Ready for War?

On​ 2 June the British government finally published its Strategic Defence Review on the state of the UK armed forces. When it was commissioned, in July 2024, Keir Starmer described it as ‘first of its kind’ and ‘root and branch’ – a clear indication that it would be nothing of the sort. This was the fourth defence review in the past five years, with two more (to do with reserve forces and defence industry matters) still in progress. But the SDR was intended as Labour’s big statement on the UK military. To lead it, Starmer appointed Tony Blair’s first defence secretary, George Robertson, along with Richard Barrons, former deputy chief of the defence staff, and Fiona Hill, former deputy assistant for European and Russian affairs under Donald Trump. The general direction was set in March 2024 by the defence secretary, John Healey, who said Labour’s aim was to restore the British armed forces to their standing before 2010, when they were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From the outset the SDR was the object of a proxy battle between the armed forces and the Treasury, fought in the sympathetic pages of the Times and the Telegraph. The ‘defence’ desks of the major newspapers have long been redoubts of support for rearmament, if not for resurrecting the mos maiorum of British armies past. The review was an occasion for a year-long series of suspiciously similar articles demanding that the UK throw money at the military. It was plain that the heads of the armed forces felt the SDR would contain too few pledges of the money and equipment they desired. Tame defence correspondents and editors of the broadsheets were fed briefings about the sorry state of affairs. The SDR, titled ‘Making Britain Safer: Secure at Home, Strong Abroad’, was submitted to the cabinet in March, but its publication was delayed for months by internal squabbling, both among the armed services and between the general staff and the cabinet.

Before the review was launched, the government had pledged to raise military spending – currently at 2.3 per cent – to 2.5 per cent of GDP, in order to revive ‘respect’ for the British armed forces. The general staff and its allies in the media argued that 3 per cent was required to achieve that. In December, the MoD revised the figure to 3.6 per cent. This was a transparent negotiating tactic; behind the scenes the brass were angling for a slightly more realistic commitment to 2.65 per cent. In the event the SDR stuck with the commitment of raising spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by April 2027, with the ‘ambition’ of reaching 3 per cent at some point in the future. In February, Starmer summoned the military heads to smooth things over, or at least to head off talk that the review would compare unfavourably with equivalent declarations in France and Germany. When the head of the air force, Richard Knighton, withdrew from an event at the Royal United Services Institute in late March, anonymous military officers told the Times that they had been ‘gagged’ by the government. (Knighton is due to be announced as the new chief of the defence staff.)

A neat bureaucratic manoeuvre allowed the SDR to be presented as more of a revitalisation of the armed forces than it was. Several cuts were announced in the months before the review, ensuring that the SDR itself would be free of them. The news that the armed forces would be losing some significant equipment – assault ships, frigates, helicopters – was meant to be leavened by assurances that others with more emotive potential would survive. The prime minister presented the review at the BAE Systems shipyard in Glasgow and pledged ‘up to twelve’ new nuclear-powered submarines, replacing the five currently in service. His announcement had an eerie nuclear glow, including as it did promises of a £15 billion ‘sovereign warhead programme’ codenamed ASTRAEA. More worrying were reports that the government is in talks with the US about acquiring low-yield airborne nuclear weapons. One of the SDR’s recommendations is that the UK consider ordering F-35A jets capable of carrying B61 nuclear bombs. As a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the UK is supposed to be taking measures ‘in good faith’ towards nuclear disarmament. Instead, the government appears to be entertaining the expansion of its nuclear weapons programme.

In May the MoD suggested that the number of full-time army personnel might be increased from its current figure of 72,500 to 76,000 soldiers. But the SDR recommended no increase, though it did recognise ‘a strong case for a small increase in regular numbers when funding allows’. In fact, both the army and the navy already miss their recruitment goals every year (the RAF until recently fared better), making such targets less significant than they might be. The SDR suggested that the military focus more on ‘the power of drones, AI and autonomy’ to paper over its inability to recruit. Drone tactics conducted by Ukraine should be adopted by the British army. Six new munitions factories should be built to increase shell production. The report also recommended that a new organisation be formed, run by army reserves, to protect power plants, airports and telecommunications facilities. Securing critical national infrastructure – the UK has no civil defence force – is a reasonable objective, though the defence intelligentsia inevitably argues that it is no substitute for more soldiers. Another of the SDR’s themes was the need to promote ‘a whole of society approach’ and a ‘shift in mindset’. In lieu of adequate equipment, there will be ‘public awareness’ of defence, in what the government – in alarming fashion – called an ‘armour-clad nation’.

The promise was that the SDR would definitively settle the shape of the armed forces and make it clear what new equipment to buy. But British military procurement is a fiasco. Most of the Ajax armoured fighting vehicles ordered in 2010 are still not in service. The UK has two aircraft carriers and neither has ever had a full complement of F-35 jets. Often they have none and rely on US fighters. A dozen or so Chinook helicopters have been withdrawn early, with the upgraded H-47 version not due to be delivered until 2027. The Spear 3 air-launched cruise missile meant for the F-35s, and originally supposed to be in service this year, has been delayed until the early 2030s. The SDR recommends the acquisition of more destroyers and frigates. But it is still unclear how many expensive (and unreliable) F-35s Britain will acquire before the arrival of sixth-generation fighter aircraft. In November 2024, the government announced that the navy was losing two amphibious warfare ships, in part because it can’t muster the crews needed to operate them. HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark were meant to lead prestigious ‘littoral response groups’ for use around the world. The government now plans to sell them.

The standard assessment of the British armed forces is that they have become ‘hollowed out’. The army has too few tanks and too little artillery to form the armoured divisions its own plans demand. In its present state it would struggle to deploy a single fully equipped division. Given the way British military forces have been used in the recent past, this is probably no tragedy. British generals and politicians keep warning that the UK needs to be ready for imminent war or – in the government’s maladroit terminology – for ‘warfighting’. Last July, the head of the British army said that Britain should be prepared for ‘a major war in three years’ time’. The threat is justified by boilerplate fretting that could have been uttered at any point in history: ‘global instability is rising’, ‘an era of increasing threats’, ‘a more dangerous and uncertain world’, ‘a much more threatening world’, ‘a new world of increasing danger and disorder’. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lent support to this tendency. Lord Robertson named ‘a deadly quartet of nations’: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Healey has described ‘an active alliance of aggression from autocrats’.

Both Healey and Tobias Ellwood, a former chair of the Defence Select Committee, have claimed that Britain is ‘being attacked every single day by Russia’. Before publication, Fiona Hill argued that while the threat from Russia may be in continental Europe, ‘the other front lines are here all the time. They’re your IT systems, they’re your electrical grids, the power stations.’ The Russians are coming for your electricity. These heady descriptions of a world on the brink of war are hardly a persuasive justification for rearmament. The Russian army has spent three years bogged down in Eastern Ukraine. And there can be no war between Britain and China, North Korea or Iran that Britain does not choose itself to enter – or which the US doesn’t choose for it.

Even if one were to accept the idea of a collapse in British military power, there is still the question of how it happened. The orthodox answer is that the post-Cold War era was one of innocence and hubris, during which Britain squandered the ‘peace dividend’. It’s true that the overall size of the armed forces declined in the 1990s, as it did throughout the 2010s. But British military spending as a share of GDP has been in decline since the end of the Second World War, not the Cold War. Most of that decline occurred between 1950 and 1990. Even a basic scrutiny of the figures shows that they display the slow death of empire and a relative national decline. The disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan subverted a longer-term trend that reasserted itself in their absence.

Most of the world’s major economies are rearming to one degree or another. But that trend also deserves some scrutiny. On 16 May, Elbridge Colby, US undersecretary for defence, noted that the US is ‘pressing our Nato allies to step up their defence spending to reflect the urgency of the security challenges they face’. That, Colby said, means increasing military budgets to 5 per cent of GDP, higher even than the levels maintained by the US itself. Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, has said that Germany now accepts ‘in principle’ the need for 5 per cent, even if it involves some creativity in counting ‘defence-related infrastructure’ as military spending. Such declarations are good for business: Rheinmetall AG, a 130-year-old company that supplied the German armed forces in both world wars, has tripled its market capitalisation in the last six months. The British government was hoping that the defence agreement it signed with the EU on 19 May would allow the UK to partake in the EU’s €150 billion Security Action for Europe fund, but that has not come to pass. The argument that the UK should expand its armed forces so as to contribute to Europe’s emergence as an independent pole in world affairs, separate from the US, is scuttled by the fact that no such project currently exists.

In theory, strategic reviews ought to assess a country’s particular security needs. But the SDR, like its predecessors, contains little thought about the UK’s position in the world. This is partly because the defence of Britain isn’t a particularly difficult problem by the standards of most countries. The UK is objectively the most secure state in Europe, or it would be if its nuclear weapons didn’t make its command and control positions at home a target. Overseas territories are potential vulnerabilities, but their status is sustained more by inertia than by British military power. As far as the defence intelligentsia are concerned, the central problem isn’t really the defence of Britain. Instead it is how to maintain expeditionary functions with a stagnant economy – as Starmer put it, ‘not just to survive in this new world, but to lead’. Olivia O’Sullivan and Bronwen Maddox of Chatham House recently argued that military spending has to be at least 2.5 per cent of GDP for ‘the UK to take a credible leadership position’. This is a moderate position in the debate and yet it is still coloured by vanity. There is nothing inherently worthy in projecting British influence to the rest of the world, and the practical record of that project is dismal, indeed shameful.

The question the SDR ought to answer is: what kind of military forces should a moderately prosperous Western European island state have? Armed forces shaped by the actual answer to that question would look nothing like they currently do. The UK certainly wouldn’t be expending scarce resources on fanciful plans for low-yield nuclear weapons. What military capabilities remain at a time of economic malaise are engineered to fit the needs of American power. The most consequential deployments of the past two years have been in relation to Gaza and the failed campaign against the Houthis in the Red Sea. British military transports made regular runs between British bases in Cyprus and Tel Aviv in support of Israel’s war on Gaza. British reconnaissance aircraft operated over Gaza itself. Talk of British armed forces needing to be ready to defend against an attack by Russia or China is misdirection: the theatres they have been operating in are in the Middle East, as per US requirements.

The SDR declares that Britain’s military should be organised to be ‘Nato first’. This is an implied critique of the ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ described in the 2021 Integrated Review. Yet HMS Prince of Wales, which has been beset by simple mechanical faults since it was launched, is still scheduled to go to the Far East on a deployment that has nothing whatever to do with UK interests and everything to do with US designs. The US government will push Britain to commit to further rearmament, and sooner or later the government is likely to capitulate. Britain’s nuclear-powered attack submarines play a significant part in US war plans in the case of a Taiwan crisis, and US officials speak as though they expect Britain to join them in such a conflict. This fact has not yet been acknowledged in discussion of the review’s contents. In its emphasis on ‘Nato first’, the SDR appears to take defence seriously as defence, rather than as a euphemism for expeditionary capacity. But does ‘Nato first’ mean a limited regional prospectus, or will it mean whatever the US decides best serves its purposes?

There is something self-indulgent about all these declarations of new eras and pages turned. A sense, perhaps, that the British state is chasing apparitions. The stream of definitive strategic documents never ends. The government will soon publish another National Security Strategy, overseen by Jonathan Powell and John Bew, foreign policy adviser to the last three Conservative prime ministers. Another ‘defence capability command paper’ will follow later this year. These, too, will resemble their predecessors. Like the SDR, they won’t address the question of how British military forces are actually used. For the defence intelligentsia, that question isn’t on the table.