What should the guiding considerations of a defence review be?
What should the guiding considerations of a defence review be?
The Memorandum | No. 11.2024
Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) published the official call for evidence to support the new defence review process, the fourth endeavour of this kind in the last decade. In a recent speech, John Healey, Defence Secretary, argued that this review is ‘the first of its kind’ because it will be externally led, with Lord Robertson, former Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), coordinating a team including Dr Fiona Hill, a former official on the United States (US) National Security Council specialising in Russia, and Gen. (rtd.) Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander, Joint Forces Command.
In announcing the review, Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, pointed out that its outcome will ‘forge a new clear-eyed approach to our national defence.’ The call for evidence clarified that the purpose is to determine the roles, capabilities and reforms required by United Kingdom (UK) Defence to meet the challenges, threats and opportunities of the twenty-first century, deliverable and affordable within the resources available to Defence within the trajectory to 2.5%.
In this respect, therefore, the review is consistent with prior efforts to balance desirable capabilities against financial constraints, albeit within a marginally increased ceiling.
Lord Robertson added that the review will focus on six primary aims: the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, the retaining of the country’s leadership in NATO, the strengthening of homeland security, the bolstering of Ukraine’s fighting capabilities against Russia, the reforms of procurement and project management, and the overcoming of fractious inter-service rivalries. These aims, apart from the commitment to support Ukraine, are compatible with earlier reviews, and can benefit from existing assessments to articulate continuity, transformation, and diverging choices.
More importantly, the language of novelty, urgency, and reform have been a constant organising principle in the demands for recent reviews. This had to be the case since all the reviews of the last decade represented a response to changing international circumstances. The Integrated Review published in 2021 marked the most significant shift in the character of Britain’s response in that it reintroduced the problem of state-on-state competition as the defining feature shaping the demands of national security. The Integrated Review, and the subsequent ‘Refresh’ in 2023, were the first two documents of this kind that contextualised defence needs beyond the threats and challenges posed by non-state actors since the end of the Cold War.
Still, as defence review processes require considerable commitment in terms of resources to be carried out, there are two questions unfolding from the above. Are we making the next defence review as future proof as we can? And how do we avoid this ‘new’ process from becoming another datapoint in a persistent list of ‘new’ efforts to meet an even more ‘dangerous and volatile world’ in a not-too-distant future? These are far from obvious questions especially since other state actors take different approaches to setting the path of their defence postures. In the United States and Japan, for example, defence reviews are regular and structured processes responding to national political and departmental-specific circumstances, with international circumstances addressed within these terms of reference.
While the question of whether British interests would be better served by other approaches rests beyond the scope of this article, the answers to the above questions invite a reflection over three guiding considerations that should inform how the drafting team pursues the stated aims and goals. The first reflection concerns what the Australian national security community refers to as a country’s ‘strategic warning time.’ For Australia, this is the window of time ahead of a perceived potential occurrence of war, one which in their case has led to a growing sense of urgency over crucial steps to take in defence, not least the decision to prioritise the procurement of nuclear-powered attack submarines.
In the UK, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has certainly prompted a greater political perception of the problem of war in Europe, with commitments to Ukraine and indeed an increased baseline for defence spending being two direct manifestations of such a change.
However, urgency in the British context is hardly ever defined regarding the possibility of the UK being directly at war. Earlier this year, when General Sir Patrick Sanders, then Chief of the General Staff, spoke of a ‘prewar generation’, a spokesperson from 10 Downing Street quickly dismissed the comments as ‘unhelpful.’ However, just a few days earlier, Grant Shapps, then Defence Secretary, had also suggested that Britain needed to be prepared for war.
Regardless of whether one agrees with the above assessments, at the moment there is unclarity on this subject. For British audiences to regard the review’s recommendations as relevant and appropriate, the risk of war – precisely because of its potentially life-changing impact on a society – needs to be clearly articulated. If urgency is a requirement for action, its character and implications should be stated clearly. This would amount to a clear-eyed assessment of why investing in defence matters, and how doing so is an active step in extending such a strategic window and reduce the risks against which defence spending occurs.
This first guiding reflection is this: Britain needs to define its own strategic warning time and be clear about where the country stands on that timeframe.
The second consideration unfolds directly from the first and focuses on the so-called ‘forgotten dimension’ of strategy. It concerns the social aspect of defence, and it points to the need to address Britain’s social licence on defence. The new government has made it clear in its manifesto that it will prioritise putting the Armed Forces Covenant into law and establishing an independent Armed Forces Commissioner to ensure the well-being of the defence communities, their families, and veterans. These are commendable and indeed crucial steps to ensure that those who serve, and the communities that support them, continue to feel part of a rewarding national endeavour. These priorities speak to the political will to increase the resilience of those who are part of the defence community.
Conversely, the defence of the realm is only as strong as the capacity of the nation to appreciate the role that the armed forces play in helping Britain to remain a sovereign country capable of shaping international security, and it is committed to participate in their renewal. In recent months, media reporting has highlighted a wider malaise in recruitment trends, and discontent among those who are closely linked in their lines of work to ensuring the sustainability of British operational activities. The defence review, therefore, would need to widen the case for defence and explain why the well-being of the armed forces and the MOD will amount to little unless British society considers the utility of nurturing its endeavours.
In particular, while the government proposal to engage in developing a defence industrial strategy is likely to enhance the link between defence and prosperity with the creation of new jobs, the ‘why’ one should more directly be part of the defence endeavours in the UK remains unaddressed. In particular, the ‘social dimension’ of strategy is also about the resilience of the idea that joining the armed forces reflects the values modern Britain stands for. In this respect, the review has an opportunity to address how defence stands at the heart not just of a prosperity agenda, but of a modern, technologically oriented, and inclusive Britain. It has an opportunity to extend the meaning of resilience in defence affairs.
The second guiding consideration, therefore, is the following: Britain needs a narrative which renews the social licence in defence and places the relevance of the armed forces within the context of a collective responsibility towards a more resilient society.
The third and final observation engages with one of the most consequential issues behind any defence review: how to make the most of limited financial means. On this subject, it is worth recalling that the UK is one of the world’s largest spenders on defence. Still, there is a political recognition – and the defence secretary has been clear about it since before the elections – that the management of the budget, in particular the procurement of capabilities and the timelines for their introduction into active service, falls short from being adequate to the demands of the time. Indeed, he agreed with one of his predecessor’s assessments that the British Armed Forces have been ‘hollowed out and underfunded.’
The review’s aim to foster a culture of ‘one defence’ and promote reforms to reward such an attitude are seemingly part of the initiatives to address prioritisation and spending. By removing inter-service rivalry – the defence secretary argued – the desire is to create a more harmonious environment within which the armed forces collectively can be ‘fit to fight – not fight amongst ourselves.’ This is indeed a commendable aspiration but one that should not carry the risk of surrendering the strategic value of Britain’s unique geography. As an offshore group of islands close to Europe, British defence has a responsibility to engage with what kind of military power – relative to threats and interests – it wishes to be. This debate is often misconstrued as one entailing a choice between a ‘continental’ and a ‘maritime’ posture. In reality, a ‘one defence’ construct should instead reward a debate over whether Britain wishes to be a ‘positional’ or ‘expeditionary’ military power.
Today’s challenges are both region-specific, and in Europe this overwhelmingly means engaging with the threat presented by Russia, and internationally linked. This is a point that in the case of Britain applies to both Russian aggression towards Ukraine, and regarding the wider challenges to Britain’s ability to survive economically as a sovereign nation. In relation to the former, North Korean, and Chinese support for the Russian war machine are two of the most macroscopic reminders that threats to Europe do not end at its immediate geographic boundaries. As far as the latter is concerned, the current crisis in the Red Sea, or indeed in the South China Sea, or across the Taiwan Strait, directly affect global trade and connectivity, with direct repercussions for British prosperity, from food supplies to tea bags.
Britain today provides forward-deployed ground forces in Eastern Europe, and this year will provide a land component to the Allied Reaction Force, while next year more contributions will be offered to NATO’s Special Operations Task Force. Whether these contributions are ‘positional’ commitments solely for NATO’s efforts, or ‘expeditionary’ capabilities primarily deployed in Europe, but with potential uses also elsewhere, should be part of a wider discussion over British defence. In particular, the Arctic and the Indian Ocean, and the broader Indo-Pacific, remain areas of the world in which problems of security and stability are likely to continue to affect the UK directly.
Prioritising investments in capabilities to enhance an expeditionary posture, across services, from cyber and space, to long-fires, from air drones to undersea capabilities, will be the yardstick of whether British defence is playing to its geographical advantage.
In sum, the defence review faces today a critical task. The new Labour government has sent promising signals that it intends to pursue this task to maximum effect. Still, as the review gets under way, some basic assumptions should be explored in greater depth. The longevity of the outcome of the review depends upon it.
In this context, there are three guiding considerations about the likelihood of war for the UK in the foreseeable future, and what it means for the defence endeavour. There is a consideration about the resilience of British society, and what is expected from the social contract between defence and the fabric of the nation which nurtures it. Last, but not least, there is a consideration about the character of British military posture, with the need to think how far and in what ways it should sustain its operations. Britain needs to think about its strategic warning time, its social contract on defence, and whether it wishes to be a positional or an expeditionary power, and in that process, plant the seeds for the defence review to be truly strategic.
Prof. Alessio Patalano is the Hebert Richmond Associate Fellow in Maritime Strategy at the Council on Geostrategy. He is also the Professor of War and Strategy in East Asia in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
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