The Law of the Jungle

How can New Zealand Navigate Global Disruption?

Tuesday 27 February 2018

A Presentation delivered by Lieutenant General Tim Keating Chief of Defence Force to the NZIIA Conference 2018 at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington.

Good morning. The New Zealand Defence Force is proud to be a major sponsor of today’s important conference.

We acknowledge the profound changes that are affecting the world today. My role remains not only to prepare young New Zealanders for armed intervention when the Government decides, but also to provide advice to the Government about when and where force is appropriate.

So as a Force for New Zealand, and a Force for good in the world, we seek to understand what is driving change, and consequently how best to be prepared to contribute to New Zealand’s response.

What is it that we remain alert to?

Well, clearly the power and influence of various nation-states is evolving.

A new cadre of states assert and exert their right to lead, and in some cases appear to desire a reset to the extant principles and rules for international arbitration.

And consequently, other states are pondering the prospect of having lesser influence than in previous times.

The combination of these changes is bringing pressure on the system the world has known since the end of World War Two — a system I would note that has benefited New Zealand greatly by delivering an extended period of comparative stability, certainty, and prosperity through trade.

Our current era also faces other challenging features such as climate change; extremism in all its forms; food and water insecurity; unmanageable population growth and internal migrations from the country-side to the cities; endemic corruption in many parts of the world; disproportionate wealth distribution and the sense of grievance that this might nurture… shifts towards nationalism and protectionism; as well as the globalisation of information.

But does this necessarily imply we are returning to the jungle?

Let me spend just a moment on this notion of jungle.

The often cited ‘Law of the Jungle’ is used to paint a stark impression of a chaotic non-rules based environment, full of hidden and dangerous creatures, harsh surroundings that may trap you and do you harm.

But when Rudyard Kipling wrote in his epic verse ‘The Law of the Jungle’, it carried quite the opposite connotation, asserting principles of social order in an environment (the physical jungle) that without such a set laws, would be full of dangerous conflicts — that without rules and order would be brutish, dog eat dog, or to the case in point, wolf eat wolf.

Whatever your appreciation of the world / our jungle, perhaps the trap to avoid is in seeing it as merely a binary proposal — a state of chaos, or a state of order; brutal barbarism or civilised organisation.

We are in a world influenced by both jungle law and civilised law, and therefore must learn to be agile and responsive to both!

Is the current era of disruption or shifting polarity much changed from the past evolution of systems of control the world has known?

Should we acknowledge some of those systems and structures of control are less relevant or need to be more nuanced today, than say the post WWII, Cold War era?

Indeed, where can we find those civilised rules that govern the world order as we know it?

Do they exist in the UN Charter, within its principles that the member states agree to respect? Or does the jungle law take primacy; and brute force, might is right, win?

Do the principles of jus ad bellum — the right to go to war — and jus in bello, the right conduct of war stand timeless from antiquity, or are they irrelevant today?

It seems to me that we largely still exist in a world determined by borders and nation states. Our leaders are not yet artificial intelligence.

Within these stand principle elements of diplomacy and dispute management that largely prevent us from leaping towards the ‘fire and fury’ options of all out armed conflict as the first response.

But we acknowledge that our strategies to manage human coexistence, and the pressures that creates, must continue to adapt to the contextual changes as they evolve.

Rules and norms are required but they must be adaptive to the omnipotence, pace and dynamics of global change.

The art of the strategist is to decide what remains relevant from past approaches, what new approaches are needed, and what should be dismissed as irrelevant dogma of the past.

The Question for this Session asks: What role can New Zealand’s soft power play in today’s highly polarised international political climate?

So what is our approach as a Defence Force — What have we learned as a military?

What remains timeless is that dealing with conflict in the form of warfare is always multifaceted, because it is an endeavour dealing with the complex relationships of humans.

Since the end of the Cold War, it seems to me that military hard power solutions, which have often produced the ‘shock and awe’ of tactical success, have largely failed because of the strategic confusion created by the lack of structure to deal with the root cause of the conflicts.

Essentially I believe this stems from a lack of an in-depth understanding of the environment in which the conflict exists.

As a consequence, militaries have had to learn to be more adaptive, more nuanced to root causes of the problems, and more understanding of the environment in which they operate.

The military has had to do this largely in the vacuum of limited political strategic guidance, which I would sometimes characterise as, at its best, simplistic and short term, or at its worst, as dangerously naïve.

How many regimes do we need to forcibly remove — and see the ensuing chaos — before we realise we need a resourced, achievable plan to fill the vacuum.

In the absence of clear strategic guidance militaries have adapted many new approaches to conflict resolution and one of these approaches or tools is referred to as operational design.

Operational design forces military leaders to use new thinking, new tools, and new approaches to designing campaigns that solve problems of conflict.

It in part acknowledges the irrelevance of terms such as winning (the war) or the political desire for a ‘military end state’, which has the inherent implication that the military has fixed the problem.

At its heart operational design encourages a climate of open exchange, of discourse and ideas both vertically through the military and horizontally through partners, these maybe other government agencies, NGOs’, International Organisations, allies and community leaders.

The approach can be adaptive across the full spectrum of conflict, including in the early stages of pre-conflict, to bring the flexible and subtle soft power tools available to the military, to work in unison with other elements to prevent situations that can lead to armed conflict.

The New Zealand Defence Force has had significant experience in this adaptive approach to campaigning since the end of the Cold War.

I think of Bougainville and the unarmed truce monitoring group that assisted the Bougainville Peace process that led to the cessation of a decade of bloody secessionist war.

Against the backdrop of a bloody war, diplomatic and military soft power were used to set in train the necessary confidence building measures to end that armed phase of the conflict.

The success of New Zealand’s contribution to the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Island (RAMSI) is also a story about empathy as a path to trust and relationship building.

New Zealand’s participation as part of the coalition Force in Afghanistan was a more multi-faceted intervention with greater elements of hard as well as soft power at play.

The New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamyan provided security in the province and enabled with various governmental and non-governmental partners the building of infrastructure and supported the institutions of civil society.

Our Provision Reconstruction Teams were only able to do this as military hard power in the form of coalition combat forces, including our own Special Forces, engaged anti-government forces who wanted control returned not to the people, but to the law of the jungle where power ruled.

Then to the most recent, Combating Violent Extremism.

I regularly meet with a group of Chiefs of Defence, led by the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff from the US, to discuss the military responses to the current era of violent extremism, characterised, but not exclusive to ISIS.

Our strategy conversations regularly conclude with the necessity for military hard power to be combined with military soft power in seeking resolution to these conflicts.

Without the careful balance of these two factors, over emphasis on the hard can create the conditions for enduring or exacerbating the conflict in that our military response can inadvertently contribute to the extremist narrative.

It is a realisation that hard power regime change is not a successful standalone strategy.

Nor is our conversation exclusively on the elements of military power. We recognise the need for the other elements of national soft power to be combined into an effective strategy, often with the military elements in support of diplomatic, informational, economic or social ‘soft power’.

When armed conflict or hard power is applied from necessity, it must be done so with appropriate proportionality and with a view to returning to soft power approaches as soon as possible.

The challenge before us is to bring together the elements of power of the state and the international system into some form of unified accord that can comprehensively problem solve.

If I were cynical we seem to have been good at evolving names for this approach: Interagency, Whole-of-Government, comprehensive, but there are few international models where beyond lip service we have seen a deliverable unified strategy.

One of the challenges is who has the responsibility, the mandate to bring this together? If not the military, then who?

So in conclusion, there is a truism in military operations that the jungle is always a great leveller of militaries.

In the jungle, force, scale and might can be defeated by intelligence, cunning and guile. The Jungle levels the playing field.

It provides the setting in which the smart but physical monkey can always outwit the strong, brutish but unthinking wolf.

Regardless of what jungle or environment we are called to operate in, hard power alone cannot ultimately solve problems and provide enduring solutions, but is unfortunately often necessary.

Used judiciously, as part of a broader strategy, it can buy space, remove impediments, and create the conditions for resolution.

But enduring solutions will always come from the wise application of soft power.

Thank you.