In its first weeks in power the new Labour government launched a Strategic Defence Review, the UK’s fifth in nine years. In the first of a new series, Richard Reeve draws on Rethinking Security’s evidence submission to the SDR to suggest ten ways that Reviewers should depart from their narrow script to begin a genuinely strategic, transformative approach to UK defence and global security.
Usually UK Governments review their wider strategic direction before working through the consequences for defence policy. Despite being billed as a ‘root and branch’ exercise, the current Strategic Defence Review (SDR), launched in July, comes before any wider review, and without any statement from the new Labour government of whether it accepts the strategic framework laid out by its Conservative predecessor in the Integrated Review (2021) and its subsequent Refresh (2023). This matters, not least because it divorces defence strategy from a range of non-military contributions that the government can make towards a more secure and peaceful UK and world, including diplomacy, development assistance and long-term peacebuilding.
Perhaps more significantly, the SDR’s parameters explicitly rule out rethinking much of the existing bases of UK defence policy, including commitments on increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, the NATO alliance, “a total commitment to the independent UK nuclear deterrent”, indefinite support for Ukraine, delivery of the “AUKUS partnership” with Australia and the United States, and the maintenance of “defence ties to the Indo Pacific region, the Gulf and the Middle East”. Trying to maintain this rather exceptional level of operations has been central to the failings of UK international policy over many years, not least a political failure to define clear objectives and realistic priorities.
So what options should a genuinely holistic, open-minded SDR put on the table? Here are ten suggestions:
1. Recommit to – and strengthen – international law
After years of dangerous drift, diplomatic double-standards and illegal actions, the UK government should take this opportunity to recommit to not just ‘shaping’ but consistently obeying international law and multilateral cooperation, which are the true bases of global stability and security for all under the UN Charter. In particular, it should rethink the approach of the MoD’s Integrated Operating Concept (2020), which dangerously asserts that old distinctions between peace and war no longer apply and that the UK should “employ the military instrument to compete below the threshold of war”.
2. Define clear objectives and realistic priorities
The UK’s military has long been asked to project global power based on the assumption that this delivers ‘strategic advantage’. This not only risks feeding into unnecessary conflict but directly conflicts with the core yet neglected task of defending the UK itself. The UK’s force structure – centred on expeditionary warfare, offensive ‘strike’ capabilities, with military bases around the world on retained UK territory, former colonies and protectorates – confers logistical and military advantages to the UK and its allies. Yet it is very expensive, entails significant responsibilities, generates risks of entangling the UK in unnecessary wars, and feeds into the security dilemmas of other countries. The SDR needs to understand how such global deployments are perceived by other actors and how this changes their attitudes and behaviour towards the UK.
3. Keep learning the lessons of 2001-2014
UK military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya was hugely detrimental to international law and security regimes, to the UK’s reputation, prosperity and interests, to the wellbeing of UK service personnel, and had devastating consequences for millions of people in and around those countries. Many lessons have been articulated in the Chilcot Inquiry, The Good Operation handbook and the UK’s Stabilisation Guidelines. However, such lessons increasingly seem not to guide UK military operations. The ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific’, post-2020 military operations in the Middle East and the broader concept of ‘persistent engagement’ and establishment of the Army Special Operations Brigade all evidence an adventurism that may serve to undermine stability and the national interest. While the aim may be to deter adversaries and bolster alliances, there are questions about the legality, the strain on diminishing numbers of personnel, and coherence with the actual evidence about how stability can be built in fragile settings.
4. Rethink UK alliances with abusive regimes
Despite wide ranging commitments elsewhere, there is a large concentration of UK forces in the Middle East. In addition to the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen/Red Sea and an ongoing presence of Special Forces within and around Syria, the UK is providing active military and intelligence support for Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran and the Houthis, and is deeply enmeshed with the militaries of Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, using base facilities in each and providing arms, training and embedded support personnel to each. Given the nature of these regimes, the MoD should reflect on the desirability of depending on bases in this region, arms sales to their militaries and loan service personnel in key positions. More urgently, the UK should cease all military and intelligence support to Israel, including all arms supplies, in line with its obligations under international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention.
5. Ask and answer difficult questions on resource prioritisation
How and in whose interests the British Armed Forces are deployed should be overt and open to serious challenge. For example, why does the Royal Navy permanently provide the core of mine-hunting capabilities in the Persian/Arabian Gulf while local militaries spend hundreds of billions on offensive aerial capabilities? Why does the British Army deploy its air defence systems in Saudi Arabia when it recognises its own deficit of such capabilities within Europe? Why is Operation Shader ongoing over five years after the destruction of IS/Daesh? Is sending a carrier strike group to the Pacific a higher priority than maintaining regular patrols of the North Atlantic? Given the economic sacrifices that the government has asked UK citizens to weather, the British public may feel such questions should be asked and answered in public before education, health and infrastructure investments are sacrificed to cover defence spending increases.
6. Make the UK’s alliances transparent and accountable
Apart from NATO and treaties with Cyprus and Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore, the UK’s treaty commitments to defend other countries are opaque. Countries such as Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are regularly referred to by politicians as UK allies despite the lack of any treaty commitments in the public realm. Such alliances open the UK to shared risks and should be accountable to parliament, the media and the public in the normal way. The UK should push for a relaxation of secrecy rules and greater accountability about NATO policies, strategies and actions. Likewise, the AUKUS pact – which has vast and costly implications for the UK’s force posture – has not been duly scrutinised in parliament or public debate despite raising significant concerns amongst defence and security experts about its sustainability, strategic value and implications for nuclear non-proliferation.
7. Recommit to peacekeeping operations
While there are significant ethical and legal concerns about the use of military interventions in many contexts, there have also been examples – as in East Timor, Sierra Leone, North Macedonia or, most recently, Kosovo – of UK forces rapidly and effectively deployed for civilian protection or conflict management missions. While looking for ways to improve the impact of peace operations on conflict and governance, the SDR should increase the UK’s commitment to supporting UN-mandated international peace support operations while ensuring they are effective in promoting peace.
8. Be ambitious about human security and conflict prevention
The UK and NATO have ostensibly adopted a ‘human security approach’ and are currently figuring out how to operationalise this. This commits them to reducing their impact on civilians, addressing conditions fuelling crisis and instability, and contributing to stabilisation and reconstruction. This means the UK needs to go well beyond trying to make conflict ‘safe’ for civilians. Conflicts have more than doubled in number since 2009, driving record levels of forced displacement, accounting for three quarters of humanitarian need, setting the stage for 98% of deaths from terrorism, enabling criminal networks to thrive and locking hundreds of millions of people into extreme poverty. The SDR should signal the primacy of conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding as a foreign policy imperative for the UK, and spell out an ambitious agenda for defence to support this in appropriate ways.
9. Lead on regulating new weaponised technologies
The UK should seek to avert costly and destabilising arms races, and get ahead of the risks inherent in AI and genetic innovations, by promoting regulation for new tech. This includes next generation military technologies such as cyber, AI and automated, space-based and biological weapons. For example, the UK should support the negotiation of a new internationally binding instrument to regulate autonomous weapons systems. The National Cyber Force’s Responsible Cyber Power in Practice paper (2023) is an example of the kind of thinking needed.
10. Be honest about the real costs of nuclear weapons
Since the ‘main gate’ vote on the renewal of the Trident programme in 2016, UK nuclear weapons policy has been almost exempt from government comment, parliamentary approval and public scrutiny despite big shifts in the international context (e.g. the TPNW, AUKUS, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, changes to the MDA) and to UK policy, industrial strategy and costs. Without factoring in likely further cost overruns due to technical and industrial challenges, the UK’s equipment spending plan for the Defence Nuclear Enterprise amounts to nearly 39% of all planned MoD capital expenditure over the next decade. This inevitably entails vast opportunity costs on conventional military capabilities, other areas of government spending, and wider industrial investment. The Government also refuses to discuss the possibility of the US Air Force redeploying tactical nuclear weapons to the UK mainland. Whatever one’s position on the ethical and operational dilemmas of nuclear weapons (though these also matter), the lack of public and parliamentary oversight of these issues – and their exclusion from the SDR – is thus deeply irresponsible and un-strategic. In an era of profound instability, it is vital for the UK to be seeking to reinvigorate multilateral commitments to nuclear disarmament.
By ducking the chance to revisit Johnson’s Integrated Review and Sunak’s Refresh, Labour risks acquiescing with a bullish, self-seeking posture that has won the UK few friends and could draw it into further unnecessary wars. This risks missing an opportunity to reinvigorate diplomatic, development and peacebuilding contributions to British and international security. Labour has the power and the mandate to course correct on any matters where defence can better support human security within and beyond the UK. To this end, all options should be given a fair hearing.
Rethinking Security’s full evidence submission to the SDR can be accessed here.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Navy Lookout. RFA Fort Victoria, the only solid stores support ship serving the Royal Navy, joins several other Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships in long term reserve in Liverpool, October 2024. Essential to the Royal Navy’s global operations, only four of the RFA’s 13 ships were in service and with crews as of September 2024, when Labour held its conference in Liverpool.
At last a sober, mature, reflective analysis of the past. It recognises our present political, economic and reputational position in this changing world. Above all it gives hope that there are sensible heads around.
Richard’s ten suggestions if given effect in the SDR would indeed enable a ‘real’ root and branch reconceptualization of the nature of ‘strategic defence’. It would thus step beyond treating UK defence as merely a capacity to jump to serve the closed (mis)perceived geopolitical interest of the USA, while embarrassingly asking ‘how high?’ The poor old UK’s defensive posture seems committed to ever more perpetuation of forceful service to the USA’s hegemony. This ‘service’ seems to embrace even the extraordinary turn of the USA’s Atlanticist North Atlantic Treaty Organisation becoming oriented a Pacific force. The painful irony of such forceful ‘pacificism’ brings to light inter alia the rights of armed seaborn forces to exercise International Law through the straits of Taiwan, as if the implication somehow did not include the lawful right of the Russian Navy with PLAN to legally travail (transit) the English Channel. However, such an exercise of international freedom of navigation (FON/UNCLOS) may be found by the USA and UK to be somewhat straitened. Beyond such stretches of the international imagination, the UK’s SDR needs surely to take into play Diesen’s observation that:
A traumatic experience is waiting the West as it must adjust to multipolar international distribution of power and rules that are seen to be set or influenced by non-Western powers. However, it does not appear that the U.S. will accept a peaceful transition to a Westphalian world order. The absence of political imagination in Washington [& UK] has produced a world view in which chaos is the only alternative to U.S. global dominance. (Glenn Diesen, “The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 2024, p275).
Perhaps then the UK’s SDR needs to take on a Westphalian vision especially as to a Europe still at war with itself (again) 2022-2026/7 … . Of course, the chances of the UK’s SDR reaching beyond its own narrow straits is virtually nil. It seems, as it were, stuck in the now established rut of the USA’s NATO such that it will surely end up “missing an opportunity to reinvigorate diplomatic, development and peacebuilding contributions to British and international security”. Which is not merely a pity for Rachel Reeve attempting to absorb the Ukrainian ‘black hole’ cost, a hole in keeping with the £60billion English Schools’ Budget, but the reality of Russian and the Ukrainian dead, maimed and displaced. So the UK’s SDR might take in Mearsheimer, Kissinger, Sakwa, Deisen … ? But there’s Valkyrie Ursula’s urging, while forging ‘Nothung for Volodymyr!