukraine choose. He invaded Ukraine, and when you go to Ukraine, and I’ve been a few times as both security minister, you meet Ukrainians who were in the Soviet army for 20 — 30 years who were made to choose on the day that Russia did what it did. If you go to Scandinavia, I think, for the first time there is now a majority in the Swedish parliament of MPs in favor of joining NATO. So Putin’s strategic goal was to keep people away from NATO or Western influence. It’s actually had the reverse effect, but it therefore worries me whether he’s really in a long-term thinking or whether he’s — so that’s oppressing.

With China, I think it’s because, you know — the simple fact of the matter is China’s scale, China’s power, speed of its military development, and its ambitions presents not only a challenge but presents competition and potentially presents a threat. And it’s no good pretending we can turn China backwards. We’re not going to send it back into the 1970s, and anyone who thinks they can will be mistaken. We have to find a way of using one of our unique selling points, which is: We have alliances. I mean, what are our strengths in our free open societies? It’s alliances and friendships. And if you think China and Russia — who are their friends? Well, you know, Russia defines itself by Belarus. China doesn’t really seem to need friends, it thinks.

Our strength is our alliances, and we’re growing them — Australia, you know, New Zealand, the Five Eyes community. This year we’re celebrating the 50th year of the Five Powers Defence Agreement, which is Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, and ourselves. So we’ve got to exploit that and develop it together. And, I think, what I meant in my speech about our traditional intelligence sharing — do we really mean it? Do we really mean about contesting? And all those silos that you and I have known for decades, in all our systems — everyone talks a good game, but have they ever really been changed to allow the application onto the problem?

Mackenzie Eaglen: We’re struggling with that here — that exact point.

Ben Wallace: But we’ve been struggling for 20 years.

Mackenzie Eaglen: No, it’s right. It’s fact.

Ben Wallace: It’s not new. And, you know, the answer to my parliamentarians and to your senators and House’s reps — if you really are concerned about China or competition in the world, everyone’s going to have to take a deep breath and make some significant legislative changes — make some in sharing changes about who we’re going to go a little bit further with and trust that we might have not traditionally done. Are we going to take decisions around investment? Are we going to use the whole of society to progress our way and protect our way of life, or are we just going to talk about it?

Mackenzie Eaglen: I cannot wait to hear of your successes, frankly, and to move beyond the talk. I think that’s going to be a challenge for anyone in our leadership in national security as well. You know, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen Russia test a new intercontinental ballistic missile. We’ve seen China build over 100 new missile silos. Things are seeming to heat up. You know, we’re slowly crawling towards some sort of nuclear modernization program. We’re getting there — like I said, quite slowly — but this decade, we will significantly ramp up our strategic forces modernization, presumably. But, you know, the question of Iran’s always hanging out there, what comes. You know, I don’t think there’s a return to the JCPOA. I don’t think you can just sort of take that old deal, which doesn’t apply to the world today. You know, if there’s not some sort of agreement along the lines that the French and others have proposed, like an international fuel bank, I’m not sure about the future. I’m worried about a Middle East arms race. What’s the outlook for the UK strategic deterrent, and are you worried about an arms race in the Middle East in particular?

Ben Wallace: So, strategic deterrent — we announced an increase in warheads on our submarines because we have to keep it credible. It’s really that simple. You know, I wouldn’t waste my taxpayers’ money on a non-credible deterrent. Either have it and make it credible, or not. So, we have to respond, and as we’ve seen — Russia’s investment in, you know, anti- ballistic missile capabilities means we have to make sure that it remains credible. And we will always continue to review those postures. We run predominantly a minimal deterrent, but that’s why we’ve done that, and we will have to keep doing it. We’re investing in the next generation of dreadnought submarines for the next generation of Trident alongside — again, in the sort of pace — in lockstep with the United States. In fact, we’re making each other’s parts of our submarines together. So it’s a very — a close-knit tied capabilities. On the second question, which was — you asked me.

Mackenzie Eaglen: I’m sorry. A Middle East arms race.

Ben Wallace: I think we should always be worried about that, and actually, that’s why — while the media attention is always on the Israeli-Iranian dynamic, which is real. I’m not underplaying that. But actually, the thing we really, really need to de-thaw and work a solution through is the Saudi-Iranian dynamic because, you know, if there is an arms race, if there is a race to nuclear, and if Iran — and one of the reasons people don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon capability is it will trigger other people doing it. And I would guess it’s not — they haven’t told me, so I’m not — but the speculation is, you know, which is the country who is religiously rivals, economic rival, cultural rival, geographic rival, and with the wealth to do so. You know, you could see it quickly going up, and that would be no benefit to anyone.

So, finding a way to try and resolve Iran’s issues is, unfortunately, getting harder with the election of this latest president, rather than easier. We have to double our efforts to try and make our way through, but, you know, fundamentally, it — you know, I use the phrase, the world is more anxious — and it is more anxious. I am more anxious about Iran than I’ve been for a long time. I used to chair the parliamentary Iran committee for eight years. I’ve regularly visited Iran. So I sort of understand Middle East politics often through Iranian eyes, and I’m sort of not very optimistic with where we’ve currently had in the recent term. But we’ll try, and I think, collectively, President Biden is prepared to try alongside the Europeans and Russia and China, because I don’t think it’s anybody’s interest. But, you know, Iran has to realize that its behavior doesn’t help itself. Its destabilizing activities in regions doesn’t help people. You know, why would you turn your neighbors against you for no apparent reason, in a sense? That’s something they have to reconcile.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Indeed. I call it a time of unsteady peace. I’m not sure of a better term, but anxiety or anxiousness would also work.

Ben Wallace: It is why — one of the things I think is as important as readiness is presence. So just being somewhere forward has a real effect on both resilience and messaging, and I think there’s a premium in presence. And there’s always a debate in our military about whether we should all be back at home and just ready to go at a moment’s notice, or whether you should be forward. You don’t have to be particularly configured for war forward. You don’t have to have an armored brigade. You could have an aviation brigade. You could have a training brigade. But being present in certain countries in the world strategically make a difference. It really does make a difference. I think there’s an adage I was told when I was up in Estonia, which was how many Americans does it take to deter the Russians? And the answer is one on duty. So, I think, my direction in the command paper was to be more present as well as more engaged and more ready, and I think that is quite important.

Mackenzie Eaglen: I want to turn to questions here. I apologize to our audience. We started a little late, so we’ll go just two or three minutes over as well, but there are many. You’re quite popular. Dominic Nicholls from The Telegraph asks, “What considerations are there when you talk about expanding who we share our intelligence with? Are you describing, for example, an expansion of the Five Eyes, or are you talking about potentially a Five Eyes light, some new organization, or amended? Which countries might you be considering, and what kind of intelligence would you share?”

Ben Wallace: Well, I don’t think I’m proposing a new structure, and the Five Eyes is a very tight, established structure. But intelligence is part of that process of sharing with partners, improving their resilience, and bringing people together for a result on a certain issue. And a good example was after Salisbury — you know, there was a debate in government about how much we shared with our allies about what we knew or didn’t know so that we could encourage them to take joint action with us. And that was a very deliberate decision that — you know, go back 10 years before that. I suspect they wouldn’t have done it.

You know, the nature, understandably, of intelligence agencies is to be very, very cautious about these things, but by sharing with many of these countries what we knew, we managed to achieve 153 expulsions of intelligence officers around the world, 60-odd from United States alone. And, you know, sometimes going to a partner that’s not so traditional and saying, “We’re going to help you by showing you something that you don’t normally see that we know,” or directing our intelligence to collect — that really helps, and that’s how you build those relationships and you make a difference to people. It’s about asking ourselves — or challenging ourselves — from traditional relationships. Mackenzie Eaglen: Our next question comes from Peter Kouretsos at the Institute for Defense Analyses: “Mr. Secretary, the UK originally pledged to buy 138 F-35 joint strike fighters for the Royal Navy and Air Force. How will Her Majesty’s government balance that commitment with the continued investment in your Future Combat Air System Tempest?”

Ben Wallace: Well, I think, the timing. So, first of all, it’s a different profile cycle, but when we’re buying more — we have committed to buying more than the 48 we’ve currently bought. But as one of the customers for F-35 — and, you know, part of it’s made not very far from where I represent — I’m also very concerned about the through-life costs, and I know your own report on the Hill recently highlighted that. So, I think it’s important as one of the customers to say we will commit to buy more. We have done already. We have a number of budget lines for buying more of the F-35s. But I do want to make sure that the contractors focus hard on keeping costs under control, because the simple reality is the United Kingdom, like anybody else, will have to balance its books if it doesn’t. And, you know, we’ve seen F- 22. We’ve seen the United States themselves examined some of the F-35, and it’s a big consortium with lots of international partners, but that won’t affect the profile of the next generation of fighter.

The FCAS program: We’ve committed to put another 2 billion pounds in for the next stage and get it towards development. I think whenever you have a new fighter program, you have the debate nowadays about manned and unmanned and the balance, affordability, and exquisite versus effectively more utilization. You know, when is it a platform? When is it a weapon system? So all of that, I think, is ongoing. I will expect leaders of my air forces to come to me and explain what they think the air force 2050 looks like. That’s my point about threat. What do we think our adversaries are developing? What do we think the airspace will look like in 30 — 40 years? I mean, that’s why we pay these defense intelligence people and think tanks to think through those problems. And therefore are we buying the right thing for that, or are we buying just the next model of the car we’ve already got? I think that’s really important, but they don’t compete for two programs.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Okay. So we’ll ask Peter to help you think through that question. Jeff Seldin from Voice of America news in Washington has a question. The Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS has been calling for more focus on terrorism in Africa. So how does the UK view that threat, and how does Great Britain plan to help contribute to that? And he has a twofer, so it’s up to you if you want to take both. Recently, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov told Russian media that ISIS is acquiring territory in northern Afghanistan as we are all withdrawing the US and our allies. Do you see any evidence to that effect about their territory taking? Also, do you see any evidence of the Taliban cracking down or preventing resurgence of ISIS in Afghanistan, which is — generally speaking, I also wanted to bring up Afghanistan just anyway and then withdraw.

Ben Wallace: So, first of all, on the Afghanistan issue — look, ISIS has been in Afghanistan for quite a long time. They are rivals to the Taliban, and the Taliban tend to not tolerate them in order the Haqqani network. I haven’t seen, sort of, reports of them taking big territories. You know, I think at the moment, obviously, the preeminent issue is the Taliban themselves, and indeed, if you look at sort of al Qaeda affiliates elsewhere in the world, they tend to actually end up fighting each other. Boko Haram and ISIS only recently in Africa — but it does lead into the Africa question. I am absolutely worried about Africa. I mean, Africa — as we see, the speed of radicalization can spread through parts of Africa very quickly. Ungoverned space can develop extremely fast. We saw in Mozambique recently — ISIL really sort of take on a small town and hold it for quite some time. We saw the murder of some — I think all workers, et cetera. And, you know, we need to help Africa’s resilience defeat that because, in some countries where there’s very high levels of corruption, there’s nothing to stand in the way of ISIS. You know, ISIS will come and preach. They will come and tell them it’s all going to be perfect under their system, or they’re a long way away from a capital. So if there are parts of African countries where there is no — you know, the rule of the government is a long way away. So, we should worry about it. Al Shabaab is getting stronger.

For example, it’s probably the most active al Qaeda affiliate in the world that’s in Somalia. Boko Haram has had significant — well, I said a recent setback, but it has grown in places like North Nigeria. And then we’re seeing over in West Africa, the French and the Mali sort of struggled to stop it. It hasn’t reversed, and I think that is a challenge. So we should worry about Africa. We should also worry because China is there in large numbers competing, not so fairly with British and American firms when it comes to trade and commerce, but also in securing rare earth and issues like that. And obviously, we now have the Wagner Group — the Russians, and obviously the Wagner Group, were alleged to have been involved in the murder of some journalists in Central Africa. We see a lot of their activity — again selling arms, engaging in issues that are destabilizing. So I think Africa is important.

You know, for us in Britain, I often say you don’t have to go to the South China Sea to compete with China. You know, you just have to go to Africa. And we should all care what happens in Africa because my point about helping resilience — and so where do I see some of the role for Britain — the Green Berets building that resilience? You know, currently, we have lots of training teams. We haven’t yet ever gone to the place where we go to the enabling — or we go alongside them. We’ll train in one country, but then off they’ll go, so we won’t be alongside them. We won’t enable them. We could give them more ISR. We could enable their capabilities against things like al Shabaab. So I think there’s definitely a role for the likes of the Green Beret — army role in place of Africa, and that’s how we’ll help build that resilience.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Good. I wanted to follow up personally on Afghanistan, but thankfully, Jerome Starkey from seeks —

Ben Wallace: [cross talk] say they had a hurdle yesterday. And they ambushed me on my —

Mackenzie Eaglen: [cross talk] all your time already. They’re hogging the mic, so to speak. He asks — and I’ll just quickly build on to that — “How does the withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrate forward, present, and persistently engage campaigning while building the capacity of our allies?” And I would ask if you have any disappointments in the US pace or scope or method of withdrawal. I certainly have some disappointments. You know, we’re seeing right now that pilots are systematically targeted for assassination because, of course, the Afghan air force has a unique NATO- and US-trained capability that separates them from the Taliban — to put aside all of the other, you know, targeted killings that are happening across the country for translators, interpreters, and others. So I’m just curious, if you had been king for a day, if you would have done anything different or want to see something different.

Ben Wallace: The lesson of both Iraq and Afghanistan is, when you go into a country, you need to get your configuration right in what you’re there for and how you’re going to deliver it. And I give an example where we did it well. Where we did help and develop the Afghan special forces — same goes for some of the Iraqi’s special forces — that’s worked. The UK — US taxpayer got their money’s worth. They’ve got a capable, able force that absolutely can hold its own, but whether it can hold its own against scale is to be seen. It shows if you do — you have your forces correctly configured to deliver, sometimes, a victory. So an armored brigade in Iraq rolled up the Iraqi army, and then we promptly just replace them with another armored brigade. Well, there’s no more armor. What you need to do is replace them with a brigade properly configured for post-conflict security assistance. So I think that is a common lesson from Iraq in Afghanistan for both of us.

It also then goes to the question of forward presence. I understand what Jerome is trying to say, but look, we went in it as a NATO deployment. We went in together. When the president said, “Look, we’re going to leave. We’ve been here 20 years. We’ve trained 300,000 Afghans,” you know, the international community didn’t really have a choice because our configuration was done.

Now, of course, Britain could have rustled up 10,000 people, put in our ISR, and just replaced them. But the lesson from 1842 — whatever it is in Britain’s time — is, in Afghanistan, you’re going to have to be there as an international community or not at all, and you’re going to have to be there for a very, very long time. So, you know, finding other partners who really wanted to stay was pretty hard, and therefore, I think, the decision was, you know, we have to move and leave. And I’ve been fairly public about it. Do I think that is the end of the matter in Afghanistan? No, I don’t. You know, will we see a resurgence of al Qaeda? What we know is two things: The Taliban do know what happened last time. I mean, they do know that it — we do also know the Taliban are desperate for international recognition. You know, if they want funding — they want money, they want banking — they’ll need to maintain diplomatic relations with the international community, and so repeating themselves like last time won’t wash, and they won’t get any recognition as a result of that. So, it’s to be seen — is the answer. I’m not kidding myself, but it is to be seen. They have given an undertaking. We’ll hold them to their word.

Mackenzie Eaglen: I agree with you. I don’t think we’re done — we, the proverbial we.

Ben Wallace: The history of Afghanistan says — no one has said. I saw President Xi — sort of a photograph of him and the president of Afghanistan grinning with a sort of offer of $62 billion. I thought somebody somewhere in a valley in Afghanistan is saying, “Another superpower.”

Mackenzie Eaglen: This colleague is not from your gaggle, but from Tim Morrison at the Hudson Institute, he would like to know, “Secretary Wallace, your government recently completed its defense, obviously, and deterrence review, which we’ve discussed. Can you explain your thought about adopting a no-first-use or sole purpose doctrine for your nuclear weapons? How do you think a US adoption of such a policy would implicate British security or that of NATO?”

Ben Wallace: We’re not in favor of that change of doctrine. In fact, our Integrated Review laid out our position that, you know, our doctrine is that — you know, it’s about a strategic event. It’s about a range of threats, and, you know, we will reserve that right to deploy those weapons as we must.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Good. I like your direct answers that are short and sweet. Thank you. Marc Selinger from Janes. He asks, and, of course, this is putting on one of your many hats of the past, “How would you describe the state of the United Kingdom’s defense industrial base? Did you have any concerns?”

Ben Wallace: Well, hopefully, he’s read our new Defence Industrial Strategy. The plus side of working in aerospace and also representing quite a lot of aerospace work is I know the difference between a T-shirt pretending you work for the company in a country and actually manufacturing an investment, and, you know, it’s always a trick of a manufacturer. You know, you get along a politician. They get a photograph in front of something, and, you know, everyone thinks it’s made there, but, in fact, they’ve stuck on the wheels and painted it — but actually, it’s been made somewhere else. And I think the messaging for the Defence Industrial Strategy is we are keen to partner with international companies. We have one of the most open defense markets in the world. I’m always over here lobbying to get rid of ITAR controls because it’s all problems.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Yes. Me too.

Ben Wallace: We spend nearly 500 million complying with that, and as I say to US industry, that’s 500 million I can’t spend with you. I mean, it’s pretty straightforward.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Amen. Preach.

Ben Wallace: I’m spending on bureaucracy. So the structure is we want to invest in R&D. We want to pull through — really important. You know, QinetiQ was a sort of DARPA, where I worked in — and, you know, awful lot of clever ideas — but unless it’s got a requirement at the end of it, we are just spending money on things. You know, we have to make sure there is a requirement at the end of this process to (a) give industry some hope but also that we use it. But also that, when we are joining with people, I want them to invest in my people as much as we’ll invest in theirs. And so prosperity is not just a word on a T-shirt. It’s got to be in a proper partnership. And in exchange for that, we will access together export markets. You know, I signed a big deal with BAE Rheinmetall, a German company — and BAE obviously for the Boxer armored vehicle. It’ll be — 65 percent of it in value will be made in the UK, and they transfer some of the IPs. So, if I exported around it, it’s in my interest to export Boxer to third countries, and they’ll be made in Britain — those ones. The ones I sell will be made in Britain. So I think that’s the sort of partnership we like.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Good. Our last question, although there are many more, sir, and I apologize — we did not get to them all. It’s from Kori Schake, my colleague here at AEI. She asks, “Great-power competition was an important acknowledgment, of course, in 2018 but seems to play into China’s hands as a one-on-one US-China confrontation rather than emphasizing its UK, Australia, Japan, India, and about 30 other countries trying to sustain this order to everyone’s mutual advantage and, of course, while China’s seeking to establish a system that’s only advantageous to China. Do you think it’s time to shift how we talk about the China challenge?”

Ben Wallace: No. I think we need to all get our China policy right first. There’s a lot of ideas, but I’m not sure I have handled anyone’s China policy yet. You know, what are we trying to achieve with China? I take the view that we’re trying to get them to change their behavior. We’re trying to get them to work with us on international rules-based system, to accept freedom of navigation, to respect human rights, and to fair play. You know, I’m a Brit. You know, we’re all supposed to believe in fair play, and actually, my message to Asian countries that I can visit is, you know, “We’ll support you because we believe in fair play that — you know, if your fishing grounds are in dispute, we uphold the rule of the UN and the rule of the law. And, you know, it’s only fair you are treated with respect. We stand up to bullies. We don’t like bullies.”

I think we need to think through the political solution as well as any military planning that — you know, you often hear over here about, you know — a lot of focus is on the size of the Chinese military, but what is our political thought on how we’re going to get to a destination with China so we can de-escalate — can be in a better position where we hope that they have, you know, changed their behavior? And that takes smart thinking. That’ll take a game of chess, and it’ll take a sort of political strategy. I’m not yet sure anyone is there, and if they are there, I don’t think they yet match with actions.

I’ll give you an example. It’s not a good idea to be overdependent on any country that doesn’t share your values. So, sometimes Britain is overdependent on some American equipment or American food, but we share the same values. You’re not going to ring us up and abuse us, you know, by using that leverage. If there are countries out there who don’t share our values, and we become completely dependent on them, we become very, very vulnerable. And actually, a start point for all of us is we should diversify our supply chain. We should seek to develop and manufacture and share technology and knowledge and R&D development and culture elsewhere, so that we aren’t so dependent on one country — so that when it comes to difficult choices, we’re okay — we’ve got a diverse supply chain.

But secondly, that will actually affect how countries like China behave. If their customers start to leave — as in we are the customers — then they’ll have to make a decision about whether they want us back a lot — and, I think, having a proper strategy around how we are going to encourage more manufacturing in other parts of the world. I do think it’s a false choice to say Britain or Chinese manufacturing, because those days are sort of gone. You know, this is not that suddenly British workers will be able to undercut Chinese workers, and we just suddenly magic it out. You know, our manufacturing profile has changed, but it does mean there are a lot of other countries we can trade with and help them — not help them but trade with them. And I think the first start point for all of us should be to diversify our supply chain, so we don’t get back into that Huawei thing where it’s one or nothing. And I think that will start to change people’s thinking.

Mackenzie Eaglen: I do like that you have a hardheaded sense of a realistic view of the world — no magic beans here. Although I will just applaud you on our way out as I say thank you on your 14 percent defense budget increase in a pandemic. That is magic or pulling a rabbit out of a hat. You’ll have to give us tips on how the US could do that.

Ben Wallace: I took time to explain to people like chancellors and the foreign secretary that the military isn’t just about war. I mean, there’s a tendency across governments to think, “You guys just, you know, you’re picking a fight into a war, blah, blah.” “Actually, our job is often to prevent conflict, and if we prevent conflict, it’s a lot cheaper, chancellor, than it is if you have a big conflict.”

Mackenzie Eaglen: I agree. Well said.

Ben Wallace: So from a treasury point of view, they understand that messaging, and that’s what we’re going to do.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Mr. Secretary, I wish you well. Thank you for joining us at AEI today. Thank you to our online audience for viewing our discussion. I wish you well in your travels in the US and abroad.

Ben Wallace: Thank you very much.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Thanks.