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 army, 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 Scottish parliament 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 Integrated Review 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 Boris Johnson signed an update to the 80-year-old Atlantic Charter. Of course, the original charter was signed by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. 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 Lloyd Austin 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 Cold War. 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.