The challenges facing the Strategic Defence Review

You can't mount a credible conventional deterrent on a shoestring

Rishi Sunak is said to have complained that he was spending too much time on foreign policy. Keir Starmer seems like he can’t spend enough.

In the 16 days since he assumed office Starmer has not only attended the NATO Summit and hosted the European Political Community. He despatched his Defence Secretary to Odesa, his Foreign Secretary to Israel and the West Bank, and invited President Zelensky to address the Cabinet in Downing Street.

Most significantly, last week, he appointed Defence Secretary John Healey to oversee the long-promised Strategic Defence Review, whose aim will be to recalibrate Britain’s military capabilities against the increased threat.

In this edition of Conflict & Democracy I outline the challenge facing the SDR, and read the tea leaves of the way it’s been set up.

Changing the process

In the 14 years since Labour was last in power, the security architecture of British government has changed radically. David Cameron set up the National Security Council, which though it is essentially a sub-committee of Cabinet also created a Secretariat within the Cabinet Office, and a National Security Adviser who is a quasi-political appointee.

This left Labour in opposition with a problem: in the British system, only ministerial posts are “shadowed”. There was no Labour shadow national security adviser; nor was there an extensive foreign, security and defence advisory group; nor were there many significant Labour-aligned think tanks focused on IR, let alone defence.

And this began to matter significantly when, in 2020 Johnson decided to break with the practice of holding a 5-yearly Strategic Defence and Security Review, where public risk assessments lead to decisions on spending and force recalibration.

Instead, Johnson pioneered the “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy” (IR21) – an attempt to formulate cross-government grand strategy - from which it evolved its Defence priorities (the Defence in a Competitive Age Command Paper) and new force structures.

The strength of IR21 was that, for the first time, it forced the UK to state an explicit grand-strategic vision for its role in the world post Brexit. The weakness was that the vision was flawed.

Or rather, it was a mixture of realism and hubris. The realism consisted of recognising that the rules based global order is collapsing, leading to a new period of systemic competition.

The hubris was expressed in Johnson’s infamous Greenwich speech, where he promised that the UK would become a global power, defending “free trade” in the face of emergent great power trade rivalry. To do so it would enact a “tilt” of foreign and security policy to the Indo-Pacific region, where the UK would play an independent geopolitical role.

With the collapse of Western power in Afghanistan, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, IR21 was subjected to a swift “refresh”, refocusing on the Russian threat. Though welcome, this coincided with chaos at the top: IR23 was begun under Johnson, its initial conclusions finalised on the day Liz Truss resigned, and published in revised form under Sunak.

IR23 declared the Indo-Pacific Tilt “complete” (a euphemism for “over”). It recognised the primary and severe threat from Russia but, for diplomatic reasons, refused to name China as a threat to the UK (despite both Truss and Sunak promising their party faithful they would do so). [This, by the way continues to baffle US security professionals].

However, it mandated no clear reprioritisation of Britain’s armed forces in response to the new situation; there was no overhaul of defence industrial strategy; and – worst of all – there was continued defence austerity.

Only towards the end of his government – and crucially after his final fiscal event – did Rishi Sunak commit to raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP; and then only by 2030. With his defence minister and army chief using the words “pre-war” to describe the geopolitical situation, this failure to grasp the severity of mismatch left Labour a mammoth problem to sort out.

Anecdotally, towards the end of the Sunak government, both Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch were making moves to remedy this lack of focus: Cameron reportedly wanted a speed-up of British material aid to Ukraine, while Badenoch kick-started a cross-Whitehall push to boost defence exports. However, both of these initiatives were stalled when the pre-election purdah kicked in.

Restating UK grand strategy

So the task facing Labour is multifaceted and huge. There is no need for, nor appetite for, a renewed debate on grand strategy. The essence of the vision outlined under John Bew as Downing Street foreign policy adviser remains:

1. The rules-based international order has ceased to function. The UK is no longer committed simply to upholding it, but to fighting for an “open international order” in the face of systemic competition: to shape the global environment with strategic intent, to maintain the UK's strategic advantage.

2. This means our allies and partners need to change. We need to maintain and build alliances in the Euro-Atlantic, but also now in the Asia-Pacific region, and to compete for diplomatic influence among the “middle” powers in the global south, which are not fully signed up either to a Western or a Russia-China vision of the emerging order.

3. Therefore, the UK must seek to create new international structures, while maintaining the effectiveness of the old ones. So alongside G7, EU, NATO there is AUKUS, the Hiroshima Accord, bilateral treaties with Vietnam, ROK, India, Nigeria and Brazil. When multilateral organisations become paralysed, the UK will need actively to create “minilaterals”

4. Though soft power remains important, hard power is now more important. We need to spend more on defence, security and intelligence – enhancing the UK as a hard power centre of gravity so that it attracts Allies and powers from the “middle”. We also need to soft power more assertively - eg the National Security Act 2023.

5. As a medium sized country, our future lies in remaining at the leading edge of technological and scientific change.

6. The Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific are no longer separate theatres of operation; what happens in one affects what happens in the other – and with the melting of the North Polar ice cap, new maritime routes and conflict zones will open up affecting both.

If you read Starmer's statements on foreign, security and defence issues since assuming power, these principles still run like an implicit thread through them.

There is more emphasis on multilateralism with Starmer; a preparadness to make the big alliances work before reaching for the minilaterals; and an overt statement that “NATO First” is the priority - notwithstanding the need for an expanded partnership with Australia and Japan. But the thrust of the “Bew Doctrine” effectively remains.

Labour sees Britain’s role as projecting security leadership in Europe, and will seek to regain the authoritative role it once had in the Alliance: in part through force commitments to NATO; in part by seeking a comprehensive security pact with the EU; in part by maintaining Britain’s role as a pro-active and creative partner to Ukraine. This, in turn, reflects the deep roots of Euro-Atlanticism in Labour’s foreign policy tradition.

And that is how to read Starmer’s early actions in government. The NATO summit was about redoubling Western commitments to Ukraine; the EPC was about projecting leadership over the issue of migration in Europe and, again, the search for a coalition of willing partners to support Ukraine.

As to the structure of the SDR, it signals change on several levels. First, the title. The absence of the word “security” means there are fewer Whitehall fingers in the pie: this will be a Defence-focused review, rather than an exercise in grand strategy formation or counter-terror.

And by moving its authorship to an external panel, headed by former NATO secretary general Lord Robertson, together with Fiona Hill (ex US NSC) and Sir Richard Barrons (a four star general), Starmer looks determined to dodge the inter-service rivalries that undermined the coherence of the 2021 Defence Command Paper.

Ultimately, because it is blindingly obvious that Britain’s military capabilities are hollowed out, the SDR has to outline the rationale for rearmament, and thus for spending significantly more on defence.

Challenges facing the SDR

However, the challenges facing the SDR are huge, because it has to include contingency plans for two variables: does Trump win in November, and walk away from NATO; and can Ukraine avoid a catastrophic military defeat?

If negative outcomes were to happen in both cases, I’ve heard it mooted in Whitehall that the UK would need to spend 7% - not 2.5% - of its GDP on Defence, a prospect that I have argued before could only be achieved through borrowing.

With consultation open only until the end of September, the signs are that the government wants the SDR concluded early in 2025. Certainly its remit is tight:

• “Put personnel across defence at the heart of future defence work.

• Ensure that the UK continues to lead in NATO.

• Strengthen UK homeland security.

• Bolster Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. 

• Modernise and maintain the nuclear deterrent.

• Adapt military services and equipment programmes to meet requirements.

• Help drive the guiding principle of One Defence”.

This does not look like the remit for a review of 20-year existential risks. Indeed, it looks far closer to the “fight tonight” priorities that the single services are focused on.

So what does SDR2024/5 need to deliver? For me, it comes down to three things. First, a clear-eyed calibration of the threat. One of the reasons IR21 moved away from calibrated risk assessments was, purportedly, that they hadn’t worked; they’d inculcated a “risk management” approach rather than a strategic vision.

The problem is, on all objective readings, both in 2021 and 2023 the threat calibrations looked fudged in order to justify (in 2021) the wrong geopolitical focus and (in 2023) the absence of money for the armed forces.

So page one, paragraph one of SDR24 has to begin with something like:

“Russia is at war with the West; it is the declared aggressor not just against Ukraine but against NATO and has conducted operations that directly threaten the UK’s national security, including cyber-attacks, hacking attacks, physical attacks on sub-sea infrastructure, assassinations and arson. It is the primary threat to the UK’s national security and our armed forces must be geared to deterring it, through denial and punishment.”

And then – unlike any public document in the 21^st century – the SDR must outline (or at least reflect) a professional assessment of the likelihood and potential timing of a Russian attack on a NATO ally.

There are of course other threats, namely a Chinese attack on Taiwan and an Iranian all out war on Israel (alternately, the implosion of the Tehran regime and resultant revolutionary chaos in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq).

But if the UK is to play a leading role in European security, via NATO, the SDR has to make clear – just as the Committee of Imperial Defence did in the 1930s – which threat takes primacy.

Second, there needs to be a clear-eyed net assessment of Britain’s own capabilities; those of our allies; and those of our primary adversary Russia. Obviously some of this has to remain at a classified level – but unless we are frank about our own shortcomings, we will never create the domestic political coalition for re-armament.

Because this is not just about money (see below), it is about the will to reallocate people and capital from an economy focused on creating coffee bars to one focused on creating missile factories; it is about equipping the UK to fight a counter-hybrid battle – in its universities, its media and across its energy and information infrastructure.

From this assessment we need to make the case not just for a force restructure around the “NATO First” principle. We need, quite simply, to make the case for rearmament. And that brings us to…

Third, make the case for more money. There is no way a cash-strapped Labour government, with legitimate priorities in fighting crime and rectifying health and social care, is going to spend significantly more money on defence unless two criteria are met: the threat assessment makes it unavoidable; and the promised deep reform of MOD procurement is demonstrably under way.

That’s why Labour’s proposed changes on procurement, centralising the process through a national armaments director and eradicating waste and slow decision making, need to bear fruit early.

Ten questions for the SDR

Beyond this, here are the questions I think the SDR should explore in detail.

1. Does Britain need an integrated air and missile defence system; and should it join the European Sky Shield Initiative in pursuit of one?