The Strategic Defence Review

144 Pages Of Obfuscation, Delusion, Jargon and Wishful Thinking Show The Weakness of The Government Machine.

Sir Humphrey Appleby advised that when producing a review the key skill was to get the difficult stuff out of the way in the review’s title. Last week’s (delayed) Strategic Defence Review, “Making Britain Safer: secure at home, strong abroad” follows this rule. The 144 pages that follow paint a very different picture of the military capability of the United Kingdom. In a trick that Sir H would be delighted by it finesses the whole problem of funding an increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP in a footnote (on page 10) treads “With the contribution of the UK Intelligence Community, defence spending will rise to a total of 2.6% of GDP from 2027.” Rather than increasing the cash available to the MOD the government will call bits of other departments “defence”, there is no cash spending increase.

The 2020 Defence Review was produced by the MOD under the direct guidance of the Secretary of State and serving Senior Officers. This one was led by a retired politician with only two years’ experience in government, a retired passed over general and a former White House staffer turned think tank queen and university chancellor. It shows.

The 2020 view was a coherent (but flawed) attempt to set out a credible path for the British Armed Forces. The flaw became apparent when Russia attacked Ukraine, so the 2020 Review was “refreshed” (Civil Service speak for rewritten). This Review, lacking the single direction has consulted widely, even including citizen panels sessions, and then pulled together some prose. It’s an exercise in obfuscation. In parallel, and less in the public eye, there is a Defence Reform programme which is shuffling the deckchairs of the existing military system.

More Heads than Hydra

Both the SDR and the Defence Reform programme envisage establishing more headquarters. The Chief of the Defence Staff is to get one to enable him to directly command the service chiefs. There will be a new cyber command, to rank alongside land, sea, air and space. Military operations will still be run by the existing Permanent Joint Headquarters and the Joint Expeditionary Force continues and a National Armament directorate has been created. Lots of opportunities there for ambitious officers and civil servants. Whatever problem Tommy Atkins faces, it won’t be a lack of supervision.

The change of role of the CDS is significant. The role and command of defence in the UK are complex. The short version is that hitherto CDS has been the primary advisor to government, but the running of the individual services is left to their chiefs. CDS is there to ensure that they are all running off the same policy hymn sheet. (In the savage cuts imposed during the Iraq and Afghan wars they got out of step, budgetary survival became the name of the game, with (predominantly) the Army simultaneously fighting the country’s enemies, the other services and the Treasury. The net result is the mess we’re in.

Part of that is due to political leadership failure, largely since Lord Robertson was replaced by Geoff (“Buff”) Hoon when Robertson became secretary of State for NATO. Few of his 13 successors have impressed and Healey appears cast in the same mould. In the absence of reliable or stable political leadership the role of CDS is even more challenging. Inevitably their background and primary expertise is in just one of the three services – despite years of “joint forces” the reality is that commanding an infantry battlegroup in combat is very different to driving a submarine or leading an air strike. Placing CDS in command of what they don’t understand makes it hard for them to ask advice from their subordinates. Giving them a new headquarters won’t solve that – if anything it will amplify it as all the military personnel in it will have single serviced backgrounds, loyalties and futures.

Similarly the creation of a National Armaments Directorate is no guarantee that military procurement will automatically improve. The entire government machine has a long history of failed procurements, from PFI hospitals and covid vaccines to the West Coast Main Line and HS2. In any case, it’s not just the procurement that’s at fault. All to often the military specify something ludicrous, be it aircraft carriers that only one sort of combat jet can use or reconnaissance vehicles the size of a tank.

Small Is Beautiful, Tech is Transformative, New is Necessary

The SDR has bought into the concept of rapid fielding of new technologies. It considers that these are best developed in small businesses and is spending £400 million of your unborn grandchild’s money on that per year. Inevitably it cites the example of drones in Ukraine.

It’s also convinced that technology is the answer to every military prayer, particularly the ability to link any sensor to an appropriate weapon to kill a target. It dresses this up as new thinking, but it’s merely a rehash of “any sensor, any shooter” from the 2020 review. That has been a military aspiration since the Cold War, (see the US Air Land Battle 2000, published in 1982).

Delivering it is rather more complicated, to which the SDR invokes the deus ex machina of AI. Like all government documents assuring us that AI will make it all better it doesn’t say how. At some stage any remote sensor must communicate with the shooter. That communication will involve electronic transmissions and on the battlefield all electronic transmissions are dangerous and vulnerable. They can be jammed, intercepted, impersonated or used to locate the emitter. (The remote sensor could avoid the need to emit if, as some are, it was controlled and reported by a fibre optical cable. However that cable is of finite length and would need to be connected to the shooter somehow. As both the sensor and the shooter will be moving frequently a cable network isn’t the complete solution).

The SDR also skips over the training and logistics burdens. If Tommy Atkins gets a new capability every coupe of years, as suggested, he’ll need training on it. That training needs to be good, and in the field, and on top of all the other things he has to do and train with. Finally a new weapon is useless unless it is available in quantity and can be produced at speed. Changing to new weaponry means changing the supply chain and replacing the stockpile. That’s not credible every two years. It’s also rather expensive.

Too Fat To Fight

The SDR acknowledges that the armed forces are some 10% under strength. It correctly notes that service personnel are expensive assets and putting them behind a desk is potentially wasteful. It suggests that retired soldiers or civil servants could cover many of the roles currently filled by serving soldiers. Perhaps they could. But many of those leaving the armed forces are doing so in disgust at the mismanagement of decline. They’re sought after employees and often leaving for a more stable life, a higher income and better housing (low baseline). Why would they take less pay and work in a duller environment? Service personnel swap jobs every two to three years, a stint behind a desk is often followed by a more exciting stint of sailing, soldiering or adiating – they joined for the latter.

Notwithstanding that, there is already a programme in place that does precisely this. The SDR is not breaking new ground, just rehashing previous decisions. Likewise it trumpets purchasing service housing to sort it out (done last year). It suggests increasing school cadet forces (a good thing) but ignores the reality that the services problem is not recruitment but retention. Yet the SDR advocates lowering medical entry standards and tailoring them to specific roles. That ignores the reality that everyone on a battlefield must expect to fight and be physically able to do so. Again this has been announced before.

And of course the SDR asserts that “Defence will not get to the heart of the problem unless the workforce becomes more representative of society, harnessing all talents to deliver the strongest possible workforce. The MOD must take a data-led approach to understand and address the systemic behavioural, structural, and leadership problems that currently prevent people from progressing within, and delivering for, Defence.” It notes that “only 12% of the regular armed forces are women” without considering that perhaps many women don’t see their future as learning to bayonet Russians (or anyone else) or becoming a prisoner of the Taliban.

Casualties & Reserves

The report correctly notes that the armed forces’ provisions to survive mass casualties are close to non-existent. Any casualty produces two problems. First treat the casualty and get them back to war (if possible) – that’s a medica one. Secondly the casualty must be replaced in their combat role as soon as possible, which is a reserves problem.

Treating the casualty is the responsibility of the Defence Medical Services, which hands them over to the NHS. Neither is ready for war and the SDR (rightly) demands that this is fixed. Unfortunately that shackles fixing a key part of functional Armed Forces to fixing the NHS. While Wes Streeting might thing that AI and heaping money on junior doctors is the solution. The entire country could tell him that it ain’t working.

A more interesting and imaginative approach would be for the military to run its own medical services, capable of meeting peacetime and wartime demands (which is petty much how it worked in the Cold War). That would not only solve the military’s problem. It would also offer an alternative structure to the NHS, which might show Wes Streeting what a working NHS might look like.

As regard replacing the wounded Tommy, that leads to the reserves. The SDR commits to increasing the active reserve by 20% (some five thousand more) “when funds allow” and to “reinvigorating the relationship” with the 33,000 of the strategic reserve who would most likely become the casualty replacements. The SDR rightly touches on the complexities of recalling reserves from the civilian labour pool without drawing the conclusion that even reinvigorated military reserves are not a solution by themselves. If, as the SDR postulates, we are approaching war with Russia the UK’s civil society needs to understand that and adapt to make such a war winnable. That’s a big ask of a stagnant economy with employers reeling from the increases to employment costs and energy prices.

Selective Learning From Losers

Ukraine is the obvious place to look if one wants to see what war with Russia might look like. The SDR does so enthusiastically, citing (alleged) lessons from Ukraine 45 times. These include more AI, the need for war stocks, drones and hybrid conflict, building national resilience and increasing warfighting readiness. The paper’s solution to almost everything is to use more AI and to change the way the Armed Forces fight using, wait for it, more AI. How that works is part of Project ASGAARD, which is a study into drones, not a weapon system available today. (Or, probably, in 2030).

One of the largest current impediments to readiness is Whole Fleet Management. Combat vehicles are held centrally in a state of light preservation, rather than being with the units that would use them – as was the method in the cold war (and indeed every army in every country until the MOD invented WFM). Thus most of the Challenger 3 tanks (which are being procured and the SDR confirms that tanks are necessary) that the UK buys will spend their life as static museum exhibits in the air-conditioned luxury of a WFM centre being built at Ashchurch. It’s more efficient, the MOD’s bean counters think, but it prevents soldiers from gaining the deep understanding of their combat vehicles that makes them effective in combat conditions. That is a real lesson from Ukraine but SDR’s authors seem to have missed that, or chosen to ignore it as it goes against their narrative.

Ukraine is losing its war with Russia, the SDR’s postulated foe. It’s losing in the trenches of the Dontez and its attempts to open other fronts are failing too. Their invasion of Kursk achieved nothing. Nor did the spectacular destruction of ten long range bombers in Siberia; before the war Russia had some 140 long range bombers, now it’s got 130. That won’t make much of a difference.

The war has become one of attrition and the Russians are winning by dint of more manpower and more artillery. Drones may or may not be causing significant casualties (the media and indeed academia are very flexible in their definition of drone). Ukraine is hampered by being outnumbered, lacking the ability to manoeuvre and lacking sufficient firepower. It’s running out of soldiers and wars of attrition are won by the side with the largest military-industrial complex.

If the British Armed forces want to look at the future of war they could do worse than look at Israel, which has pretty much won its war on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen remain problematic and US (plus a few RAF) air strikes have not been completely effective. The SDR only mentions Israel twice, neither time in the context of the evolution of the British Armed Forces. It was the IDF that first used drones (to suppress the air defences of the Beqaa Valley) in the 1980s. Drones are not new. The IDF have a long history of winning wars at all levels against much larger foes through exploiting technology. If I were seeking to rebuild a military capability and integrate it into society I would be talking to Israel, not censuring them as Our PM and ludicrous foreign secretary are.

Nuclear Nonsense and Hypersonic Hysteria

As noted above, transforming the Armed Forces into something capable of doing their job of deferring potential aggressors and defeating those who attack will require all of society to adjust their mindset. Not only are they going to have to foot the substantial bill of military revival, they must fill in for reservists when they’re called up (for training and for any war). Of course, they might not like that so it seems that the government is dusting off its favourite standby, Project Fear.

It started with one of the SDR authors, General Barrons, on Sky News saying a Russian cruise missile is only 90 minutes flight time away. That’s hardly news, the UK has been in range of Soviet (now Russian) missiles all my life. Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) fly a lot faster than cruise missiles and could get here in 15 to 20 minutes of the button being pushed. As could their Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) and Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM). The point is that, so far, no one has pushed the button. The reason for that is simple. Somewhere in the ocean is a quiet, British ballistic missile submarine carrying scores of 100 kiloton (six Hiroshimas) nuclear warheads, each capable of hitting any city in Russia (or pretty much anywhere else) in a retaliation for any nuclear strike on the UK. It’s called MAD (mutually assured destruction) and it works.

The SDR reaffirmed the commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrent. Hardly news, the first submarine, HMS Dreadnought (odd name for an Armageddon delivery system) started construction in 2016 and is due in service in the early 2030s. Two other boats (of the four total) are in various stages of construction. A new nuclear warhead is being designed and built in Britain (what’s wrong with the old design?). The SDR doesn’t include anything about smaller tactical nuclear weapons, which the UK hasn’t possessed since 1998. (In this context, smaller means less than one Hiroshima. It’s still a very big bang.)

Then the Prime Minister himself announced that he was in discussions to equip the RAF with tactical nuclear bombs. That makes almost no sense to anyone, except Tobias Elwood, one time MP, Defence Minister and Chair of the Defence Select Committee. Elwood and Starmer are wrong. (Conspiracy theorists will point out that Elwood is a serving officer in the Army’s shadowy 77 Brigade, responsible for information warfare).

Tactical nuclear weapons are hugely expensive and very complicated to use – there’s far more to it than pressing a button in a ballistic missile submarine. Warheads need protection. The process of getting them form a store to a plane’s bomb bay is necessarily complex. Then of course the plane might get shot down or have a technical failure on it’s way to the target, so better send two. So what does the second plane do if the first plane gets there and drops successfully. And so on.

Precision guided munitions can achieve similar destruction at far lower cost, with no radioactive fallout and almost no chance of kicking off Armageddon. If the SDR was serious about creating battlefield devastation it would have recommended leaving the Ottawa convention and reequipping with cluster bombs and other sub-munitions. Russia isn’t a signatory, nor are the United States or China. If we’re to be in the front line why renounce key capabilities?

In parallel with this nuclear surge SDR mentions increasing homeland defence, which will involve the armed forces but the detail on who, when and how is being written by the Cabinet Office. The powers required to run a country fighting a nuclear war probably include a form of martial law and national command structures in case London takes a major strike. As part of this SDR anticipates relocating PJHQ – it’s main warfighting headquarters – to somewhere less vulnerable than the London suburbs. I suppose that’s good news for the residents of Northwood who would slip down the Russian nuclear target priority list.

SRD also mentions anti-missile defence, allocating £1 billion to it. It seems confused about the speeds at which ballistic missile warheads arrive. Short range missile warheads (like those being fired at Ukraine) are hypersonic, meaning they travel at five times the speed of sound. Longer range ICBM and SLBM travel four times as fast. An Israeli Arrow missile might, on a good day, hit incoming Mach 5 warheads, as might the US THAAD, Patriot and the Royal Navy’s Sea Viper. Shooting down an ICBM warhead travelling at 20 times the speed of sound is a whole bunch tougher. £1 billion won’t buy an equivalent of the Israeli Iron Dome which we don’t need – unless we go to war with France. (Iron Dome protects against 50 km range, slow rockets). £1 billion isn’t going convert Sea Viper into an anti-ICBM system either.

The money would be better spent on early warning. SDR did, rightly, note that the UK’s two new Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft are insufficient. The fleet needs to be at least five, and SDR suggests a joint NATO purchase might be possible. (The programme is in trouble and £1 billion might help fix it ) Whether NATO funding would lead to NATO control of deployment is not discussed.

SDR doesn’t mention the other major early warning problem, which is that the wind farms in the North Sea degrade and confuse military radar looking past them for hostile planes and missiles. (It’s no surprise, metal reflects radar pulses and the blades reflect enough to sometimes be mistaken for aircraft. Net Zero isn’t just destroying the economy, it’s undermining our defence. ) The MOD has been working on this for several years; it’s strange that it’s not mentioned in SDR.

Show Me The Money

SDR repeatedly mentions that funds will be available when economic conditions permit, by which it loosely means next parliament. Sir Humphrey would admire the can being kicked so far down the road. Unfortunately the SDR also says that the Russian threat exists now and that, should there be a ceasefire in Ukraine Russia will regenerate its military capacity in about a year. (For reference, Russia builds about 200 T-90 tanks a year. The British Army owns about the same number of Challengers. The T-90 is a decent tank, not quite as good as Challenger 2, but too close for comfort). The UK’s armed forces problems exist now. They need solving now, or at the least being put on the path to success now. SDR achieves neither.

SDR is keen on defence exports, a first for a Labour government, which it thinks will come from AI drone swarms ( ©Dominic Cummings – another self-appointed military genius) and other military productions. Typically, much of that is already announced. BAe Systems is making a lot of money from the F-35 programme and involvement in many other defence companies. So is Rolls Royce. While some British military technology is superb, much of it has been bought by overseas companies like Thales, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. The work comes to the UK but the profit is exported. Most governments rightly view dealing with small companies a risk in itself; if they really want something produced by small companies they’ll get one of their preferred contractors to buy it. Creating a self-funding defence industry takes time, investment and an indifference to whom one’s customers are.

Currently the UK defence exports run at about £14 billion a year, mostly funded though UK Export finance, which has just been increased by £10 billion. UK Export Finance is, of course, funded by taxpayers. (Treat those numbers with caution, military hardware sales are notoriously opaque.) Defence exports are crucial to support the UK’s equipment spend, roughly half of the defence budget or £28 billion a year but they should not be the focus of defence policy. If the MOD specifies good equipment other countries will buy it. The combination of defence cuts and festering procurement decisions have undermined the UK’s weapon manufacturing sector. Why the SDR thinks the same organisation and people that ran the defence sector down can now build it back up is not explained.

UK Defence Spending in 2024 -25 is about £57 billion, some 2.2% of our £2,256 billion GDP. The reality remains that if the UK wants to achieve the current NATO target (now 3% of GDP) it needs to find an extra £20 billion year. That’s the size of the black hole this government discovered just eleven months ago.

Choose Your Wars Wisely

The mark of an outstanding commander is that they win many more battles than they lose. One of the ways in which they achieve this is only to fight when they know they can win, rather than fighting because they must. As SDR tacitly admits, currently the UK is not prepared for war. Given the country’s economic weakness there isn’t any more cash to splash on new weapons and more soldiers, sailors and airpeople.

Why then does this government insist on adopting a path to war with Russia? We’re already in a proxy war with them. (Our proxy is failing, not least because we have neither the military nor the financial wherewithal to support them adequately). We’re also waging an economic war with Russia. That’s not really hurting them as they simply sell their energy to other countries. We’re engaged in cyber warfare with them (as they are with us). Our conventional forces are run down so we can’t win a conventional war. Now we’re discussing a nuclear war with them.

It was once generally accepted that it’s not possible to win a nuclear war as once started it inexorably escalates to Armageddon. Nothing in the SDR or the Prime Minister’s pronouncements changes that. Only a fool starts wars that they can’t win.

Until the British Armed Forces are regenerated and demonstrably capable a wise Prime Minister would avoid getting into any war with anyone. A wise Prime Minister would not witter publicly about building tactical nuclear weapons. But then a wise Prime Minister would have insisted the MD produce its own review, rather than contracting three has-beens to produce 144 pages of spin, guff and obfuscation.

The SDR is a stunning exemplar of all that is wrong with the entire government machine. It avoids reality, relies on fictitious solutions while producing ever more bureaucracy and headquarters to mismanage its activities. In the unlikely event of anyone in the mainstream media challenging policy it first obfuscates and then resorts to Project Fear while seeking more draconian powers against the people who pay its wages.

The biggest threat to the UK is not Russia, nor a nuclear strike. It’s our government machine.

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