Fans of the classic British sitcom will feel a warm glow, as details of the forthcoming strategic defence review (SDR) were revealed this weekend. It leads with a proposal for a ‘home guard’ of civilian volunteers to protect the UK’s critical national infrastructure of power plants, airports, telecommunications networks and subsea connectors. Predictably, this cued up references to Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwaring and the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) raised in the dark days of 1940.
The SDR, commissioned within weeks of the government taking office last July, has been drafted by a team led by former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, assisted by General Sir Richard Barrons, ex-head of Joint Forces Command, and County Durham-born Dr Fiona Hill, previously director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council. There has been an alarming number of iterations, with a fourth draft presented to ministers in February, but publication is finally believed to be imminent.
Lethality cannot always substitute for numbers
Although the SDR ‘focuses heavily on homeland security, national resilience and the need for the public to realise that Britain has entered a pre-war era’, focusing on the ‘home guard’ proposal seems a peculiar distortion.
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