🗣️ What would you do if war broke out?

For my colleagues in Ukraine, war has been a reality for four long years.

I remember the first time we heard the drone of an air raid siren over a team call. A colleague apologised for the disturbance, said they needed to go, and several cameras turned off in quick succession.

War and resilience are a regular topic of conversation with our clients in Brussels. But in the UK, few outside of the national security and foreign policy space seem to be talking about it. It feels far away in many senses—geographically, culturally, generationally (it is telling that before 2022 my reference point for what an air raid siren sounds like was WW2 films.)

The lens through which many view the prospect of war and growing defence spending is ‘it’s taking our budgets’. This is of course true—but, if you were in government, how would you respond to growing geopolitical instability? And if our governments are planning for war, should we be planning too?

It’s just one of the many questions that Catherine Day, today’s guest, intends to grapple with through the National Strategy Project. Catherine is a career insider who has spent over a quarter of a century advising successive British governments from within No. 10, the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

One of the reasons she co-founded the National Strategy Project is because of this sense that as a society we are vulnerable: we don’t have the right kinds of institutions for today’s challenges; we conceptualise community as something local and atomised—not national; and we don’t sufficiently interrogate what our role as a citizen is or should be. You can read more about the challenges the Project intends to address here.

It’s not just our nations and societies that should be thinking about this, but our organisations too. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me five years ago that Cast from Clay would shortly buy power backup units and have conscription contingency plans.

Tom

Success is not necessarily what does happen, but what does not

A lot of my career has been in the national security space, the international space, and on geopolitics. Perhaps because of that, my career highlights are often about what we avoided or prevented, rather than what we made happen.

This is one problem with views on government today: its core duty is keeping us safe, but people don’t see most of that because security is largely measured in things not coming to pass.

The proximity of war

We are wildly vulnerable right now. We take a lot for granted in the UK today when it comes to defence, and I say that as someone who grew up in Northern Ireland and served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We’re not resilient. Successive governments have opened us up to risks in many ways by failing to plan and prepare for the long-term. The COVID pandemic showed how fragile our supply chains are. The war in Iran is showing how vulnerable our energy systems are. And we’ve quietly let our civil resilience fall away. We’re not bringing up our children in ways that will help them to survive if and when things get difficult: their ability to critically think is vulnerable. 

There is nothing surprising about the risks. We have simply not invested in preparing for them. In many countries, citizens are trained and organised to act when crises come. Here, we mostly assume someone else will deal with them–or that we’ll call in the army. 

Your role as a citizen is to challenge and better the state

Just because we’ve stepped into a set of systems that dictate ‘this is the way things are done’, does not mean that it has been thought through properly. It definitely does not mean that it is the right way to do things in the future. 

One of the things I’ve always found strange is that Northcote and Trevelyan would still recognise the structures and functions of the government that we have. Despite the fact that they wrote down the rules for the permanent civil service nearly two hundred years ago. 

That is not okay. The British state and context was entirely different then. It simply is irrational to think that institutions that were set up so long ago are fit for the times in which we’re living today. 

Political incentives are one of those vulnerabilities

There are huge challenges that we have to deal with: demographic change, climate change, technological pressures, economic shifts… These are all long-term challenges, but we rely on a politically-dominated short-term system to respond to them.

People in the system are trapped in this way of doing things that sees politicians having to win elections every few years, and which sees a civil service having to implement whatever the current government has come up with. Those things are often not necessarily rooted in reality. They are rooted in the realities that enable politicians to win elections. We inhabit a system with the wrong incentives.

I was part of the team that did Boris Johnson’s Integrated Review of foreign, defence, development and security that was meant to set our strategy for the coming decades. One of the bits of direction we received was, ‘Well, you can’t touch Europe. It’s still too toxic.’ 

You can’t come up with a serious national strategy that ignores the massive market on your doorstep because of such short-term constraints.

The methodologies that prop up a flawed approach

Focus groups and surveys don’t answer the right kind of question–they’re like a dipstick of where public opinion is now. They don’t ask people to engage their minds on the reality of the issues at hand.

It’s why we are embracing deliberative methods in the National Strategy Project. We don’t want a measure of where people are now, but a measure of where people are when they have thought about the matter at hand, and when they have exchanged views with people who have different views to their own. 

Changing our institutions starts with you

We have a strange learned dependency culture of government in this country where the government is an Other. We don’t see it as being of us; it’s something else. That makes it easier to blame when things go wrong: this idea that government is something that politicians do to us, and that the civil service facilitates.

Government is the expression of our people. It is the sum total of the choices we make as a society about how to organise ourselves. It is not some Other.

You don’t get that in other countries. In Vietnam and South Korea they have this vibrant sense that they’re all in it together, and they’re going to organise themselves to have a better future.

The problem is maybe how we conceptualise community. In Britain, what we mean by community tends to be our local communities. We haven’t put equal and opposite effort into thinking about ourselves as a national community. 

Our current political fragmentation is the natural end result of that: you can’t devolve out and devolve down and expect everything to hang together unless you’re also thinking about what brings us together. We’ve all got a role to play in that.

There is a cohort of people who reliably read to the end—thank you for being one of them.

You’ll hopefully know that we have a handful of training courses: one on strategic communications (objective setting, audience definitions, etc.), one on writing effectively, one on how to engage ministers and their teams, and one on getting the most out of AI.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be moving to a new training platform. And with that, we’ll be starting to offer organisational membership. One flat annual fee, and your colleagues can pick and choose which training they want to do. If that is something you’d be interested in discussing, please hit the button below.