By IRNA,
London : Britain’s foreign, defence and security policy is being undermined by a lack of strategic thinking at the heart of the government, an all-party group of MPs warned Monday.
The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) accused the government of having a tendency to “muddle through” and pointed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of where there has been a lack of overarching strategy.
“Whitehall has fallen out of the habit of strategic thinking. Different departments think about strategy in different ways, often at cross-purposes,” said PASC chair Bernard Jenkin (pictured), a Conservative MP and former shadow defence secretary.
“While the Foreign Secretary has said he ‘rejects strategic shrinkage’, all the evidence suggests that Whitehall lacks the capacity to make strategic sense of defence policy, while reducing spending on diplomacy and defence,” Jenkin said.
The warning came as the government was due to publish a new National Security Strategy as part of its first defence review in 12 years.
Speaking ahead of the publication, Home Secretary Theresa May listed that terrorism and attacks on computer networks are among the biggest threats to the UK, but said she was not prepared to rank these in order of gravity.
‘We are facing a very serious threat from international terrorism,” May said.
‘We have to look at the whole picture. That is what we have been doing and that is not what has been done in the past,’ she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
But in its report, the PASC questioned how far the government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review can actually be strategic and called for the creation of a ‘community of strategic thinkers’ across all departments to provide capacity for ministers.
“We welcome the new government’s aspiration to think more strategically, but when we tried to find out who actually does UK National Strategy, virtually all the evidence we took suggests the answer is ‘no one’,” Jenkins said.
“To secure the safety and prosperity of the UK, it is critical that the Government relearn the lost art of national strategy,” he said, warning that ministers were “in danger of announcing a Strategic and Security Defence Review that is anything but ‘strategic’.”
The report raised particular concern about the government’s capacity to support Foreign Secretary William Hague’s declared aspiration to extend the UK’s “global reach and influence” with the necessary strategic analysis and assessment.
The announcement of new National Security Strategy is intended to form the background for the release of the government’s Strategic Defence Review on Tuesday, ahead of budget cuts being detailed across all departments.