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IN WHITEHALL THEREAUKUSNATOGDPAUKUSGCAPNATONATONATONATONATONATORUSIAUKUSGCAP,GCAPGDPNATOYour browser does not support the element. is no pastime taken up with greater enthusiasm than a good policy review. At least a dozen are under way in the Foreign Office alone. China policy is going through an “audit”. The submarine deal is being assessed. The crown jewel among all these is the strategic defence review—Britain’s third in four years. As it reaches its denouement, Britain’s armed forces are staring down the barrel of dramatic change.The review has been entrusted to three outsiders. George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary and secretary-general, is chairman, reprising a duty he performed in 1998. He is joined by Sir Richard Barrons, a retired general, and Fiona Hill, a British-American expert on Russia policy who served on Donald Trump’s National Security Council. That trio is supported by six defence bigwigs, among them a former Conservative junior defence minister, and a secretariat which includes American, French and German officers. They are expected to finish and submit their recommendations in early 2025, but it is up to the government to decide whether to follow them. Months of internal wrangling probably lie ahead.Sir Richard, appearing in front of the House of Commons Defence Committee alongside Lord Robertson on December 3rd, described two priorities for reform. One was the primacy of digital technology—cloud computing, artificial intelligence, virtual environments—as the backbone of the armed forces. The second was the role of vehicles, planes and ships without humans in them and the eventual dominance of autonomy. (“The thing about robots”, Sir Richard told your correspondent in 2019, “is that they don’t have pensions.”)These are not settled issues. The Royal Air Force says that autonomy will not be reliable enough to replace humans in the cockpit completely by 2040. Others retort that this is too conservative. But the review will “chart that path”, promised Sir Richard, “with at least a 20-year horizon”. He added that the team would also make “powerful recommendations” on how to solve the skills crisis in defence, and tackle areas from logistics to homeland resilience.Then there is a more profound fork in the road. The reviewers have been told that their recommendations must be affordable “within the trajectory” from spending 2.3% of on defence, the present level, to 2.5%, the target. Yet in Kafkaesque fashion, that trajectory might not be set until a spending review in June.Moreover, the nuclear deterrent increasingly cannibalises all else. Its cost has risen from 5-6% of the defence budget a few years ago to at least 19% by next year, notes Sash Tusa of Agency Partners, an equity-research firm (see chart). That, plus two other big projects—the pact to build submarines with Australia, and , a scheme to build a next-generation warplane with Italy and Japan—appear to be set in stone. That leaves precious little to plug other holes.For the past decade Britain’s solution to this problem has been to continue doing everything, decreasingly well. The result is an army that cannot produce a combat-capable division, an aircraft-carrier strike group without a fully resourced air wing or complement of escorts and an air force without the munitions it needs. Many insiders hope that the new review will at last identify priorities and trade-offs. By definition, that means winners and losers.One vision in the Ministry of Defence, backed by many in senior positions, is that Britain’s natural strengths lie in air and maritime capabilities, rather than in heavy ground forces that might be provided by others, such as Germany and Poland. “Does [] want an alliance of 32 ‘mini me’s?” asked Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, rhetorically, in a lecture on December 4th. “Or can we use ’s size to be able to take more risk and constantly search for a winning edge?”In this view, the defence of on land is impossible without dealing with Russia’s northern fleet, which is largely unscathed from the war in Ukraine. China’s navy is increasingly active in the Atlantic and Arctic. Air and naval forces are flexible instruments of statecraft that could be used in the Middle East and Pacific. “ first”, the government’s mantra for defence policy, need not mean “ only”.The alternative to this maritime-air vision is one focusing on land-air. Russia is on the front foot in Ukraine. Its army is larger than it was at the start of the war there. And Britain has big holes to fill in this area. Army generals acknowledge that ’s formal demand—a “strategic reserve corps” with nine brigades and a bevy of supporting capabilities—is unrealistic at current levels of spending. Their aim is not to expand the army. It is to show that a more modest force, one explicitly modelled on Ukraine’s way of war, fuelled by intelligence from America and other members of the Five Eyes spy pact, could still do the same job.The idea is that, through technology, a British brigade of 7,000 or so soldiers could defeat a Russian “combined-arms army” triple the size. Naval power matters, in this view, but should be focused on specific areas, such as anti-submarine warfare in the North Atlantic, rather than carriers.It is tempting to frame these debates as inter-service bunfights. In fact, they are as much if not more about differing visions of the threat, how to counter it and, crucially, the timeline over which it will unfold. “The defining political choice of this strategic defence review will be the degree to which the government invests limited resources in these long-term projects,” notes Justin Bronk of , a think-tank, referring to and “as opposed to plugging the capability gaps in the current force [for] Russian aggression this decade.” The air force says that the expense of is necessary because no other system will be able to destroy Chinese and Russian air defences and long-range missiles by 2040. To critics, that is impossibly far away and risks swallowing resources needed to keep Russia at bay in the next five years.Lord Robertson, Sir Richard and Ms Hill are confronted with a stark set of options. Defence spending would have to rise to 3% of to meet all these goals. If it rose to 2.5% immediately, Britain might be able to preserve front-line air, land and naval forces but would need to accept greater shortfalls in areas such as munition stockpiles and training. If the Treasury only signs up to hitting that level by the end of the decade, something has to give.That would come with political and diplomatic costs. Formally quashing the army’s ambition to field a division would provoke a backlash in even as Donald Trump is demanding that allies step up. Mothballing a carrier would invite derision on a party that authorised their construction when it was last in government.John Healey, the defence secretary, is said to have balked at the binary choice between land- and sea-focused forces. The trade-offs will be hotly debated in Whitehall. American officials are also weighing in. On December 10th Kathleen Hicks, America’s deputy secretary of defence, when asked what the Pentagon wanted to see in the review, singled out the nuclear deterrent and maritime capability—“the ability to be expeditionary, to operate throughout the world”. The tension between continental and maritime commitments has been a leitmotif of British strategic debates for centuries. But after years of slicing away capability across the board, Britain will find itself at a moment of reckoning, unless the fiscal taps open.
