UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR): Reviewing the Review & the Reactionariat.

The good, bad and ugly.

The SDR published yesterday (Monday 2 June) is the best of my lifetime. It is sharper, more honest, and more structurally ambitious than any I have read—including those that predate today’s formalised processes and those written by nations beyond our borders.

But it is already at risk. Not because of what’s in it. But because of what’s being said around it.

I’m writing this not just to praise the Review, nor simply to critique its flaws. There are several, some are serious. But more urgently: to warn that the opportunity it presents could be lost amid noise, spin and superficial commentary. This would be a failure of national consequence. I hope the blog might reach those who can help us avoid it.

Distinguishing Review Signal from Political Noise

The misunderstanding and mischaracterisation create three principle risks:

1. We could miss the moment to prepare for war—and thereby make it more likely, and more disastrous.

2. We could miss the chance to raise the level of our defence debate, after years of kayfabe, fake budgets, and misdirection.

3. We could lose the Review’s careful and detailed analysis amid the thunderous political ‘announceables’ that risk drowning it out —many of which are either unrelated, outdated, or contradictory.

Let us take the third first.

In the run-up to the Review’s publication, there was a story that the UK would now fund and field a second fighter-jet launched nuclear capability, in addition to the continuous-at-sea deterrent, our nuclear submarines with nuclear missiles. This is not in the Review, and regardless of its potential merits and demerits (I think on balance a sovereign capability we need) – or indeed whether we do commit to this following the talks that the Times tells are us are being held with the US, the Review does not recommend this. It was certain though that announcing it would drown out almost everything else in the debate. Similarly, the announcement of a £15bn new ‘sovereign warhead’ was always going to grab headlines, but isn’t new. Likewise, the announcement of twelve new submarines is not in the Review [0.1], which instructs the MOD to confirm numbers against requirements. Announcing all this as the Review was published obscured what the Review actually says.

The Flaws are Clear

Many criticisms of the review are justified. Decoupling it from a Spending Review, as happened in 2021 during the Integrated Review, neutered it. It is a standard Treasury tactic and it enables the Government to do what institutionally, it prefers – make policy and strategy word-smithing and empty rhetoric, a kayfabe, while the gritty, largely boring reality of implementation and hard choices are hidden: made by default, rather than decision, choices made when the headlines are dominated by wider cuts, spending and taxes on non-defence issues. Relatedly, the MOD reserving for itself the decisions on what equipment it needs, to come after the Review, makes it unlikely they would sign-off any recommendations the Reviewers might want to include on what and where to cut. It cannot be an ends-ways-means review, a strategy, if denied or constrained in the opportunity to comment on what means - financial, and in kit and equipment - are needed.

In consequence, this Review has been emasculated by being separated from the spending review. As many commentators have noted either:

a. Defence needed a lot more money. Or

b. the Reviewers needed to show where they would cut, take risk and transform.

They have done neither. But they were presumably prevented from doing so. One wonders what the Review looked liked before the five-month period of ‘Decision-making and finalisation’ as the Review team ‘finessed…[their]…recommendations’ during ‘Engagement across Whitehall…’.

The language seems dumbed down in many places, enabling consent and evade (or ‘toxic compliance’ as I heard it called recently). e.g. “high-low mix” can be whatever the MoD decides it wants it to be. Digital Targeting Web is clearly a “Kill Web” the failure to call it what it is shows I think the lowest common denominator compromise that has infected parts of the Review. On procurement, we are still allowing some equipment to be built on 15-20 year timelines, with individual capabilities taking 18 months+ to manufacture. I don’t think you need to see the classified info (and to be clear, I have not) to see that this is a recipe for cost overruns and failure. The tech will improve a thousand times or more during the life of programmes, requirements will change in geopolitical cycles that can be hours and days, or just a few years. Most importantly - we must be able build stuff faster than our enemies can destroy it. What’s the ratio between expected attrition rates and the production speed of new platforms like FCAS or SSNs?

Things are often under-specified, for example, the MOD will likely just rebadge its multidomain integration stuff as a “digital targeting web” and keep on failing.

There are the usual linguistic atrocities. But these fall in to the category of niche objections that might matter, but not to most people. Fellow pedants, find more in the footnotes.[1]

But there is a real danger here that ‘the Reactionariat’ of which I am now a part, miss a historic, urgent and vital opportunity to use the Review to raise the quality of our Defence debate, to hold the Government and the MOD to account. Strategic Reviews rarely give us a strategy - they should, that they don’t is a failing of our system [1.2]. But they can still be influential - harnessing the zeitgeist, empowering reformers - through a kind of ‘narrative dominance’ they can change the conversation, and with it the priorities and activities in Government. This is where the risk of missing the opportunity given by this excellent review lies.

The Review has Given the Nation an Opportunity we Must Not Miss

In diagnosis the Review is clear and comprehensive in saying how bad things are, overturning rocks, and calling out how urgently things need fixing. You can see where it has been dumbed down I think, not quite being able to say that if we fight tomorrow it would be a catastrophe. But it is very close, and you don’t have to work hard to figure out that is what it says. I think you could sum this up as saying it would no longer be possible for HMG to say it did not know how bad things are. I think to have got this through the Whitehall system – maybe even more in need of reform than that within the MOD - is a significant achievement. It is detailed, exacting and far-reaching. Genuinely impressive in form and content. It could, if understood for what it is, drive a much better debate on defence.

There are important structural changes - Cyber-EM Command unifying electronic warfare (we’re actually pretty good at this, in narrow pockets that are permanently at risk of being killed by the system). Similarly, MSHQ and killing Levene are a big deal. Something we tried to get done when I was serving in 2018, again in 2020 when in No10.

Under the current SofS’ John Healey’s leadership, and now public in the Review, CDS now has - or should have according to his revised role described in the Review - some meaningful authorities and not just sit as an advisor to SofS and the PM. We can stop talking about a civilianised ‘Head Office’ with its appalling culture but a proper HQ, that can be held accountable (without this, no one was in charge and everyone blamed everyone else for continuous failure). These problems were and are systemic, not individual, but they incentivised and rewarded some pretty toxic behaviours. They were part of the reason that lowest common denominator compromise consistently triumphed over confronting issues. We should now have not three and half (STRATCOM) forces designed separately who figure out how they will fight later, but one force, centrally designed and focused on how we would fight in NATO vs Russia (I personally don’t think this is the right way to think about the threats we face in an era of systemic competition, but it isn’t an unreasonable approach [2]).

The Review has a ‘demand’ for specific metrics, on lethality, productivity, and national economic impact. There is a section designed to ensure accountability (p.50). There’s a call to cut “by at least 50%” MOD regulation that kills industry. The kill web has a deadline - MVP by 2026, fully operational by 2027 – and where described as a ‘clear unifying mission’ seems to be an attempt to give us a proper theory of winning that we haven’t had since the end of ‘Air-Land Battle’ which passed with the Cold War. The commentariat could do much to push this to become a full operating concept, a theory of winning that drives force design based on DARPA’s ideas of the Kill Web, and Mosaic Warfare (or decision-centric warfare).

The focus on the way war has been transformed by technology runs throughout, describing how this is not an event, but rather that technology is continuously redefining warfare. This is, I think, correct and not really disputed (the degree to which it is true is argued, not the fact that it is).

Criticisms that there is not enough on emerging technology and procurement are unsustainable – some of the Reviews recommendations were clearly taken by the Treasury and announced early, but they are well covered and pushed further: “Major modular platforms (contracting within two years). Pace-setting spiral and modular upgrades (contracting within a year). Rapid commercial exploitation (contracting within three months), with at least 10% of the MOD’s equipment procurement budget spent on novel technologies each year.” The MOD is pushed to engage with VC and Private Capital in ways it currently does not.

The commitment, publicly, to making the UK’s Armed Forces ‘the most innovative in NATO’ echoes something I argued for in 2020 for the 2021 Integrated Review. To be meaningful, it will need measures and metrics – how will we know we have achieved this? But these are not impossible to imagine. I offered suggestions here in 2021. You could adapt the CBI’s measure of innovation pull-through ‘new to market new to firm inventions’ – as ‘new to frontline, new to service inventions’. This Review gives Parliament and media the chance to propose how this might be metricised, measured or judged, and hold the MOD to account either for delivering against them, or to propose its own. There are a lot of deadlines – any reader of Government documents will recognise how rare this is in HMG policy. It is a huge opportunity for Parliament, media and public alike to hold Government accountable for detailed delivery. In shouting down the Review, the reactionariat risk missing a generational and urgent opportunity to make us safer.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen a commitment to a 6-monthly independent review of progress vs the recommendations, submitted to the PM, Parliament, and available to public. That was what embedded Levene’s reforms, mostly for the worse in the long run, but the process teaches lessons: people respect what you inspect and value what you reward. I would have had named owners for each recommendation, and reported on their progress in those regular independent external inspection reports. Of course Parliament, media, commentariat could now start making the argument for this, to help those reformers on the inside doing the same, to push the system to reform. To improve our Defence debate. This was probably always beyond what the Reviewers could achieve. Neither this Govt, nor the last, or any in my lifetime would have agreed to that - it needs one under greater political pressure (where scrutiny now could help), or one with greater confidence, and/or one that viscerally believes in what this review tells them: war could be imminent, and we would likely lose. If you’re not steeped in this stuff, that is hard to believe.

Examples of how far-reaching and thorough-going this Review is run throughout, but are particularly notable in the chapters on Defence medical, education and training – again calling out shortfalls and failings clearly, with recommendations for how to get to a solution. A crucially important example – especially since everyone, reviewers and critics alike, seem to agree we aren’t spending enough, won’t spend enough, and are not ready to deter or fight a war - is the call for a proper plan for mass mobilisation as Sky’s Deb Haynes and I called for this time last year. How we prepare to rapidly increase our resilience, preparedness and ability to fight across the whole of society and government if war comes while our conventional armed forces are too weak to succeed or sustain in the fight is not just prudent planning, it is a part of deterrence too. Similarly, making defence infrastructure an operational consideration, and not one civilianised, lobotomised, and focused only on cost, efficiency and short-termism is a huge shift. The form of this Review is better - the citizens panels a neat innovation. The substance on a national conversation - expanding cadets - is good. None of these are things past Reviews have covered anywhere near as well.

Armed Forces

The recommendations on the RN & Army are radical and right. Worth reading these sections alone (short, digestible). The recommendations on the RAF are in my opinion dangerously inadequate. There is nothing on what the high-low mix should be. Little on where the RAF carries risk in current operations. Far too much scope for consent and evade. The diagnosis has either pulled punches or has been too superficial. We should remember that the notional independence of the Review makes this the Review Team’s failing, not the RAF’s. Since this Review offers only recommendations, it does not mean the RAF can’t still be clear-eyed in diagnosing and addressing its own challenges with the clarity, rigour and radicalism that is present in the Review’s section on the RAF’s sister Services.

The section on Space disappoints. The U.K. continues to radically underestimate its importance and centrality to our future prosperity and security. I don’t think the Reviewers, and almost anyone else, agrees with me on this. But I stand by it (it requires AI leadership to turn its potential for our relative power into reality). The review is good, within the parameters of the existing debate, where space is just the bit above the air domain, and the issues are access and control - not trade, industry, colonisation. This should be an area for the National Security Review. I am pretty certain they will fumble this too. It is too far outside the Overton Window, and would blow the mind of a Treasury trying to scrape money together for social spending. We’ll all be much poorer and less secure for this in 10-years time, but that kind of thinking and planning is hard in Whitehall. For Defence to contribute to the debate and the capability we needed an independent Space Force as both I and others have argued.[3] A Space Force could argue for funding and develop expertise in the domain on equal footing with those representing the Air, Land, Maritime and Cyber domains. We still don’t have one. Not a surprise, but disappointing.

On Cyber-EM. This is complex. There is a continuity across cyber and EM (I prefer ‘electronic warfare’ - narrower, clearer). But they are also distinct. And they run through everything else. I think we need an independent Cyber Command to argue for resources as an equal to space, air, land, sea domains. But this doesn’t solve the EW problem. And there is no chance the Treasury, or the existing services would allow two new Commands. It was never a likely outcome. We probably have the least bad option here, and a big improvement on the status quo.

Info Ops for me is central (war is about coercing decisions) even a nuclear strike is an attempt to coerce a decision, ultimately for psychological effect, so too every bullet fired. It is a side note in the Cyber EM section. Again though, this is the orthodoxy. I am not a lone voice, and I think logic on our side. But it is an argument we have not yet won.

On intelligence – the Review is very good on calling out our weaknesses in Counter-Intelligence – which we must prioritise, indeed in which we need to be best in class, or everything else is undermined. I am less sure on the radical merging of the intelligence branches - I think this will kill off necessary specialisation. I also note that the Reviewers don’t call for the re-establishment of Defence Economic Intelligence (another thing I think is important, but not many talk about as an issue), and should have done. This is an era of geoeconomic competition. We have no economic intel function in HMG (killed in Defence Intelligence in the 1990s). Also necessary to support Defence Exports. Perhaps the National Security Review that Government has said will follow, will cover this. But I am not optimistic and I think the Defence Reviewers missed an opportunity here.

Reviewing the Review

A short way of seeing how much better this Review is than anything that has come before in my lifetime would be to print off the MOD’s 2020/21 Command Paper, and read them side-by-side. The former was bad at the time. It is shamed by this.

I think a fairer judgement than the many who are saying this is just ‘more of the same’ would be that the Review gives the MOD enough that with the structural reforms and a genuine SofS commitment to real implementation, it could be transformative.

Without SofS commitment, the dumbing down of language and stopping just short - i.e. stating the need for metrics mostly not specifying what they should be, not saying what should be cut, not offering a view on balance of crewed/uncrewed, on AGI timelines, specifying a need for kill web without the fuller “theory of winning” (op concept) leaves it largely impotent to address the threats we face. It can only describe and recommend.

The Reviewers were hamstrung by this being, as Matthew Savill has said ‘Schrödinger's Review’ neither independent and external, nor internal and owned by the MOD. Thus they have been prevented, I would guess, in going as far as they wanted. But it is clear that they have used what political power their position gave them to preserve much that is valuable.

The problem with the fake budgets, rhetoric, and vapourware, the noise around the Review, is that they sound exactly like ‘business as usual’ and everyone is acting accordingly, taking pot shots at a Review that seem to me to be frequently completely detached from what the Review actually says. Sometimes ‘control K’ in the SDR for whatever key word of criticism is being levelled can expose this. It isn’t hard to check.

The noise is at worst a political attempt to obfuscate what the Review actually says, e.g. explicitly and directly “business as usual is not an option” and which otherwise - even in its likely watered down form – exposes the gaps between years of rhetoric and reality too clearly, and in ways that are not advantageous for a Government that knows there are still not many votes in Defence. Even at best, if not deliberate, the noise results from a misreading of the Review’s contents. Whatever the reason, there is a real risk that the ‘annouceables’ obscure what the Review actually says, harming the debate the Review calls for before it has even started. Drowning out signal in noise. Leading the commentariat to discredit the Review, making association with it low status, ensuring that narrative dominance - the only way in which this Review can succeed, is never achieved.

My call to action is this: read the Review in detail, and celebrate it. Make association high status. Use it to push the recommendations further, to empower the reformers whether they be Minister’s, civil servants, or military. Theirs is a difficult fight, the review gives them material support. Allies - you - could help them win.

An effective Defence is, as the FT’s Janan Ganesh said of growth, something everyone in Britain wants, but, whenever a trade off is required ‘just not that much’. The Government, Secretary of State John Healey and his team in particular, are to be commended for creating an opportunity for a debate that might change that. Commissioning even a semi-independent Review was brave. In publishing and accepting the recommendations of what could be a radical review, the Prime Minister and his Government have created the space for and seeded a much better national conversation on just how much we want to spend on defence, vs the risk of our sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, friends and colleagues, coming back in body bags, being overrun in battles we fail to deter and are not fit to fight. What happens next matters hugely. I write this in the hope that reformers in and across Government, those in Parliament, media, and public alike can make the most of this most remarkable of Reviews. It must not be a return of what Cabinet Secretary Simon Case once called ‘the curse of the missed opportunity’. As the Review quotes one of its ‘Citizen Panellists’ on defence: [otherwise] ‘…it won’t be long before something more significant happens and we will think it should’ve been more of a priority.’

[published 0700; updated 09:33, 21:58, 4 June 2025]

[0.1] Added 2100, 4 June 2025. I am grateful for having this pointed out so I can correct the record: technically this is not quite right, in the SofS foreword he does talk about the ambition to get to 12 SSNs. But I offer two defences (1) my defence is of the ‘independent’ Review, the SofS foreword cannot, by definition be in anyway independent of the MOD; (2) in the foreword it is contextual and soft pedalled, not trumpeted to the point where it drowns out discussion of anything else, as happened when this information was provided ahead of the Review as ‘a response to it’ (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-expand-submarine-programme-in-response-to-strategic-defence-review).

[1] ‘Warfighter’ should be excised from the lexicon. It is a hair’s breadth from ‘Warrior’ which is even worse – and I think misunderstands how military dominance is achieved. The Spartans were defeated by the better organised forces of Thebes. The Romans dominated the ‘warriors’ of Europe through superior organisation. The Vikings were routed not by lone berserkers but by the more centrally organised Anglo-Saxon levy at Stamford Bridge in 1066, where Harold Godwinson’s disciplined fyrd outmatched their hit-and-run tactics. In each case, it was organisation—training, supply, command and control—not individual heroics, that determined the outcome.

Picking out and trying to kill-off a personal bugbear that finds its way into the review: “war is fought across all five domains but people and the land they live on are at the heart of it”. This is a half-baked zombie idea, and should be murdered, cremated, buried and sealed in the earth’s core so I never encounter it again. It is the Army’s attempt to argue for the Land domain as the decisive and most important. Which is nonsense. You win wars by imposing costs, and potential future costs, that the enemy state or nation are unwilling to tolerate. You a coerce a decision. That’s it. There is no special premium on ‘the land people live on’. Similarly, the ongoing fetishisation of SF as ‘the tip of the spear’ needs to end. I think it infantilises the rest of the military and damages our overall effectiveness.

[1.1] e.g. see last year’s Liaison Committee report on Strategic Thinking in Whitehall, and multiple Committee reports before: 2011, Public Administration Select Committee, on the 2015 SDSR, on Syria, on the 2018 NSCR and Modernising Defence Programme

[2] I think abandoning the Indo-Pac tilt is an error. We are focusing on NATO, by which we really mean a land war in Europe most likely an attack on the Baltic states, just as Russia is bleeding itself white in Ukraine, it’s war economy hollowing the country out unsustainably, when we have two new powerful continental allies in the alliance, Sweden & Finland anchoring the Northern flank and now Article 5 committed to aid any member that is attacked. We are doing this when continental Europe’s Continental Powers - Poland in particular, but the Czech Republic, Romania (transforming into a serious military power on NATO’s eastern front), the Netherlands and Denmark are all rebuilding credible land forces. France, long prepared for expeditionary war, now preparing for high-intensity conflict on the continent - and most notably Germany too all rearming for this land war - continental powers building continental armies to fight continental wars [see my article: https://wavellroom.com/2022/04/06/ukraine-the-integrated-review-land-power-in-europe/]. In such a situation, a UK maritime, air, cyber and space commitment to NATO, with the flexibility to secure our maritime nations security and economic interests - and make a massive contribution to the defence of Europe. Labour’s politically driven ‘NATO first’ mantra, is interpreted by Whitehall as meaning they can forget ‘East of Suez’ again - an error when the deeper and more enduring threat and more likely war comes from and with China, and geoeconomic systemic competition (see IR 2021) from China threatens UK security at home and interests globally - esp in the Indo-Pacific, where the world’s largest middle class will soon be and where the world’s fastest growing economies are. I would have us plan not vs Russia with NATO but vs a range of very specific scenarios. Interested readers might see Murray & Knox’s ‘Dynamic of Military Revolutions’ (especially p. 192) for more on this last point: ‘…revolutions in military affairs have emerged from evolutionary problem-solving directed at specific operational and tactical issues in a specific theatre of war against a specific enemy. Successful innovators have always thought in terms of fighting wars against actual rather than hypothetical opponents, with actual capabilities, in pursuit of actual strategic and political objectives.’ [bold added, italics in original].

[3] Dolman, E.C., 2009. Victory through Air Space Power. Strategic Studies Quarterly, 14(2). Available at: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-14_Issue-2/dolman.pdf [Accessed 10 March 2025].

Fletcher-Jones, C. (2024). In Favour of an Independent Royal Space Fleet: The Smuts Report and the Precedent of the Royal Air Force. The RUSI Journal, 169(1–2), 22–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2024.2359405