This weekend has not been a masterclass in political communications by the government. Selected morsels of the Strategic Defence Review were dropped over several days, concluding with an anodyne launch by the prime minister at BAE Systems in Govan. The result: the prime minister and the defence secretary contradicting each other on defence spending, a rightly furious tirade from the speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, for neglecting Parliament and an urgent question from the Opposition. They are not good at this.
The SDR was never going to be a radical reassessment of Britain’s place in the world
It is plainly unacceptable that some journalists had sight of the full text of the SDR five hours before Members of Parliament could obtain copies. But is the 144-page review itself, emetically subtitled ‘Making Britain Safer: secure at home, strong abroad, the defence moment of a generation’ an actual ‘plan for transformation’, as Defence Secretary John Healey told the House of Commons?
Nae danger, as my Glaswegian grandmother would have said. There are a few provisos. The first stems from the review’s terms of reference, which were extraordinarily restrictive. Essentially, the reviewers were not able to consider the future of the nuclear deterrent; the pre-eminence of Nato in the UK’s defence policy planning; any aspect of military or financial assistance to Ukraine; the UK’s commitments in the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf and the Middle East; or significant examination of spending levels and requirements. The SDR was never going to be a radical reassessment of Britain’s place in the world.
The second consideration is the authorship and extent of editing of the review. The reviewers are reported to have submitted the last of several drafts to the Ministry of Defence in February or March. As it is now June, it is reasonable to assume that the original text has gone through a number of iterations since then, and it shows. The tone is uneven, veering from insightful analysis to the blindingly obvious, all of it overlaid with a characteristic lifeless, repetitive, sloganeering and simplistic Starmerese. ‘Defence should be ruthlessly focused on delivering the core digital platform for the warfighter’ is pure Keir.
Then there is the barrage of jargon and formulaic phraseology which is the stock in trade of the Ministry of Defence: ‘step-change in lethality’, ‘a common set of foundational enablers’, ‘a force optimised for warfighting’. If this seems impenetrable to outsiders, it is, but all I can tell you is that this is an organisation which ‘abbreviates’ the commander of UK amphibious forces to ‘COMUKAMPHIBFOR’.
The SDR is not all bad. There is a reasonable assessment of the current geopolitical situation, a summary of the roles the armed forces should play and an endorsement of some of the organisational changes within the Ministry of Defence – known as ‘Defence Reform’ – which are already underway.
It also comments usefully on technological change and greater integration between different elements of the armed forces, and the creation of ‘the Integrated Force’, a Boris Johnson-era term championed in the 2021 Command Paper ‘Defence in a competitive age’. The SDR gives it a vaguely sinister Marxist spin when it notes ‘there is no end state for the Integrated Force: its design and capabilities… must continue to evolve’.
Force structure, capabilities, procurement and ethos are all present, but there are two striking and fundamental gaps: overarching purpose and budget. The first really means strategy. The review has little to say, and almost nothing new, about what role Britain should play in the world.
Given that Nato, the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf and the Middle East were immutable under the terms of reference, there was not much scope for the reviewers. Whoever defined one ‘strategic’ role as ‘shaping the global security environment in favour of the UK’s interests, supported by the prioritised use of all the levers available to it’ did not have his or her proudest day at the office. But there is no underlying purpose, no mission, no hierarchy of geopolitical goals. It leaves the SDR lifeless, any strategic vision somewhere between Godot and Billy Bunter’s postal order, perennially absent.
None of this has much impact without considering expenditure. The reviewers worked within ‘the budgetary context of a transition to 2.5 per cent of GDP’; as I wrote yesterday, the government’s ‘ambition’ to reach 3 per cent in the next parliament is provisional. Thereafter little more is said about money, but it is hard to believe that the extra 0.2 per cent as of 2027 will satisfy all of the commitments within the review. It also avoids the fact that the MoD’s Equipment Plan (which will be superseded by a ‘Defence Investment Plan’) currently has a deficit of around £17 billion.
The SDR is not a bad document, but it is a disappointing one. It is hard to read it and see a clear strategic purpose and narrative or any vision of Britain in the world ten or 20 years hence. When it is set alongside the six or seven reviews beginning with Lord Robertson’s own 1998 Strategic Defence Review, it will not be considered a classic.
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