To what extent are the British Armed Forces ready for Hybrid Warfare?



To what extent are the British Armed Forces ready for a Hybrid Warfare?

In November 2006, the UK Ministry of Defence announced that an alliance arrangement would be put in place for FRES, similar to the UK CVF aircraft carrier alliance. The FRES Alliance is led by the MoD with the support of an industrial system of systems integrator (SOSI) and a group of three industrial teams for each of the FRES vehicle families. The industrial teams for each vehicle family will include a vehicle integrator, vehicle designer and vehicle manufacturer. Increasingly, a unitary view of war is becoming the 'gold standard' for which armed forces should prepare. Institutional flexibility is essential in identifying the character of each conflict, and the potential changes within it, thereby influencing doctrine, training and defence spending. The current UK defence structures concerned with the development, assimilation and application of ideas about war are stove-piped, however, and do not relate to this unitary view of war. (Vincent Desportes 2007 Pp 115)

The year 2009 marks the centenary of the publication of the British Army's first official manual on doctrine, the Field Service Regulations, which appeared in 1909 in two parts; Operations and Organisation and Administration. The event was marked by controversy. Both the contents and the very idea were hotly debated in General Staff conferences at Camberley. Those who opposed the publication of doctrine outright argued that, as the agent of an imperial power, the British Army could not anticipate against whom it might fight, where it might do so, and - most important of all - how it would do so. The army had to be ready on a daily basis for what the 1909 Field Service Regulations called 'warfare against an uncivilised enemy' or what Charles Callwell in his book of that title had dubbed 'small wars'. Each of those wars was likely to be very different in terms of its tactical needs, its geographical conditions, and its possible enemies. The defence of the Empire, in other words policy at the national level, generated uncertainty for military thought, and was as likely to create discontinuities as continuity in war. Defeat in Afghanistan (and that really was his example) could be rectified he said, but 'if the British Army is beaten by a Continental Army in Europe, be it in Belgium or in Norfolk, the defeat will be decisive'. Although this was the view too of Major General Douglas Haig, then Director of Staff Duties who was responsible for the production of the Field Service Regulations, it was not incorporated in to the published version of Part I: Operations. It laid down that the conduct of war rested on principles which were common to both civilised and uncivilised war, to regular war and irregular war, to major wars and small wars. These principles are recognisable to us today, and still figure in most doctrinal publications in most armed forces. They are often expressed as paradoxes: ...