New threat of psychological warfare means we need a new kind of defence

Disinformation on social media aims to undermine confidence in democratic governments, writes Ewan Lawson

In what may be one of her last speeches in a brief tenure as Defence Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, at the annual Air and Space Power Conference, laid out her concerns about the global security situation and what she believes the UK should be doing about it.

Unlike some of her political colleagues, she has studiously avoided talking about budgets, at least in the context of Nato’s two per cent spending target, but has, rather, focused on the need to deliver military capability to deal with what she has intriguingly labelled as “sombre warfare”, where potential adversaries seek to destabilise societies such as ours whilst avoiding direct confrontation with the West’s conventional military power – its ships, tanks and planes.

This phenomenon, typified by Russia’s actions in Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, has been labelled by commentators everything from “hybrid” through “grey-zone” to “tolerance” warfare, but beyond a few politicians calling for increased defence spending there has been little serious consideration of what a response ought to look like in practice.

Whilst some of that response needs to come from outside the military, the challenge arises at the same time as the unit cost of modern military equipment continues to rise, leading to smaller overall numbers of those ships, tanks and planes. Whilst some say there are no votes in it, it would seem that a conversation about how we approach defence is long overdue.

While there have clearly been challenges for Western militaries in using their strengths in precision firepower in conflicts such as those against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, it can be argued that their potential power has deterred

some states from undertaking military adventures that otherwise might have been tempting.

Instead, they have chosen to use the full range of national powers, including economic pressure and political mischief-making such as election interference, to stay below the political threshold that would see a direct military response. Indeed, this approach has built on and exploited the way in which Western populations seem increasingly reluctant to support the use of military power in overseas adventures.

All of these efforts have been supported by active efforts at disinformation and the obfuscation of both activities and intentions.

Exploiting the development of social media platforms, the aim seems to be to undermine confidence amongst Western publics in the institutions of government, both national and international, as well as generating (sometimes barely) plausible deniability as to their own actions.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this has been the range of explanations generated in Moscow to explain the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine.

Thus, any conversations about future approaches to defence need to recognise that the response needs to be more than a military one and instead one that embraces not just the whole of government but the whole of society, including the private sector.

Clearly this is not an insignificant ambition, but successful examples exist of such approaches and not too far from home. The Scandinavian countries have all embraced various forms of what has been labelled Total or Comprehensive Defence, which seek to integrate not just