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. The wartime LDV, renamed the Home Guard, quickly grew to 1.5 million strong, made up of those ineligible or unfit for military service, at a time when 11,000 British servicemen had been killed and another 40,000 taken prisoner during the Battle of France. The comparison with the small force of several thousand reportedly proposed in the SDR is very loose.
This must not obscure other elements. There seems to be no prospect of a significant increase in the size of the British Army, at 67,107 trade-trained regular personnel (as of 1 January), the smallest since the Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy is reportedly demanding a dozen new nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines, partly to protect underwater cables which are vulnerable to sabotage. A defensive system to defeat ballistic and hypersonic missiles is also believed to feature.
The SDR is entirely theoretical without adequate resources. The government eagerly points to the impending increase in defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP from 2027, an additional £13.4 billion, and its ‘ambition’ – remember that word – to go further to 3 per cent in the next parliament. Yet 18 months ago the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded that the Ministry of Defence’s Equipment Plan 2023-33 had a £16.9 billion shortfall between requirements and resources. As I pointed out in February, a larger budget will make good existing shortfalls, rather than leading to a spending spree.
The Ministry of Defence’s response is a predictably robotic and empty exercise in buzzword bingo:
The UK’s strategic defence review sets out a path for the next decade to transform the armed forces to ensure we’re prepared for emerging threats – making Britain secure at home and strong abroad while transforming defence to drive innovation and economic growth as part of our Plan for Change.
In fact, the review seems positively un-strategic. There is no suggestion of any fundamental change in force size or structure, nor any major alteration in the UK’s global posture or the tasks expected of the armed forces. The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, spoke last year of doubling the army’s ‘lethality’ by 2027 and tripling it by 2030 – essentially, using advances in technology to allow fewer soldiers to kill more of the enemy. But lethality cannot always substitute for numbers.
The Royal Navy was already expecting new hunter-killer submarines. The current Astute class will gradually be replaced by a joint US/UK/Australian design under the AUKUS agreement, beginning in the late 2030s. But note that the sixth and seventh Astute-class boats, HMS Agamemnon and HMS Achilles, have not even entered service yet. Even if joint procurement means that the AUKUS submarines are no more expensive than the Astutes they replace, they will cost around £1.6 billion each, so the idea of buying twelve of them to replace seven Astute-class boats seems financially implausible.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister told the London Defence Conference that the review would be a ‘first-of-its kind, root and branch’. Unless there are major surprises, it is hard to see how the armed forces will look radically different after its implementation from their current size and shape: slightly bigger, perhaps, and marginally better equipped, with a greater emphasis on UK resilience.
This was always a possibility. The review’s terms of reference placed so many issues outside its scope that the ability to change either roots or branches was very limited. The additional resources are welcome if urgently needed, but so many questions are unanswered: we must also wait for a new National Security Strategy, due before the Nato summit on 24-25 June, and a defence capability command paper in the autumn. At the moment, the strategic defence review feels more like a tactic to get through the next few months.
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