Why is Dominic Cummings visiting British military and security facilities?

It would be nice if Mr Cummings would come along and tell the public what he thinks he’s playing at, writes Sean O’Grady

Dominic Cummings talks to police officers outside Downing Street (EPA)

It is a poignant contrast. Sir Mark Sedwill, distinguished career civil servant and recently ejected from his roles as cabinet secretary and national security adviser and indeed government, was giving a valedictory performance at a parliamentary committee. It was a perfect model of transparent democratic accountability on the part of a senior public servant. Sir Mark was replaced as national security adviser by a political appointment, David Frost, currently the chief Brexit negotiator and with no significant experience in security matters. In due course, Mr Frost will become a peer.

Elsewhere in Westminster, the prime minister’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, who may have had something to do with Sir Mark’s changed circumstances, is planning his progress through Britain’s defence and security establishment. Mr Cummings is famously unelected (as is, or was, Sir Mark) but is far from an ideal example of accountability. Indeed so unkeen on scrutiny is he that he remains in contempt of parliament for his refusal to attend a session of a Commons Select Committee. Only a year or so ago, the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee said Mr Cummings had shown “total disregard” for parliament in failing to show up to be interrogated about his Brexit campaign. For his part Mr Cummings offered to attend, provided all the MPs also swear an oath. It said everything.

At the height of the crisis over his lockdown drive from London to Durham he was pressured into giving a press conference to explain his actions, dragged from the shadows into the warm sunshine of the Downing Street rose garden. It was as bizarre as he is.

With no public, parliamentary or media access to the mind of Cummings the question of what he is up to invites speculation. Fortunately, Mr Cummings intentions are no great national secret.

On a number of occasions, not least in his voluminous blog, Mr Cummings has expressed frustration with the way Britain runs its foreign, defence, aid and security policies. Apart from his general distaste at the UK’s generalist civil service culture, amateurs in a world of players, the usually low calibration of officials and the cumbersome, process-obsessed and dysfunctional way it goes about its work he has identified defence procurement as a particularly wasteful aspect of public administration. He wants to shake things up. In his own words: “In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park”. Well, quite.

To be fair to Mr Cummings, Britain’s defence department has been responsible for some spectacularly expensive failed projects over the decades, if not centuries. Various projects to design and build warships, nuclear missiles, early warning aircraft, tanks and rifles have yielded either nothing or products inferior to those available more cheaply and reliably elsewhere, usually the United States. This is why the UK is so heavily dependent on America for its “independent” deterrent, and why not every piece of kit has been as magnificent as the Spitfire or Harrier jet.

The British general staff have also sometimes displayed an uncanny knack for making elaborate preparations for the last war they fought rather than the next one they might be asked to win. It is, for example, rumoured that Mr Cummings favours chopping 20,000 Royal Marines and using the money for cyber warfare, on the face of it a reasonable, if radical proposal.

In principle too, there is nothing wrong with the man who exerts so much influence on Boris Johnson learning about how things actually work and what the threats to the UK are actually are.

The problem is one of trust. The impression Mr Cummings gives is of dangerous arrogance, not so very different to his boss. With the political appointment of a new NSA, this gives rise to the concern that this important area of policy will be driven by a tiny clique in Downing Street putting partisan interests before national ones, ignoring the advice of the experts in the field, despite Mr Cummings pleas for experts, albeit weird ones, to join him in Downing Street.

This is magnified by a second perception (at least) that Mr Cummings has some eccentric obsessions and is prone to a certain dilettante fixation on military doctrines and management theories, endowing them with a power they don’t actually possess. Some of his thoughts on defence and national security must be bewildering even to those who’ve spent their lives serving Queen and country. For example, in his blog entry for March 2019 Mr Cummings invites his audience to consider that organisational structure is the essential precursor to successful policy (hence for example the merger of the Foreign Office and Dfid) and to ponder some “connections”. It is worth quoting at length to understand exactly what goes through Mr Cummings’s mind, for good or ill, and what the top brass in the MoD, armed forces, MI5, MI6 and defence intelligence will be up against. The nexus of connections involves (and Googling will be necessary):

“Project Maven.

• The example of ‘precision strike’ in the 1970s, Marshal Ogarkov and Andy Marshall, implications for now — ‘anti-access / area denial’ (A2/AD), ‘Air-Sea Battle’ etc.
• Development of ‘precision strike’ to lethal autonomous cheap drone swarms hunting humans cowering underground.
• Adding AI to already broken nuclear systems and doctrines, hacking the NSA etc — mix coke, Milla Jovovich and some alpha engineers and you get…?
• A few thoughts on ‘systems management’ and procurement, lessons from the Manhattan Project etc.
• The Chinese attitude to ‘systems management’ and Qian Xuesen, combined with AI, mass surveillance, ‘social credit’ etc.
• A few recent miscellaneous episodes such as an interesting DARPA demo on ‘self-aware’ robots.
• Charts on Moore’s Law: what scale would a ‘Manhattan Project for AGI’ be?
• AGI safety – the alignment problem, the dangers of science as a ‘blind search algorithm’, closed vs open security architectures etc.”       

The easy, breezy familiarity with all these abstruse concepts and jargon may be pure bluff or a suggestive of genius – but no one knows.

The obvious danger is that Mr Cummings is neither as brilliant as he thinks he is, nor as right, and wields so much private power that no one can prevent him instructing the prime minister to embark on some disastrous course because he was bamboozled. With a neutered civil service, marginalised media, puppet cabinet and quiescent parliament, there are no checks and balances on prime ministerial executive power, no brakes on the wagon of wacky wonders.

The last irony is that Mr Cummings’ and Mr Johnson shared enthusiasm for high spending grand projects will end up costing the taxpayer dear, and with no significant yield either in defence of industrial spin-offs. In particular Mr Cummings is a huge fan of the US government’s Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), but trying to emulate its successes will be risky and expensive, and the UK maybe doesn’t really have the money to make it worthwhile trying. It would be nice if Mr Cummings would come along and tell the public what he thinks he’s playing at. He won’t, though, and neither will anyone else make him. Not even the SAS.