Letters

Dec 2009, Vol. 154, No. 6

Promoting Virulent Envy: A Response

SIR, Your August journal carried an article by Yahya Birt entitled ‘Promoting Virulent Envy?’. The article was an important and thought-provoking contribution, but did not fully reflect our Prevent work: I wanted to respond to some of the points which it made.

Mr Birt claimed there is division in the ‘highest ranks of government’ and among senior counter-terrorist officials over our approach to Prevent, based on what he called the means- and the values-based approaches, which would create very different approaches towards engagement.

Broadly, a means-based approach would focus on working with those who have influence over the vulnerable, even if they have socially conservative views some would call extremist; whereas a values-based approach would promote liberal shared values and prioritise working with those we see as moderate Muslims.

We do not recognise this division. Our strategy starts from the fundamental assumption that radicalisation happens for a range of reasons, including: the wide dissemination of an ideology, conveyed by people living in this country and overseas; individuals who for a range of largely personal reasons are vulnerable to their message; communities which are sometimes under-resourced to challenge and resist violent extremism; and grievances, some genuine and some perceived, including those directed very specifically against government.

Prevent seeks to address all these factors. We need to support credible voices to challenge the ideology pedalled by Al-Qa’ida and like-minded groups. We must support individuals who are vulnerable to the message of violent extremism. We need to tackle radicalisers and make it harder for them to operate here. And we will work with communities across all these objectives, creating broad-based and inclusive partnerships to do so.

Mr Birt claims that Prevent has led us to engage with Muslims as communities at risk, not as citizens, and that issues such as shared values and citizenship should be disconnected from our counterterrorism work.

We have repeatedly said that the vast majority of people in our Muslim communities have clearly rejected violent extremism and that we must avoid giving any impression to the contrary (we must also avoid implying that community work against violent extremism began with the government Prevent strategy). We have carefully drawn a distinction between work to promote integration and community cohesion and Prevent, and have argued that these are separate (though connected) policy areas. Cohesion is not a security policy. Integration is important for social rather than just security reasons. Shared values are not just about counter-terrorism. All this is stated and explained in CONTEST, our counter-terrorist strategy. In a letter written to Local Authorities by the Home Secretary and Communities Secretary on 14 August we explicitly said that ‘we do not want terrorism to define or be perceived as defining the relationship between Government and Muslim communities’. Mr Birt echoes some of the wilder accusations about Prevent, including the claim that its focus is surveillance and the covert collection of intelligence. I know he is quoting the opinions of others but this claim is untrue.

We have always been open about the aims, objectives and programmes of Prevent and the organisations involved in their delivery. That must be right. We are also clear in the published CONTEST strategy about the role and purpose of intelligence in our counter-terrorist work. Prevent has never been and will not become a pretext for spying or intelligence-gathering. Intelligence is intended to illuminate criminal activity not people engaged in Prevent. I would also challenge Mr Birt’s claims that Prevent has compromised the role of neighbourhood and community policing in Muslim communities and that the police have an excessively strong influence on Prevent projects. Neighbourhood police teams working in, among and with Muslim communities have to be aware of the risks Prevent is intended to address. That does not mean that they have been turned into spies. They have not. It simply means neighbourhood police teams are being asked to consider Prevent-related issues in their day to day work, in just the same way as they consider often related issues such as drugs, gangs and anti-social behaviour.

Partnership working at a local level is essential to the delivery of Prevent, and the police play a vital role in this. But the role should not be overstated. The police do not lead on Prevent and do not wish to do so. They do not have the power to veto Local Authority Prevent projects (unless funds are at risk of being diverted for criminal purposes). The Prevent strategy is intended to ensure a careful balance at the local level between the work of the police and local authorities on Prevent, an approach welcomed most strongly by the police themselves. Prevent is a relatively new strategy, and we know that despite the successes, there is more to do. Informed comment has helped to sharpen and improve Prevent delivery. We haven’t always got it right, or explained Prevent with sufficient clarity.

But most countries around the world facing a terrorist threat have a Prevent-type strategy. So do the EU and the UN. This reflects a shared view that we cannot tackle the threat of terrorism simply by the process of arrest and prosecution. Arresting people does not itself undermine a persuasive ideology. It is not an appropriate response to someone who is not engaged in criminal activity but is being drawn towards violent extremism. It will not always support institutions being targeted by violent extremist organisations. And it does not resolve grievances which violent extremist groups can exploit to recruit people to their cause.

We believe the Prevent strategy remains fundamentally right. We can certainly improve its delivery and we are doing so all the time. But the strategy developed in this country stands in comparison with any other and has made significant progress in the past two years. It is vital that it continues to do so.

David Hanson
Minister of State for Policing, Crime and Security

Cutting the Fat

SIR, I have believed for a long time that the Ministry of Defence fails to present us with a clear, all-round view of what it is doing and why. A good example of a missed opportunity is Dr Andrew Tyler’s article in the October issue of the RUSI Journal. Anyone who has studied the Gray Report will have a very clear idea that, while there is much to praise, there is also a great deal wrong with defence acquisition, and that many of the problems that were identified in earlier initiatives such as Smart Procurement (1998) and the Defence Industrial Strategy (2005) remain partially or wholly unimplemented. Indeed many people well versed in acquisition have drawn attention to a number of issues that need addressing urgently.

I am well aware that Dr Tyler is writing from a DE&S viewpoint and that he does not have the authority to change many things that seriously affect that organisation because others in Whitehall have such responsibility. However, he devotes 40 per cent of his article to DE&S back-patting, which would be fair enough if it concerned major achievement. Yet he argues too much of it on the wrong ground. Has anyone suggested that nuclear submarines should be procured through the UOR procedures? Has anyone implied that UOR delivery is poor? Does anyone believe that supermarkets should deliver through the Khyber Pass in winter?

Further, he glosses over certain real issues. He mentions that, in projects where there are cost overruns, ‘we find that actually we got exactly what we paid for; or perhaps more accurately, we paid for exactly what we got’. This is surprising in that Bernard Gray states (in his report) that, because of delays in the system, between 15 per cent and 30 per cent of our equipment spend goes on what he calls ‘frictional’ costs – spend which brings no value. In other words, we waste (in the true sense of the word) up to £2 billion per year – out of a spend on new equipment of about £6 billion.

Whether Dr Tyler is right or wrong in saying that we got what we paid for, he suggests that this is an achievement, but fails to mention the very real problems caused by inaccurate cost estimation, particularly in the early stages. Early cost estimations are always far too low. Whether this is deliberate underestimating (the so-called ‘conspiracy of optimism’) or inadvertent failure to cost realistically (for example, immature technology, interface costs), the fact is that it allows more projects to be brought into the equipment programme than will be affordable in the years to come. In turn this requires programme butchery every year – either cancellation of programmes (including reduction in numbers or performance) or, more often, delay. Time is money as everyone knows and delay increases programme costs, leading to increased ‘frictional’ costs, more butchery the following year, and more cost increases – so the unrighteous circle continues. So much of the problem can be traced back to under-estimation of the cost in the early stages. We desperately need to estimate better.

There are many other areas where major issues are skirted. It is difficult to mesh Dr Tyler’s statement that ‘the vast majority [of projects] are delivered to performance, time and cost’ with Gray’s finding that on average there is an 80 per cent delay and 37 per cent cost overrun since Initial Gate. There is no mention of many of the issues raised by Gray in his recommendations on improving the ability of DE&S to deliver efficiently. Above all, perhaps, is the lack of observation on several cultural issues that have been raised in past Ministry of Defence initiatives but never properly implemented.

Is Dr Taylor shying away from several important issues?

Bill Kincaid
Editor, RUSI Defence Systems and author of Changing the Dinosaur’s Spots: The Battle to Reform UK Defence Acquisition (RUSI Books, 2008).

Missile Defence

SIR, two omissions stand out in Sir Lawrence Freedman’s article, ‘Framing Strategic Deterrence – Old Certainties, New Ambiguities’ (RUSI Journal, August 2009).

One is that he does not mention missile defences, which these days certainly have a role in deterrence. Indeed, in July, in Moscow, the two presidents – American and Russian – reached an agreement that included a provision recognising ‘the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms’.

‘Missile defences’ are of course not ‘defensive’, although generally assumed to be so. Even Mr Medvedev recently in Switzerland referred to the S-300 antimissile system that Russia is committed to selling to Iran as ‘purely defensive, [so] their sale would not contravene international laws’. The context was Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hope that the contract would not be fulfilled.

Missile defences form part – or should be seen to form part – of an offensive strategic posture. You preemptively attack your opponent’s deterrent forces (President Bush declared pre-emption legitimate) and hope that when he retaliates – if he does – his retaliation will be so reduced, so mitigated, that your missile defence shield will be able to cope with it. This was President Reagan’s logic: his Star Wars programme was going to render nuclear weapons obsolete.

The great kerfuffle over President Obama’s cancellation of missile defence in Poland and the Czech Republic in favour of a ship-based system certainly also reflects this view. And in what way can a ship-borne anti-ballistic missile system, able to take itself anywhere, be seen as less ‘offensive’ than one set up close to one’s opponent’s borders? The other omission in this article is minimum deterrence. This is not quite ‘deterrence-lite’, or even regular deterrence; but rather a possible tripwire to nuclear war unwanted by others. A country with small – ‘minimum’ – nuclear forces will be paid attention to: Israel is probably the best example, as we are seeing these days. And neither Iran nor North Korea is expected to develop massive nuclear forces: theirs would probably be minimum deterrents. This may well be the motivation behind their nuclear ambitions, and before that of Pakistan’s or Israel’s – all countries facing militarily powerful neighbours. And even France’s and Britain’s original motivation: we did not care for the idea of an American nuclear monopoly.

The ABM Treaty had more or less encapsulated these understandings: an arms race in anti-ballistic missiles would be undesirable. But then President Bush withdrew from the Treaty because of his – or his advisers’ – belief that the United States could comfortably secure ‘full spectrum military dominance – land, sea, air, and space’.

It is possible that minimum deterrents may now be harmless, provided there is full, internationally approved and monitored security. After all, we really cannot expect a ‘world free of nuclear weapons’, can we? How would we know? As for the role of nuclear deterrence in the future: anything dependent on cybernetics will be open to hacking; anything receiving information from space will suffer intractable information overload.

Elizabeth Young
(Lady Kennett)

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