They may be of such a size or significance that they are political players in their own right, and their views have to be taken into account. (They may be closely linked to a political party, for example).



They may be regarded by government as worthwhile interlocutors in their own right.

The latter case is less common, but can happen, if an organisation meets the following criteria:

Knowledge: It must have a good grasp of the basic facts, unaffected by political or other prejudice.



Legitimacy: It must speak for and represent someone beside itself.



Reality: It must operate in the real world and, where it makes recommendations, they should be capable of being implemented.

The limitations of information

Not only must official information be interpreted by those who issue it in such a way that it reflects well on the government of the day, most of it is ambiguous to start with. Take, for example, an apparently innocent question about an increase in the size of next the year’s defence budget. To begin with, this is a political decision, and will be justified politically to different groups in different ways:

Supporters of higher defence spending will be given a robust justification, and be told that this increase reflects the seriousness with which the government is taking the defence of the nation.



Opponents will be offered a much less robust justification, and will be told that, even so, the nation is spending less on defence than some of its neighbours, and that spending in other areas (such as health) has also been increased.

Even in concentrating on factual information, however, there is no simple answer to the question: ‘Are you spending more on defence next year?’ The following conclusions, for example, could all be true simultaneously:

The government plans to spend more money next year than last year.



The army is having problems recruiting and several equipment programmes are late. Less money could therefore have been spent last year than will be the case this year.



If inflation is higher than expected, defence spending could actually fall in real terms next year.



If the currency continues to devalue, more money will have to be spent on equipment imports, and other parts of the programme will have to be cut.

In such a situation, whether the public believe that a government is being ‘transparent’, essentially depends on whether, for political reasons, they align themselves with the government or not.

The same general considerations apply to the idea of accountability, which is often a code for greater access and influence by those who wish to criticise and even reverse government policy, but are not currently in power. A careful distinction must be made between the valid and important function of opening up debate and policymaking so that people can see what is going on, on the one hand, and simply enlarging the magic circle of policymaking to include former critics, on the other. It is doubtful whether, in any country today, there is any real public pressure for widespread discussion of defence issues in public. There is, of course, much agitation for this from opposition politicians and interest groups, but this is part of the political process, and is intended to increase the influence of these groups over government policy. It should not be mistaken for public interest in greater accountability, although pressure groups, in particular, are often prone to this confusion.

Of course, there are specific cases where there is a widespread public demand for scrutiny of the behaviour of the armed forces. This is generally related to historically bad behaviour, rather than present policymaking. For example, there is still widespread public anger at the excesses of the South Korean army in the 1980s, and popular demand that the situation should not be allowed to recur. Something similar has happened in South Africa. But, both of these examples relate really to behaviour, and express an understandable desire for investigation and punishment of the guilty.

Accountable for what?

Accountability, in spite of what was said, is normally perceived in the abstract, as a type of relationship which exists between the framers and implementers of policy, on the one hand, and various outside groups, on the other. The question of what governments should be accountable for is not usually discussed in any depth, partly because demands for accountability tend to come from interest groups whose intention is to secure more influence for themselves. Democracy only works because people are prepared to go along with governments they do not like and did not elect. It presupposes that, if a person has voted for the losing party, he or she nonetheless accepts that the winning party has a mandate, and cannot object if that mandate is put into effect, much though he or she might dislike the policies which result. Of course, some electoral systems have more support and credibility than others, but it is assumed here that a governing party, either individually or in a coalition, has secured more than 50% of the votes at an election.

Under the rules of politics, it is quite legitimate for opponents of the government, whether inside or outside parliament, to attempt to disrupt and even reverse these policies. It is also true that individual policies on which the government was elected may prove to be unpopular or unworkable. There will also be many cases where a policy adopted by the government was not in the manifesto, perhaps because the issue had not arisen by that stage. There is, therefore, no special status to which the policies of the government are entitled. Equally, however, those who are critical of the government cannot claim any special status or higher moral ground just because they are not the government, and certainly not just because they use the vocabulary of accountability.

Nonetheless, there are temptations to which governments are prone, and it is important that a system of oversight is in place to deal with them. The main ones are obvious, and not confined to the defence area, but it may be worth setting them out here:

The law: A government’s assessment of whether what it is doing is legal, and in compliance with a constitution is obviously not going to be accepted by all. Courts must have the ability to question and overrule acts of government which are illegal.



Administration: Citizens, and the servants of the government itself, need protection from arbitrary and unfair acts, even if they are not necessarily breaches of written law.



Finance: There must be an independent scrutiny of the way in which government has spent its money, since temptations to abuse it will always be strong.

The role and limitations of parliament

So far, little was said about the role of parliaments in transparency and accountability. The problem here is that, while no-one would argue that parliaments should be excluded from defence decisionmaking altogether, the temptation is to run to the other extreme, and to suggest that ‘accountability to parliament’, however it is defined, is always and only a good thing. But, the fact is that a parliament reflects the political system of which it is part. Although a system with parliamentary scrutiny is obviously better than one without, the trap should be avoided of assuming that parliament, just because it is parliament, has any automatic claim to moral superiority. The opposite can, in fact, be the case. Politicians want to get elected, and have to please the electorate to do so. In any constituency-based system, this will mean, among others, lobbying for money to be spent locally, and promoting the social and economic interests of the area they represent. This will frequently involve special pleading, and attempts (where the political system allows it) to divert money into their own constituency. Almost by definition, such people are incapable of taking a wider view, and the sum total of a series of narrow views taken by legislators is unlikely to be very edifying.

The most difficult and dangerous examples are where spending money is involved. In a system where, for example, parliamentary committees have to scrutinise the award of major contracts, the scope for corruption is enormous. Sometimes, this may be relatively limited, and amount only to lobbying in favour of a solution which will favour the economic interests of their constituency. But, it may be more than that. It is a fact that, whereas government decisions often involve large numbers of people (and thus an element of safety against corruption), the votes of a committee will be much easier to affect with a clutch of brown envelopes.

At their best, of course, parliaments do an important job, but it should not lie in being a surrogate government, or trying to second-guess government decisions. Later in this chapter, some suggestions are presented on how parliamentary oversight works best in practice.

As above, so below

Having been rather negative up to this point, it is perhaps important to say something more valuable about how transparency and accountability can be made to work. The attitude so far has been critical of some of the most common assumptions in this subject, as it is believed that they emphasise too greatly the element of conflict and control. As suggested elsewhere, a policy of control is not easy, and seldom effective. Indeed, talking to enthusiasts for oversight of different types, it is questionable whether they have sufficiently considered that no system will work in the first place unless there is something in place to oversee. Oversight, in other words, is not an end in itself, but a contribution to an end.

The essential point was made by the alchemist Paracelsus: As above, so below. The objective must be to have a system which works well in the first place. A system which is founded on democracy and the rule of the law, in which the military plays a role with which it and others are content, will be a system which is also likely to work well. Of course, this will not remove the requirement for transparency and accountability, but will, in fact, make it rather more effective and useful. This is an important point, because a confrontational style of oversight, which takes the government to be guilty and then seeks out the proof, is actually doomed to fail.

There are two reasons for this:

It creates an adversary culture, where, instead of oversight being identified with the public interest, its advocates simply become another enemy to be fought.



Because governments are always more powerful than outside bodies, they will simply hide things they do not want to be seen.

A workable approach to transparency and accountability, in fact, recognises that no amount of oversight can do much to improve a society which is politically deficient in the first place. But, this kind of approach is wrong anyway. The virtues of accountability and transparency are not things which are forced upon a reluctant government by an altruistic group of crusaders, they are part of what good government should be anyway. These virtues and similar ones should be practiced by government because they are right, not because there is no alternative.

A workable system

One of the themes of this monograph has been that decisions are generally better if a large number of people are involved in them. Indeed, a closed style of personalised decisionmaking is almost a recipe for bad government and bad decisions. A collegiate style of decisionmaking, on the other hand, makes it much more likely that bad ideas will be spotted early. While many of those involved in decisionmaking will necessarily be within the system, those who will pay for the results, and those in whose name the policies are being conducted, deserve a say as well, provided (another theme) that they do not try to duplicate what has been done elsewhere. What parliament does, in the defence field as elsewhere, is to represent the citizen, the voter and the taxpayer. The best type of relationship is where the executive is obliged to come to parliament, to expose its thinking and plans, and seek parliament’s approval for what it proposes to do. Any sensible plan, sensibly articulated, should receive the support of a sensible parliament or parliamentary committee, although partisanship, especially in an adversarial political system, may make this more difficult. But, the real virtue of parliamentary scrutiny, ironically, is less in enhancing the role of parliament than in obliging the executive to think through its policies, to explain them to non-experts, and to be prepared to defend and even amend them if necessary. The questions that parliamentarians will ask are likely to be close to the concerns of the average voter, and the discipline of having to satisfy such concerns is an extremely healthy one.

The issue of extraparliamentary lobbies is more complex. There is an important difference between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and academics who produce studies of serious issues, and campaigning organisations seeking to change policies. (Most NGOs will make policy suggestions, of course, but the test is what they primarily do). Many NGOs have detailed expertise in particular areas (many, indeed, employ retired officials of various sorts), and can often have a useful role in introducing new ideas and gingering up governments. In turn, they are often useful people for government to speak to. Campaigning organisations, especially those focused on one issue, are really more analogous to political groupings, since they are (to put it crudely) more interested in power and influence than in the objective facts.

One of the greatest temptations of government is towards a kind of omniscient arrogance, which dismisses the views of ordinary people as uninformed, and thus of no interest. The first of these is often true, but is no excuse for the second. Government has, in fact, not only a narrow technical duty to explain and defend its policies, but a much wider duty to explain the facts of a situation with as much objectivity as possible. In the end, the quality of the debate in a country depends more on the attitude of the government than on any other factor.

Information and secrecy

Finally, the question of what kind of sensible policy a government can pursue about defence information has to be asked. Clearly, the general ethos of a country and the development of its political system will have the greatest single influence on policies of this kind, but in every system there are choices to be made. To begin with, everyone would accept that defence information needs to be protected, in certain cases, in ways that are not necessarily true of information about agriculture, or culture. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that too much secrecy actually damages a government’s own interests, since information is always required in the public domain, and if nothing official is available the information will simply be invented. Indeed, bad information usually drives out good, in the sense that the popular media and dedicated pressure groups usually tell a story which is much more colourful and attractive than the sober truth, and will thus tend to attract more supporters.

A distinction between two kinds of secrecy is suggested:

fundamental secrecy, which says that everything to do with defence and security is secret and can never be revealed; and



incidental security, which looks at everything on a case-by-case basis, although usually with certain guidelines attached.

In practice, the first of these is usually impossible, because it is impossible to keep everything secret. Moreover, many such systems wind up devaluing the concept of secrecy; when everything is secret, in effect, nothing is secret. Any competent intelligence service will be able to tell quite a lot from information which is, in practice, impossible to keep out of the public domain.

Many of the areas where secrecy is justified will be obvious, and will not vary greatly, but one area which will be different from country to country is the degree to which parliament and outside agencies are brought in. It is hard to generalise on the basis of different experiences, but it does seem that, if a legislature or an outside organisation is approached on a sensible and adult basis, then it is likely to take confidences seriously, and protect the information it is given. (This is not surprising when human psychology is taken into account: most people would prefer to be part of an in-group rather than of an out-group).

Some of the kinds of information which require protection are not necessarily obvious. Personnel records may contain secrets which it is not fair, after many years, to reveal (they may even be inaccurate). Much commercial information, for example, to do with equipment purchases, is extremely sensitive and needs protection. There is information which other governments have asked to be protected, and there is the kind of frank advice to ministers which would be very embarrassing if it were to be revealed: assessments of the objectives and negotiating positions of other nations, for example.

There will always be those who believe that governments, just because they are governments, necessarily have something to hide. The conspiracy-minded, holders of strong views on any subject and single-issue campaigners will be deliberately unsatisfied with whatever information the government puts out, because their working assumptions require them to be so. But, accepting, here as elsewhere, that all of the people cannot be pleased all of the time, there are actually strong practical advantages for a government in adopting a policy which is seen to be sensible, maximising what can be released, and making it clear why certain things cannot. Partly, the issue is one of attitude as much as anything else. A government which makes an effort to be as open as possible, and provides sensible explanations when it cannot be, is likely to find favour with most people. But to argue that, as did one apocryphal British official, ‘if it is in an official file it is an official secret’, is not only silly, but in the last analysis self-defeating.

If the relationship between the military and society is complex in any event, then the relationship between society and the military as it is thought to be will therefore be even more problematic. Yet, it is the appearance, rather than the reality which is important here, as is usually the case in politics, and the appearance itself is not a unitary thing, but varies from group to group and person to person, according to their hopes, fears and experiences.