Once again Britain is conducting a large-scale Strategic Defence Review, just four years after the last one. On the face of it, this is not a bad thing. Much has changed since the Integrated Review written and published under Boris Johnson. A new Labour government quite naturally wants to develop and set out its own national security strategy and plans for defence spending. The Integrated Review was perhaps in any case made obsolete almost as soon as it was published by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Talk of an “Indo-Pacific tilt” looks a little silly when one of the largest-scale conventional wars since Vietnam is raging at the gates of Europe.
Just as importantly, the Ministry of Defence is once again structurally bankrupt, if it was ever solvent. The effects on personnel and equipment are visible across all three services. Every service is operating with fewer troops than the budget allows, with every service raiding the savings generated by this under-spend to support their faltering equipment budgets. The Army is a full 10% under strength, the Navy 5%. Munitions shortages were already bad in 2020. After everything given to Ukraine, they will be far far worse. There is no prospect of replacing the donated missiles any time soon. The money that could be spent on improving pay and conditions, and replacing what has been lost, is instead being devoured by a massively overstretched equipment programme. The MOD is simultaneously trying to renew the nuclear deterrent, fund the development of a whole new fighter jet program, perhaps buy enough jets from the US to justify the existence of the carriers, build a new generation of frigates in two different classes, and acquire multiple new fleets of heavy armoured vehicles. The money is not there for all of this or perhaps even for half of it given semi-realistic assumptions about program costs.
Right now, this equipment program is devouring so much cash that existing operations are being sacrificed to pay for it. The Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) are especially crippled by undermanning. Pay and conditions are not good enough to attract enough sailors. The two aircraft carriers are dependent on the RFA’s only solid stores ship, Fort Victoria, for resupply of food, fuel, and ammunition at sea. Whenever it is unavailable, as has been the case for the last three years due to maintenance and crew shortages, the tenuously-defended carrier group must do without or rely on allies. RFA Stirling Castle, a platform for autonomous minehunters, has been essentially inactive ever since her purchase in 2023 for lack of crew. RFA Tiderace, a tanker just 6 years old, is likewise laid up for lack of crew. The Army has been cutting down on training operations for years. The Royal Marines are about to cripple whatever was left of their amphibious assault capabilities by selling off HMS Albion and Bulwark, again for lack of crew. Such is the lack of any kind of functioning long-term plan for the Services that Bulwark had only just been through a £70 million refit, only part of which is likely to be recouped in the sale.
As ever in British politics, we got here through a series of unfortunate events and bad decisions. From 2010 onwards, the incoming Tory-led Coalition government enacted austerity through indiscriminate cuts to the budget across all three services. The first war in Ukraine, in 2014, forced political elites to realise that, like George Lucas watching the first rough cut of the Phantom Menace, they had perhaps gone too far in a few places. The 2015 defence review promised the partial restoration of what had been lost, but without committing the funds to pay for it. The MOD has been over-committed ever since. Sir Stephen Lovegrove, permanent secretary at the department from 2016 to 2021, spent years publicly telling anyone who would listen that his department was out of money, an unusual thing for a man in his position to do.
On top of this chaotic funding situation, the Conservatives tried to save money by doubling down on the practice of delaying necessary expenditures, a mistake that the Blair and Brown governments had already made on a few occasions (e.g the 2008 decision to delay construction of the carriers). Inevitably this incurred additional expenditures through increasing the total cost of the programs for purchasing new equipment: it costs more in the end if you have to pay people to work for longer on a project, even if by stretching out the program you typically lower the in-year cost.
Just as painfully, the MOD was then in many cases faced with huge additional maintenance bills as the cost of keeping existing equipment alive that it could not afford to do without. In 2010 the Coalition delayed the build of replacement submarines to carry the nuclear deterrent by five years, purely to save some money in the short-term, one of the most incredibly stupid decisions out of a very long list of bad ones. The result is that the nuclear deterrent may very well disappear entirely for at least a few years in the 2030, if the new Dreadnought-class submarines are delayed and the ageing Vanguard-class submarines cannot be kept running any longer. By then the entire class will have gone through a major refit, and one has been refuelled at a cost of over half a billion. Already, the need to conduct major multi-year refits on one Vanguard-class at a time has driven up average patrol lengths, with crews now entombed under water for over six months, a brutal ordeal both for the crew themselves and their families.
It also makes the boats rather crusty.
Several hundred millions were likewise spent on life extension programs for the Type 23 anti-submarine frigate fleet, for a very limited return. This should perhaps not have been surprising, as the original design explicitly envisaged a service life of just 18 years, but the Navy was trying to push the fleet beyond the 30th birthday of many of the ships. HMS Westminster spent two and a half years in refit between 2014 and 2017, but is now to be scrapped anyway. HMS Argyll spent two years in refit over the same period, and was undergoing another refit since May 2022, but has now been sold to BAE for training. HMS Northumberland spent two years undergoing life extension between 2016 and 2018, and was due another refit this year, but was found to be in such poor repair that the ship could not be saved. HMS Somerset spent three and a half years in refit, but on her return to the fleet in February 2022 suffered a series of mechanical breakdowns that has kept her on the shelf for another two years.
The budget situation is not helped by specific procurement disasters such as Ajax, or the Type 45 destroyer engines that used to randomly cut out in hot weather and had to be replaced, or the failed maritime patrol aircraft Nimrod project. These kinds of disasters are in fact quite common in American defence procurement, but the US can typically afford to salvage failing programs simply by throwing more money and talent at them. The C-17 heavy lift transport plane is a good example of a project with a very troubled development history that nonetheless eventually yielded an outstanding and beloved plane in the end. Only the very worst disasters, like the Littoral Combat Ship, are truly unsalvageable and eventually canned.
An RAF C-17 taking off. Europe is desperately short on strategic lift, and nearly all the Antonov AN-124s in commercial service are in Russian ownership.
Britain would be admittedly better off if it had French levels of efficiency in defence procurement. France maintains a nuclear deterrent, a larger standing army, and a very comparable Navy and Air Force - all on a very similar budget. In the last decade and a half it has successfully modernised almost the entirety of the armoured vehicle fleet, a painful contrast to the Ajax disaster, the slow and indecisive selection of Boxer, and the £450 millions spent on upgrading the Warrior IFV before the whole program was cancelled in 2021 (although Warrior still remains in service, despite the poor states of the hulls and the antiquated unstabilized autocannon, simply for lack of anything else to cover the role). HMS Albion and Bulwark are gone, as has helicopter carrier HMS Ocean, but France maintains three fairly new Mistral-class LHDs to cover the amphibious assault role. The well-regarded Rafale fighter jet has now been exported to Greece, Egypt, the UAE, India, Indonesia, and Qatar. These procurement successes are underpinned by the deep sector knowledge embedded in the Direction générale de l'armement (DGA): the export successes are likely also assisted by a helpfully more lax French attitude towards anti-bribery legislation.
Nonetheless, part of this relative French success is due to a willingness to limit its ambitions. While Britain built two aircraft carriers, France simply operates one. Whenever Charles de Gaulle is unavailable due to maintenance, the French Navy must simply do without. The Air Force operates no stealth fifth-generation fighter jets, which would have real costs in a fight against any enemy (such as Russia) with sophisticated, networked air defence systems. Britain’s fleet of C-17s and heavy lift Chinook helicopters offer capabilities that French defence planners would no doubt kill to have. Apart from the tracked Leclerc tank, the French Army is now all-wheeled, a very reasonable choice for many reasons (it cuts fuel costs, makes the army more easily deployable, and is more suitable for operations in Africa), but again a choice that would have some costs if French troops went to fight in the autumn muds on the Eurasian steppe. In such a scenario, severe munitions shortages would quickly become apparent, just as they would for UK troops.
The MOD deservedly gets a bad rap for its failures, but the bigger problem is an excess of strategic ambition beyond what a weak economy can actually support. This is a political problem that ultimately comes down from No.10 and the Cabinet Office, although the MOD has proved itself completely incapable of providing any kind of strategic or financial realism. The equipment programme simply has too much stuff in it, but is also undermined by the cult of technology fetishism. The thinking goes that we can never match Russia or China in quantity, so need to outcompete them in quality. Inevitably this means that far too many programs take on far too much technology risk.
Moreover, budget limitations and high technology risk mean that only small unit quantities of any given piece of equipment will ever be bought, which in turn means that a wider range of internal stakeholders have a vested interest in any given project, since the equipment will typically have to serve multiple roles. This in part drives the endemic concept creep and over-speccing. Lower unit volumes also tend to mean that fixed maintenance costs cannot be spread over a larger fleet.
All these problems are compounded by chronic inter-service rivalry and intra-service politics. There is no single individual who is responsible for building a coherent joint force: contrary to what you might think, this is not what the Chief of the Defence Staff actually does. The result is that the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts. The “carriers without planes” problem is the most high-profile example, with the RAF’s Global Combat Air Programme and the Tempest fighter jet cannibalising the budget that could otherwise be spent on the F35-Bs that the Navy needs. The RAF might of course fairly argue that the Navy is the one cannibalizing their budget, but either way, the fundamental problem is the same. Of course, one way to square the circle would be to cut short F-35B purchases, and instead develop a carrier-compatible, short-takeoff vertical-landing variant of Tempest: when Dassault developed the Rafale fighter jet, it naturally also built the carrier-compatible Rafale M. The RAF, however, has no interest in doing so, and there is no one in the institutional hierarchy who can realistically force them. Real men fly off runways like God intended (and, admittedly, STOVL aircraft are not easy to design or build). The Army is crippled by a shortage of combat support formations and a considerable oversupply of light role infantry, which it has been reluctant to cut for optics reasons.
This is admittedly a very long list of problems, but some solutions are nevertheless obvious.
1) Pay and conditions must improve. The bleed out from the services and RFA has to be stopped, or lack of manpower will simply invalidate every strategic choice that is made. Planes, ships, and tanks are pointless with no one to crew them.
2) Centralize all procurement and force structure planning under the control of a civilian Director of Defence, who would sit on the MoD’s Executive Committee with the Permanent Secretary, Secretary of State for Defence, DG Finance, and Chief of Defence Nuclear. Merge the role of Chief of Defence Staff with the post of Commander of Strategic Command, and abolish the post of Vice Chief of Defence Staff altogether. The Director of Defence should be formally confirmed by the Defence Select Committee and should be a respected bipartisan figure with no close ties to the governing party. They should serve a seven-year renewable term, to allow for the long-term nature of defence procurement cycles. Any kind of control over procurement needs to be completely removed from the control of the Services.
3) No.10 and the MOD’s political leadership must set the Director of Defence a clear steer that the age of technology fetishism is over, and from now on procurement must prioritise quantity over quality. This means the maximum possible density of cheap UAVs across all three services, and an end to the practice of throwing away or selling off nominally outdated but still serviceable weaponry, particularly armoured vehicles. In an age of bloody and highly attritional wars, where sweeping unexpected manoeuvres are hard to pull off simply because the enemy can see what you’re doing on drone-saturated battlefields, quantity really does have a quality all of its own. Some kind of selective, voluntary draft at a relatively small-scale level is at least worth considering to build a reserve pool of potential troops with at least some prior training, on the Norwegian model. Crucially, such a draft would be instituted purely on military grounds, not to achieve bizarre Onward-style community cohesion goals (sorry Rishi!): there would be no civilian alternative.
4) Make sure what you have actually works and can be affordably operated. Nuclear weapons with misfiring missiles and warheads that have never been tested at all are not worth the eyewatering price. Likewise, F-35s with no standoff air-to-ground attack capability - and not plans to obtain suitable missiles until at least the end of the decade - are at least somewhat dubious, on top of the painfully high maintenance and operational costs. The small weapons bay magnifies the problem of a limited number of airframes. Sticker prices for upfront acquisition are just a part of total lifetime cost of ownership, and in any case tell you very little about how many bangs you get for your bucks.
5) Allow for more multi-year flexibility across the defence budget, with the MOD able to shift funds backwards and forwards as it needs. The need to rigidly stick within in-year budget limits has repeatedly forced the MOD to stretch out equipment programs over time, as discussed above, delaying the introduction of new equipment into service and racking up huge long-term additional costs. The nuclear enterprise already has some of this flexibility: it should be extended far more broadly.
6) Limit our geographic and political ambitions. The UK should not plan to join the US in a fight over Taiwan: such a war does not serve our interests and will likely cause further catastrophic economic damage to an already crippled European economy. Such a war in any case may very likely be unwinnable, and must not be fought. The long-running energy price crisis due to the absence of Russian gas from the European market has driven deindustrialization across Europe and crippled the economies of both the UK and many of its core trading partners, compounding the already-high upward pressures on energy prices linked to Net Zero policies. It must be acknowledged that the UK and all of Europe has paid a brutally high price for its support of Ukraine, a cost far higher than the political elite seem willing to admit. Perhaps the cost was worth paying anyway, but at any rate the last few years have highlighted the costs of participating in conflicts, even if only indirectly. Wars can and should only be fought for core national interests, but when fought they must be won.
7) Think about how some kind of Europe-wide defence planning can be institutionalized. What use is a small, boutique UK tank fleet? What good does it really add to the much larger armoured vehicle forces that Poland and Germany could deploy? Conversely, the RAF’s C-17 fleet offers a strategic airlift capability that exists nowhere else in Europe beyond the three airframes deployed in Hungary via NATO. These planes are far more valuable on a European level than another fast jet, but are always going to be secondary to the RAF’s core interests. These conversations need to take place on a European level, not primarily through NATO, because the truth needs to be acknowledged that there should be some kind of coherent European force that could be put together if needed without any kind of large-scale reliance on US support.
Most importantly, however, the key to national security is economic growth. A weak deindustrialized economy cannot support anything more than a weak military, no matter how efficiently procurement is run. Economic growth is not just one objective amongst others that can be traded off with other objectives, like decarbonization or national security or the reduction of inequality. It is the bedrock on which everything else depends, especially if you are a small open economy with an ageing population, a redistributive welfare state, and a pay-as-you-go pension system. Every national security strategy that does not put this consideration front and central will be as hollow as the force it will produce.