Los desordenes londinenses y la Defensa.

London Riots and Europe's Security Equation            
By Nikolas Gvosdev | 12 Aug 2011

                          

El Ejército Británico patrulló las calles
Belfast hasta el 2007.

The riots this past week in the United Kingdom, coming on the heels of the terrorist attack in Norway last month, the protests in Greece and the tsunami and subsequent nuclear accident in Japan earlier this spring, should be a wake-up call to Europe and the rest of the developed world that it cannot ignore the domestic side of the national security equation. It is time to dispense with the hubris of thinking that natural disasters, civil unrest or terrorism produces instability only in countries like Haiti or Iraq. And as Reuters correspondent Peter Apps notes, while a massive police presence in London has now tamped down the violence, "[the police], too, face the drastic spending cuts that will affect everything from the military to social benefits and inner-city services." Certainly, the unrest has shaken the perception of Britain as a global "safe haven."

But it also raises questions about the sustainability of Britain's recent strategic defense review, which translated projected budget cuts into scaled-back military capabilities. The notion that the British army might be called in to help secure the country from internal unrest was not on the agenda even a few months ago. And yet this week, Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged, "It is the government's responsibility to make sure that every future contingency is looked at, including whether there are tasks that the army could undertake that might free up more police for the front line."

But John Schindler, a colleague here at the Naval War College, isn't so sanguine about the British military's capability to act as a panacea. "The U.K. is in a very tight spot here," he told me. "Having reconfigured the force for expeditionary warfare, plus the drastic Cameron cuts, the British army is caught. Since the U.K. lacks any paramilitary force like France's gendarmerie or Italy's carabineri, this [function] by default falls on the army. And the number of infantry battalions at home is now so small, I doubt the army actually could restore order in more than one or two cities at a time."

So if the unrest in Britain causes a reassessment of how to spend already tight national security funds, what conclusions will be drawn?

The first might be that, in determining where further budgets cuts are to be made, a definitive floor has to be set in terms of spending on welfare, police and infrastructure. Finding a new balance between the realities of budgetary austerity and the need for preserving some degree of social cohesion may cause the Cameron government to revisit its budgetary projections.

Moreover, given that London is set to host the Summer Olympics in a year's time, there will be considerable pressure to ensure that sufficient resources have been made available to prevent any repeat of this type of unrest from occurring again. In particular, the accusation that police forces were undermanned, undertrained and underequipped for dealing with riots will reinvigorate calls for increasing spending on local constabulary forces. It may also lessen any enthusiasm for continuing to take part in overseas operations, and likely accelerate plans for an early termination of the Libya operation and the withdrawal of U.K. forces from Afghanistan.

Renewed concern about domestic security may also lead to a re-evaluation of the type of defense force the country needs. Does Britain need expeditionary forces that can be sent in support of counterinsurgency and nation-building operations in the greater Middle East? Peter Preston, writing in the Guardian, called for Britain to "come back to fortress Europe," noting that the major threats to the country these days are "terrorism . . . with maybe a pinch of Tottenham-fueled civil disorder and a spoonful of Northern Ireland thrown in."

This argument could gain greater traction in the weeks ahead, and if so, the consequences for Britain's force posture could be dramatic. After all, the military establishment that is needed to cope with the challenges Preston lays out does not require tanks, nuclear submarines or Eurofighters. At the same time, the government may come under pressure to slow down the downsizing of the military services, in order to avoid releasing large numbers of job seekers into an already tight job market. So we may see a situation where it becomes more politically expedient to scrap purchases of military equipment in favor of continuing to keep bodies on the payroll. The end result could be an armed force that has even less expeditionary capabilities and becomes far less likely, in the future, to be in a position to assist the United States in its military endeavors around the globe.

Britain's experiences will be closely monitored by other countries, particularly other NATO members. Certainly there is little incentive for Germany, for instance, to bolster the size of its armed forces or to reconfigure them for more expeditionary missions away from Europe. The argument heard in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, asking why the U.S. was paying to open fire stations in Baghdad when they were closing in Peoria, will find new resonance among voters in both Europe and North America, who will be facing the impact of social service spending cuts.

Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pleaded with U.S. allies not to trim their defense spending, noting, "Each country has to be able to make its appropriate contributions. . . . Despite the budgetary pressures that we all feel, we will continue to be committed to our mutual efforts." If the riots in Britain cause the Cameron government to revisit its spending priorities, and this, in turn, has a ripple effect through the rest of Europe, that will be bad news indeed for a U.S. administration that has been pressuring its allies to concentrate more efforts on developing expeditionary capabilities in order to "share the burden" with Washington.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, The Realist Prism, appears every Friday