The UK’s new Strategic Defence Review is a squib. Not because its ambitions are under-funded, but because its ambitions centre on keeping the MAGA state engaged in European defence at any cost. Richard Reeve argues for an urgent and open national conversation that confronts the unsustainable and unstable myths at the heart of UK security policy.
In what has become, since 2015, an almost biennial event, the UK’s Labour government unveiled a new Strategic Defence Review (SDR) on 02 June, supposedly setting the context for a decade of military reform and societal mobilisation. As ever, this latest Review offers a mix of path-dependent continuity, speculative technological innovation and contentious pledges of industrial investment. Different this time, however, is the darker tone of ‘armour-clad’ ‘war-readiness’ that has eclipsed the breezy hubris of Global Britain, and an uncomfortably corporatist appeal to national duty, endeavour and sacrifice.
Most commentary has focused on whether the Review’s 62 recommendations are affordable within the government-mandated 2.5% of GDP allocated to defence from 2027, and why the government is not showing greater urgency to spend above this level if it (like most mainstream journalists) believes in its own inflated threat assessments. This ignores the many untested assumptions baked into the SDR and the political drivers of its flawed process, conventional findings and hyperbolic presentation. These, as well as the horrifying financial, social, ecological and human cost of preparing society for war, should be the subject of a genuine, sober conversation between government and society on security priorities.
A flawed process
This SDR was unlike other British reviews. Borrowing from the Australian Defence Strategic Review process of 2022-2023, the SDR was commissioned by Keir Starmer in his first month in office and led by three leading figures from outside government, providing an ostensibly independent external perspective. In reality, the Reviewers (all former top insiders of government, the military and NATO) have been supported by civil servants, and their draft was with the PM, MoD and Treasury for nearly six months, presumably while they and ministers haggled over acceptable content, narrative and recommendations. The fact that the government released the Review with a public commitment to implement every one of these 62 recommendations demonstrates that these had been refined and pre-agreed between Review team and government.
Arriving after this 10-month process, the 144-page SDR comes ahead of a new, more wide-ranging National Security Strategy (NSS). Hastily being pulled together over barely three months, and based on the findings of the SDR and a dozen or so other reviews from several departments, the NSS is due for release later in June and is rumoured to be barely 30 pages-long. This sequencing is wrong. The NSS should set the broader national and international strategy of the still new Labour government and make an assessment of the threats to the physical and human security of the people of the UK, not just those threats that can be deterred or defended by military force. The SDR should logically follow from that, along with other sectoral strategies, including crucial diplomatic and development strategies on how to resolve or prevent violent conflict, and urgent action to tackle the climate and environmental emergency. This was the case with the last two ‘Integrated Reviews’ (2021 and 2023), whatever else their flaws. Instead, it is the military logic of the SDR that has set the grim narrative to which the national strategy must respond. Given Labour’s broader ‘security is everything’ political narrative, it is hard not to conclude that this has been done for political rather than strategic reasons.
Strategic disingenuity
It is unclear if, as in Australia, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) will now draft a new so-called Defence Command Paper to demonstrate how, when and at what cost it will implement these recommendations. It now appears that this may not be the case. Having been so comprehensively finessed within Whitehall before its release, it appears that the SDR is effectively accepted as the MoD’s new policy document. Defence Secretary John Healey has called the SDR “our Plan for Change for Defence” and alluded only to the production in the autumn of a Defence Investment Plan, which will supersede the MoD’s rolling, costed (though not always funded) 10-year Defence Equipment Plan.
The SDR talks at length about threats, technology and industrial opportunities, but it sketches out little of the usual detail of defence white papers; defining force strengths, structures or procurement plans is beyond its mandate. So there are vast lacunae. While the proposal to build “up to 12” new nuclear-powered attack submarines has captured headlines, there is nothing about various under- or un-funded major equipment programmes like the Type-32 frigate, the medium helicopter programme, or artillery systems. It is hard not to conclude that has been done to avoid scrutiny, not least on financial criteria.
This is reflected in disingenuous consultation processes. Against precedent, there is no public engagement or consultation process to the NSS, which should have the people of the UK at its centre, as our own Alternative Security Review has done. Conversely, the SDR included a major online consultation process that secured over 8,000 responses to its strangely technical and circumscribed questionnaire. High public engagement is good but the government has presented the findings of this outreach, highly mediated into the SDR, as being a nationally representative “Britain’s Review”. Given the high response rate from within the military and military industries, this would be methodologically disingenuous even if the questions asked were not so selective and leading.
Assumptions unchallenged
As we noted in our own submission to the Review last September, the selective terms of reference of the SDR largely predetermined its findings and failings. Logically in the context of 2024-2025, the three biggest questions of the Review ought to have been: how can the UK urgently reduce its military dependence on the United States, whose commitment to collective security is unreliable and contempt for international law unconscionable; is the approximately 25-30% of all UK defence spending going on renewing and operating its nuclear weapons programme justifiable; and how should the British armed forces prioritise defending the UK and its people? On each count, the Review has thought only the thinkable and endorsed an unsustainable status quo.
This is most evident in the SDR’s reaffirmation of the United States as the UK’s closest ally. While the Review document politely notes Washington’s “change in security priorities” and talks of the alliance in largely pragmatic terms (rethinking the status quo would be hard and expensive), Starmer spoke of “strengthening our bridge to the US, as Britain’s first partner in defence”. Nowhere in the SDR is there any sense of a need to reduce dependence on the United States, only to do more to prove our usefulness to it. This is the logic of London paying £101 million per year to lease the vast Diego Garcia air and naval base from Mauritius for the almost exclusive use of the US military.
On nuclear weapons, the SDR makes some welcome acknowledgement of their vast cost, budgeting £15 billion for a new ‘sovereign’ warhead, and hinting that the whole programme may be unrealisable without legislation to compel private industry to cooperate in nuclear production (p.102). But it makes (as per its mandate) no real assessment of their actual and opportunity cost, nor their independence, credibility or legality. Indeed, in a particularly controversial passage (p.99 & p.102) it coyly suggests “Commencing discussions with the United States and NATO on the potential benefits and feasibility of enhanced UK participation in NATO’s nuclear mission”. To be clear, this does not (yet) state that the UK will acquire or deploy so-called ‘tactical’ nuclear bombs or other air-launched nuclear weapons, and all its existing ‘strategic’, submarine-launched nuclear missiles are already committed to all of NATO. Moreover, there is clearly no existing money to develop, build or buy such additional nuclear weapons. So the implication is that the UK is considering joining the NATO ‘nuclear sharing’ scheme, by which it would need to acquire F-35A strike aircraft that could be used by the RAF to carry US-owned B-61-12 nuclear bombs stored in Suffolk. Shamefully, the government continues to refuse to give any further comment on this potentially seismic shift in policy and posture.
The Review makes a comprehensive and necessary assessment of the vast and often expensive range of military and other technologies that are changing the global strategic environment. On this, it merely recommends easing regulatory frameworks on UK tech development and testing – while failing to call for tighter international regulations and norms on, for example, autonomous or space-based weapons. It fails to identify ‘legacy’ systems or structures to phase out, or foreign bases or partnerships to withdraw from. So while the SDR obeys its ToR by placing greater emphasis on Europe and NATO than expeditionary warfare, it abjectly fails to prioritise by identifying what the UK will stop doing. As in past exercises, unless resources expand exponentially, this approach to strategy lacks credibility.
Critical conversations
This is where the SDR and its flawed assumptions will crash into fiscal reality. Only a day after Starmer and Healey admitted they had no firm plans for increasing military spending to 3% of GDP by 2034, the MoD was briefing journalists that NATO was about to collectively commit to a new spending target of at least 3.5% of GDP on defence by the mid-2030s. This would effectively be the price that Europe would agree on to keep the Trump administration committed to its defence. Coincidentally or not, the new threshold is set at, or just above, the spending level of the US imperium. At 2025 prices, that additional 1.1% of UK GDP means at least an additional £35 billion per year that would need to be found from spending cuts or tax increases. That is about £1,300 per household per year, an obscene and unnecessary transfer away from human wellbeing and development or much more urgent climate action.
At several points the SDR calls for a “Government-led national conversation on defence and security”. On the face of it, this is exactly what Rethinking Security was established to encourage. However, it is also clear that the Reviewers expect this not to be a listening exercise for the government but one of ‘educating’ the public, and especially school children, on what it believes are the threats to our collective security and on our collective responsibilities to respond. This is the opposite of productive engagement on common security, and given public discontent with the state of services and infrastructure, it risks significant political backlash.
The Labour leadership appears to be betting that tough talk on defence and ‘security’ is what will win back its voters from Reform UK, which is seen as soft on Russia in particular. Yet polls suggest otherwise, with voters far more swayed by cuts to social benefits than defence policy, and the populist far-right party still far ahead of Labour. While a plurality of voters seem to support higher defence spending, a larger majority say they personally are not willing to pay higher taxes or see services cut to finance it. Although some may be swayed by a ‘defence dividend’ from jobs in massively subsidised military industries, in fact the employment returns from such industries is far lower than investment elsewhere could achieve, suggesting an anti-growth impact. Those jobs that are created and sustained are likely to be in the prosperous South where high tech and nuclear sectors are concentrated.
The government urgently needs to engage in sustained, meaningful dialogue with the people of the UK on their security. This conversation must challenge the grim narrative and too-big-to-fail assumptions of defence planners, which lock us into an unsustainable cycle of preparing for and fighting wars. In particular, there is an urgent need to push back against the appalling idea of the UK once again procuring, hosting or deploying new nuclear weapons of a type that only militarist fantasists believe are credible and usable. Given the costly delusions baked into the SDR, critical analysis and wide-ranging public debate aimed at rethinking security has become more urgent than ever.
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: Number 10 on Flickr. PM Keir Starmer pre-launches the SDR at BAE Systems shipyard in Glasgow, 02 June 2025, in contravention of the UK ministerial code.
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