The 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) had within it a clear message: defence can no longer be ‘contracted out only to our Armed Forces, good and brave as they are.’ With multiple current and future threats and challenges facing the United Kingdom (UK), ‘a whole-of-society approach is essential. Everyone has a role to play and a national conversation on how we do it is required.’
A year on from the SDR’s publication, and with threats mounting from all directions, this conversation is starting. Polling in support of increased defence spending is trending in the right direction – that is, unless you are part of the sizeable percentage who abhor defence and think it is a waste of money.
A sensible communications campaign is not going to spend much time on that group. Those already in favour should not need extensive targeting either, but are often targeted anyway, because doing so is easier and less risky. Everyone likes talking to their own echo chamber, and nobody enjoys being called a warmonger.
Yet, it is the middle of the normal distribution – the majority of the British population – where most effort should lie. This audience is often described in polls as ‘disengaged’, and those who think defence is either someone else’s problem or that the military has it covered. Indeed, the inability to deploy a single Royal Navy warship to protect the UK’s air stations on Cyprus seemed to be the first time that many within this middle group realised how thinly spread the British Armed Forces have now become.
Defence language
Reaching this group requires a clarity of language that defence does not naturally possess. Armed forces language has always been slightly exclusionary. This is no different from other professional groups, from finance to medicine to law – ‘this is our gang and you’re not in it’. Each service having its own lexicon also does not help. This is controversial, but perhaps the whole business of defence does not attract the best communicators. It certainly does not always attract good writers, and the technical, clipped style demanded in written communication throughout a career does not improve matters.
Add to this the extreme brevity required on many radio circuits, and the result is a mash-up of jargon abbreviations and codewords, often incomprehensible to the person sitting next to you, let alone an interested outsider. Without care, you can leave the service and before you know it, you are using the 24-hour clock at work and saying ‘roger’ at the end of sentences and everyone else in the office thinks you are weird.
Clunky language, mangled syntax, and the occasional made-up word is not the root cause of defence’s problems, but it is a highly visible symptom. The real problem runs deeper than language alone.
Online, where character limits matter as much as airtime on a radio circuit, the problem is equally acute. Acronyms such as SDR, JEF, NAS, NATO MARCOM, and PJHQ are sprayed about on the assumption that everyone knows what they mean.* A recent Royal Navy post on X about Exercise TAMBER SHIELD illustrates this nicely:
Personnel from @815NAS conducted rescue and firefighting training with the @Sjoforsvaret during Ex #TamberShield. The exercise runs under JEF, the UK-led coalition of Northern Europe nations which works in support of @NATO_MARCOM ops. @JEFnations
The only people who understand this language are in the wrong target audience, and even they find it grating. They then lead the ridicule, which in turn discourages wider engagement. And while many social channels encourage tagging users and employing hashtags, they should not be used at the expense of clarity.
Clunky language, mangled syntax, and the occasional made-up word is not the root cause of defence’s problems, but it is a highly visible symptom. The real problem runs deeper than language alone. It is a fundamental communication problem. The national conversation does need to happen, and it must be conducted in plain English. However, it also needs to be honest, both internally and externally, or the ‘say-do’ gap will continue to widen and undermine trust.
Centralised control
Speaking to those who handled communications for the individual services during the Cold War and 1990s, it is clear that they had a level of freedom unrecognisable today, despite having far fewer channels. Over-centralisation of messaging has become entrenched. It was already well established in the Ministry of Defence by 2011 when David Cameron, then Prime Minister, issued his famous ‘you do the fighting, and I’ll do the talking’ reprimand to Sir Mark Stanhope, then First Sea Lord, who had merely suggested that providing an extra ship off Libya might stretch the Royal Navy.
Sir Mark did, of course, deploy an extra ship on top of all the other standing tasks of the day, and the issue was quickly forgotten. But this papering over of the cracks is part of the problem. The British Armed Forces have a built-in desire to say ‘yes minister’. This is part of being in a democracy. Not doing so is also the fastest way to guarantee being passed over for promotion.
The follow-on problem is the military’s ability to deliver, while hiding the ‘duct tape’ required to make it happen. The result is a damaging lack of honesty: politicians not being entirely frank with the public about the state of defence, and the military not being entirely frank with politicians in return – a communications issue, in other words.
This obsession with centralisation shows no sign of abating, and is certainly not confined solely to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), nor to either side of the political aisle. Not long ago, there was a discussion floating around Whitehall about removing all ministries’ communications departments and doing the whole thing centrally. If this overreach feels as though it verges on parody, consider that Brexit and Covid-19 communications were the examples used to justify it.
Computer says ‘no’
In such an environment, it is easy to see why individual services struggle to get their messages to the right audiences. For HMS Dragon – which was deployed to the Gulf of Oman in early May – to communicate anything beyond routine matters, approval is required from the UK commander in Bahrain, the Joint Headquarters in Northwood, the Operations Directorate in the MOD, and ultimately the Directorate of Defence Communications. A single ‘no’ anywhere in the chain kills the opportunity.
This ponderousness causes defence to miss literally thousands of good outreach opportunities every year. The iconic image of HMS Diamond firing her Aster missile at an incoming drone was released in error – just as well, since the system would otherwise have blocked it. All told, this has produced an all-time high in risk aversion towards unit-level communications, with no sign of improvement.
Threats
The urgency of fixing these problems is clear. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, daily sub-threshold activities against Europe, questions over American commitment to allies, and an impending energy shock should be warning enough. This is not just a Royal Navy issue; it is pan-defence. One hopes the visit by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, to a Vanguard class submarine that had been at sea so long it changed colour might be a trigger. If the ‘pointy stuff’ is being exposed as this thin, the underpinnings raise a whole new level of concern.
The system continues to claim it is ‘meeting all operational tasking’ when it is demonstrably not. This was effective as a ‘line to take’ when Britain still had enough mass to paper over the cracks. Now, though, it does not.
Yet even now, the official language speaks of sticking plasters and ‘increases in due course’. The latest proposed plaster is smaller than the black hole it needs to fill. This is what used to be called ‘more cuts’, and it helps explain why the Defence Investment Plan has still not appeared a year after the SDR upon which it is based. Meanwhile, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) which could help to plug gaps at relatively low cost struggle with communications barriers, often by design. The system continues to claim it is ‘meeting all operational tasking’ when it is demonstrably not.
This was effective as a ‘line to take’ when Britain still had enough mass to paper over the cracks. Now, though, it does not.
Conclusion
The SDR was right: a national conversation on defence is essential if the UK is to understand the gap and therefore vote to improve national resilience.
This is a whole-ship sport, and clear, honest communications – using plain English, delivered through a spread of channels and voices and based on ambition, not fear – sit at the heart of it. Each service has the capability, but their shackles must be loosened. This does not mean a free-for-all, but an environment in which communications risk is properly tolerated and managed, just like any other operational risk.
All that is required is the courage from the top to delegate authority effectively and to accept the associated risk. The alternative is that change will be forced upon Britain, when it will be too late and much, much more expensive.
*Strategic Defence Review, Joint Expeditionary Force, Naval Air Squadron, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Maritime Command, and Permanent Joint Headquarters for those who do not know.
Tom Sharpe OBE is a communications consultant who specialises in enhancing and protecting reputations in complex and contested environments. Prior to this, he served for over 25 years in the Royal Navy, the last five of which were spent in military plans and communications.
This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Defence Unit.
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What do you think about this Memorandum? Why not leave a comment below?
This is an excellent essay. It addresses an issue that the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security is attempting to address.
https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/centres/strategy/research/public-understanding-defence-security/
The language used by the defence community excludes the public and is a significant contributing factor to groupthink. It removes the public from proper scrutiny of defence and avoids the obvious / stupid question such as how can ever increasing output be delivered from ever decreasing inputs? The expansion of the debate to include more voices that are not steeped in the language of defence can only benefit all. Thank you for this helpful contribution.
Excellent post, and the problem is shared by other countries!